Best posts made by Deribus

In both my ladder and team games I've gotten the feeling that Chrono Dampener can be quite oppressive to play against, while also providing little feedback. I've written a mod (called "Chrono Expand" in the vault) to try to address these shortcomings.

Default Chrono Dampener:

There is a small effect around the ACU which causes units in a huge area to get immediately stunned for 2.5 seconds. The last titan is actually at the edge of the range, but there's no way to tell that.

Chrono Expand:

The effect now covers the entire area in a wave which stuns units. All units lose the stun effect at the same time, which means that the closer the unit is to the ACU, the longer it gets stunned for. At present, units right next to the ACU get stunned for 3.5 seconds, while units at the edge get stunned for only 1 second.

The values above aren't set in stone, and are actually mostly the result of my lackluster modding ability. I'd love to get a stun shorter than a second at the edge but for some reason that starts to shrink the radius of the effect instead.

What are your thoughts?

The king is dead, long live the king

The "hate for Dual Gap" is irrelevant here.

You have (again) failed to provide an argument for why this should be a core balance change rather than just a mod. Hives are balanced just fine on virtually every other map. Nerfing them so they're balanced on Dual Gap would come at the expense of those maps.

Hives were considered very OP in Phantom. You know what people did? They wrote a mod that gave hives to all factions. Problem solved.

Ship FAF with PD + walls template by default

One of the most common pieces of advice I see for new players is to make a template of PD surrounded by walls. It's by far the most used template and even some more experienced players can be annoyed if they lose access to it for one reason or another.

Why not have FAF add the 4 (one for each faction) templates automatically? It'd be a QoL feature like mex assist for storage and should be fairly low impact to everyone who doesn't want it.

@Tagada said in Weak Overcharge:

I really wish we would have a few guys that would be responsible for deleting all the stupid posts

Ask and you shall receive.

All posts that did not actively contribute to the conversation and/or contained personal attacks have been deleted. Keep it civil, keep it on topic.

The community has shown that the existing ruleset is not necessary for nor does it promote productive discussion. Too many exceptions have needed to be made for it to continue to be effective.

These new rules are intentionally much simpler and leave much more room open for interpretation. However, that's why I'm opening them to feedback first, I agree they might not cover everything.

A common question we get is "best PC components for FAF," and usually the advice is "anything made recently will be just fine." While I don't disagree with that sentiment, I thought it might be more informative and interesting to set up a spreadsheet that has the following information:

• CPU
• GPU
• RAM
• FAF CPU score
• Time to run a set replay at +10 speed
• Date
• Username (optional)

This would be done by each participant manually, and the information above would be sent in to me for me to add to the spreadsheet. There isn't any way I know of to verify anything, especially the times, but there also isn't any incentive to cheat.

Thoughts?

What about massively increasing their death explosion radius and damage? That way they're a lot more dangerous to chill in your base, and if you keep them clustered together they'll chain

@Arkansas said in The Last Thread about RAS SACU Balance:

How about just removing RAS from ACUs all together.

Do you mean SACUs?

Increase the volatility of a RAS ACU (lower hit points, bigger bang, makes it less useful in its other roles)

This what I suggested as a first step, but I disagree with lower hitpoints.

Upgrades universally improve upon the unit's capabilities. RAS reducing HP would be unintuitive for new players.

Remove RAS preset

@archsimkat said in The Last Thread about RAS SACU Balance:

I feel like an easy change to nerf RAS bois just would be to remove all SACU presets.

Not a fan of this approach either. Making something clunkier to use just makes the game more frustrating, instead of making a well thought out balance change that improves the game as a whole.

@keyser said in T1 sub rebalance:

one player didn't bother making subs, while the other one, used his own subs for a long time and was able to deal quite a lot of damage through out the game.

I actually went through that replay tracking the first sub with a stopwatch. Jagged's first sub spends no less than 7 minutes and 12 seconds actively firing at something, and it dies with around 1100 mass killed.

At 360 mass per sub, extrapolating that means it would take an average of 2 minutes and 21 seconds of constant firing for a T1 sub to do its own mass worth in damage. I can't think of a single other combat unit that would have to survive in combat for that long to recoup its worth.

I completely agree that the recent attempts to clean up the balance forum have been a colossal failure, and for that I apologize and accept full responsibility.

The goal has always been to encourage the balance team participate themselves, mostly by raising the bar for effort in posts.

How to best do that though has been a mystery. One of the pieces of guidance I've received is to "delete stupid balance posts" which I have refused time and time again. I cannot judge if a certain balance idea is stupid, and attempting to do so would for not only remove tons of potentially great ideas, it would in essence turn this into a "balance Deribus approves of" forum, which I do not support.

I'm attempting to get in touch with the balance team directly to get their thoughts on the matter. The guidelines aren't final and will probably continue to get many rapid changes as we continue to what the effects are. As always I appreciate the feedback and ask that you please be patient as I do my best to take it into account.

@ZLO please add a replay to conform to guidelines

Okay, third time's the charm

What are people's thoughts on this as a potential ruleset?

1. Describe the problem and provide one or two viable methods of resolving the problem. Provide evidence if and when it is requested
2. Do not repeat the same request if 3 or more posts has been made in the same thread
3. Be objective and consider all game elements. Balance requests because of a single map or map type will be immediately locked
4. Stay on topic, if you have a different balance idea make a new thread. You may link to the original thread if you believe it to be relevant

@CorvathraNoob said in Balance Thread Guidelines Feedback:

However I would be totally happy with a minimum 1500 rating requirement to start any thread for balance issues. (This should not at all be the case for suggestions, just the balance forum).

I cannot and will not support a rating requirement to post in the balance forum.

First and foremost, it's unenforceable. It can take multiple minutes just to check one user's rating. I frankly cannot be bothered to do that, nor would I expect any other moderator to. Plus it's never that simple. Are they 1500 global but 1k ladder? Are they on a losing streak and lost 200 rating since posting? Are they 1800 rated but not played a single game in the past year?

Second, being under a certain rating doesn't prevent you from recognizing issues, just potentially from developing a good fix for them. As Tagada has said, fixes are what the balance team is for. There's no reason to filter for 1500+ when everything has to go through the balance team anyway.

Lastly, balance isn't for the tip top of gameplay only. If a unit is incredibly overpowered until 1500 where players have the APM/coordination to counter it, it's still a problem. Take hoverbombing for example. Imagine if instead of removing it bomber balance was adjusted to compensate because everyone above 1500 knew how to hoverbomb anyway. Bombers would probably be unusable in lower ranks.

Hamburger menu in the top right, settings, pagination, set whatever you'd prefer

@KaletheQuick said in Global ranking not accurate -- is there a way to reset?:

@lafindumonde If you want help tanking your rank I am definitely available! I have rank tanking experience.

Do you now?

FAF Rules:

You will not manipulate your rating in any way.

There has been a lot of discussion in the the last thread about RAS SACU balance about reclaim, especially dead land armies in the T2 through T4 stages.

The core of the issue is that a failed assault at that point in the game leaves an enormous mass gift on your enemy's doorstep. This discourages aggressive tactics, and encourages strategies like nukes and T3 artillery, which in a worst case die quickly only for you to reclaim 81% of the mass back.

There are countless ways to address this, but first I think there should be some guidelines to agree on:

• Map reclaim should experience minimal, if any change. This includes unit wrecks like on Seton's. Most maps are already tuned with a specific amount of reclaim in mind, and updating hundreds of maps is unrealistic.
• Players should be rewarded for fighting for and securing reclaim fields, but not to the point of becoming more important than mexes or creating an endless snowball.
• Reclaim at the T1 land stage is relatively healthy, and should be looked at as an approximate goal.

If you disagree with any (or all) of these don't hesitate to say so. I'm happy to change or refine these.

With that out of the way, what are some ways to nerf reclaim?

• Reduce reclaim speed. This has been done before but could be done again. I don't think this is the proper approach though, since the limiting factors for reclaim are typically the amount and the travel time, not the engineering capacity to grab it all. It also impacts map reclaim just as much as anything else.
• Reduce reclaim value by tier. This is perhaps the simplest and most brute force method, but that doesn't mean it's the least effective. It would however impact map reclaim unless some kind of exceptions were coded in. As an aside, it could be interesting if T4s did their death damage a split-second after the wreck spawned, reducing the reclaim value.
• Introduce a reclaim decay system. Make higher tier unit wrecks slowly reduce their reclaim value over time. This would encourage players to grab reclaim as quickly as possible. Again, exceptions would have to be made for map reclaim.

What are some other ideas? What do you think about those above?

Community ideas:

@KaletheQuick said in Reclaim:

• reduce wreck HP by tech level
• add 'wreck' option to target priorities

@arma473 said in Reclaim:

• buildings should still leave 81%
• Add "better reclaim view" and "unit selection cost" to the base game of FAF
• Instead of reducing reclaim by tier, determine the % reclaim left after a unit's death based on the ratio of energy cost to mass cost.

@Exselsior said in Ship FAF with PD + walls template by default:

A potential issue I could see with adding a template is how would this interact with someone like me who has a pd template but it's more minimal with 4 walls instead of 8?

It wouldn't affect you. What I'm saying is if you were to reinstall FAF you would have a game.prefs file with the PD + walls template already there instead of a blank one. If you want to edit that template later then you're free to do so, and that's not any more work than making if from scratch.

@arma473 said in Ship FAF with PD + walls template by default:

Maybe walls just shouldn't block any shots at all.

I'd like to avoid this becoming a general wall balance thread. If you want to discuss that please make one in the balance forum

@KaletheQuick No worries, tone can be hard to gauge online.

The problem is MMLs exist solely to break firebases, and TMD exists solely to protect from MMLs/TMLs. You have to keep a balance between the two or else MMLs become either under or overpowered.

I would agree for a straight damage buff. This would preserve the current MML/TMD balance while also nerfing shields' ability to block them.