@Nuggets said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

If you think thats the case, you haven't played faf for more than 3 games.

Hi, 2694 games here.

Specific slots having specific mass extractors is not a rule, and even attempting to make such a thing very quickly breaks down because in essence you're asking for different or differently enforced rules depending on the map.

• How would new players know? If I joined FAF and got into a Seton's game, start making mexes, and then my teammate starts reclaiming some of my structures, that's a terrible new player experience.

• It would require every moderator to know every assigned mex on who knows how many slots, and also keep up with the meta on those maps. Yeah every moderator probably knows what slot gets what mexes on Seton's, but how popular does a map have to be for these rules to kick in? Does Open Wonder have assigned mexes? I don't know.

• It would force un-optimal gameplay in weird situations. Let's take Seton's as an example. Beach gets nuked and air swoops in to rebuild quickly. Except beach is reclaiming their stuff because technically those are beach slot mexes.

• The current implementation immediately solves all mex ownership arguments. If your teammate built the mex, it's theirs. You can ask to have it, but they are also free to say no.

• It's about a crystal clear rule as we have right now. "Do not reclaim allied units or purposefully fire on allies." Your proposed solution would require a flowchart to even answer if you're allowed to reclaim a mex.

5 minutes would be considered fast

@LordVladimer said in Blocking players, dodge list in MM:

I dont want to carry usless massblockers (even massfeeders, I can say), that dont engage ACU at eargly game, dont spam, plaing some kind of SimCity instead of playing and provide literally 0 impact.

Play 1v1 then

You can contact the creative team here: https://discord.com/channels/197033481883222026/877542950773616690

Might have something to do with one of these changes?
https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/5528
https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/5518

More specifically that these changes may not have been extended to Nomads.

Do you have any high rated replays of T2 torpedo defence being built? Might be good to have some context in what situations you might want to build them

@IndexLibrorum said in T2 torpedo turrets are awful:

T2 torps being outranged only by (missle) cruisers would make more sense.

This is already the case for UEF and Sera. Their destroyers have equal range to T2 torpedo defence because they have missile cruisers for long range damage. Aeon and Cybran don't have missile cruisers so they have longer range destroyers.

That is an unreasonable expectation for new players

I could see letting sera T2 torpedo defence move, since their T2 sonar already can. The other factions not so much

@AleksanderDerIch said in Thoughts on UEF doctrine and balance from a noob:

Second of all, it is literally said in the Supreme Commander Wiki:

Yeah, which is fan-made and not an official source. Plus it covers the original game, not the modded FAF client which has done a ton of rebalancing, including some of the complaints you had.

Then what is it if it's not a land oriented nation? UEF units would suggest that to be the case. They are the only nation to have a T3 transport Continental that also has a shield bubble and their T2 gunships Stingers have a carrying capability of one T1 or T2 unit. Additionaly, they also have a T3 point defence Ravager. How is this not suggestive of a nation that puts emphasis on land-based warfare?

They're also the only faction with dedicated shield boats, torpedo boats, a battlecruiser, and a submersible aircraft carrier. Would that make them naval focused as well?

@AleksanderDerIch said in Thoughts on UEF doctrine and balance from a noob:

Also, if that is not the case, then why would someone pick UEF over other nations? What does UEF excell at?

Oof that's gonna be contentious. I would say their strengths are T2 and early T3 land, early T3 navy, and T2 air. Weaknesses are T2 navy and their overall T4 selection.

Then again I think all the factions are almost identical and always play random.

Having both stealth and cloak, while having the ability to spot enemy units both with radar and direct line of vision, means that a Seraphim commander can spread a bunch of Selens across the map without enemy being able to do anything about that once the Selen stops moving and shooting. T1 technology that can only be countered by T3 technology - omnisensors. How is that not overpowered?

They provide very little intel when cloaked, aren't much of a threat, take a while to cloak, and can't move. If a Selen cloaks you still know exactly where it is. If you really need to you can ground fire it or send an attack move engineer to reclaim it. ACUs also have omni so if it gets into ACU range it's just dead.

@AleksanderDerIch said in Thoughts on UEF doctrine and balance from a noob:

How is stealth much worse than shield? Having a shield means that units will still receive damage, first to the shields, then to the units themselves. If enemy doesn't have an omnisensor or a permanent optical vision of the stealthed units, they will never take damage to begin with.

Because your entire stealthed army becomes irrelevant with a single air scout. Shield generators provide value no matter what.

@AleksanderDerIch said in Thoughts on UEF doctrine and balance from a noob:

In theory, from what I've read, it is supposed to be the tankiest, head-on nation with great defense capabilities and long-range engagements potential represented in artillery and missile weaponry.

No. Supreme Commander doesn't have strong faction identities beyond the visual design. UEF tends to have more tanky units, but that's not even true a lot of the time, as you demonstrated. Trying to say "____ is the faction that exceeds at ____" won't work well in this game.

A lot of this post is focused on an erroneous assumption that UEF is "the tanky defensive faction", but I will try to directly answer some of the questions.

Despite being a land-oriented nation (in theory)

It is not

Seraphim Selen is notorious for being weirdly OP

Is it? Notorious among whom? It's an incredibly niche ability

But wait, why is [the Mech Marine] faster than other bots?

Because UEF T1 tanks are on the slower side and that made them have trouble raiding at T1 before that speed buff.

UEF Titan is one of the worst units in the game for its cost.

Absolutely not. UEF is probably the single best faction at the moment to rush T3 land with, simply because of Titans. They're fast and will shred through lower tier units, while the incredibly quickly regenerating shield (they get it back in 15s!) means that most damage they do take while running across the map gets healed back for free.

Why does Cybran Brick have 300 more HP than Percival?

Because UEF has mobile shields while Cybran doesn't. Mobile stealth is much much worse than mobile shields, so Bricks have a bit of an HP advantage to make up some of the difference. Also Percival has a strong alpha strike, which means a decent chunk of your Bricks will get deleted in the first second of combat.

Experimental units: UEF Fatboy is a very weird and too much of a situational experimental

Yeah you aren't going to get much pushback here. There have been many ways discussed to potentially buff or rework Fatboy, but nothing has come out as a clear solution yet. It's a unit flawed in concept and that makes it hard to rebalance.

It's highly map and playercount dependent. There are some maps where people will get full T3 mex before their first combat unit, and some maps where getting their first T2 mex before a T1 tank is basically an auto-loss. Perfect balance for both situations is impossible.

I've seen SMD miss, but never ignore a nuke. Would need a replay

A note about what?

@maudlin27 said in Another dumb idea from Dorset:

Wouldn't it be simpler to just do a mod as proof of concept?

That's what I've done with my past balance suggestions. Like the chrono rework I made as a proof-of-concept mod first

Personally I don't like the 4 "petal" T2 shield generator model. Would it be possible to have an additional set of petals come out of the first?

Here's a (very compressed) video of @Saver's modded animation, just for visibility.

Let's focus on the billy and not turn this into an "overall UEF balance" thread

Billy has a similar problem to Ahwassa in that upon being built it effectively means T3 land is no longer an option. And you aren't going to send land T4s without support, so it means land gameplay is over. It isn't fun to watch your entire army be deleted in an instant, and there's very little counterplay (aside from TMD creep, which by that point in the game is very easily sniped). It also promotes turtle gameplay and air dominance.

What if had a targeting laser effect? A little marker like teleport has so you can see that there's one incoming and split your army or build emergency TMD with some front line engies/SCUs. That way you have some counterplay options and the "skill issue" crowd can still say "should have seen the targeting laser"

Yes, we have attempted to reach out to Square Enix. They have shown no interest in wanting to talk to us, much less give us money.