F
Offline
With my proposed rework a proxy would be kept safe with an smd that you built early on, it just becomes a high priority kill target and rushing the smd will delay ur land push by a minute while you build the missile.
The idea is that SMDs operate as more of a conscious swap from units into defenses when right now they’re more just something you’re supposes to build at some point and passively fill as the game goes on without giving it any real thought
Thankfully, what an awful take
Boy I sure do love the not-op use of a nuke hitting all the core base infrastructure forever removing an entire player from the game because he was 30 seconds late to making an smd after a nuke was up for 45 seconds. Increase the ratio of these situations please
Damn we gotta get rid of that mega op usage of nukes where they could be launched at a push causing a person to dodge and potentially take a bad engagement or create stall time for defenses or destroy reclaim that was donated in error, god this gameplay sucks we need to ruin it immediately
yes all the nukes used on navy in skadi that are a problem (literally nobody thinks this)
I don’t even know who thinks nukes killing pushes is a problem, you’re literally the first person I’ve ever seen even propose this being a problem let alone OP
please god can somebody please think of a map situation that isn’t just fucking sentons
this is not the biggest op point of nukes, like at all
I literally WANT even MORE nukes used this way
I don’t personally like the way SMD and SML interact fundamentally. They should be brought much closer to TMD/TML interactions which also induce additional gameplay interaction in their theater.
SMLs should operate somewhere around where they currently are.
SMDs should be cheap structures which load a single missile quickly (60 seconds even) but take a lot of mass at once to do it (think 100 mass per second). This way an SML has near zero shot of killing a key base even if scouted late unless an SMD is sniped beforehand. However, high priority bases such as air bases will need to keep stacking SMDs as time goes on, and each respective SMD runs a large risk of costing you in unit presence when you invest in it. The single missile per SMD is important for keeping agency in the hands of the SML owner as they have the insight into viable nuke targets.
In addition, investing in many SMDs in some tertiary base is not a high priority as wasting 2 nukes to kill something like sentons island is just not worth it.
Everybody is encouraged to utilize nukes in their gameplay without it causing ridiculous game swings where a whole base is eliminated and the game is over. Nukes revolve around becoming passive large investments as you get several missiles long term or tactical tools for forward bases/armies.
It can even be made so that SMLs are expensive structures with cheap missiles (in mass not BT) while SMDs are cheap structures with expensive missiles.
I expect the costs will have to be adjusted for everything but in general I prefer that as a philosophy to what it currently is where there is no depth to the resource-check it represents.
This would in turn also make yolo less problematic while still being a good game ender because you may force a dude to be pushed out of the game by spending 400-500 mass a second (yolo can also be stat adjusted to make this work) while keeping a priority area of the map safe, same as mavor or scathis.
It’s just a paragon/yolo problem on sentons where paragon pays itself off in 30-60 seconds and yolo has the brutal reality of smds where increasing bp isn’t a particularly great option to deal with it (unlike bp on shields for mavor and scathis or outbuilding the destruction of pgens) and those smds can still get edge nuked.
The conversation is pointless without deciding upon a baseline of maps to center the discussion around. If we operate by the metric of matchmaker pools, which is how FAF historically determines the framework for balance, then game ender balance is fine in my mind. I don’t really see many 20x20 maps in the 2v2 or 4v4 pool that make t4 gameplay unfeasible or too short. Likewise, 3v3 tmm doesn’t generate maps where game ender before min 40-50 makes much of any sense.
Now if we instead operate on the 6v6 crazy mass map gens that often get hosted on weekend, then yes game enders come online super quick if people are playing competitively, but I just disagree on basing something like game pace balance off of these lobbies.
I personally think the only problematic game ender units are
I think it needs to be easier to dump the resources into an SMD than it currently is, whether that’s making SMDs have more bp or adjust the ratio so engies provide more of a relative boost. The fact a nuke + sml costs close to a mainline t4/half a t3 arty is crazy for the value it provides. The sheer existence of it can often morph entire game plans for the next 5 minutes to purely revolve around it for both teams.
T3 arties are fine, maybe like a 10% cost increase but I wouldn’t do anything more than that.
Novax should just be adjusted to be a high alpha weapon so engineers can properly deal with it by rebuilding behind things it kills.
Whether it's a showmatch or tournament, as long as it's an organized event and there's some sort of incentive for all highest rated seton players to gather and compete against each other, im satisfied as long as it's not the like the previous slop we recently had, unsure if we can call it "pointless fluff", most people would definitely enjoy watching some peak high level seton gameplay, and if there's something at stake, we would definitely see players performing at their highest level instead of them playing the game suboptimally like it's some random tuesday lobby even if somehow all highest rating players were present.
The captain draft of this last tourney is working to make as minimal pointless slop games as possible. The point is to create as many equitable teams with a fair shot at winning as possible, and the best way we really have to work through that is going to be trueskill. Personally I would have cut the tournament down to 6 teams based off the rapid dropoff in player skill level in the last round of picks but regardless the average quality of what we got was essential to minimize the level of pointless games while maintaining 8 teams.
For a FAF tournament there are anywhere from 5-8 games in a tournament day before you enter into game fatigue, so making even one game pointless by trueskill metrics means 12%-20% of your event experience is already wasted time by my personal definition. I do not enjoy lopsided games so my goal is mitigating them as much as possible in a tournament.
Requiring every slot to be rotated between is going to disqualify competent players that irregularly plan sentons because they carry way too much downside relative to only needing to play 1-2 slots they either learn or are already strong at.
If they aren't able to play all slots then that already makes them incompetent, being flexible is what makes being worthy being one of the best at setons, this suggestion is primarily made to avoid one-trick players and allow for more diversity in gameplay for players and viewer's entertainment.
Well, i figured nowadays there'd be enough high-level 2k seton players to form atleast 1 or 2 teams that could be able to challenge this super-star roster you speak of, tourneys games can get quite chaotic and there are many other variables besides mechanical raw skill that determines the game outcome like better teamwork/synergy, cheesy strats, etc.
Okay, but you have now halved your potential player pool. In a tournament that you are specifically structuring to already be intentionally difficult to be competitive because of the lack of a rating cap. Nobody is going to be able to meet the quality of you and your thousands of high level sentons games when they might have done like 2 dozen at a high level lately.
Determining if a cheesy strat can work requires fundamentals about the map, you can’t determine valid cheese without knowing timings to beat. And it isn’t even like the team I posted would have terrible communication, you guys play together all the time.
But if you're correct then perhaps in future seton tourneys the same captain-draft system could be used but with less captains or higher prize-pool for fairier teams.
All i want is players of same caliber being able to play with each other instead of being put and forced to play with people that are way below their skill level and with people that can't even speak in the same language.
Yeah, I agree. In effect a TD has full control of what kind of event he will be able to create once the player signups are locked in. He can have a 2200+ event with 2 teams, a 1800+ event with 4 teams, a 1500+ event with 8 teams. Whatever is deemed to be best for the event. Of course some people will complain about it because they wanted to play (every time I try to host a lower bracket for the rest of players I get a huge attrition rate unfortunately) but part of being a TD is picking a vision and sticking to doing the decisions that make it optimal.
This proposed format is a showmatch, not a tournament. You might as well as just invite the top 10 sentoners to play a BO9 because anything else is pointless fluff for casters, viewers, and players.
Requiring every slot to be rotated between is going to disqualify competent players that irregularly plan sentons because they carry way too much downside relative to only needing to play 1-2 slots they either learn or are already strong at.
Likewise no rating restriction in effect means a team lower quality than some function of farm/yudi/nory/foley might as well as be barred from the event. I’m not even sure a 2nd team could be created to beat that team unless you went into the crypt to search for nexus and tagada and get them to derust. It’s not really any different than the last 3v3 that was posted where one of the signups was 1/2 the lots semifinalists. What’s the point of signing up against that team except to waste a Saturday for casters to cover a predetermined game, viewers to watch a stomp, and players to play an uncompetitive match?
All in all, there isn’t much point in treating it like a tournament with signups, maybe some insanely qualified dark horse 3rd team of banani tier players could try to compete but that’s basically the only other team that could exist and they could just DM the TD to make the decision of whether a 3 team event would make sense or not.
That paragon suggestion is not feasible in a teamgame. There is no fluid dynamic for a team to understand when overflow ends or begins so what you’ll have is everybody overbuilding engineers and then once the paragon player has resolved his overflow now the entire team has a 30k mass surplus in engineers to deal with. The optimal way to play and minimize inefficiency would still be donating all eco to the team while one player utilizes the paragon /some donated bp and not doing that would just operate as a noob trap due to inefficient bp scaling.
I would personally find it extremely frustrating to never have an understanding of where my economy stands until it’s too late and the paragon overflow stops if I was on the team with the paragon.
Paying 10k more mass for equivalent units is not moot, by this logic late game costs for anything don’t need to follow any expectations and we could just make UEF t3 arty cost 8k more mass because it’s moot
Losing a t2 mex to win the loya reclaim is worth the trade. Especially since if the loya is just sitting there doing damage to the mex I could have gotten free damage in on the loya with said titan.
Why is your ACU unsupported exploring the world at t3 stage. I used to do shield + gun + t3 acu as a support for titan spam that arrives later to deal with the now sizable enemy t3 army and build a firebase. I would love it if my ACU gets swarmed because now i can converge all my titans there and get a giant reclaim pile to snowball with. Possible because of the speed advantage allowing me to dictate when to take a good fight, and that’s why titan spam was meta back then.
Far greater? I doubt it. Maybe lose like 1-2 more. Nobody is charging loyalists into harbs/othuums.
In 9 out of 10 cases you say? Pretty crazy I was winning games with pure titan spam 2 years ago before they got their bt changed then. I think you’re confusing you deciding to not retreat them with you can’t retreat them. Can’t believe I’m losing my mexes and reclaim over a 15 second shield recharge time, pretty insane gameplay I must be in. I thought you just mentioned how fast titans are why am I simply being killed now? They can just run away, even against loya since you should be hovering around max range anyway.
Titans have a huge speed advantage against ilshies, you should trade equivalently when you are playing terribly and just walk them into the literal t2.5 assault bot. Harbs and othuums crush titans? They crush loya too, I don’t get it.
Titan got renerfed after everyone realized it was worth making and went back to its old statline with the bt. Loya got another buff because it was still seen as too bad relative to titan. It needs to revert back to titan because titan is the normalized level a t3 raid bot should be, loyalists are just too strong against the top end of t2 thanks to its dual stun tools. It’s fine against titan in terms of dps, titans just require more micro to stand up to them which is fine, bricks need more micro to stand up to percies too.
Yeah, you can abuse enemy laziness with cyb stealth. I personally do not have any problem with cyb asf, yes. Like I said I never pick cyb in a tournament for air because I don’t value stealth asf much, it’s really not a big deal when you play properly. It’s more of a problem when you’re doing a 1v1 or a 2v2 and have a litany of things to manage and cannot spend the time properly screening air. But that’s also a problem for all factions until omni is up in 1v1 and 2v2 and unattended air fights happen in these game modes often in general.
I strictly see cyb stealth as reinforcing really interesting gameplay in t3 air stage and have no desire to make it less pervasive. Like I said it’s way better for almost every faction to have stealth asf instead but if that’s not gonna happen then they should just stay where they are.
Stealthed asf doesn’t give Cyb an advantage against anybody except incompetent players. By default you should be screening your ASF with spy planes for intel, Cybran just has the ability to cause that to harm you with an even worse first engagement than the other factions.
Thats just wrong. It happens to everyone that you suddenly get jumped because you forgot enemy is cybran. Yes, you should be screening with scouts, but scouts can also be shot down, you dont pay attention for 2 seconds and its over.
Now I'm not saying cybran or worse or better, as I'm not sure myself, but I just disagree with that stealth doesnt give an advantage.
If your spy planes got shot down then stop being aggressive and pull back, if you didn’t then you should be confident in having around 33-50% more ASF than the opponent so the bad turn potential won’t cause a loss.
I have never forgotten my opponent’s faction, this is literally one of the first things I scout and remember in a game.
These are just bad air plays which should only be happening in scenarios where air needs to make bad plays because the game is in a really bad spot. If you’re doing this in non “do or die” scenarios you’re just a bad air user/player.
Stealthed asf doesn’t give Cyb an advantage against anybody except incompetent players. By default you should be screening your ASF with spy planes for intel, Cybran just has the ability to cause that to harm you with an even worse first engagement than the other factions.
I have never picked Cybran for air since the strat bomber adjustment, they’re equivalent to UEF for me and Aeon is just obviously the superior faction.
Game balance is not about a unit being seen in 15% of games. Absolver carries insane utility against elements like shielded acus as well as breaking firebases alongside winning sniper vs sniper engagements while also being insanely powerful in the aeon vs aeon mirror. There is no need for the unit to need an increase in utility.
Yes, titan is fine. Titan trades pretty fairly with ilshies which should be the expectation for t3 raid bots. The problem with loyas is that they totally slaughter units like ilshies and obsidians when they shouldn’t. I don’t actually have much of a problem with titan vs loya balance and think titans trade well if you micro them properly to take advantage of the shield recharge. You aren’t supposed to just sandbox and charge them into one another and conclude loyalists are OP, that’s not how titans are supposed to fight them.
Nomander’s arguments in the github thread actually involve numerics about the game not just throwing out “you need like a million engies to deal with a mavor and uh then a 2nd mavor is up before u finish ur paragon” or talking about shielding/supporting shielding of ur air grid against a mavor because killing it means you can now strat the para. This isn’t how game ender scenarios play. Neither you nor Robo seem to realize how easy it is to spend 10k mass and how quickly 10k mass a second becomes insurmountable in a game where having 15% more mass invested in anything that your opponent is doing means you win regardless of micro/positioning.
Czar is probably the best balanced air t4 in the game, it’s not costing an arm and a leg to build like a washer where there is huge volatility in outcome but it still serves a very good purpose in air screening and focusing single targets, it’s literally just a big resto.
Absolver is an insanely good unit and it’s crazy that Aeon has it in its roster, I cannot think of many units needing a buff less.
Titan is fine, problem is loya being overtuned against t2.
Spearhead singlehandely carries UEF t3 stage and the only thing tolerable would be like a 500 hp nerf to it. Everything else about it needs to exist while percy stays completely mid.
Novax fix is changing it to shoot like percy (funny how that makes it worse) with high alpha and no aoe so it can’t snipe engies, killing random things on enemy map side isn’t the big problem with novax.
Othuum/Mercy - No strong opinion, they need something just don’t have my own take on how to fix it.
Mermaid - Get rid of torp def and increase cost of mermaid, then it’s fine.
Air Stealth - Not a problem, Cyb ASF lose equal number battles against the other ASFs due to the terrible projectile, stealth is the only thing not making them a bottom tier faction.
If anything every faction (except Aeon) should have stealth asf because it actually reinforces playing air competently and rewards proper unit placement and screening. Aeon doesn’t need it because these purposes are done by resto and it would be a reason to not always pick Aeon every-time in an air slot.
Paragon - 10k mass paragon is the most broken unit in the game, I don’t even understand how anyone can make a cogent argument based in the math of the game to argue against it. Both you and Robogear’s arguments in that github thread are not good and involve random stretches of assumption of things being impossible to counter and fundamental misunderstandings of how game ender scenarios play/what matters in them.
The only argument about countering paragon is yolo because of the reality of SMD buildtime and yolo being 190k, which is more a situation of how op nukes are in general and why we need to review SMD vs SML/yolo balance so that nukes can’t swing to immediately ending a game because an air grid didn’t scout an sml until it was up for a minute.
Normal move command obeys the collision box, subs aren’t any different
If you fully remove all collision then things like tempest are monstrously op because you now need to manually babysit everything so you don’t take quintuple dps from a random tempest or bs or exodus shot when you didn’t intend it.
The problem is the jam just sort of always exists for big navy production because it’s much more of a given to have 60 engineers on a factory while land factories don’t run into that. This is especially true for something like ie skadi where you could be building navy in a cove or something like flooded tabula too.
While armies are smaller on a unit basis, the actual unit box of a battleship is closer to a t4 than a t3 unit and a destroyer is also like 3 t3 units in size as well. It’s really easy to run into a problem with pushing units through in a map that doesn’t have a senton style wide, obstacle free ocean to position in.