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.

@Nuggets said:

@FtXCommando said:

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.

Because shift+g is a solution to bad pathfinding, it’s used all the time both in land and navy for that. Likewise with navy you can have 15 destroyers/battleships sit in the same spot after being made, but with land you’re going to create a traffic jam that stops your factory from producing and the units will also not be able to leave and likely lose their order due to perpetual engie bumper cars. It would be significantly easier to run into the issue of idle navy facs if they had land unit collision and required their own individual space like that.

Of course it’s intentionally kept, it isn’t very difficult to give navy units collision like land units. I’m even pretty sure it used to be part of old balance mods a decade ago like equilibrium if I remember correctly.

I imagine a lot of the reason it applies for navy is because of the dynamic of navy unit buildpower/infrastructure. A land factory with 50 assisting engies creates an unsolvable traffic jam unless you force create a path, navy units need even more room. If navy units had collision then it’s also going to be extremely painful to get navy units to move especially in tighter corridors that are much more common relative to unit size than land units see. Land units can already be incredibly painful in terrain where only like 3-5 units can move through at a time.

It’s a fallacy to say that just because FAF is a macro focused rts that it means you don’t have to micro manage units. This isn’t an auto-battle game.

A cheat is by definition getting an unfair advantage through malicious means. None of that applies here. This is a hotkey that exists and a unit interaction that is intentionally kept. Factory attack move has a more reasonable argument to be a cheat than shift+g of navy units.

It’s a gameplay interaction that you think makes the game worse, so just explain that and how the counterfactual makes the game better instead of throwing extremes out that make your argument way worse because it’s just wrong.

Storm is “another unit” because that’s the game code solution to making it work when the chicken is dead what kinda backward logic are you trying to use to justify this weird urge to nerf an ability that nobody has a problem with

Fact: Nobody puts chicken without storm above or equal to gc

Fact: Nobody puts chicken including the supplementary benefit of the storm above or equal to gc

Therefore: No need to nerf a 3.5% cheaper t4, the storm isn’t impactful enough to change anything about the valuation of the unit.

Creates way more problems than it solves, the game doesn’t need even more snowbally combat

@Caliber said:

and no relevant difference if the storm did 30k damage potential as that would still be enough to more than cover the difference between it and stronger exp anything more is just overkill

Your statement only makes sense if people were broadly in agreement that chicken now is the best direct-fire t4 for value and needed to be adjusted in some way to nerf the faction. Nobody thinks that, so saying “it would still be enough to cover the difference” makes no sense because I’m challenging the idea that there even is a difference in the first place. If a difference doesn’t exist, the whole question of nerfing is pointless.

Evidently not considering it doesn’t manage to push chicken above gc in general utility, you would just be making a worse t4 worse

Why would you base your balance around not accounting for micro on what is very clearly intended to be a centerpiece unit? Do we begin balancing fatboys around no micro too?

There are some niche scenarios where the storm will get huge value but in most practical situations you would prefer a gc, it has insane utility not only due to the t4 vs t4 micro but also with the added benefit of getting much stronger veterancy hp boosts. It doesn’t make sense to nerf something in a unit when that unit is not even recognized as being the best in its class while leaving other units untouched

nobody is picking chickens over gcs so evidently this isn’t a significant enough factor to change the meta there

Wonder open

It will always be easier to skip t2 when there’s 7 acus walking around because ACU counter units basically only exist at t3 stage. If you want t2 stage to exist for 8 minutes on a 7v7 it will be completely oppressive in a 2v2, game isn’t built for 7v7 lobbies.

You couldn’t? I mean you see the engies in the screenshots and it looks like you could pretty confidently get close enough to get a third of the mass with an engie in the specific slot in these screenshots from those locations