As people age they have more money and less time. Can't wait till FAF is mainly played from retirement homes with 20 apm and players falling asleep during a game.

I have tried myself quite a bit on mathecatically describing balance. I am currently at the stage: Complex system even just for direct fire units you will only get to a precision of 10% of the balance mass cost at best. There are so many unit stats that change the strenght of a unit. Easiest to start is with effecitve DPS, HP and Masscost. But then you have a lot more stats like energy cost, movementspeed, range!!, firecycle (regarding alpha damage and overkill, which also quite depends on the army composotion you are facing.), turret turn speed, hitbox size, acceleration. And I am sure there are at least twice more stats than I have named here that effect balance. So a theoretical approach via those unit stats becomes very hard to do. It can be usefull when you have to first set a baseline for balance for a mod etc. I did help Dragun with his SCTA mod a bit with this and an efficiency calculation based on lanchesters laws. But that is only a base line after that you can only improve balance via playtesting.

I am going to talk about the medusa bomber stun issue as an example. I find it quite hard to compare the stun of a medusa and the bomber. Mostly because one is an air unit and one is a land unit. So the counters to each other are quite different. Also the bombers main advantage is that it is very fast and is not restricted by terrain. So it needs to be less efficient than a medusa because it can attack way behind the front line whereas the medusa is not capable of doing so. The stun is rather a gimmick for later game use of the bomber because it is cheap and can stun high tier units. Also medusa usually gets dodged, whereas t1 bombers attacking an army usually don't get dodged.

But the biggest issue in my opinion is that you are asuming all tiers of all domains of all factions should be equally strong. That is not the case and is not desired as far as I am concerned. Quite similar balance is required because of the map diversity present in FAF. Some domains have a huge advantage over other on some maps. This results in very similar factions if you want to have interesting games between all factions on all maps. But you still have a bit of wiggle room and in my opinion it should be used. So that is the reason there isn't even an intent to make all t1 bombers equally strong (even if it was possible). They need to be comparable but I am quite certain if you made a statistial analysis of all replays and just calculate the average vet of all t1 bombers in all games it would not converge towards the same value for all bombers. And quite often you don't even have an equivalent unit in the other faction.

Balance is messy and as far as I can tell it is currently done by a couple of the top players having a discussion about their intuition of what is op and what is not. Another problem on top of that is balance is distorted on what tactic (unit composition etc.) currently is in fashion. Also ease of use has a huge impact. Most memorable example that comes to my mind is the introduction of SCAU presets.

If you are interested this is the (old) combat efficiency of selected units calculated via a partial discretization of lanchesters laws wich only takes HP, Mass and avrg DPS into account:

Just remove seraphmi, cybran and aeon from the game. All hail the uef mirror matchup. Perfect balance.

Thanks for being so committed to tracking down the issues.

@ThomasHiatt
I suppose it is just a matter of taste. I didn't enjoy learning bos or even standard tactics at all up to the point I got like 1300 global. Was still fun.
Now I don't enjoy learing bos but I accepted i have to do it to at least some degree. Or at least get a feel for the map/ knowing about the tactics that can work on the map.

Playing bad is still fun for a lot of people. But unfortunately not for the majority, as they are too afraid to leave the astro/gap safe space.

I don't think that the people in lower ranked ladder mind playing on unknown maps. They already are comfortable with a lot of maps.

There should be an advantage to not store up 20000 mass until you have your unit.

To add to @archsimcat calculations:

when you take into account what your mex is usually replacing the t3 mex suddenly becomes a lot more efficient. in the best case when you reclaim your t2 mex and have a lot of bp on building the t3 mex it has an even smaller repaytime than upgrading a t1 mex to t3. When upgrading it is still more efficient than ringing mexes.

So when someone properly enters the t3 eco stage it can be considered some kind of eco runaway. I would consider the t3 mex to have a 10% shorter repay time than capping t2 mexes in a realistic szenario where you are reclaiming your t2 mexes.

To put that into perspective: Usually a 1v1 is over when one player has a 10% total mass lead and isn't significantly behind in army size. All because of that exponential groth nature of eco scaling.

When switching to a 10% more efficient eco stage you have the 10% generated mass lead pretty quickly and the 10% total mass lead short after that.

My cunclusion is that the efficiency increase of switching to t3 eco makes the game quite unstable at the transition stage. If you aren't able to mirror your opponent in first t3 mex or deal big damage right after the transition you are screwed. The question now is if it is a bad thing to have this deciding point/phase in a game. On setons navy for instance it is meta to not invest into heavy offense before you have at least some t3 mex. I would consider that a sympton of not falling behind on the t3 eco switch.

I don't feel like I have understood the problem well enough to have an opinion on whether t3 mexes should get changed let alone what change would be good for gameplay. Maybe this theory approach helps to form a better decision.

equations behind the sheet, cause I am too lazy to explain:

Would be nice if that could happen asap. I am running dry

TMM is the controlled fusion of faf

I think just showing the percentage of mass going into eco and going into units would be more helpful. Since on most maps the main gameplay decision is between putting mass in to eco and spamming. But eventually you will get an intuition about how many mexes are currently upgradeing/ how much buildpower is on them.

@arma473 Unfortunately they will start to cycle between the factories with their assisting and when the distances are wrong you are presented with a huge pathfinding mess B(

Did you know spread attack also works on assist order?
nice for reducing pathfinding mess when upgrading support facs.

As people age they have more money and less time. Can't wait till FAF is mainly played from retirement homes with 20 apm and players falling asleep during a game.

@auricocorico groundfiring subs is the biggest navy has apparently. I get that subs don't really have a role atm. At least on setons. But battleships groundfiring is not the issue. I totally agree with turin here.

It annoys me though that the only efficient counter to harms is groundfiring it.
Torpedobombers can not kill it mass efficiently if you have well placed sams behind it that are out of range of battleships which don't push into harms range. Pretty sure every sub/destro gets absoluetly melted by harms as well.

Groundfiring harms is just another navy apm drain that gives huge benefits and isn't fun at all. And depending on the faction it can take ages to kill them.

I would prefer if they weren't groundfireable but had less hp so that suiciding torps into them would result in a 1:1 kill loss ratio.

@muaddale it not possible from faf. But you can do it in the game.prefs accessible by the burger menue of the FAF client. The section regarding resolution is nearly all the way at the bottom. Windowed mode is an option as well. there is also the possibility to hide the taskbar etc:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/123/guide-fake-fullscreen-and-optimisation/2?_=1618762485946

On topic of my original post:
I like the Idea of battleships being able to deal more damage to each other by preventing dodging.
Faster muzzle velocity would be one option but that would also make frigates etc. a lot more voulnerable to battleships. Thus requireing to adjust the hp/dps stats of battleships anyway. Also it kind of breaks the theme. I love the summit for its projectiles, they just have the right feel of weight to them.

Another option would be to decrease battleships acceleration and turn speed. Making it impssible for battleships do dodge anothers salvos. This would also go with the theme of battleships being sluggish. Downside: The pathfinding mess around factories would get worse when factroy placement is done poorly.
I could even imagine giving battleships a slight top speed buff in order do accelerate the t3 navy stage. Top speed doesn't affect dodging capability when the acceleration is low enough.

@h-master
Didn't read the feedback on it but I imagine it would cause some balance issues. How about just pausing construction while carrier is moving. So at least you wouldn't have to requeue everything, which is the most annoying part of using carriers.

If you ever played a semi high level setons games you know that when you and your opponent go for the chill game approach it will end up in a huge t3 navy battle. with battleships pounding each other for more than 10 minutes ingame time. Also micro helps a lot as you can probably dodge 50% of the incoming damage. In combination with the simspeed slowdown late game setons navy becomes sending battleships in circles for 20minutes realtime (and cycling shields). With occasional eco management/scouting. I really don't enjoy this. And here lies the important point of this suggestion: I know a lot of people have perfected the t3 navy micro stage and some enjoy it a lot. But I also know people in the 1700+ range who share my opinion and try to avoid t3 navy all together, because they dislike the way it has to be played. What is the opinion of the majority?

The reason why t3 navy is so slow lies mostly in the slow movement speed of battle ships and the very low dps/hp of battleships. First it takes very long for a battleship to reach the front line and then it takes very long to kill another battleship. And to top it all off the power of retreat is very strong because there is a lot of mass in the reinforcment stream you can retreat into. So the frontline has to be pushed very slowly when having a superior fleet.

The best adjustment to make t3 navy more exciting would be to decrease bs hp and inrease it's dps. In current balance battleships have the lowest dps/hp of any surface naval vessel.

By increasing that ratio the killtimes between battleships would decrease and therefore decrease the time you actually have to micro your navy but making that time count more.
Bringing Battleships a bit more into the glass cannon regime would have some impact onto other units as well though. Shields would become even stronger in navyl, torpbomber more effective, bases would fall faster after a navy crush.

The perfect example for a fun navy unit is the neptune. It makes a t3 switch actually capable of winning the pond fast. As has a comparatively high dps and is fast.

I think there is a difference of the game quality that is shown in the game wich is defined by the trueskill specification and therefore hardcoded in a sense and an arbitrary gamequality that the server ususes to match people. @BlackYps did a post about how he *will calculate it in a future update in another thread. Afaik it mostly modfies the game quality for people with few games. Also it takes rating differences of a matchup into account. With the current one it doesn't feel like I get good matches which were regularly <10% ingame game quality.
On topic: I am against the Idea of buffing peoples eco according to their skill. Punished being good, in a system that already tries to create balanced matchups. And the better player will just be in the passager seat and at the mercy of his teammate playing bad or horrible. Which is a huge pain to watch.
If you are matched with weaker teammates just give them basic instructions. If you aren't a douche they will actually follow them and it will increase their effective rating by roughly 300 points in the match.
Don't tell them what they did wrong during the game. It doesn't help at all. Don't try to play the game for them. Just basic stuff like which expansion belongs to who, where to send acu. If you want to spam or win the long tech game. Tell them when to push or retreat (in general). When an airfight is taking place.
This is how I won a lot of games with lower rated teammates in tmm.

(Edit *)

I am interested in joining a showmatch. Especially a 2v2 match. Rating wise I peaked at close to 1800 tmm rating before the reset. Ladder I am hovering around 1700. I would also be willing to set up a pov stream to feed into the casting stream, as I belive FTX suggested in one of his recent posts.

Caster wise I have to say that farms and jagged had a very good synergy, would be great if we could see both of them more often on the channel.