Posts made by IceDreamer

I profiled the game while it was running and produced a statistical output of how much time was spend in each function, both in engine, in lua, and the time at which the function call was registered.

@jip Oh, that's easy - The vast lion's share of the compute time is taken up by function calls across the C++/lua boundary. It's about two orders of magnitude slower than anything else. Potential areas for improvement would be to look for areas where the lua makes repeated, unneccessary calls to engine. I worked with a couple of guys to eliminate all the points in the exe which make stupid calls the other way, so that's already done.

Other than that, you can try using more local variables in hot code - Intel, collision detection, economy events.

I designed the current system, and gotta say I like the sound of option 2. Wish I'd thought of that. It's not quite the same, as it means the distribution of damage from units which regen or get repaired shifts, but tbh that is so ridiculously uncommon I was wrong to take it into account. The cost of the table lookups probably isn't worth it.

xp = (damageDealt / MaxHP) * massCost should do the trick. Probably doable in about 20 minutes by anyone familiar with unit.lua.

How it should be:

T1 Frigates - Fast, surface only, radar, sonar, pwned by T2 destro
T1 Subs - Fast, stealthed
T2 Destro - Slower, surface fire dogsbody, wins surface vs all, dies to T1 subs, has flares and weak torps against T2 subhunters
T2 Subhunters - Long range, high alpha, beat T1 subs, lose to T2 destro, lose badly to T1 frigate, very low HP so lose to destro.
T3 BS - Bombardment, loses to most, needs escort. Think of as T3 Mobile Arty on land
T3 Subs - nuke station, super-long-range defensible bombardment, needs escort. Think of as T2 MML

Everything else can be fit in as unique units or variations on these themes, such as the BC being a bigger destroyer.

All frigate? Pwned by destro. All destro? Pwned by T1 sub. All T1 sub? Pwned by subhunters. All subhunters? Pwned by destro. Destro + subhunters? Frigates + subs, depending on mix (Frigates go in and kill hunters, die, but subs then kill destro. Countless variations need testing, but it's better than where we are right now.

Frigates are bullshit and always have been. I left this community in large part because people are stubborn morons and nobody wants to change the status quo to make the game better. Everyone's so afraid of their own goddamned snot when it comes to changing the balance of the game to something fundamentally new and injecting new life and intrigue into the game. It's pathetic.

This should have happened a decade ago. The purpose of a unit icon is to inform the player of the role, capability, and danger of that unit at a glance, not to inform them whether it has legs or tracks.

@tagada This game is now 14 years old. I strongly question whether your premise would actually be a bad thing.

@FunkOff That was me. Code still exists, and it was put forward as a balance patch, but was rejected by whoever was BC at the time. Which sucked, because it made so much sense for the unit and made it much more fun to use.

@FtXCommando Also the memes. Can't discount the memes man

AIr has been OP forever, I told everyone that to fix it requires a fundamental repositioning of the entire Air section of the game as much weaker to AA than it is right now (See SupCom 1 for successful Air balance).

Nobody listened.

People are too stubborn.

This will never be fixed. Until I become a millionaire and make SupCom3. So, 15 years

@arma473 Uhhh. I mean, might be a decent idea, but maybe you didn't realise: I was Game Councillor for like, 6 years. I literally ran the dev team for that time, and know more about the game's code than anyone else. I wrote the book. That comment was just me making a small joke with FTX because he and I often clashed on what the problems were I'm sure he understood

@FTXCommando - I'm in the rare position of agreeing with absolutely everything your just said Apart from, perhaps, the proposed solution...

I think a couple of better ones have been proposed in this thread. In order of what I think will be most successful:

• Tune the interaction between Sniper/Shield mixes and Titan/Loyalist pushes specifically. +0.5 speed on the latter, 25% increase in shield drain, and a reduction of something like 10% in shield HP would, I think, have quite an effect.
• Increase T3 Mobile Arty range as FunkOff suggested, though the balance with Fatboy needs to be careful. I believe Fatboy should still outrange them, so if you go this route the numbers I suggest are Mobile Arty 90 -> 105, Fatboy 100 -> 110. I don't think that would break Fatboy particularly. Keep the necessity to deploy, it's a key part of their balance in other matchups.

End of the day, I think it's also important to realise that "They can get this strong on the main battlefield so the others have to too" is not the only way to balance factions. You could pursue a route which recognises that, hey, a good Aeon or Seraphim player in the lategame with a properly constructed and microed army just cannot be stopped by UEF or Cybran on the ground without going T4, and give UEF and Cybran wins in other situations. Perhaps the solution to a group of Mobile Shields, Snipers, and Harbingers/Othuums should be T3 Gunships or Strats. Perhaps you could look at slowing down both Mobile Shields and Snipers, meaning that they take longer to cover ground while the team of Titans or Loyalists which can no longer take them head off spear around the back to attack your T3 PGens directly and crap all over your base to drop the Shields. Perhaps for Aeon, you make Disrupters and Snipers a unit pair by giving Snipers a penalty against Shields with a negative damage multiplier, forcing the Aeon player to spend mass on Distrupters which is wasted against Percivals, or mass on Snipers to counter Percivals which is wasted on Titans. Cybrans could then have their own strategies of sneakiness buffed, or just given a stronger win elsewhere.

There's lots of different ways to approach this and it deserves a bit more thought I think. Removing the deployment time, however, does not strike me as the correct answer. @Tex is correct, that is likely to lead to more problems down the line. It smells of a bandage on a larger problem to me.

Allow Atlantis to fire AA while submerged

• Very cool
• Unique
• Powerful
• Opens new strategies

I proposed this years ago and made the changes needed, but all the stick-in-the-mud boring people told me not to put it ingame. I got outvoted.

So boring

EDIT: Just saw Deribus' post. I have no replay, but as this is a response to the OP and general idea of the thread, rather than the ensuing conversation, I request this be allowed to slide. Thank you!

OP is 100% correct and any arguments against him are flawed. The correct move for the good of the game is to remove the upgrade entirely, and to remove the static resource generation from the base body as well.

Mobile, build-capable, self-defending units should not be able to produce resources, period.

The only, read, ABSOLUTELY ONLY reason it is even slightly acceptable on the ACU is that you only have 1, and if it dies, the game is over. That's the downside to a mobile, build capable, self-defending unit. Oh. No, there we go. There's the balance guys. If you want to keep the RAS SCU upgrade, the way to balance it is that when it dies, you lose the game. That might, maaaaybe, make it doable.

Anything else is not enough.

Remove the upgrade.

I pains me to see this community still incapable of thinking outside the box This was the best you could come up with? Engineering station clones? Didn't even think about, I dunno, giving them an advantage in another gameplay arena other than buildpower that might allow them to win some games, did you? This is an awful change.

@TheWheelie There are other solutions to the slow start in this game. The man is completely right: Clicking on rocks manually is an extremely lame mechanic.

A generally good rule of thumb when considering whether a concept is any good as a whole is to put yourself into a state of mind where the thing doesn't exist, and try to imagine the response if it were proposed. A proposal to add the necessity of manually clicking a bunch of rocks in the first few minutes in order to compete at high levels on certain maps would simply be laughed out by any playerbase which was not already pre-conditioned to accept it.

@deletethis It would not be wise. Most of them are unfixable engine-level faults, and for the most part they are unknown in the community at large. However, if I and a small number of other developers took note of them over the years, it's possible that a dedicated wannabe-cheater would be able to notice them as well. Most of the fixable exploits have been fixed.

I'm not gonna get very involved, but I feel a duty to point out that UI mods are capable of doing a lot more than most people know about, and are... quite breakable, if you want to.

@MazorNoob Of course I can, it's what I believe. You presented what you believe to be an option. I disagree; I don't think that it can be done. I don't think there's any state where that unit design won't be either stronger than any alternative, and therefore overused and, in time, regarded as "cheap" and "OP", or weaker than more commonly available alternatives, and therefore never used. I don't believe there is any such state. I just cannot see it. All the testing I did years back, trying literally hundreds of stat combinations, I couldn't get it there. I couldn't even get it satisfactory on paper!

My prior response stands. If you wish to try it, I won't stop you. Just be aware that it's my belief that you won't succeed.

Balancing them as a pure snipe unit again won't work. They were like that before, and they were OP, then UP, then OP, then UP... It just can't be done. FFS, give up! Try something new!

Pearl, your argument that the guy had already lost is disingenuous and silly. A pair of well-placed OCs are easily capable of rescuing that situation, and for all we know Air was on its way, so Bombers wouldn't have achieved what Mercies did.

Fact of the matter is that ALL of this game's pure snipe weapons have been mired in controversy for years because they don't feel good to play against. At that point balanced or not isn't the question, it's whether people quit the game entirely for not being fun any more!!! Mercies, TMLs, Beetles, Strats, Telemazer... People don't like them very much.

This is why landmines is the only possible route forwards. TMLs have direct counterplay. Strats are T3 and have direct, very effective counterplay. Mercies have direct counterplay. Telemazer has direct counterplay. Yet even with the counterplay in effect, the mobility of the assualt allows it to still be useful. The same is untrue for beetles. The same approach will never work.

Try. Something. New.