Posts made by maudlin27

Most arguments against seem to be that manual reclaim isn't that important (in terms of helping you win the game). If anything, that's another argument for the change (since it's not going to have much of a balance impact)!

I'd bet most people playing the game find it more fun to do things other than playing 'click rock not tree simulator'. Something that therefore reduces the APM required for manual reclaim (and therefore the need to do this) is likely to increase fun for such people. The change also removes a source of frustration with not being able to properly execute a decision - as mentioned above, if you want your ACU to reclaim an area, there is no suitable option at present. Unlike engineers, you don't have a sub-optimal attack-move order option, and if you do patrol then that can cause various issues/unintended consequences. It is also still sub-optimal to choosing the reclaim targets yourself, just not as sub-optimal as an attack-move order, so people wanting to eke out small advantages that make use of higher apm will still be able to.

So we have a mechanic that isn't fun, can at times be frustrating, and seems generally accepted by proponents of it posting here to not result in a decisive difference between games being won or loss. Other than this mechanic rewarding people with high APM, what's the benefit of banning a reclaim brush type option?

Also, why is it acceptable to automate/reduce apm with features like mex capping and mass fab automation, but not with reclaim?

@jip While I agree in principle with the idea of having simple checks for a secondary weapon where that weapon's effect is negligible, I'd disagree with making it as broad as 'if it's not the primary purpose then downgrade it'.

As an example, you mention cruisers with direct fire weapons. Sometimes I will build a Cybran cruiser for the primary purpose of using its direct fire weapon, since on some maps it's the optimal unit for taking out a firebase (although having said that I dont actually know what its default priorities are so maybe it wouldnt make much difference).

Seraphim sub hunters would be another example where you might build them both for the AA and for the anti-sub capabilities.

Other examples where you might build a unit for a combination of its weapons/non-primary purpose would be restorers, and in theory continentals (although in practice they're a bit too weak to use efficiently as a combat unit that can also sometimes transport units)

I'd therefore suggest a stricter threshold, where the weapon must both be a secondary purpose, and also be very bad at that secondary purpose. So for example a fatboy's anti-air or a transport's air to ground would fall into that category, but a Seraphim sub hunter's AA or a Cybran cruiser's direct fire attack wouldnt.

v34 - Dynamic firebases

• This update introduces firebases, although the scenarios where they get built will be relatively rare. More extensive turtling logic is planned for a future update (specifically pre-planned firebases), but for now M27 has what I'm calling 'dynamic' firebases, which in practice are likely to be built if it faces a constant stream of progressively stronger enemy units. As part of this, it will now build T2 artillery for the first time.

• Another related change is the introduction of shield assist logic to help with T3 arti wars, with M27 being significantly better at surviving against a T3 artillery.

• 15 Bug fixes, including an issue that stopped torpedo bombers working (they'd only attack enemies that got near them previously), and an error that would happen when building experimentals if the enemy had an experimental

• 33 misc changes, including improving ecoing ability slightly by trying to always have something upgrading (sometimes this can hurt it though)

Thanks to:

• Pyrolol for highlighting a bug with Plateaus on Twin Rivers
• Relent0r for a bug with the decision on what experimental should be built.

Was queuing up for 4v4 TMM, 2 computers using the same internet connection, one of us showed 7/8 connected, the other showed 1/8 connected. We've managed 4v4 TMM games before (although usually after many attempts).
I'm assuming given what was displayed that it was one of our computers failing to connect, but seemed strange that one could connect to everyone else while the other couldn't even connect to the computer on the same internet connection so thought I'd mention in case it might be a wider issue than just with one of our computers.

Just to check re the point about never rechecking for targets if one has already been found, does that mean if I fly an air scout over a bunch of T1 MAA, followed by bombers, the T1 MAA will all target the air scout (it's the only unit they see), and if they fail to kill it (often the air scout travels too fast, unless its cybran MAA or is going almost directly at the MAA) theyll keep trying to target it while the bombers are free to cause carnage as long as the air scout stays within range of the MAA?
Similarly a land scout could be used to distract Aeon T2 PD (although it'd require more micro) allowing a guncom to close in without taking damage if the opponent isn't paying attention?

Aeon gun's increased range is massive - you can reliably kite enemy guncoms with it, and they're forced to either hope you slip up with the kiting (letting them get within range), have a load more nearby units to charge at you, or get enough T2 PD up to stop you. Oh and a cost decrease to gun upgrade is a buff to the gun upgrade.

Aurora I don't like but it does at least give a clear difference to the other factions who all have a very similar main tank.

Mercy - discussed a load in a separate threat - I'd prefer the oppsosite of your suggestion - instead of making them survive against MAA, make them die to MAA. IMO if the enemy has MAA by their com it should counter mercies. Making Mercies able to tank T1 MAA shots for a while would make them insane.

GC - It gets omni and the claws, which are really powerful against some matchups. As an extreme (unlikely) scenario - I can beat other land experimentals with certain SACU mass equivalent combinations. Try that against a GC and it'll easily crush them due to its claws [Edit: Forgot that the sandbox scenario I was recalling was UEF Shield SACUs with Percies underneath them and for some reason thought the claws got the SACUs - instead it got the shielded percies]. It also easily beats a monkeylord, and its 'crush when walking' is more meaningful due to its huge HP.

Czar - compare this to soulripper, there's just no contest. It's incredibly versatile - you can charge at the enemy com under shields with SAMs nearby and kill it (try that with a soulripper and you've just given them a big mass donation). You can kite enemy asfs with it; you can use it in a more attritional style thanks to its shield; you can do surprise attacks by storing air units inside it, etc.

What about for the second condition (slightly more complex but not massively so):
elseif energyTrend >= 99 and (energyStoredRatio >= 0.99 or (energyStoredRatio >= 0.91 and energyTrend >= 2000)) then

i.e. by having it at 99 even if dealing with a T2 mass fab you should be getting a very tiny energy shortfall as it turns off and on (helping to highlight to the player there might be an issue with their power)
By having it kick in at 91% when you have significant net energy (that's more than a T3 fab) it means your power should recover quickly from an overcharge, while allowing significantly longer to turn on mass fabs to avoid significantly overflowing energy.

There are often discussions on the balance section of the forum where there's no visibility on what the balance team's conclusion is on the topic (although there might be a hint if one of the team posts on the topic). Meanwhile, balance patch notes mostly seem to feature changes that have had no discussion on the forums (i.e. no indication they're being considered). Would you improve communication/visibility of balance decisions for the wider community, and if so how?

v33 Hotfix

• Fixed a number of Plateau related bugs that resulted in issues where the Plateau had 3+ mexes
• Fixed bug causing bombers (in particular T1 bombers) to not work properly when in defence mode
• Various other bug fixes (23 in total including the above 2 points), including Czar targeting issues, MAA not being built for experimentals, and SMDs not building more than 2 missiles.
• 36 misc changes, including making it less likely M27 will overflow mass, and improvements to special T1 bomber engi and mex hunting logic.
• Misc changes included tweaks to the logic for building PD to make the AI build more of them (originally intended as part of a larger update to have the AI make firebases in some rare situations, but this part was postponed due to the number of bugs that needed fixing).

Thanks to:

• Pyrolol – Highlighting issues relating to Plateaus on Open Palms
• Relent0r – Highlighting a bug with the bomber defence logic and Plateau issues on Open Palms, along with replays showing a Czar targeting bug, and bug with sending MAA with experimental units
• Fearghal – Replay highlighting SMD not unpausing after firing its missile (when 2+ missiles had been built)

v32 - Plateaus
The main focus of this update was introducing Plateau logic – on maps that have mexes that can’t be reached from the starting location, M27 should sometimes send engineers there with a transport. This effectively required the creation of a mini-M27AI to operate for these plateaus, with the following all being done:

• Logic for identifying the plateaus, and deciding whether they’re safe to send a transport to
• Building the transport
• Loading engineers into the transport
• Sending the transport to the plateau to land the engineers
• Having the engineers decide on appropriate buildings to get (e.g. building mexes, land factories etc.)
• Having factories on plateau decide on appropriate units to get
• Disabling parts of the main M27AI logic that wouldn’t be very good on Plateaus (e.g. avoiding upgrading plateau factories to T2 unless there are no other options)
• Having specialist logic for any units build by factories on a Plateau, to only consider targets on the Plateau. This involved different platoon AI logic for scouts, MAA, indirect fire units, and direct fire units, along with disabling parts of the main M27AI logic (e.g. for scouts and MAA)

Given the extent of the Plateau changes there will likely still be a few bugs relating to this.

Other changes:

• 15 Bug fixes, including various issues with TML (they would rarely be built; get built in the opposite direction wanted; and could lead to a crash in the game), and a bug that could lead to 5+ experimentals being built simultaneously.
• 44 Misc changes, mostly relating to use of air units, with some relating to building engineers.

Thanks to:

• Relent0r – Replay highlighting bug that caused 5 fatboys to be built simultaneously and vulnerability of M27’s bomber defence to enemies building shielded flak near to M27’s base, along with general suggestion to have hover-bombing not apply if flak detected. Strategic flaw with having M27 ctrl-k all T1 factories at once when it thinks it doesn’t need them.
• !MarLo - Providing several screenshots and replay highlighting issues with M27 having >300 strats idling

It might work for 1v1 ladder, but would be really bad for teamgames, since it gives a big advantage to people who recognise the enemy team names and know how strong they are.

E.g. you might deliberately choose not to kill the low ranked player on their team, and also know that you'll need to support your ally if they're against a much higher ranked opponent.

So you either need to remove names as well as ranks for teamgames (which causes separate issues) so there is no way to tell who the strong players are on the enemy team (other than by what they do in game), or you need to leave ratings in for anything other than 1v1s

@marcspector thats not option 4. Option 4 I think is saying it is automatically part of FAF (presumably with an option in settings to turn it off) the way building storage around a mex is integrated.
(Edit: posted pre your edit!)

If it’s made a SIM mod (which I presume is what is meant by banning it-ie ban mods featuring this unless they are SIM mods) and Jips ideas for making it hard for most people to use are implemented I dont see an issue with this not being fullproof. Not being able to stop 1% of cases shouldnt mean giving up entirely.

I can see a valid argument for allowing mods like this if the desire is for FAF to be primarily about what decisions you make, and for high apm to play as reduced a role as possible. However, this means that various other currently banned things like auto-clickers and auto-manual reclaim should be allowed. Essentially any automated micro should be permissible.

The alternative is that high apm activities are for the most part not considered appropriate to automate beyond UI type options (e.g. selection based hotkeys that selects certain units at the press of a button) and basic quality of life enhancements (right clicking a mex to build storage around it). For the most part this seems the route FAF has taken.

Therefore as things currently stand it doesn't make sense to me that a mod is allowed that automatically takes actions for you (enabling and disabling mass fabs based on your current energy requirements), but other mods such as the autoclickers and reclaim are banned. I'd therefore favour banning this aspect of EcoManager, regardless of whether such functionality is considered good or not (as many people have commented in the past about how relying on this functionality can teach you bad habits and make you a worse player).

@femboy I dont mind much whether you have it showing all in one go or you click a tab/something to switch from all time to last 30 days, main thing for me is that there is a way of seeing the figures for the last 30 days (and potentially other time periods such as a year as subsequently suggested, in which case tabs or a dropdown box starts to make more sense due to issues with cluttering the page/squeezing too much info in one place)

Division ratings
Games played in last 30 days (of the type being shown)
Win rate in last 30 days
Highest ever rating/rank/division (not fussed which, just some sort of ‘best x achieved’)

AI biweekly/monthly tourney: MapGen
The idea of this tourney was to use MapGen to create a map for the AI to fight against for 5km, 7.5km, 10km, 15km and 20km. Due to the AI tourney still being run manually a single map was used for the map size for the tourney (rather than generating a new random map every time). The maplist chosen was:

• neroxis_map_generator_1.8.5_vgf5tqx2uxrcu_aicae_
• neroxis_map_generator_1.8.5_uydyqpk4utuuu_aidae_
• neroxis_map_generator_1.8.5_xaghpcvo2lnrk_aieae_
• neroxis_map_generator_1.8.5_bvwpdifwrols4_aigae_
• neroxis_map_generator_1.8.5_44sxnthefcek6_aiiae_

Setup
Setup is similar to the last tourney - 12 AIs are split into 4 groups. The weakest 4 are eliminated in the first round, with the winners from one group fighting the runners up from the other in the quarter-finals in 3 matches.
As there were 5 maps, maps were chosen randomly for the group and quarters, and then for the semis and finals each map was played.

Changes to AI
3 of the featured AI have released new versions since the last tourney: M27, SCTA Arm, SCTA Core

The results
Group stages

Quarter finals

Semi finals

Finals

(M27 and RNG drew 1 game)
Total wins by AI

Detailed results
The full results can be seen in the 'DetailedResults' worksheet of the following file:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1i2ObsZ49S9gUTgWw0E68qZ8VrOkaP_Jk/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=100973959280546778272&rtpof=true&sd=true

Other Observations

• Notable changes in fortunes: In the final, RNG had c.25 mass to M27's 621, yet still managed a draw (M27 attacked RNG's base with its ACU leading to both ACUs dying)
• The 7.5km map featured two land masses separated by water, which caused several AIs issues
• Although SCTA failed to get a win it managed to match Sorian Edit for map control and eco for much of the game, with both games going over an hour
• The group stages required two deciding matches to determine groupings, with an extra Dilli vs Adaptive and Sorian Edit vs DilliDalli match due to them getting the same number of wins as each other.

v31 - Bombers and TML
The main focus of this update was a rewrite of most of my bomber targeting logic and use of the Ahwassa. This took a bit longer than other updates in part because I had a week away.

• Ahwassa can be built by Seraphim
• Bomber targets are now determined based on the bomber tech level (previously the current Air factory HQ was used as a proxy with all bombers assumed to be the same tech level)
• New engi hunter targeting mode for early bombers
• Bombers should avoid targets protected by static AA ((previously they'd only avoid if the AA was near the target itself)
• Introduced hover-bombing, mostly for strats and Ahwassa
• Strats will launch co-ordinated attacks to try and take down more heavily defended targets
• TMLs can now be built
• 12 Bugfixes (including one causing massive over-production of engineers at the start of the game)
• 37 General misc changes
• 17 Further misc changes focused more on late-game (e.g. refining the logic for what experimental gets built, and how certain experimentals are used)

Some of the misc changes resulted from feedback/replays provided by people. In particular thanks to the following for this version:

• Chp2001 – I almost gave up on getting hover-bombing to work, but Chp2001 shared code they’d used that achieved hover-bombing. Although I couldn’t get that code to work, it gave me better motivation due to knowing it should be possible for an AI, and a better steer on some of the timings - even after this I had so many failed attempts I was going to give up on my last attempt (which ended up working), so had it not been for Chp2001, there'd be no hover-bombing in M27AI as I'd have given up far sooner and needed more attempts to get there.
• HintHunter – replays highlighting poor early-game performance including heavy mass stalling and engi-overproduction
• Relent0r – highlighting poor performance on Selkie Mirror vs Sorian Air (on running the map I realised one reason was a bug with the pathfinding I used that led to 2 mexes being ignored)
• Azraeel – Replays showing a number of late game flaws and issues when dealing with units on a plateau
• Babel – Notes on ACU being too aggressive, and M27's vulnerability to enemy air if it doesnt scout the air fac in time (M27 now gets a couple of inties preemptively to support its bombers while its ACU is far more likely to fall back when ahead on eco)
  (apologies if I've missed anyone off - as it's been a longer update cycle I've lost track of the reasons for some of the changes)

What about just buffing the SACU rapid fabrication by increasing both the mass cost of the upgrade and build power, so it becomes a viable option on those maps where hives are good - i.e. it gives concentrated build power that doesnt cause pathfinding woes (since you wouldn't need many of them). Since you'd get a mobile unit with a basic combat ability it'd need to be slightly less efficient than a hive at building, but not much.
For example, instead of a modest increase in build power from 56 to 98, quadruple the build power from 56 to 224, and also increase the build range slightly. Then set the mass cost of the upgrade accordingly to balance it. E.g. a hive costs 350 mass per 25 build power. Since the value of having a mobile builder with combat ability and basic resource generation is priced into the base SACU model, lets make the rapid fabricator upgrade as efficient as a hive in respect of the increased BP element. So taking the Sera ACU, and assuming it's roughly balanced at 2k mass for 56 bp, that'd mean you'd want the extra 168 bp to cost 2,352 (total cost of 4402 for 224 build power). By comparison, the current upgrade gives you 42 bp for 800 mass (so is significantly more expensive than a hive in terms of the additional bp).

If this would be too powerful, then make it 10% more inefficient for the additional BP.

Personally rapid fabrication feels really weak and not worth getting (I'd rather have 3 Sera SACUs than 2 rapid rabrication Sera SACUs, even if I'm planning on using them to say build a firebase or setup some SAMs) and I've never seen anyone get rapid fabrication SACUs, so it feels like an opportunity to increase variety a bit, it preserves the uniqueness of the hive, and it doesn't require work with creating a new unit.

A nerf that involves changing an existing stat (eg mass cost increase; damage change) has the advantage of not changing how the unit fundamentally works vs the original fa/steam implementation. Something like randomness while moving or a deployment time would be a significant departure and in the case of inaccuracy while moving wouldn't be obvious to a new player.

Sera T3 mobile shield isn't that much different to a fixed UEF T2 shield, despite being mobile and able to go on water:
T2 UEF structure: 600 mass, 9250 health, 120 regen, -200 energy
Sera T3 mobile shield: 720 mass, 10400 health, 133 regen, -175 energy
So costs 20% more, for 12% more health and 11% more regen and marginally less energy consumption. The size isn't much smaller when you factor in the mobile shield is a lot smaller than the fixed shield (i.e. you can fit units in the area that a fixed shield would take up). However, it's mobile, making it far more versatile.

Other factions' mobile shields are harder to use since they have a much smaller shield size (needs more micromanagement), and the shield is a lot weaker (so you get less benefit from using them, and bombs and arti shells will quickly break through them).

Currently if trying to kill a sniper bot under a Sera mobile shield with strats you'd need 4 strat bombs. If the mobile shield health was reduced to 8250 from 10k (17.5% reduction) then most factions could kill with only 3 strat bombs. The mass cost could be reduced slightly to compensate (e.g. a 12.5% reduction to 630).
The shield size could also be increased - while this would be a buff in some scenarios, it'd also make the mobile shields more vulnerable to T3 mobile arti fire, and mean multiple shields would run into the shield overlap and aoe damage issues.

I.e. if they were to be nerfed, it'd be nice for sniper bots to retain a key role as a counter to slow moving ground units such as percies, while in turn having clear weaknesses to units such as mobile arti and bombers that can only be lessened but not removed through the use of mobile shields.

If the health of the Sera sniper bots was to be increased, it could also make T3 mobile arti much weaker against them when they were without shields, since UEF deals 750 a shot and Sera 700 a shot (i.e. they can 1-shot an unprotected sniper bot at the moment, since the sera health is 700)

Another option is to make them more of a glass cannon - increase their initial damage, but increase their cost as well