Hi all,

I'm the guy that's responsible for FAF replay server, here to talk about stuff. Tl; dr if you have issues watching live replays and want to help out, scroll down to the bottom.

A long time ago there was the original replay server. That thing had a bunch of issues and had to be restarted every once in a while. Some time back I rewrote it and the new version has been running ever since. The replay server does two things: it streams live replays and it saves them to FAF vault. Right now saving replays works perfectly fine, but streaming doesn't quite work.

Many of you know that there's a bug with live replays where if you're behind on replays and the game ends, the replay ends abruptly. I know about this bug, but never managed to fix it. I can't reproduce it myself and I have absolutely no clue what causes the bug. Maybe it has something to do with how Python deals with TCP connections, maybe it's the FA executable acting up, or maybe there is some bug in the server I missed. I don't know. Here's a possible way to fix it.

Not long ago I rewrote the replay server again. This version is IMO simpler, more tidy and it's done in Rust rather than Python, meaning it's faster, multithreaded and easier to maintain. I spent some time polishing it, making tests and so on, the last bit that's left is testing it with a bunch of real games, then deploying it. Now, we held off for a while on that last step. From our (dev) perspective, current server has been working fine, in a sense that replays were saved properly and nothing crashed. Here's where you come in.

• First, I need to hear your opinion on live replays so us devs can gauge how serious of an issue this is.
• Second, I need a bunch of people for a testing session on the test server, maybe a mini-tourney of sorts, with some people playing and other people watching. This way I can verify that the server works fine, and with a little luck the live replay issue will be fixed as well.

I don't have any timeframe for the testing session, but we'll figure something out, maybe on some weekend. Come help out pls!

I wish Discord stopped taking over community everything like this, it's horrible for retaining or searching for any information

@ftxcommando said in Nuke Sub Rework:

2. Just spamming TMD on the water. Late game navy combat already involves SACUs being dropped to get reclaim and build SAMs. It will not be difficult to just use them to build a few TMD as well. I'm unsure how to feel about this issue and it's the main reason I decided to stop theorycrafting about the idea and just make a post because I can't tell if this makes it a deadend or if it's viable if we tinker with values like cost, hp of the missle, and so on.

How about long range nuclear torpedoes?

You'll end up with people flaming about kill stealing and accusing one another of stealing rating.

Jesus Christ people what are you even talking about

I know I don't do much dev work, but please, please listen to my heartfelt plea. I know it's hard to do when we're 100 posts deep into accusation and hurt feelings, but it's just a videogame. There's no reason for any of this drama to exist.

I'm not the kind of person that likes the "toxicity + inclusiveness + CoC" HR nonsense, but maybe we can accept some provisional rules to get this thing under control. I don't want another ZeP episode over nothing.

• Assume good faith, even when first impression tells you not to. We're all adults here, we should assume by default that we're not driven by pettiness, even if we sometimes lash out.
• Get angry in proportion. Being direct and sometimes offensive is fine, if the thing at hand warrants this approach. If something is bullshit about a thing, call it bullshit. If we ban getting angry, people will vent through underhanded office politics bullshit. OTOH no one is obliged to respond to every rant and people who rant all the time start being ignored, so save them for things that really matter.
• When in doubt, deescalate. If things get too heated, deescalate first. Get someone else to arbitrate. If you're a bystander, support the person that chose not to escalate, not in what they're arguing about, but in their stance. An argument is a dollar auction game and beyond some point betting higher should be made not worth it.

Can we all agree to this? I hate to see people who contributed this much more to FAF than me lose it over petty nonsense.

@hoschmosch said in Connection issues never been this bad:

Engaging the Russians could be a solution. Whoever finds irony can keep it.

Surely appeasing people with delusions of persecution willing to destroy a community with no remorse will lead to nothing but good things

This thing is good, it parses tick count real fast, it's thanks to this thing that we get to preview in-game time for replays, you should adore it

Following recent balance forum rule changes, I decided to check how often beetles are actually built. So, I did the following:

• I grabbed 2000 replays from id 13370143 downwards, skipping IDs that gave me a 404.
• I ran the replay parser on replays with the following script:

  #!/usr/bin/fish
  for file in scfa/* 
   ./fafreplay commands $file -c IssueCommand 2>/dev/null | grep -q xrl0302
   if [ $status -eq 0 ]
   	echo $file
   end
  end | wc -l
  

  This basically counts the number of replays in which commands were given to a unit type "xrl0302" (or fire beetles).
• Finally, I counted replays in a similar fashion for a bunch of other gimmicky/niche units.

Here are the results:

• Beetles: 18
• Sparkies: 100
• Mercies: 79
• Janus: 187
• Continental: 99
• Spearhead: 42
• Shard: 76

We all think it's hard. If reworking netcode is a piece of cake for you, then do it. You'll be a FAF hero.

Jesus @Askaholic relax. I don't care about complaints or people being annoyed, I just want to get something done.

4 subs have 4 times the DPS that a Brick does.

You can just make half the mass in inties which is something like 4 per corsair, keep them near you and demolish the corsairs after the first pass. The moment you scout a couple enemy corsairs, spamming T1 air should be the reaction. T2 flak is not great against T2 figher bombers and it's okay, it's there to stop gunships and murder T1 air. This also means flak keeps your clump of T1 inties safe from enemy air and free to kill the corsairs.

• Alternative flak mode is a tiny nerf to corsairs since right now you can micro them to stay almost out of flak's range. Faster projectiles will make it harder.
• I can't see a scenario where corsair EMP would be useful. Against buildings it does nothing, it doesn't work on ACUs because it would be insane if it did, non-AA can't fight back so it just slightly slows it down and who cares, unshielded flak already dies to corsairs anyway and any other AA, especially shielded, will be immune anyway.
• Aren't Nothas already consistently dodgeable?

@thewheelie said in Satellite overperforming.:

Making novax on 0 e income also takes a while wonder why you didn't mention that 4head

Does Novax cost 2 million e to build?

9/10 times when someone makes telemazer (or novax) it's late enough in the game for a team to have 50k+ e income in total and on average people tend to overflow e in that stage in the game (since e stalls become way more impactfull), so you generally almost never need to make more than 2 t3 pgens and some storage

If we're talking so late in the game that e costs no longer matter then the opposing team should afford tele def anywhere they have antinuke anyway.

You are in no position to say "different units different uses different counters" since you are the one who started making the novax/telemazer comparison. If you think they cannot be compared you shouldn't have started the comparison to begin with.

Yes I am. Nukes are yet another "target anywhere on the map, has a specific per-area cost counter that you need ahead of time" weapon that has yet another counter with different numbers. Doesn't make the underlying mechanics much different.

Aside from that you're completely missing the point. Mazer needs to pay itself of yes, but it does that by simply existing since making it already indirectly pays for itself, while for a novax this is completely not the case considering there is a huge opportunity cost added to it.

How is paying 20k mass and 2 million e for a telemazer not an opportunity cost?

Also i've seen paragons protected by 15 shields die to well positioned telemazers.

And I've seen navy production completely denied by 2 novaxes, what of it? Anectodal evidence is anecdotal.

Protect from what? You have shields and sams yes, but like i said shields are way less usefull against tele so u need pd's instead. If you have fb's instead of pd's you can still buy way more time by dodging and the entire air grid will be dead by the time you kill the acu.

Fighter-bombers obviously won't protect the telemazer target in the first place sure, that's the job for T2 PDs. Their purpose is to ensure the first tele is the last one, and this they can do no problem.

An important difference is that shielding against a novax usually benefits you in another way later on, like protection against air or arty's/game enders, but defending against telemazer doesn't benefit you in any other way.

This I concede in part. Shields alone won't protect you from units or nukes and nobody uses T3 arty to target random T3 mexes.

Conceding the Novax DPS analysis, except again, you have to factor in the cost of shielding all the mexes where otherwise you wouldn't bother because SAMs stop strats and no one will nuke/arty/Asswasher random lone T3 mexes.

@thewheelie said in Satellite overperforming.:

a novax cost 36k mass for 250 dps
mazer cost 25k mass for 3000 dps

4k for lazer + 15k for tele leaves 6k for pgens. Making tele on 5k energy income will take a while.

mazer can also tele under shields rendering them useless unless you have multiple overlapping shields

And Novax is immune to PDs and air. Different units, different counters.

The moment a telemazer acu finished the entire enemy team better has 60k mass in defenses ready at that exact moment

You probably already protect anything that's 30k+ worth of mass in a concentrated spot, and anything else can be sacrificed and countered by having 15 or so fighter-bombers ready to respond.

but the moment a novax finishes the enemy team needs nothing in particular, especially since by that time you have some random shields around your base to protect important buildings against air (which are irrelevant vs mazer since they just tele under the shields).

Sure? Different units, different uses. Novax can freely target anything risk-free, mazor has to pay itself off because it's usually a one-wat trip. Complaining that you can't snipe a shielded anti with Novax is like complaining that teleporting somewhere to kill 2 T3 mexes is not worth it and a suicide half the time. It's not like 2-3 properly overlapping shields don't protect against tele anyway, especially with how it just refuses to fire if you tele too close.

Even if you don't have time to build shields it doesn't really matter if you lose a few mexes since you can just instantly rebuild them after dropping some t3 engies there. The main damage is apm drain, but then again the novax player is microing his novax as well.

Can't Novax target wrecks? If they can, then it's something like 100 mass/second damage when attacking a T3 mex until everyone makes a Novax's worth of mass in shields. Either way as long as the enemy doesn't expend this much mass in shields you'd still be ahead, wouldn't you?

@ftxcommando said in Satellite overperforming.:

I cannot even fathom how you arrive at a conclusion comparing telemazer to novax, might as well as compare interceptors to destroyers.

They both can reach any point of the map regardless of enemy action and destroy any single target that wasn't covered with relatively expensive, small area of effect countermeasures. They're similar to each other the same way each is similar to a nuke. Nukes and tele have seen arguments of being too powerful relative to per-area cost of their counter and were nerfed a few times, but the same argument made against novax is dismissed, arguing that once the defenses (that on some maps can cost more than the novax) are up, novax becomes useless. But wasn't it the case with telemazer and nukes as well?

I'll risk a stupid, maybe incendiary question: isn't Novax strictly better than telemazer? Considering:

• It's arguably cheaper when you factor in T3 pgen costs,
• It doesn't put your commander in harm's way,
• It can't be killed at the location it's attacking,
• It's expensive to defend from in a different way: while telemazer is more expensive to protect from if you want the targeted thing to survive, it's less expensive to make some strats than to shield everything if you just want the ACU to die, and ACUs are irreplaceable,
• It can target surface of open water unlike mazer,
• It can be scaled up indefinitely unlike mazer,
• It gives free intel.

I'm not sure if telemazer's being harder to scout and more effective at one-way suicide bombing makes up for this.

Why would that consume so much CPU time? It's maybe a few dozen state updates a second at the absolute most. Back when I maintained the Python client after rewriting the chat code I didn't see much CPU usage. All I used at the time was a Python IRC library, some Python data structures to keep track of players and IRC users, a Qt model and view implementation, and Qt itself. Despite a lot of it being Python, I don't recall it taxing the CPU much.

Okay, so that's a stealth field radius buff, which as I already explained does not compensate the vision range buff.

@sladow-noob said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

That's why Cybran stealth got a buff iirc, it was a topic in the vision-debate as well.

What buff? If you're talking about the stealth field range increase, then it doesn't nearly compensate for the vision range buff and I'd like to know the train of thought of someone who thought "if we give stealth equally more range then it all equals out". Why would I care for deceiver having a bit more range when stealthed units are still dealt damage way sooner than they used to on attack or are completely locked out of kiting in more situations?