Posts made by MazorNoob

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?

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

@mazornoob Due to the vision bug. One of my latest games there was a mantis fighting with mine, however it was near the edge of the vision so even though their mantis shot at mine, my mantis couldn't shoot back due to that bug (we both had no extra intel -> He literally only had an advantage cuz or RNG).

Sounds like the game working as intended, you don't have intel so you're worse off. In microfights like this there's already other sources of RNG like who started shooting first or micro, so I don't see it as a legit reason.

As for unfairness of early game small scale fights, UEF and Sera inties can kill transports in 10 hits and inties in 6 while Aeon and Cybran need 11 and 7 respectively. It has never, ever been brought up as an issue even though almost killed drops happen fairly often.

By increasing the vision of everything just a little, the hope was that the vision bug didn't play such an important role. However how much the impact really was is something I can't tell you, I only know the bug is still there. Now it might be much better than months ago, but yeah.

It's not surprising. Increasing vision range didn't make the mechanism itself more consistent, it just pushed the RNG envelope more towards units that used to have much less vision than range. Short of giving all units vision range well beyond weapon range there's no surefire fix.

And in turn that would make Cybran stealth completely useless rather than much less useful like I've seen people in the forums complain about.

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

There are reasons for every balance change

What was the reason for giving 90% of units and buildings 15% more vision radius across the board?

@ftxcommando said in Fix tactical artillery - Battleships/T2/T3 mobile artillery:

made uef the worst at yet another tech level

Made a list just to check if it's true.

T1 land -> arguably yes, but not by a lot
T2 land -> no, Cybran is
T3 land -> no, Cybran is
T4 land -> sure

T1 air -> arguably yes, but by a tiny margin
T2 air -> yes
T3 air -> no, Sera is
T4 air -> arguable since they have Novax and it's not like Cybran bug is any good

T1 navy -> after Aeon buffs, sure
T2 navy -> no, Cybran is
T3 navy -> no clue
T4 navy -> no, Cybran and Sera are by not having naval exps

This, except make ASFs lose max HP no matter what the longer they are in the air.

Could be a graphics driver issue maybe, given that message?

This looks like a GPG employee's file path baked into FA binary for logging during compilation. Definitely not something sent by a malicious player.

It used to be that beetles had a higher engagement range so they could actually explode after catching up, but someone set that range to their explosion radius making them next to useless when not microed. Then I guess it was reverted to the tiny range under the assumption that they'll be shot at and killed anyway, again making them useless when not microed.

@hoschmosch said in Connection issues never been this bad:

an admin who invests more time in constantly giving us long-winded statements instead of addressing the problem? And again, this is about a core issue, not the design."

From my perspective that's far from the truth. There's multiple people with sysadmin experience investing enough time into FAF for it to be a part-time job, all for free. FAF's infrastructure is non-trivial and takes much more effort to maintain and develop than say, a Minecraft or CS server, even without a few vindictive people hammering its services.

To give an exaggerated example, doomsaying of your sort is about as reasonable as saying that people running the economy are idiots and if they just printed and gave everyone a ton of money then everyone would be rich. It just doesn't work that way.

Dumb opinions lead to sarcastic responses and there's nothing you can do to prevent it

@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