T1 pgens aren't essential for T2 arty, it's a 4% reload discount which ends up being a 1.19x effectiveness for fully capped arty, coming to a profit of only 62 mass which is a negligible 2.8% of the total 2200 mass cost of the setup (unitdb).
This marginal adjacency is eclipsed by the idea that sparkies shouldn't build any eco structures so that there is no chance of them not being a combat unit.

As Deribus mentioned, I think reducing the size without changing the stats would make it too powerful in firebases, since you can basically stack 4+ instead of 3 shields to defend a T2 PD and they are high HP and low cost compared to UEF/Cybran.

Here's the overlap possible for a PD with the current shields:

I don't think being unable to upgrade the shield is a huge drawback, it just requires you to ctrl-k the shield and reclaim the small wreck before building the very cheap T3 shield. It requires some APM but definitely isn't impossible if you're defending something important that requires your attention with shields.

For the size complaint, I'm not sure what you want to shield. It can shield adjacent structures pretty well. Not entirely but almost everything:

For this pgen specific case I'd rather opt for a tiny increase in shield size instead of making the structure smaller.

I've been testing your size idea with the "Create entities" dialog (its in the hotkeys, you use the hotkey while a unit is selected and you can change its blueprint values. Spawn a new copy of the unit to make sure you get all the changes. Requires cheats):
4x4 size is just way too OP, since you get ~8 overlapping shields instead of 3:

5x5 size is enough to cover a pgen but its still a small shield so its not reaching towards diagonals:

It also still increases the coverage from 3 to 4-6 shields:

Decreasing the size even by 1 seems to bring more problems than solutions.

All in all, I understand why you dislike the shield but I think its strengths in HP and cost make it above average for firebases and protecting most directly adjacent things like T3 shields, pgens, factories, or engineers. The T3 shield is also very strong because it's super cheap and the 2nd most powerful, while giving sufficient radius imo: I've seen Aeon T3 shields easily protect air grids, artillery, or game enders from artillery barrages when a sufficient number are built (and number of shields is the most mass-efficient way of defending, so having a cheap shield helps a huge amount - natural regen is nearly worthless while recharge from 0 is extremely strong).

SMD missing and having to fire a second time is unacceptable. In that game the SMD firing twice actually lost the game.

I have published the SACU Rebalance mod. Afaik there are no bugs and its very playable: the balance is theoretical number crunching with very light T3/T4 land/navy combat testing, and all the game/visual design is implemented at a basic level (so you can look in UI for stats). Please host it/play it/sandbox it.

There's a github page with the working environment and commit history: https://github.com/lL1l1/SACU-Balance-Mod/tree/main

From the github:

FAF SACU Rebalance

This is a mod for Forged Alliance Forever.

Implements changes for the SACU rebalance proposed by balance team: cheaper SACUs, stronger adjacency/gateways, new army support enhancements.
Rambo SACUs are independently reworked with new weapons and upgrades to fill gaps in faction rosters.

General Changes

• Cheaper SACUs: Buildtime and energy costs are significantly reduced across the board.
  • RAS is more energy expensive due to decreased base SACU mass cost. RAS also increases death volatility of SACUs.
  • Weaker base SACUs: Unupgraded SACUs have less HP and/or DPS.
• Stronger gateways: Gateways consume 32-44 mass/s building SACU and have 160 buildpower, while costing 2550 mass, down from 3000.
• Stronger adjacency: Mass fab and pgen adjacency for gateways is un-nerfed and made equivalent to land factory adjacency.
• Engineering upgrade buff: Engineering upgrades are made much cheaper, especially on buildpower and energy, so that they can come close to engineering stations in power.

Faction specific changes (Rambos and support enhancements)

• UEF SACUs are highly armored with good firepower. They have powerful support enhancements and combat enhancements designed to engage T4 units.
  

• Cybran SACUs are lightly armoured and slow, but are highly upgradeable with enhancements designed to engage enemy T3, SACU, naval, or air units.
  

• Aeon SACUs are agile and have a powerful sensor suite (to counter underwater cloak) but are lightly armored. They have cheap combat enhancements designed to engage enemy T3 units.
  Aeon SACU nano is removed since nano does not fit the faction.
  

• Seraphim SACUs are highly armored with increased Regeneration rate but reduced firepower without combat enhancements. They have unique utility/support enhancements and powerful combat enhancements designed to engage enemy T3 units.
  Seraphim SACU shield is removed since personal shields do not fit the faction.
  

Fix here: https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/6884

This is a repost of a post made by @Jip on Discord:

It goes without saying that when an ACU is destroyed that it should explode. This discussion is not about the 'typical' way that an ACU ends up exploding. Instead, this discussion about what should happen when a player disconnects. There's some interest of adjusting this behavior, see for example:

• https://feedback.userreport.com/354e2fbd-fdb7-4282-ae57-df75bf625431/#idea/448833

And with thanks to @Nomander we now have a technical solution:

• https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/5971

We just have to enable it. At the moment it is disabled. We can make the behavior work like any of the other share conditions. And we can also introduce a new behavior: the ACU recalls individually.

The question that remains is how this feature should work in practice. A few relevant facts:

• A) It is difficult, if not impossible to determine whether a player left the game on purpose or because of technical reasons. We'll refer to this as the player 'leaving' regardless of what the cause is.
• B) It is possible to make it configurable, in the same way that the victory conditions and the share conditions are configurable.

And the primary questions for this topic?

• 1. Should we adjust the behavior of the ACU when a player leaves the game?
• 2. Should we make the behavior customizable (through the lobby options)?
• 3. The new (individual) recall behavior, how should that work exactly? Are there conditions, and if so - what are they?

I'd like to add some more details based on what's possible with the current implementation too:

• Aside from recalling the ACU individually, we can share the ACU for a limited time or permanently.
• The share condition for units can be changed based on if a player disconnects, and whatever anti-abuse measures are used (ex: use fullshare for disconnects unless we detect abuse, then use no-share just like for normal deaths).
  • Some ideas for anti-abuse measures are checking current ACU HP, if the ACU was damaged recently, or letting the ACU live (and possibly sharing it) and calling it abuse if it dies too quickly.

Maudlin is correct that assistance costs vary by shield, since it is based off of regen rate, repair cost, and RegenAssistMult.
Documentation on github repo:

--- How much buildpower is required to provide 1x of the shield's regen rate.
--- The cost of assisting a shield is repairCostRate / RegenAssistMult,
--- where repairCostRate is determined by Unit:UpdateConsumptionValues
---@field RegenAssistMult? number

These are the buildpower and mass efficiencies considering that repair cost is 0.75x the unit cost and RegenAssistMult is 60 for all shields.

Considering that defending a T3 Aeon artillery costs at least 165 mass/s, and a Mavor at least 550 mass/s, it is well worth economically to spam out multiple shields (they cost around 3.4k mass each) instead of assisting one, although it is riskier because the enemy can retarget the artillery, let all your shields get up, and then come down all together in the next few artillery shots as the overspill and splash damage take effect. Good for game enders that you need to protect at all costs but also need income to build.

2 Aeon T3 artillery one shot a shield and it is impossible to assist to prevent that currently.

Assisting works at full speed if you're stalling but that's a hard to fix engine bug/performance heavy Lua fix.

[Does assisting] speed up getting a collapsed shield back up?

No it does not. That is determined by the shield recharge time which will be added to the UI soon.

Aeon used to have t2 shields that couldn't be upgraded (unless my memory fails me) but that was patched as a balance decision.

The balance team does approve of letting them be upgradeable but there is simply no animation for doing so.

Good post. If you want you can take a look at/contribute to 4z0t's rings for all mod, it's set up to display range rings on top of units and currently there's no capture preview iirc.

As for interrupt pathfinding, it can get a bit out of the original scope with certain commands (attack move causing long range reclaim, load into transport from long range, capture from long range). We already filter the order to engineers only, but we could go further and filter by command type too, so it only works on what we want for good gameplay. Alternatively we should implement interrupt on assist/capture/auto ranged reclaim into the game going by the (poorly enforced) policy of integrating important mods into the game.

The cost of the TML isn't just 800 mass:

• mass cost: TML (800 mass) + missile (250) + some way to kill tmd, let's say 4 (easily countered) T1 bombers (360) = 1410 mass (unitdb) which affords 5 TMD.
• You need to get an extremely valuable central map position to be able to force out 6 TMD per enemy base. You then have to get T2 engineers to that position. Taking all that time + having to get the engis there (early HQ instead of eco) gets your opponent a T2 mex.
• You also have to build a TML instead of a T2 mex which gives your opponent extra mass to build TMD while you load the TML.

If there are more than 20 desync messages sent from any players: https://github.com/FAForever/server/blob/1b98cdae23350c92fab5203b4e6ac9bf52198e6a/server/games/game.py#L477
So I guess the unpredictability comes from the player count heavily affecting the result. An Astro game will send 6 desync messages every 5 seconds while a Dualgap game sends 12.

@Fichom said:

And here's my document that outlines how adjacency bonuses stack up (or don't) with additional engineering: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UT6xJbBYUu3jX1YIlK_v4Ma9IqMjEWQNNcrg_rI47gI/edit?tab=t.0

It's not really useful to think of mass discount adjacency as a discount on unit costs because it doesn't cause the unit to scale its per mass effectiveness in the same way as a reduced unit cost. Trying to calculate that reduced unit cost alongside adjacency is not useful for the same reason.
It's better to think of mass discount adjacency as a bonus mass income that is greater than the bonus income from storages but is affected by mass stalls, requires building an expensive adjacent structure, and locks up the bonus income in that structure's expenditure.

Steam page says they're expecting to release in a year, so for that reason I think currently they're just in alpha and aren't going to really take many players because bugs/incompletion etc.
Kickstarter page stretch goals shows that they're getting a nice amount of money though, and their updates page says they expect to reach 700k-1M USD. I'd expect the numbers to actually lower when they're done with the game then.

Imo the actual reason FAF would lose players atm is major technical issues like connections and desyncs.

"All factions FAF BlackOps Nomads" + "Low Commander Tech-Ras Upgrade Costs incl BO" would spawn in all ACUs and let you instantly build their tech upgrades for free.

Click on the player's name in the scoreboard. If you're using the supreme score board mod then you'll need the updated version "Supreme Score Board2HC" to shift-click to switch armies.

Here's a prototype script for aeon smd I made where each projectile gets assigned to the shooter cap. A weapon won't target something if its shooter cap is reached, but it will shoot continuously once it has targeted. Adding the projectile to the cap instead of the weapon basically keeps track of how many projectiles are in the air instead of how many shooters there are. This works better than normal but it still fails for nukes that take more than 1 shot to kill like Yolona since the projectile is removed as a shooter once it impacts. I suppose you could work around that by spawning dummy entities taking up the shooter cap every time the high HP nuke projectile takes damage. That workaround would also work for non-projectile weapons in general.

---@class UAB4302 : AStructureUnit
UAB4302 = ClassUnit(AStructureUnit) {
    Weapons = {
        ---@class UAB4302_MissileRack : AAMSaintWeapon
        ---@field unit UAB4302
        MissileRack = ClassWeapon(AAMSaintWeapon) {
            ---@param self UAB4302_MissileRack
            ---@param muzzle Bone
            ---@return Projectile
            CreateProjectileAtMuzzle = function(self, muzzle)
                local proj = AAMSaintWeapon.CreateProjectileAtMuzzle(self, muzzle)
                LOG('self target', self:GetCurrentTarget())
                local target = self:GetCurrentTarget()
                if target then
                    target:AddShooter(proj)
                    LOG('target shooters:', target:ReachedMaxShooters())
                end

                return proj
            end,
            RackSalvoFiringState = State(AAMSaintWeapon.RackSalvoFiringState) {
                Main = function(self)
                    local target = self:GetCurrentTarget()
                    if target then
                        target:RemoveShooter(self.unit)
                        LOG('maxed?', target:ReachedMaxShooters())
                        if target:ReachedMaxShooters() then self:ResetTarget() ChangeState(self, self.RackSalvoFireReadyState) return end
                    end

                    AAMSaintWeapon.RackSalvoFiringState.Main(self)
                end
            },
        },
    },
}

Use Unit:AlterArmor to change the damage amount.
Hook the OnGotTarget, and OnLostTarget functions of the unit weapon to adjust the damage resistance when needed. Janus example

I got some evidence in the discord discussion after throwing out a 10% cost nerf idea and saying this:

I think I was just throwing out a number [10% cost nerf] to reason about if I was to look at it from nugget's/farm's perspective, but it came off a bit too much like a decision on a change. It was kind of a random number without thought behind it. Personally I'm still not convinced of such a change because like you [maudlin] say there's a lot of different maps that have to be balanced for and maybe setons is just an unbalanced map for this specific scenario, which is unfortunate for its legacy.
More specifically I'm not convinced because:

• Nuggets/farms have the argument that invasion is too slow so a cost nerf is needed.
  • their evidence is "I've seen games where it's optimal but they didn't do it"
  • no replays where it's optimal but wasn't done
  • no replays where this optimal move was done and the enemy invasion was equal mass but simply couldn't win, particularly when not vs para/yolo
  • they themselves use house rules to not have any recent experience using or playing against the strategy
  • they both say its true on mapgen as well but there are no replays and no explanations why. I also checked nuggets' replays and saw that he often plays drawn out/setons-like naval mapgens and such types of maps that aren't relatable to the average mapgen player, so taking that into account lowers my confidence.
• ftx says its purely a para/yolo problem, so a cost nerf is not needed.

All of these I guess you could say they're too low-rated players just going off experience (quite harsh ik but like there might be some errors to look out for, like maybe opps are too bad at defending):

• skrat and spcr (mlgtastic) argue that the ender's cost gets it killed by land
• sainse argues t3 arty would be unbalanced and claims that the timing just isn't possible/doesn't happen as early as nuggets says it is
• maudlin claims the timing isn't an issue

Nuggets and farms responded that searching replays is too tedious compared to the chance of a satisfying balance conclusion, but farms still gave a replay.

From @maudlin27; Rainbow cup game where T4 land push wins vs ender:

FYI this was the game I recalled (T4 land push vs game-ender):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tdv1ZoqBvbc

24329811

20x15km map, has AI enemy teams in the corners which complicates things, but has the benefit of being a cash prize tournament so you'd expect teams are going with the strategy they think is best.

Using in-game timestamps (rather than video):

at 29m40 teams are roughly equal on eco (1.1k mass), and they largely remain similar after this for a while (bottom team fluctuates between 1.2k and 1.0k)

The mavor is started by bottom team at some point before 34m (at 34m17 it's 32% done); the top team briefly started a paragon before abandoning it and focusing on building GCs and other units

Mavor completes at 39m

Top team pushes with GCs, bottom team manages to land a nuke on a couple of the GCs (and later the AI also nukes one of top team's GCs). was very close but top-team's push with the GCs wins.

From @knownsniper; public/casual high-rated setons where he plays without eco bar (!!giant blunder!!)

anyway just for you this is an example #27433457

due to a disconnect the replay stops at min 38

https://puu.sh/KQj23/ea24a46581.png

in a completely even position (income is the same total mass generated is the same, also 1 min after this time nory wins top navy so both navies are equal)

but there's this to watch the end https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2822304906?t=05h11m32s

Here's @sainse's local replay that doesn't end early.

My take on the rainbowcup replay is that units showed to be better than Mavor. Nukes hindered the land push a lot but then air came to save the push, although everything was still quite slow. Thankfully Mavor is weak compared to Para/Yolo, particuarly vs units, so it didn't deal complete game-ending damage in the time it took for the land push to win.
It might've been a bad emergency defensive situation for the Mavor because there was Fatboy spam instead of other T4s. If the fatboys were swapped out fully in cost then maybe the mavor would've stayed alive with most of the bases destroyed, and the game would've continued for a while, which is a fair situation imo.
If Para/Yolo were built then they defeat the push easily and the north team would've lost because they had no follow-up with arty or ender (which can potentially defeat a yolo that spent its time nuking units, but they can't win long-term against para's defensive shield and smd capabilities).

For the setons replay I think:

1. Popiska and farms didn't cooperate which led to an ineffective strategy for the team as a whole. They should've either gone farms 2-3 Ahwassa + Popiska 600 ASF or farms should've contributed mass to Paragon. I think the Paragon would've lost but the air attack would've killed the Yolona at minimum and secured future air domination by killing ASF and killing all bp that could've been making SAMs, which allows a followup with more air or a land invasion that skips all the flak setup.
2. Farms delayed his invasion by 3 and a half minutes because he didn't manage his engineers, factories, and transports correctly. This was because he was focused on irrelevant things as seen in the stream recording, doesn't use ferry orders for transports, and had no eco bar while playing. At 5:13:43 in recording or 41:46 in replay he checked his mass bar and he floated 51k mass and overflowed +145 out of 474 income. It was safe to drop engis for invasion at min 38, Yolona started min 41, and nuke landed min 45.
3. It was quite lategame so doing an all-in with a land invasion at that timing was already more risky than usual invasion timings.

What I'm convinced in right now is that paragon output should be nerfed and Yolona cost should be shifted from energy to 225k mass to stop air players having a ridiculous 37k/63k mass advantage (17% cheaper than mavor, 25% cheaper than paragon) compared to other enders when turning off their air grid and going into Yolona. 225k mass with lower energy requirements should put it at a similar timing as before for ender rush eco slot build orders (no air grid to pause). It could be slightly lower at 210k mass since it has to eat through the game's accumulated SMDs, but still it needs a significant shift into costing more mass instead of energy.

A work-in-progress opinion is changing Yolona to cost more time when nuking units. A simple answer would be 1.5x missile BT, 1.5x missile HP, and 1.5x minimum reload time, but with how extremely powerful nukes are there could be changes to SMDs from there, so the Yolona change has to wait for whatever happens in that area.

You can ignore that Paragon/Yolona are quite overpowered compared to Mavor/Scathis if you want.

Might be a client bug. The icon appears in the vault screen for me: