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.

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

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.

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.

Vault has v1.0 because v1.1 was removed for some reason, but you can still download it from the original forum post: https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=17047

It was only reduced from 10000 to 8000 compared to the Steam version. On top of that, shields can reduce crash damage by 20% of their own max HP (basically this means Czars/Ahwassas crashes can only kill 3600 HP SMD through shields).
@Kilatamoro is correct in that it's like a normal AoE that gets absorbed by shields. I did write some code where crash splash damage ignores shields, since it is reduced by shield max HP already, but the issue is that if the unit crashes right outside a shield it deals 8000 damage straight through the shield, which isn't fixable.

I already worked this out, among other options, see: https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/5971
In summary it adds 2 new lobby settings: disconnection share conditions and disconnection ACU share conditions.

• Disconnection share sets the share condition for a player after they disconnect. I would expect it to be the same as the share condition or fullshare, but all the other share conditions are available too.
  • To prevent abuse, when the disconnect share condition is applied depends on how the ACU is shared in Assassination.
    In non-assassination, it defaults to fullshare because I find it very unlikely that people can disconnect to avoid death in other victory conditions.
• ACU sharing determines what happens to an ACU after the player disconnects:
  • Explode: Like normal, the ACU explodes 10 seconds after the player disconnects.
    • It is an instantaneous condition, so if the ACU took damage in the last 2 minutes (to prevent abuse) the disconnect share condition is not applied (no abusing disconnect to fullshare a base in a normally noshare game).
  • Recall: Similar to Explode with the 2 minute timer, but the ACU recalls and doesn't damage anything.
  • Delayed Recall: Disconnected ACUs are shared to allies for 2 minutes or until 5 minutes pass in the game. The DC share condition is applied when the ACU recalls or dies.
    This is the competitive option in my opinion, which gives some time to stabilize and use the ACU, but limits the use time since there were concerns about having two ACUs being OP.
  • Permanent share: Disconnected ACUs are shared to allies permanently, and the DC share condition is applied when the ACU dies. This is prone to double gun ACU abuse or just easily saving the ACU for way later tele/com bomb, but it is the option that maintains the current game state the best, so if people don't find multi-ACU oppressive they can use this option.

I like @Deribus's solution of vet also giving HP proportional to the personal shield HP.

It's a simple, mildly consistent solution that avoids the issues of how to deal with shield recharge/shield regen and you can even ignore (S)ACU shield upgrades since they don't come with the unit by default and are already balanced with vet HP.

I'm not aware of any little arrow to open the map. Typically you enable the minimap using the map options button in the multifunction bar in the top left:

Monkeylord has a target bone on its turret, and as far as I know all surface targeting weapons can target the seabed layer too, so it is not an issue with seabed layer targeting or bones. I thought it was related to LayerChangeOffsetHeight, but changing that doesn't affect the targeting, it only affects how deep in the water the Monkeylord shows up with vision (which would be a good improvement by itself). So it seems to be entirely an engine issue with how weapons target things on the seabed but on the land layer (because if you disable AboveWaterTargetsOnly, then the weapon fires at underwater, seabed-layer targets just fine).

For example, although these two can hit and see each other, they won't do it without an attack command:

Slacking on the job when the commander isn't looking :

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).

It was only reduced from 10000 to 8000 compared to the Steam version. On top of that, shields can reduce crash damage by 20% of their own max HP (basically this means Czars/Ahwassas crashes can only kill 3600 HP SMD through shields).
@Kilatamoro is correct in that it's like a normal AoE that gets absorbed by shields. I did write some code where crash splash damage ignores shields, since it is reduced by shield max HP already, but the issue is that if the unit crashes right outside a shield it deals 8000 damage straight through the shield, which isn't fixable.

@FtXCommando said in AEONS are GARBAGE!:

bomber that granted has some micro quirks.

Was fixed, it no longer flips out when you try to micro it.

@Sprouto I randomly found out that Monkeylord's SinkLower causes this, as for GC it doesn't use SinkLower and its target is rather messed up still so I don't know.

@Kilatamoro said in Wish-A-Mod Foundation:

A visible cooldown for Billy nuke on your com. Otherwise you have to look at the in-game timer and remember the cooldown duration.

The ACU model has a small animation for the missile hatch closing depicting the reload time. It's not visible at a distance, but it's good to know about. It also reloads in 30s and rebuilds in ~30s with T3 suite (or 3 T3 engis) so those numbers match up.

@TankenAbard The examples your own post fit the criteria of supporting an army and not replacing it itself, because those effects are way stronger when used by units with good DPS/HP stats compared to the same mass in pure SACUs.

As for replacing the ACU, that's a good thing as it allows using the cool things the ACU has on a large scale across multiple fronts (like 1v1) and without risking ending the game due to a simple shift in mass from the entire map concentrated to snipe the ACU.

You can hack around the issue with projectiles by setting the ACU's hitbox to very small so that it paths around units a bit better, and then creating an entity attached to the commander with a hitbox. Then you can override the new entity's OnCollisionCheck, OnCollisionCheckWeapon, and OnDamage functions with the ACU's versions.

There is an example of creating an entity attached to a unit in the Aeon T2 Torpedo Launcher script. I don't have an example of an entity with a hitbox passing damage to the base unit, although I know it's possible since giving props projectile collision was an experiment we did.

Monkeylord has a target bone on its turret, and as far as I know all surface targeting weapons can target the seabed layer too, so it is not an issue with seabed layer targeting or bones. I thought it was related to LayerChangeOffsetHeight, but changing that doesn't affect the targeting, it only affects how deep in the water the Monkeylord shows up with vision (which would be a good improvement by itself). So it seems to be entirely an engine issue with how weapons target things on the seabed but on the land layer (because if you disable AboveWaterTargetsOnly, then the weapon fires at underwater, seabed-layer targets just fine).

For example, although these two can hit and see each other, they won't do it without an attack command:

Slacking on the job when the commander isn't looking :

Make sure the "Always Show Custom Names" option is enabled in your game settings.

I'm not aware of any little arrow to open the map. Typically you enable the minimap using the map options button in the multifunction bar in the top left: