Best posts made by Nomander

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.

Shield	AssistRegen/BP	AssistRegen/Mass
Sera T3	2.80	6.06
UEF T3	2.18	4.40
Aeon T3	2.50	5.69
Cybran ED5	2.33	5.19
Cybran T3 ED4	2.17	4.13
Cybran ED3	1.87	4.35
Cybran ED2	1.47	3.29
Cybran T2 ED1	0.75	4.38
Sera T2	2.55	6.07
UEF T2	2.00	5.11
Aeon T2	2.30	6.07

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.

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.

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

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.

@cocainediesel
Teleport would be an overpowered preset due to very high total adjacency discounts.

Adjustable selection priority is a feature allowed by the implementation, since I don't know of any way to adjust engine selection priority outside blueprints.

I think custom presets are not necessary if the upgrades are all made useful and the presets available become best options for a specific purpose.

I wrote a reply last week and a fix PR but forgot to post lol:

I didn't see arty in that replay, but I found it in #23022644. Unfortunately it is desynced so idk if the replay shows the truth of what happened.

For those who didn't watch the replay it's dualgap and a player built arty up on the cliff next to the bases and the arty can't shoot because the muzzle velocity characteristics don't give a possible firing solution, as you can see in the screenshot there are very few possible firing locations:

What is the point of removing gateway assistance?
It's not like rushing any type of SACU is a giant issue like nukes:

• The counter is way easier to build in the form of PD or a T4 or T3 units you already have. On the other hand, SMD is going to take 2.5 minutes to load with assistance, and you can't do anything about it.
• SACU is way less impactful, you don't instantly lose your entire base once an SACU starts attacking if you were unprepared. You also don't lose economically if your opponent makes RAS SACU, you can beat them with mass fabs.
• SACU is way easier to scout because they have to walk to the front where there are less sams blocking spy planes.

Buffing combat SACU cost relative to RAS SACU can be done easily by shifting the costs from the base SACU to the RAS upgrade.

For underwater reclaim, I don't see why it's so unbalanced (especially as to make gateways unassistable), every faction has access to SACUs and should use them underwater when engis can't get to the front and there is lots of reclaim in a dead zone because of shifting frontlines. It creates new decisions around when to build SACU, how to kill the SACU with subs/torps, how to keep them safe, possibilities of building stuff with the SACU, and so on.
UEF SACU will be hurt by the base bp nerf in this rework because of random naval AA killing the engineering drones though.

Personally contextual keybinds would be great, you could rebind most of your order keys to build units when only factories are selected.

To make future integration easier you can look at the repository code at https://github.com/FAForever/fa and check out the code style of the recently changed files (some things like UI are very old and unchanged).

The "ACU Self Destruct Confirm" mod by @HollowSubmarine could be a starting point/inspiration.

Does the time-in-queue adjustment for rating threshold get adjusted by how many people are in queue/how many people are on faf? Wouldn't want to wait the same amount of time to get a larger rating threshold in peak hours vs dead hours.

@tankenabard said in SACU Rebalance:

If auras in general are out

Auras aren't out, just very complicated area effects are. I think what @Jip meant was more of a warning about having area effects than to discard auras. Not sure what level of complexity is unacceptable.

@tankenabard said in SACU Rebalance:

With the Aeon, the heavy shield pack could help tank damage similar to a GC so that harbingers could do work.

A tank needs to be threatening in some capacity to help tank damage because target priorities exist. Currently Aeon SACU only has a 300 DPS long range AoE gun.

@tankenabard said in SACU Rebalance:

Seraphim is fine with Light Overcharge, if personal shields are out then maybe Nano1 and Nano2 like the commander?

If it's an upgrade then it makes an OP (or T4-tier) 50k hp + regen + 35 range OC SACU. Idk if that's actually overpowered so here's an alternative:

Honestly the only use of the shield right now is tele sacu, so you could just put the HP boost of the shield as a prerequisite upgrade for tele or integrate it into tele. Tele conflicts with OC so you won't get an OP OC SACU, and if it's a prerequisite then you can have a 50k hp 400 DPS gun SACU for some reason. Or a 30k HP engi SACU (this is bad going by the current ideology for engi SACU in the rework).

Also you could apply the same idea to Aeon SACU to make its tele relevant by adding HP to tele or making tele compatible with the shield upgrade. Otherwise Aeon tele SACU should be like 2-3x cheaper because it's 15k hp 300 DPS vs 30k/50k hp 400 DPS.

Yes, lifetime is in ticks (10th of a second), and then any particle size effects will scale on that lifetime, reducing the visible time to just a few ticks.

Fatboy should be able to fire 3 guns when you right click on a target and it automatically rotates towards it, so only 25% maximum firepower is lost.
Do you know in what situation it only fires 2 guns? Would be best if its reproducible in a sandbox game too, but a replay works.

@waffelznoob said in I am abandoning Aeon:

Its mml might be the worst though so that's one point for you

Aeon MML has 2 hp on the missile, so it's the second best.
Cybran (super rapid fire splitting missiles) > Aeon (2 HP + high alpha dmg) > UEF (2 shot burst of 1 HP missiles) > Seraphim (rapid fire 1 HP missiles)
Arguably, aeon has the best MML if the cybran split missiles hit a shield before being shot at by TMD.

@Resin_Smoker
If you remove the WeaponCategory field entirely, it won't show the weapons in unitviewdetail (see line 532 of that file). Does that solution work for you?

@sprouto said in Is there a workaround or override ?:

Would it not be easier to just prohibit the UI from displaying Dummy Weapons in the rollover ?

He's using the weapons' AimManipulator functionality for animations, so they're not actually dummy weapons, they just have WeaponCategory = 'DummyWeapon', which is why they show up in the UI.

For FAF the file blueprints-ai.lua already calculates threat levels from unit stats, you'd want to overwrite the function SetThreatValuesOfUnit in there to properly replace the threat level calculation. This also means you don't have to worry about mod load order since that threat calculation is done in PostModBlueprints.

There are MANY combinations and control values that can impact the actual DPS calculation - it goes far beyond the 'RateOfFire' blueprint value, which many consider to be the 'be all and end all' of DPS calculations. It is not - and anyone who has done sufficient weapon 'rigging' can tell you the many pitfalls, in the blueprint values, that can lead to an erroneous DPS value.

@Sprouto There's a rather comprehensive DPS calculation in FAF's unitviewdetail.lua, I think it's only missing fire rate when it is limited by energy requirements or animation speed, and if I remember correctly some rounding for some stat should be floored instead, but it's still quite complete. I should really put that calculation in a library.

@arma473 said in SACU Rebalance:

There's a reason Yudi likes to make 2 gates + 20 hives.

I've heard that Yudi doesn't make RAS SACU in serious tournament games, and only does it on Setons because he's way ahead (way better than others) and playing a chill game. RAS SACU + Hives is an extremely chill way to secure your already won game through more eco. So I don't think he actually likes to make RAS SACU because they're a competitive decision.

He can quickly spend excess resources on RAS boys to get max return on his investment

The max return on his investment would be T3 engis + mass fabs or T3 engis + whatever unit actually kills his opponent. The T3 Engis can shift production just as easily as gateway assistance.

The conclusion of the balance argument is null because the premise is incorrect.

to be lore-accurate. They are opening a portal to another planet. How is some t1 engineer with a dinky little engineering beam going to help with that?

Supcom lore waves away logic with the word "quantum" among others, so you can make up pretty much anything. For example if you wanted to be lore accurate you wouldn't have presets (you'd have to upgrade the SACU outside) and gateways would only consume energy. Or you say you need mass to create exotic matter (is that even gpg lore?). Or you say that engis can provide additional mass/energy for stabilizing/streamlining/optimizing the connection so it goes faster. Also why does teleportation take less energy than manufacturing aircraft? Why is the cost of presets exactly the same as manually upgrading? The lore simply makes little sense for technical details, especially for a balance perspective.