I noticed a while back that resource production buffs aren't applied to RAS SACU.

• turn off energy and mass throttle in the options. Idk if mass throttle even works for the current ecomanager version.
• eco ui tools provides an alternative overlay
• ecomanagercbt has less agressive energy throttling and removes mass throttling
• don't energy stall

@seraphim-noob may be interested in that for his WIP rust client

Notably, there isn't a single AddSearchPath log line referencing the Mods directory anywhere in the game log — only the base gamedata (c:\programdata\faforever\gamedata*) and Steam install directory (f:\steamlibrary...) get mounted.

It seems like the game's file system isn't mounting your mod folder.
Check "C:\ProgramData\FAForever\fa_path.lua" to see that custom_vault_path is correctly set.
ProgramData\FAForever\bin\init.lua uses that value to determine what folder to mount for your maps/mods. The only way that could be broken is if you set a different init file in the client's launch args (unlikely that you did that).

Second Iteration of Partial SACU Rebalance

The second iteration of SACU changes is now live on FAF Beta Balance.

Please make sure to host FAF Beta Balance, since the changes are not on FAF Develop.

The complete changes can be found on the changelog website.

Previous discussions about the first iteration can be found in the "experimental changes" posts on the forum and on Discord.

Iteration Changes

This iteration tries to prevent SACU rushes while making them a little more efficient lategame, and addresses Seraphim overcharge and UEF bubble shield. We encourage everyone to play with these changes and provide feedback.

All the changes specific to this iteration can be found in this commit history.

Early SACUs

Early SACUs were very powerful because you could only fight them with T3 units, and any failure would result in the SACU regenerating all damage, reclaiming wrecks instantly, and securing the area with structures. To prevent this:

• Significantly increased energy cost of survivability upgrades.
• Slightly increased energy cost of combatant SACUs
• Removed ACU priority from SACUs
• Reduce buildpower of SACUs by 25%, except for engineer presets and UEF. UEF keeps their buildpower because their engineer preset's drone can be shot down by AA, they have a weak pushing T4, and it promotes using their unique Ravagers.

Lategame SACUs

We do want SACUs to be good lategame, especially to stabilize lategame mass donations or air losses, which are factors that make players hesitant to attack and overall idle the game.

• Mass cost reduction for high-tier survivability upgrades (Cybran cloak, Aeon 2nd shield, UEF shield, UEF bubble, Sera shield)

Other

• Increase cost of Seraphim's overcharge upgrade to reduce its snowball potential. It's pretty much an upgrade over the ACU, and can replace the ACU's energy consumption, so the first OC SACU requires increased costs.
• UEF bubble shield receives a small buff to shield recharge time.

Future Changes

Future changes will be tracked in this pull request. When they are made, they will be deployed to FAF Beta Balance with a similar announcement here.

supcom campaign branch is enabled when playing campaign on the steam version and it being enabled gets saved to the game prefs for some reason.

He mentioned that it's anything he contributed "after this post", and to "treat it as unsupported and remove it where practical." I don't think he meant anything bad, just asking for people to take care of the maintenance/cleanup.

@Sheppy said:

I feel like too often there is clearly "one best option" in the selection and that takes away choice. I don't know how to best fix that, only thing I can say is that in most other games I think a lot more about my selection.

Some roguelikes bias rolls towards what your "build" is. I think combining that with general purpose upgrades (eco) would make picks more interesting.
You could even track what units the player has built recently to determine the build.

Also printer is 1.5k 4.7k games and plays terribly according to his own replay (that he even thinks matters for the nerfs done) so I shouldn't waste more time here and I wouldn't recommend for anyone else to do so either.

@Printer
Reads like AI stylized your post.

1. not an argument
2. Post replay where transports matter. AoE vs units outside engi clumps, like shields or mex storages, is irrelevant because its unrealistically apm heavy.
3. yes that's the point. Second sentence doesn't make sense.
4. Wrong because it's 3750e/s avg
5. Wrong number. Also not an argument.
6. You need to build power anyway to use the unit, this forces you to do it before it is finished instead of after.

E nerf makes arty a more viable counter without affecting total mass cost.
AoE/retargeting nerfs fix the most annoying/toxic things which were killing fab capped mex, stalled shield arrays, and engi clumps.
All of this was explained in the changelog snippet and you should address those ideas instead of just listing the (wrong) numbers then baselessly saying they're wrong.

@DommyMommyDostya

You still need a really high number of novaxes to one shot shields through assistance with the increased burst DPS.

A setup of 2 Dukes with adjacency has 1960 DPS and deals 15680 dmg + 6 aoe every 8s, while costing 76k * 2 + 3240 * 6 = 171k mass and producing 2500 * 6 - 1400 * 2 = 15k excess energy.
For just that mass you'd have 5.3 novaxes not counting the 20k/s avg. energy drain.
If you count the energy in terms of pgen-storage infinite grid mass cost (best case scenario) then it's 32k + (3240+200*8)/(2500 * (1 + 0.0625 * 16)) 35630 mass total per novax or 4.8 novaxes.
If you subtract the excess energy from the duke cost (lets say you used it in advance for mass fabs) then the cost goes down to 171k - 15k * 324/250 = 152k, which is equivalent to 4.3 novaxes w/ grid pgen energy.

Also not to mention if you add some engineers the novaxes can't actually break through your shields because they still take time to deal damage. Against 7 novaxes (3 arties equivalent) you'd need 9-22 additional engis to survive the burst damage, on top of the 19-24 engis to survive the avg dps.
Meanwhile 3 dukes one shot all shields and you can't stop it, but the avg dps needs 33-42 engis to out-assist (vs 28-46 to survive the novax volley).
Additionally the engi assist costs are up for a balance pass eventually so that it's more fair across factions, since that mechanic has never been touched.

It's definitely possible but it's not easy. The biggest hurdle would be the game's performance stopping you from doing general-purpose machine learning approaches. I think on zulip someone reverse engineered a basic simulation of the game but I'm not knowledgeable on the matter.

There's some work towards build-order infrastructure:
@seraphim-noob has worked on a build order recorder mod ("BO Logger" by Seraphim-Noob). The description says the data is for use in a BO analyzer which I found on his github here: https://github.com/TimMasalme/Bo-Analyzer
@sheppy has a website with build orders in text form manually input from players. https://fa-companion.services.atlantishq.de/maps

In my personal opinion build orders are solvable almost analytically. Your context would be mass costs and mass-seconds (for travel time). The target builds would be a sequential list of builds to achieve at what timing, since splitting focus between 100% the target or eco should always be the fastest way to build something. Once a target is achieved you can add its impact on mass/energy production to your economy's state and continue ecoing to the timing of the next target.

ok, thanks for letting me know.

@Nuggets said:

Everyone is responsible for activating / deactivating their own mods)

Actually we can update the init file in the game repo to mark a mod as deprecated so that the mod doesn't even get loaded into the game. I did this in my PR that implements feedback for the chat rework.
Also any mod author reading should know that the deprecation status is based on version number, so you can update your mod and then people can load it again.

That mod overwrites the entire chat.lua file, so it's unfixable and 4z0t has to rewrite it or game team has to integrate it.

Can you post a game log? It sounds like a UI mod issue.

https://wiki.faforever.com/Development/Missions/Mission-Scripting#video

@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.