Satellite isn't unbalanced, it's just annoying to play against. If you simply target T3 mexes with it it basically does less damage in mass/s than the equivalent production in mass fabs (if the t3 mex are rebuilt eventually), and it eventually falls off as things become shielded, until an entire T3 arty has to be built to give it opportunities to hit stuff again (not guaranteed).

@Caliber said in Another Novax conversation:

Arty has an energy cost to fire.

Give Novax a large energy cost to fire weapon?

That way spamming lots of them can cripple your E reserves and stall.

This is a mere (hidden) cost increase to the satellite, since satellites practically never get rebuilt, so they cannot re-use the energy for the old dead satellite.

@Blade_Walker said in Another Novax conversation:

So what if your nukes (not SMD) had a toggle to detonate in proximity to a novax ( could even work for any air Experimental?) Double the build cost and maybe time for a replacement Satellite.

I like this idea in terms of economic costs: 16.5k launcher + 12k missile + at least 6280 mass in pgens (34.78k total) vs 36k novax + at least 10k per rebuilt satellite
This is way better than the SMD idea where sats basically die for free (7.5k smd + 3.6k missile + 2k pgen = 13.1k total)

In terms of gameplay design it is a bit of an awkward solution with the targeting but at least both sides get something useful out of their investment if the nuke isn't used to intercept the sat so there's never useless mass wasted. Also balancewise imo it would be a poor, unsatisfying decision to make a nuke and use it on a sat that will kill its mass in 5 minutes instead of using the nuke to kill some poor player without smd (way faster mass killed/time).

Decapitation was added as a rated victory condition server-side and has an implementation in the game lua awaiting in this PR: https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/6667
It would make ACU snipes still have a place in stopping ACU usage or ending the game fully but it wouldn't put people out of games as a "cheap" win by destroying a team's apm (or give an unfair loss by giving enemy 2k bases). I hope you can host and enjoy the victory condition when it comes out.

Balance-wise, my opinion is that 7 min T2 air snipe is incredibly greedy and has an unreliable outcome unless its explicitly to snipe some T1 + ACU pushing guy. It would be easily countered with a playstyle (I won't use "meta" here because imo higher level players do actually do these things, at minimum in response to scouting snipes) that has heavier emphasis on scouting, inties, raiding, and early T2 land tech.

@kdrafa91 You can just compress the Notifications mod folder and send only the mod. The mod folder for Notifications is called "reminder".

Noshake got integrated as a game setting.
Notifications v5.2 was hidden in the vault due to having version naming in the title. You will have to send the mod to your friend manually.

@RakeAnomander Mantis lost its bot icon shape for the tank icon shape a while back, but aside from that I don't think there are many such things because most types of units ("what they are") correctly corresponds to what it's good against. UEF destroyer is just an outlier because it has really weak torpedoes due to the existence of the cooper. In theory it can be confusing but people never faction mix coopers + other faction destros.

An icon change we can draw parallels to was Brick/Percy getting the "x" symbol instead of the directfire "+" symbol to differentiate from Loyalist/Titan (12 years ago). Nobody would disagree with this change, and having separate cooper/valiant icons is a similar case.

the icon means it is good against submerged targets
valiant doesn't have it but cooper does

I really don't see the problem this is solving at a high level of play.
T3 engineers consume 18-20m/s for T4s/nukes/arty, and 24-25m/s (30m/s Scathis) for game enders. So a huge spending of 800m/s requires around 32 engineers in one place to build something meaningful. I don't think 32 engineers is so difficult to manage that we need engineering stations, especially for a one-time thing like an artillery/nuke/game ender rush.

That covers large projects, so now we can look at smaller projects:

• Economic structures:
  • Mexes build super fast, so no pathfinding issues there.
  • T3 Pgen/Fab grids are a great option if you have to spend lots of mass (as opposed to T2 fabs), and they average out to 20m/s per engi, which is plenty enough for the time when you will be building them: when you are just building up your eco past T3 mex. And late game when you have a huge eco yet still want to expand it the fab grids you can split into just two or three groups. It'll be safer and is easy to do. Also since eco takes up so much space, you'll need an unbalanced amount of buildrange to make the engi stations good here.
• PD/Defenses: These things are already very strong and fast to build, removing pathfinding will just make that easy to do on a large scale, which is not a good thing since it buffs a boring and already decent strategy.
  • This also nerfs artillery a massive amount because you can pretty much always near-instantly build a shield anywhere in your base as long as an engineer is nearby. I think artillery is already quite weak and easily countered by proper shielding, so this nerf is unnecessary.
• Factory assistance: This is one thing where engis can be problematic, because units require a ton of buildpower and engis slowly get into a formation around the factory. It's resolved by the "interrupt pathfinding" hotkey, and you can write a UI mod to run that hotkey when giving an assist order (GAF did this)/the engi comes into range. I personally spam the hotkey all the time when assisting/building so I am biased against engi pathfinding issues ("32 engineers is not hard to manage").

I'll also agree with what FTX said on Discord which is that it makes the game into an all-or-nothing situation because there is no way to run the buildpower away to save it (a nuke would be devastating), but it is also much harder to attack buildpower.

As for engine limitations, yes it isn't possible to filter nukes/SMD, and I don't think you can make it so you can only reclaim allied units.

There is a hotkey to copy the queue of an engineer you're mousing over ("Copy orders of the unit the mouse is on top of"), and I often use the the ctrl + right click game option version of the feature that ("Assist to copy command queue"). Can queue with 1 engi and then add new engis without the assist behavior slowing things down. Can also remove the original engi to do something else while another engi continues the queue.
It's not exactly keybinds but it's still an essential way to control units (for me).

It's fixable, in AirUnit.lua you have to disable the vision and unit intel when the unit is killed instead of on impact. You also have to disable vision in Unit.lua for navy. It already disables radar/sonar on death.
Whether or not it's desirable for balance I'm not sure, people often use dead scouts for vision into bases through SAM walls or to counteract Cybran stealth more effectively. Your idea for slowing the scout down as if its experiencing air drag seems like a decent way to make dead scouts decent vs armies (slower t1 scouts) but worse vs bases (faster t3 scouts).

Pathing stuff like this is really tied into the engine so there's not much we can do. I think you can't even make ACUs path over units because it would automatically apply that 1x1 footprint to all 1x1 units (all t1-t3). So a lot of it is wishful thinking unless you dive deep into reverse engineering.

I think this would be a good thing as I dont believe players consider the known poor pathing in this game to be a positive aspect.

The bad pathing has cemented itself in the game's balance and micro so for some it is a positive aspect just to diversify supcom from other games, even though it has its frustrating moments.

@Nuggets said in Ranked vs unranked games:

i have 0 trust in anything else it shows from lobby settings

Its display of the share condition is bugged but everything else is good I think.

https://forum.faforever.com/topic/272/why-was-game-x-not-rated

The UI mod Supreme Scoreboard2 displays if a game is rated or not, although I think it only handles common cases like mods, victory conditions, AIs, and unit restrictions.

Also I'd like to mention that Aeon gets another anti-Percival unit in their double range double shield ACU long before a GC can be built, so it's not like Harbs are even bad on one-lane maps where in theory Percivals always kite and win. Harbs are great for keeping Percies off your ACU in that situation because the Percies have to try to swarm your ACU to kill it instead of dying one by one but that requires moving forward into Harbs/shields.

@FtXCommando said in AEONS are GARBAGE!:

Percies are slower than chickens and same speed as GCs let alone t3 units.

Percies are 2.2 speed, while chicken/GC are 2.5/2.4 speed respectively. You're thinking of bricks with 2.4 speed. The rest of what you said with them being unable to start fights is correct though.

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.

Shield	HP	Mass	HP/Mass
Cybran ED2	7000	460	15.22
Cybran T2 ED1	4000	160	25.00
Sera T2	13000	700	18.57
UEF T2	9000	600	15.00
Aeon T2	11000	480	22.92

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).

Shield	Shield HP	Mass	BT	HP/Mass
Sera T3	21000	3600	5841	5.83
UEF T3	17000	3300	4988	5.15
Aeon T3	18000	2400	4097	7.50
Cybran ED5	16500	4260	7100	3.87
Cybran T3 ED4	13000	2460	3515	5.28

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.