The recommended direct counter is groundfiring the stacked subs with ships that have splash damage, such as destroyers.
Only exodus has enough splash out of all the destros to groundfire subs (1.4 instead of 1), and even so it's barely enough so I wouldn't recommend it. Battleships with 2 splash radius are the usual groundfire unit, although by that game stage it's a bit irrelevant.
You had 1 t3 sera shield barely covering your scathis and it seemed like it was already damaged. You got dropped 2 ahwassas dealing 8k crash + 1.1k initial bomb damage = 18.2k dmg. Then there's 9900x2=19800 remaining delayed damage on the bombs.
Didn't watch czar replay.
I think you're more complaining that ahwassa has too high alpha strike than anything related to suiciding them. If you ever talked about bombing and then ctrl k for the wreck to fly under a shield and kill it to let the bomb deal 9900 dmg that would be about the crash damage.
For mitigating crash damage: shields absorb crash damage up to 20% of their max hp (ahwassa 8k -> 3800 when going through sera t3 shield, shield bar takes 4200 dmg), and you can spam shields around your target to reduce the chance of the remaining crash damage's splash reaching your target.
The reason ahwassa can have the high alpha strike is because it's bad against shield spam since it has a long reload and you need to micro well to fire on time with that reload. It's also a bomber and the most expensive air t4 but also lowest hp. So you should spam T3 shields in a line parallel to the bombing path to stop ahwassas easily.
You could hook OnProductionPaused and OnProductionActive of the MassFabricationUnit class for fabs, MassCollectionUnit for mex, or Unit class for both mex and fabs (might mess with RAS upgrades though).
There you can access in self.Brain a shared counter of units and a list of units. You would adjust the counter and list, calculate the correct mass production modifier using the counter, re-create the Buff Blueprint using the new value (make sure it uses "REPLACE" for stacking), and then go through the list of units applying the new buff.
If you want an example of a game with non-linearly non-exponentially scaling economy there's zero-k: https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Cold_Takes/5_-_Making_Metal
Basically you have to use a square root on mass production to counteract the exponential scaling of reinvesting eco.
For FAF you should use the documentation in the intellisense docs:
https://github.com/FAForever/fa/blob/9868135d041a49e4e48afce1ae8dcbd8d5c814bc/engine/Core/Blueprints/UnitBlueprint.lua#L81
Setting up intellisense is easy, it's just VSCode and the FA Lua extension. It will show tooltips for documentation, add autocomplete, and help navigate the code. Further instructions for a dev environment are here: https://faforever.github.io/fa/development
There's cinematic camera mods but the main issue in replicating the effect imo is you can't get a blur effect.
RFA does show enemy range, make sure you're pressing the shift key while mousing over the enemy and have the correct settings enabled.
For anyone working on the UI side you can get the playable area with SessionGetScenarioInfo().PlayableRect. There is also a user sync event with the key NewPlayableArea when the sim updates the playable area.
Though this was added in March 2024 so you have to fall back to size[1] and size[2] for old replays.
It's a faf bug caused by uef engi drones being near a structure when it completes or dies
This is in the context of the typical lane-based land teamgames, which is a great situation for snipers because of high available apm, reduced effectiveness of T1/T2, and smaller areas to cover so less unit speed required.
No, the AI is wrong. You have to find the projectile blueprint the nuke uses in its weapon blueprint's ProjectileId field. Then you create a merge blueprint using that same blueprint id and edit what you need. For example:
UEF Nuke is unit UEB2305, and its projectile id is:
ProjectileId = "/projectiles/TIFMissileNuke01/TIFMissileNuke01_proj.bp",
So you would create a merge blueprint like:
ProjectileBlueprint{
Merge = true,
BlueprintId = "/projectiles/TIFMissileNuke01/TIFMissileNuke01_proj.bp",
Economy = {
BuildCostEnergy = 9999,
BuildCostMass = 9999,
BuildTime = 9999,
},
}
Haven't tested it but it should work.
@maudlin27 I didn't like the aim rate for the same reasons as you but with Caliber's mod I got to test it out and it didn't seem that bad. You get enough time to retarget to kill 3 shields in a downed array but you don't get to kill 9 shields with the full 4860 damage, and you can't kill huge numbers of t2 fab caps just flying your novax over enemy mex.
That was my experience testing his 5s lifetime so maybe the even shorter 4s is too much of a nerf as you say. As for novax spam, I don't think the shorter lifetime is unfairly buffing it against shields. It's already easy to defend because it has low dps for its cost and no splash (you can stack shields without a worry). Assisting to survive even a 4s beam lifetime would take half as many T3 engis as assisting against the equivalent mass in T3 arty.
That said, none of the changes feel like they would resolve the core issue where it's a lot easier to queue up attack orders on mexes with the novax and then check on it occasionally to make sure it's not firing at shielded mexes, vs defending against the novax by building shields in the core base and further afield mexes (and rebuilding any mexes killed by the novax).
My proposal does the most that can be done to minimize its OP parts vs t2 fabs and shields/spread out engis, and it even gives a huge buff to T3 arty fighting novax spam, which is already a great counter because it drains more mass for the cost, forces much heavier shielding than the novax does, and actually contributes potential to ending the game.
Anything more (like nerfing it vs exposed t3 mex) and you're running into its fundamental role as an artillery unit, which needs a complete rework to change.
@Ninrai To summarize the old balance team discussion: it's balanced economically, so a lot of stat changes get rejected, but despite that it's still an annoying unit because it is a cheap precision artillery piece. Since that's a fundamental issue with the role of the unit, it was just put away because nobody has a good idea for a new role that fits the UEF roster, and there's just a lack of interested devs and team activity to test stuff. Removal of omni was mentioned quite favorably so that's an easy change.
Personally I like the idea of nerfing turret aim rate like in caliber's mod and giving energy firing cost while reducing the unit's mass cost. Nerfing aim fixes its genuinely OP part of killing t2 fabs or stalled shields, and makes it much less annoying when it tries to kill engi clumps on navy or that are rebuilding mex. Making its cost energy-drain focused makes T3 arty an even better counter to novax spam, so it would help lower-rated players who are fighting novax spam from a mass disadvantage.
The game files have unit descriptions, but there could be a project to make more gameplay-relevant descriptions.
For example the brick's description:
<LOC Unit_Description_0318> Amphibious assault bot. Capable of attacking land and naval units.Extremely heavy Amphibious Assault Robot, equipped with direct fire blasters, weak torpedoes and anti-torpedo flares. Designed to engage enemy heavy units and defense structures. Although this doesn't let you create a graph of counters like requested.
why do you believe the storm weapon/unit should cost nothing and defy the economy logic of the game whilst delivering relatively high damage
It's there to counteract Ythotha's weakness in larger T4 fights. Mega has long range with high DPS so it counters Ythotha's low HP pretty hard. GC has "free" DPS in the form of its claws vs T3 units which Ythotha usually gets from splash, but it can't use that splash on units if its focusing the GC. GC can also dodge DPS and just walk into the Ythotha to break its aiming. In both cases the storm can help to even out a fight that involves more than 1 T4, since the remaining T4s can't retreat for free.
Fatty isn't good vs Ythotha but the storm doesn't come into play because all the UEF units it is fighting can walk out of range while shooting backwards.
It does 220k-240k damage to land units and land factories but it misses ~2/3 of its beam lifetime vs allies and non-land units because it doesn't maintain its targeting on them.
You don't need a new unit, you can hook the script of an existing unit to modify it. I did so in my SACU rebalance mod for example.