@JaggedAppliance said:

Yes these desyncs and crashes affected replays as well as live games. Actually they were really common in replays which helped a lot with testing.

The reason why this fix was so difficult is because it's a memory corruption writing into random space. With the way your computer set up the game's memory it caused regular desyncs and crashes in replays. For a lot of other people it rarely did anything. So for Brutus's idea, this specific bug would be caught by luck in a simulation CI.

Here's how I see potential improvements compared to my experience:

1. Desync tracking would automatically and seriously tell devs of deysncs. I only noticed desyncs from constantly checking forums and chats, and eventually I had to go through a specific replay search to even have any data about desyncs, and even then there wasn't a really big response. Automation would've been a more serious alert and it could've even caught it much earlier on.
2. The reason this specific patch wasn't caught early was because there was 0 testing in prod. It's a tricky bug, so fair enough that some testing in dev wouldn't catch it, but since we released it without any feature using it, it took all the way up until the painting feature for its effects to show, which made the change that introduced the bug disconnected from the updates exhibiting the bug.
3. With AI we can do much better reviews. This bug was a very human error that is easily picked up by AI or I guess some linter. I don't think we do very complex patches most of the time, so static analysis should work quite easily. In this sense I think we could actually speed up engine patches because of their more reliable code, but of course it's best if we just have the backup testing in prod with the two points above.

BrewLAN has a unit cannon.

The latest hotfix (3840) has a fix for shield assist repairing full HP when stalling resources. Now stalling resources also reduces the shield repair amount, which means that T3 artillery will kill bases if you don't have enough resources to assist against it.

If necessary, we want to implement a balance hotfix for shield assist costs. We can adjust mass/energy consumption and buildpower effectiveness (m/s/bp, e/s/bp, and hp/s/bp).

The best evidence for making changes would be replays, since the path to a T3 arty lategame is complex, so please provide them here. Opinions are also welcome but are less convincing so they need wider agreement.
For adaptations to the new patch, I encourage trying to build multiple shields, since recharging shields is much more efficient than assisting, and if you still assist for reliability, repairing 15% spillover is also much cheaper.

An example of a very convincing replay would be a relatively even game up until an arty vs land/air/navy attack, with the arty dealing far too much damage, despite good shielding technique (lots of buildpower, multiple shields), and proving that arty is too good of a "next step" in an even lategame compared to attacking with lategame units (which normally should be providing the reclaim requirement to afford arty).

Resources are kinda unorganized so I'll point you to what is needed. It's a relatively simple mod:

1. set up the mod_info.lua (modding intro)
2. add the mod's lobby options file (guide).
3. Make your new lobby option with the same key as the default lobby option, which is UnitCap (source).

You can write a sim mod to add a unit cap option with the same key as the actual unit cap option but with more options. M28AI has that, but iirc it's just bigger unit caps, not small ones.
I don't know of mods that reduce unit cap or introduce a unit cap system based on supply units.

It's cool but clearly too powerful if you look at the unit mass costs (8k mass carrier coming with a free 10 * (1750+1500+195+1650) mass of units + no massive aircraft energy cost). I would turn down the initial numbers even if not aiming for a well-balanced, modded game.

@Nuggets Do you think there's some generic or simple instructions/skills that you could share?

@Nuggets You're right, I found a different private message where he said it more explicitly.

Yeah it's quite bad to get a bunch of cards and then ruin your entire game because you got too many mass production buffs.

It might be interesting to consider a different scaling for example multiplicative because the flat % decreases are very strong at low amounts. Like 200+30% mass brings you from 60->70% energy or -25% of your current energy. Same for build cost, although build cost is a positive trait so that's more fun to minimize (and it doesn't decrease buildtime anyway).

I actually noticed that build cost has a minimum limit, but it isn't specified anywhere in the UI or cards. In addition to that, build cost reducing cards should be removed from the pool when the limit is reached.

It's probably extremely difficult as a UI mod if your mod embeds all the strings inside its UI elements' code. The proper way to make it work is to use the LOC function for all relevant strings and prepend each string with <LOC keyName> . After that you don't have to do anything yourself, the modders can add localization to RoguelikeUiLocalizationMod/hook/loc/ru/strings_db.lua

@Deribus air scouts, t2 radar, spy planes, and t3 radar replace land scouts past at most early t2. Sure they're cheap but mixing them causes pathing issues and gives you a less dense formation, so that's why you get rid of them eventually.

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.