@FtXCommando As I said, I understand some are attached to the more interesting dynamics this flaw of the UI created but it also created some shitty dynamics as well. Gameplay depth should rely on players' choices, and the game should properly convey all the information needed to inform those choices.

Gameplay depth should not rely on noticing damage values or 3d model variations. It's a RTS not a "spot the difference" game.

If the original devs had included units that don't have associated icons, I'd have to concede that this was an intended mechanic, but they never did. Instead they went with stealth, cloak or jamming when they wanted gameplay elements revolving around intel gathering. That's because hiding icons (and thus information down into the detailed 3d level) runs counter to the goal and usefulness of the continuous zoom feature which defines this game to a much greater extent than the stuff you mentioned in your post. And when those aforementioned abilities trip you up, it doesn't feel like it's the game screwing you instead of your opponent.

Game does that for allies, not for enemies. For enemies players need to watch out for big gun acu themselves.

The game alerts you when teammates get upgrades and build experimentals via chat messages. These were implemented in faf and are not in the base game - another example of info that's relevant, poorly communicated, that got a fix which I think is imperfect because it's transient and lacks location information and is at odds with how the game usually presents info: using icons. As for enemies, "gun acu" text markers are quite common in the early game, players add this info to the map themselves, after scouting it and recognizing it, because the game doesn't do it. Getting the information isn't the problem, showing it is.

My suggestion would not make the information easier to get. If a com got gun and I didn't scout it, the invisible unit that would show this upgrade icon next to the com would not be revealed to me until I had vision of it, same as all other units in the game. How is that a "legal map hack"? Literally the only difference would be I wouldn't need to zoom in to see the big gun. Why are you so attached to this oddity in the game's presentation? Is that what you call gameplay depth?

@Sainse if the information is available to players as you say, scouting it should highlight and label it as it does other information.

@TheWeakie apparently you're unaware "you can calculate com upgrades from HP and visuals". If Sainse is correct, the depth you refer to is that of your own ignorance of obscure, unintended, clunky ways of gathering intel when the game fails to communicate it and also fails to hide it. Either show this information properly or, if you're gonna argue for keeping it hidden, hide it properly. The way it is now is due to oversight by the original devs and players figuring out workarounds.

Here's some of the things that usually show up on text markers in team games: "com upgrading", "experimental under construction", "TML ACU" - all of that stuff is often scouted, the information is often revealed, the players do their jobs, but since the game doesn't do it's job of labeling and disseminating it, teammates have to do this part themselves too. There's no gameplay depth in leaving this burden to them.

I understand some are attached to the more interesting dynamics this flaw of the UI created but it also created some shitty dynamics as well. Gameplay depth should rely on players' choices, and the game should properly convey all the information needed to inform those choices.

Maybe a good middle ground is to give the upgrade icons stealth.

I'd like to suggest increasing ACU TML minimum range to 130% gun range or something thereabouts, enough to ensure that if an opponent is hit by a missile as they're approaching, they have just enough time to turn around before they are finished off by the gun. Moreover, the TML com would no longer have such an easy time retreating from a fight by forcing their opponent to dodge, and it would solve the problem that at very close range, dodging requires luck.

On a related note, I'd like to also make a suggestion for fixing one of the UI's glaring flaws: add secondary icons to ACUs to represent their upgrades. Broadly speaking, it's our job to make and send scouts and it's the game's job to label and present the information they gather in a consistent manner - icons. We shouldn't have to zoom in and squint at a unit's 3d model or peculiar glow (while upgrading), and this information should persist for players to take note of even after vision is lost, provided there is radar coverage. I vaguely remember @Jip saying that changing the ACU icon is not possible, but maybe an otherwise invisible, unselectable unit can be made to accompany it and show the upgrades as icons right below it.

@maudlin27 currently, the TML com is very strongly incentivized to time their first missile to hit just as they enter gun range - a high probability hit since very few players zoom in and take note of the backpack. After that, the TML ACU can pursue while both shooting and lobbing missiles that are at their absolute hardest to dodge so close in, even experienced players need to get lucky to avoid taking hits. If their victim wants to disengage, they have to zig-zag as they go, making them effectively ~10% slower.

I like attacking coms with TML but I don't want a single well timed surprise hit just before an engagement to mean inescapable death for them.

@Caliber I didn't know this. Do multiple stacked shields survive?

@Nomander the projectile's motion need not be flat. By deciding how the billy flies you can adjust how valuable intel is to dodge it - make the landing take a proportionally larger chunk of the flight time, or a projectile that starts off fast and slows down as it goes, and scouting is less relevant.

I personally would like a reduced billy range more than tweaks to its speed, and even a reduced ACU TML range to be honest, but I would have thought it to be a more radical suggestion since it's very counter-intuitive that an upgrade to the tml have shorter range, and since it impacts billy's performance against static targets which I didn't think was the problem. This is why I suggested what I considered less drastic.

If you did go for the range reduction, would you let players still fire regular TMLs after upgrading to billy? If yes, how would reloading work? I don't care either way, just wanted to know what you thought.

@Nomander I guess you have a point, it wouldn't help noobs in particular. Should you agree that it's cheaper at lower skill and in larger games and consider it a problem, shifting its cost towards mass and away from energy might address that more directly.

However, I think it's a strange to suggest my proposal would make the weapon 99% useless and call it a nerf instead of a change when I was so vague with the parameters and even explicitly called for a cost tradeoff. You're also apparently estimating its usefulness against static targets, which would actually go up, to reach at most 1% after such a change. Consider that telebilly would never have even been suggested in the first place if static targets were that unappealing.

Should you decide to be a bit more charitable though, I would rather you imagine a changed billy being effective and cost-efficient at ~2x gun range against skilled opponents and falling off gradually beyond that, to the point where getting your army hit at max range is cause for ridicule. This would make it a bit trickier to use when experimentals are pushing or air is contested, but more interesting, since you would actually have to put some thought into the ACU's positioning.

If you get maser or splash or advanced gun range then just chill among static shields and pd forests, it feels like a waste. Venturing out with your com to make use of these powerful weapons is part of what makes them exciting. I'm not saying billy is unbalanced, but it's not as fun as it could be.

I'm sure there's enough leeway here to work with, but if you don't like my suggestion, I would rather you explained either how it would be detrimental to this weapon's current intended role, or why there is no combination of numbers that could achieve it. If you don't respect arguments for noob-friendliness, consider them arguments for fun gameplay, and avoid straw men please.

@FtXCommando it's true that the billy is quite expensive, especially energy wise, but it's efficiency quickly scales as the number of players goes up. Similar to how on setons, for instance, one nuke launcher forces 4 smds, the very large range of the billy allows it to stall or complicate pushes from several players on many fronts very fast, especially if you also get a continental. Another reason it scales so well with more players is because of energy overflow. It spreads the cost out among teammates and this means the investment into a billy doesn't leave as large gaps to exploit for the opponents in a 6v6 as it might in a 3v3. This also makes it "cheaper" in lower rated games, where overflow is way more abundant, but the experience, reaction speed and attention management needed to defend against it are at more of a premium. The fact it leaves no wreck behind, unlike broadswords, also grants it a comparative advantage as the average skill goes down.

And while defending against broadswords might be more expensive mass wise, it's definitely cheaper attention wise. I fear the skill floor might be too high to push against the billy properly for quite a few players, which is another reason I suggested making it cheaper but slower.

I wouldn't mind a nerf to billy speed, even if it were made significantly cheaper to compensate for this nerf. Its very generous range makes it too safe to use in my opinion, compared to other late ACU upgrades. If it flew slower, there would be more of an incentive to get closer before launching, or it would be less frustrating to play against because dodging would be easier at max range.

That being said, here are some things you can do to counter it on the move @Caliber. As soon as it's revealed, split your armies up into small, spread clumps, start a few t1 air scout streams in the UEF's general direction, start spamming t2 or t3 engies to the front from at least 1 factory, and avoid pushing until they get there. Later you can switch out the engies for sACUs if you want, they can do this more reliably.

If you're seraphim, add more mobile shields to the army mix, they block the billy so incredibly well that you can just keep everything clumped. In the longer term, if you're aeon, you can also consider transitioning to GCs instead of mass t3. Whatever mobile anti air they need can follow behind the build power and still be effective, while the collosi themselves are so tanky they make for very unappealing targets.

In general I found billy a bit less annoying to deal with after I started mixing t2 or t3 engies into the army in all my games instead of relying only on t1 engies to reclaim in the lategame, as I had been doing before.

@Firv, with other late-game upgrades, you get maybe a few minutes of value before the armies become too big to face, whereas billy you can potentially keep using to good effect almost indefinitely right now, sitting cozy under shields behind percy walls, lobbing rockets across the map. The risk hardly increases as the game progresses, like it does for other com upgrades, since there's not much incentive to get anywhere close to threats in order to use it. In addition, because armies tend to get bigger and less wieldy, the care you have to put into your aim actually goes down as time goes on. Plus, you can pair it with t3 which is a defensive upgrade. The change I suggested wouldn't mean you absolutely must bring the com into knife distance either.

Also, it doesn't impact tele billy at all, because in that scenario you're shooting at helpless and static targets. If you're hunting armies, teleporting is actually worse than airlifting because you can't adjust your destination as the move orders shift around plus your fire rate is shit.

My biggest complaint about the billy is it's insane range. It is too safe compared to other end-game upgrades, and less fun than it could be as a consequence. I propose making the projectile around 20% slower, thus a bit less useful against armies unless the player takes on a bit of risk by closing in. I wish effective use of it encouraged transport play more.

The counters to it should remain unit spread or mixing build power into the army rather than mobile shields in my opinion, because they require more attention.

I regularly used google translate in this way before the copy functionality was removed because it was way, way more convenient than using my phone to clumsily film the screen. The camera loses focus, the translated words jump and glitch constantly, the translation quality is low, it's super janky. Unfortunately that is now the only option, but it was always like this for lobby chats so eh.

Interesting, I didn't know all this about how the probabilities work. So if I understand this right, by ticking the "use custom style" checkbox, I've also switched from hand-tuned to flat probabilities that each generator option gets picked when set to random? In that case what I said earlier about default behavior is not true, as my assumptions were incorrect, and it seems this problem is already addressed for casual hosts.

I like the switch to separate generators and away from sliders in general. I always felt like the impact of the sliders was very unpredictable before, whereas now the overall shapes of the map are more controllable.

That being said, the default, minimal fiddle, all random behavior does tent to make boulderified maps way more often now, and more often than the UI would suggest, which is worse.

I don't know specifically if the prop generator now gets picked completely randomly if set to random, with the reclaim slider later acting as a parameter to the one that got picked, or if the slider affects the probability distribution function over generators, but maybe the latter is worth considering. Although I'm not familiar enough with the other prop generators and if they can easily fit into such a scheme, it seems to me the most intuitive behavior should be for this specific one to only start showing up if the reclaim slider is set quite high.

If such a fix is not quite quick enough, another very interesting suggestion by @snoog was to make the drop-down menus of the map generator multi-select. This would allow users to opt out of specific prop generators or biomes while still enjoying most of the diversity on menu. It's a (hopefully) small change to the UI that improves things a lot for the users since most people have negative preferences - they don't want a specific biome for instance, they just want to avoid the white one.

@ftxcommando said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

Nothing here was something I said.

This you?

Matchmaker from the beginning was a completely collaborative process on how to make things function fairly but also fun. For example, if we wanted to be totally tryhard, we would have no party system. I had people complain to me about that idea during the planning stages.

@ftxcommando I apologize for implying you were an endless-essay pretend-pro busy-body. That was very Passive Aggressive of me.

@thewheeler said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

We would rather have the top 0,1% surgeon to operate on our heart than an average surgeon.
We would rather have the top 0,1% pilot fly our plane than an average one.
We would rather have the top 0,1% designer make our new phone than an average one.
We would rather have the top 0,1% coder write our apps than an average one.

Sure, I don't mind if the balance team is comprised mostly of top players. That can't be their only qualification, though, right? At the very least, they should be able to communicate without provoking undue friction with their peers, and work together with other teams, and not be afk for years.

Since there are not thousands of potential coders available to faf, we can't pick. We have a few, and they picked us.

Whereas players potentially balancing the game? There are quite a lot of players. How about top 10% skill wise (they could still consult with champions whenever they needed to), but they are the best at working with these devs without causing them to burn out - that includes explaining what proposals are unfeasible efficiently and gracefully, after making an honest attempt at making them feasible.

Given the circumstances - the extreme disparity in the scarcity of potential candidates for the two roles, that would be my preference.

@jip It's fine, I rattled his cage, I'm no better. What's actually funny is I was asking @FtXCommando how exactly a thousand new pros might improve his or my faf experience more than the features I like and he hits me with "we could have been real tryhards and prevented you from playing TMM alongside your friends, but relented". Insert tyrant extolling his benevolence to his subjects meme.

My dude, you're not even an actual pro, you're a 1900. "We"? Pffff

No wonder the lobby server dev quit after TMM was up and running. Imagine working to help players more conveniently find games and having to deal with some endless-essay pretend-pro busy-body actively trying to sabotage your main goal, because, you see, the trueskill data (a mere means to an end) would otherwise be a bit noisier than it already is. Then, to top it off, they go and take partial credit for the work, calling themselves Collaborator, since starting, then losing futile arguments about dumb shit technically counts as labor, right? Also, they get indignant should their effort not be valued over yours, the actual dev.

Regardless other contributions I have you to thak for, this one's not helping change my mind about whose activity benefits me more. The boastful claim this was actually within your power and we were spared such an outcome only by your willingness to compromise would be worrying if I actually took it seriously. I'd I'd rather hope someone reasonable will always be here, willing and able to step in whenever your lot fails to be brought to your senses, which is why I'm speaking up before you drive them away.

@ftxcommando I made no grand claims regarding my contributions, nor do I feel entitled to have a say in how this or that change is implemented.

I'd rather stay and offer reassurance that things are not as gloomy as the OP and complainers makes it sound.

If you did write code for faf, I guess you're a dev and what I said applies to you as well: just do your thing and ignore the haters. If instead you mean writing forum guidelines you then ignore, well, anybody can do that. Just because it happened to be you doesn't mean it couldn't have got done without you.

@thewheelienoob by reordering the reclaim commands such that the engineer has to travel some amount between them, as when it does so it gets closer than it strictly needs to be, thus wasting time. The width of the reclaim strip can be widened as well to achieve this. By making sure it stops to pick up every little speck of dust if need be. Some combination of those factors.