Hello here.

Thank you all, again!

I am from Russia, but I have (some of the required) skills and I'm willing to help you. Hope nothing deters you.

I do not want to Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance Forever end like this.. I want SC:FAF to continue until my grand-kids have 1k+games. Then you can stop, okay.

P.S. Supreme Commander is one of the few RTS games that "made sense" to me as a kid (why is that T1 engie is fixing my factory? Because it's a robot; it does what I tell it to. In WC3 why is my worker fixing guard towers while five dragons attack him until he dies? Well, I have no explanation).

Looks like no FAF games for me this week . Anyways, some time freed for analytics. I decided to start with my little hunch: Bricks and Percies are quite similar in tech/cost/stats/function, but Percies have huge alpha-strike and better DPS (and UEF has T3 transport, but unit-sharing is a thing); so they are much better fit for T3 drops. They are guaranteed to one-shot your T3 mexes if get dropped (even if your army is near).

I extracted drops (too-quickly moving units), and found 186 cases. Among them:
Brick: 59
Percival: 127
So my hypothesis looks plausible; will dig into that.

Another one was that higher-rated players are more prone to try to drop. This turned out incorrect, see the image. I'll look up the replays manually to check whether there is something off (for example, Bricks/Percies being grabbed by GCs are 'moving too fast' and trigger drop detection system).

Another one: I wanted to visualize brick and percy drops. I could not get map coordinates right, so the lines are scuffed.

I look forward to presenting arguments to nerf Percies (as a Cybran player, yeah ).

P.S. about 1/3 of the replays were too short or empty. Looking for an answer from @Nooby about data collection, especially tick registration - maybe we should implement stuff suggested by @Caliber . Thank you guys, that's getting epic!

P.S.S. I am happy to apply my expertise to my favourite game! Suggestions / hypotheses are welcome

Randomly, once.

I've played quite a few games after that. Will post the logs if I notice something fishy.

By the way - in the Supreme Commander intro cinematic a UEF commander shoots down a plane. Probably with overcharge.

This is canon!

Hi, that's pretty rad!

I had a similar idea a while back - to settle the Bricks vs Percy/Loyalists vs Titans debate, and analyze the effectiveness of unit/experimental compositions on certain maps.

But I quickly discovered (after painfully patching available FAF replays parsers, yes) that the replays only had some basic stats and chat logs (including experimental build start/end times, and that's it). I had to simulate and log the game itself, which I found cumbersome (even with some outside help with Lua on Discord); and running FAF with log mods on machines are beyond my skill level.

So I gave up and focused on basic analytics, such as drawing a large graph of who-plays-with-who: https://github.com/rampeer/faf-advanced-analytics
. That was not my original plan, but at least I could do it. It looks like I've lost a few last commits, will look into that.

You managed to overcome all these difficulties, which I am very excited about. So I am happy to receive the dataset (the sample file seems to contain exactly the unit data I need).

Also, if you are willing to share the settings/scripts for extracting the data (which I had trouble with), I am willing to run it on replays of other maps (dualgap + mapgen) and then share the data, as I don't play seton's much.

Thanks in advance!

What a question, what a thread!

I spilled water on my gaming laptop, so I couldn't play FAF for a few months (I couldn't install FAF on my company laptop, and I couldn't play FAF in PC clubs, since it requires a special launcher).

I unironically missed lobby simulators, random conversations (or just shitposting), and playing with my clique. I also missed those clutch playthroughs where team coordination leads to a comeback (6 players spamming shields to protect almost finished Mavor is hectic and fun, IMO).

That's why I came back. I smiled when I saw familiar nicknames on the screen in the game. I like this community.

I wanted to pick it up, as I have some expertise (once I made a program that computes Elo rating for chess puzzles), and wanted to contribute to FAF somehow.

But realized that it's hard to devise any sort of controlled experiment. Some players get better over time, some players get worse, expecting the rating to be stable is wrong, and it's impossible to differentiate between rating drift due to misconfiguration and . Maybe let different AIs battle each other?..

But my hunch is that current change-per-game is too high. These zigzags are not normal, just look how rating graph looks for chess:

People stay in FAF for many thousands of games, so I do not buy "it's for people to get to their real rating quicker" argument.

Also, 4.5% draw probability is just wrong. Who has that many draws?

What is this? I haven't seen that ever

Are these named bots? Or just players I could not connect to?

Destroyer speed is 5, Cruisers and T3 sonar speeds are 4.5 (I was surprised by these numbers, btw). Battleships speed is 3-ish.

Giving T2 turrets same speed as cruisers / more than battleships seems a bit too much (picture a battleship running from a flock of T2 torp launchers - it's funny but not right).

What about 2.5?

*Just realized that the thread is not in the balance-related forum. Oops

I do not believe you. 1v1 rating graph looks just as jagged as global:

I am certain it's possible to sacrifice a bit of ramp-up time (note spike on the left) for overall smoother graph and more stable rating.

Also, what about draw probability? It feels like all the coefficients are off; will look into it later.