Last time balance team reworked it I suggested to redus its damage to symbolic 100, but add EMP with decent AOE to this unit.

This way you can use Fire Beetles:

1. Stun groups of enemy units or PDs when getting in close range with your army
2. Save units on retreat. For example avoid enemy units to catch Hoplites

Instead of killing something with Fire Beetle you stun it and kill with something else. No sniping ACU or eco structures, only useful against units and PDs.

https://youtu.be/YasCEKgd0o4

How do I link youtube on this forum?

May as well just keep things as it is. It's more fun without Fire Beetles right?

Calibration tournament #2.
26.06.2021 18:00 (Moscow time).

Tournament directors: SiwaonaDaphnewen (Apofenas), Inspektor_Kot
Challonge will be announced by the start of the tournament. IRC channel won’t be used, instead we’re going to use tournament channels in Russian discord (https://discord.gg/rW6AHqr).

Description:
Last month we ran test tournament for low-rated players for Russian community. This time we got some funding and doing same for all FAF players.
Tournament will take place in Rus discord, but not exclusive for Russian only.
This tournament will have swiss-style or round-robin format depending on how many players we get. This is based on suggestions from last tournament so participants could accumulate replay base and ask personal trainers for analysis. (you will likely have to play 5-6 games during tournament regardless of results)
Game rules are not standard, so take a look at details below. In short, time for game is limited, you get 20 minutes to kill opponent and if none of players succeeds – map starts shrinking every 5 minutes until 25% of map is left (min 40). Maps will be generated so there’s land in center of map. - this way we limit round length. Previously participants didn't even live long enough to see first shrink

Player requirements:

• Ladder rating is higher than 700, but lower than 1200; Global rating is lower than 1300;
• Account was registered before 01.06.2021;
• At least 50 games played total;
• At least 10 ladder/matchmaker games played after tournament was announced.

Tournament rules:

• Tournament will happen if there’s at least 6 players registered;
• Round robin system if we have 8 players or less, Swiss style if we have more;
• Only 2 prizes are allowed if we have less than 8 players;
• Sign up period will be closed 1 hour before tournament starts;
• All participants need to be in discord channel 15 minutes before tournament starts;
• Participants would have to get in voice channel and stream their screen to confirm their identity;
• Draws are replayed on same map;
• Desynchs and disconnects before minute 3 count as draw;
• Desynchs and disconnects after min 3 count aren’t replayed, winner is decided based on FAF vault results;
• VPN is restricted;
• All players may be checked for rating manipulations, smurfing or giving their account to other players;
• Situations that weren’t listed in rules will be decided by tournament directors.

Game rules:

• Tournament directors and streamers are allowed as observers, other observers are restricted;
• Maps will be generated and listed in challenge when tournament starts;
• Game mode: Claustrophobia;
• Claustrophobia preset: Custom;
• Claustrophobia Custom Preptime: 15 min;
• Claustrophobia Custom Interval: 5 min;
• Claustrophobia Custom Shrink Count: 5;
• Claustrophobia Custom End Size: Not small;
• All other settings are default.

Prizes:
1 place: Tournament winner+50$;
2 place: Faction face+25$;
3 place: Faction logo.
Winner pays the commission for money transfer.

Sign up:
We use discord platform to run tournament. This means in order to sign up you need to send a private message to tournament director and state your FAF nickname and FAF ratings (Apofenas#2305 Inspektor_Kot#7713).

Tournament sponsors:
Morax
SiwaonaDaphnewen

Ah lovely shitstorm. And this ugly forum...

Yes, I did post announcement about Sanctuary RTS in Ru discord. Because I considered it to be a FAF project in a first place. It is being developed by people who worked on FAF here and there, it was planned to be free to play an it is being created based on community feedback (which mainly consists of FAF players). (correction i had info about it being f2p by the moment i posted it, but apparently it isn't - my bad XD)

Creating mod based on 15 years old game engine with its source code being held in Square Enix is better?

Then why posting about Plannetary annihilation on forums wasn't a problem when kickstarter campaing took place? If it wasn't for FAF i would never knew about PA. If it wasn't for FAF i would never knew about Zero-K when it got steam release.

The discord post i made is not a problem of this conversation and i'm going to tell you why. What happened to it? It is still there!

It is already second post about Sanctuary RTS and they both are still there! Nobody tried to reach me about it. Nobody tried to give me a warning after posting them. Nobody tried to ask or force me to remove them. Very likely nobody reached ZLO or Sid so they remove it instead of me.

When this council shitstorm started nine reached me and in result i had to change some parts of text.

I was open for chat and waiting for someone knocking on my doorstep trying to threaten me, but nobody did. Because NOBODY ACTUALLY CARES!

Instead some councilors use this post to throw shit at each other in public. This proves that the actual issue is personal relationships between multiple mature people.

And btw, Louvenarde wrote FAF rules and FtXCommando using links to those rules after he pushed her out of FAF is kinda funny...

haha

haha

ha

It's not the issue that torp bombers are too strong against subs. The issue is that subs are generally too weak.

T1 subs are complete rubbish. I wonder if someone could take pure stats on how much frigates are being build in every naval maps compere to subs. Most likely t1 subs wouldnt even be built in most situations on all naval maps regardless of their size and player count.

They have no role in this game. They lose to every unit with torps except what? Wagner? T3 sonar?

EQ fixed that years ago. FAF didnt even bother to make it less worse. Because the point you start looking at naval balance and adjust t1 subs you will realise t2/t3 phase is way too unbalanced with different unit rosters for each faction (the way torp defence works is also a factor). I highly doubt someone in FAF team would do something this big.

...or if someone would just copy-paste EQ in FAF.

Years pass, people still propose nuke subs to be reworked into billy nuke launcher...

I did try that in Nomads and both the result and feedback I recieved weren't really good.

Let's be short:

1. Most naval units have damn TMD with huge range. Billy nuke as it is won't break through single cruiser/battleship/ect defence.
2. Naval units are spread too much so you wouldnt kill many units pre missile meaning its inefficient against t1-t2 things.
3. T3 units are too tanky. Billy nuke would be inefficient against Battleships even if it somehow hits them.
4. Stacking Billy nuke with cruiser/torrent missile valley leaves little to no chance to defend the land firebase.
5. Single Loyalist would kill your nuke sub and everything nearby because FAF can't copy EQ features since 2016.

Current nuke subs are fine as they are for FFA games. Much easier to hide, much harder to understand who launched it. In most cases it is used for cybran because stealth is too cool, but sometimes could be used by other factions. This IS what should be done for all factions.

IMO if nuke subs needed a billy, they should get it instead of their TML weapon (most of the time this TML is useless anyway), not instead of actual nuke.

Not sure if you need to copy Absolver completely. Hover/amphibious ability is something you would never use so might as well just not bother with it.

Could make use of Cybran T3 MAA ground weapon. Change it to some anti-shield rockets and get it to launch at 65-75 range with low arc like Hoplite.

However what to do with aeon Absolver? Delete?

@whendaybreaks said in THE KING of Seton's Clutch 2v2 66,6$ U4500:

Nomads balance exploits

https://faforever.github.io/spooky-db/#/UEA0107,UEA0104,XNA0107,XNA0104

Not intended. Speed differences will be fixed next weekend.

If you're taking a look at roll-off time and do some changes with it, could you also take code from EQ which turns unit inside the factory towards its current waypoint?

For example: if you had factory send units to the right, you'll have unit get build towards right side. Currently if you change that direction to left, the unit would have to rotate on its spot itself freezing the construction. EQ changed that the way unit gets rotated instantly and can move right away.

@nooby UEF and Cybran torp bombers drop their torps directly into the target. The time gap between torp entering the water and torp reaching its target is too small. Torp defence wouldnt have time to work regardless of faction.

If that is the "solution" to addressed problem, than UEF and Cybran torp bombers would have to drop bombs some time before their targets and that way is much worse when the target is close to some land areas.

Other case is torp defence: UEF and cybran torp defence would be much better at absorbing damage than aeon/sera. Torp defence is waaaay too different among the factions and that thing never took a good look in FAF.

@jip Ur awesome

The suggested design for Cybran unit is ugly. I'm against that change as long as FAF gets proper unit design.

Also this IS adding new unit regardless of how FtXCommando calls it "moving" from faction to faction.

I believe there must be a community vote for this specific change.

@tomma
Neither energy storage placed separatly gives you any eco. You don't build it so you could get extra energy out of t2 pgen, are you?

Mass storage surely doesnt give you any eco, but why should it do so in general? I mean i'm not against that mechanic, but right now Mass storage is generally used as "MEX UPGRADE" and not as "STORAGE".

Right now engies and factories provide you just enough storage to never bother about it if you keep balance of your eco. But if you suddenly had to reclaim field of two dead armies, you would want to have it. Without storage in engineers and factories you'd be limited by ACU storage of 600 mass, which is very little. Meanwhile enemy who lost his army gets a counterplay on you - he can destroy your storage(s) (assuming most of the time you would put your first 4 storages around mex). That would either deny you from filling up your storage or destroy stored mass.

If you take a close look at storages, you'd see that they show how much is your storage filled so it is logical to lose the mass inside of that storage. That makes the storage an alternative target compared to mex.

This is an EQ concept and it was tested and played.

Right now the mass storage only works as mex upgrade. Mostly as a t2 mex upgrade before transitioning it to t3.

Pretty much there is no way competent player would put a mass storage alone somewhere not around mex or a mass fab. On other hand you would see energy storage placed somewhere far from energy.

So why don't players build storage for STORING mass?

Reasons for it:

1. Other units provide you mass storage
2. Mass storage itself doesn't provide enough storage for its cost.

Here's quick browse on top players' games. I've been watching only the eco development. Here's some chart how much extra storage do players get from their units:

There were games where players never built a single storage because they never needed them: factories and engineers gave enough storage for them to store reclaim so they never needed to build a separate building.

In fact if storage didn't give adjacency boost we would barely see this unit as engineers and factories provide enough storage.

This reminds the early FAF balance change when energy storage was removed from engineers and factories exactly so players built separate structure and to provide enemy a counterplay to snipe a dedicated building.

My suggestion to remove the storage from engineers and factories. Also remove energy storage from Sparky as it wasn't done with other engineers. Here's PR https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/5824

Further suggestions:

1. Reduce Mass storage cost to 750e and 100m, but also reduce adjacency bonus from 0.5 to 0.25.
2. Take EQ code that calculates amount of mass stored in each structure and removes it from player when structure dies.

@maudlin27 there are plenty of other important stats other than just cost. There are range and reload time which matter a lot. Nomad Scarab has lower range and lower fire rate meaning it can't completely replace static TMD.

Stealing Nomad features again?

Answering Liam_'s question, no, that wouldn't be OP. It exists for more than 10 years in Nomads. Although that would make faction harder to break and stop some TML rushes.

No point in balancing Nomads until models are finished and some units cut or replaced or reworked. Before that happens, all you can do is make things look less worse. Original team wanted to implement some really weird things in mod and some of them exist to these days.

One thing is certain: mod needs thoughtful approach of "balance team" and "model team" to make things happen. The amount of work to make models of required quality is absurd. And FAF balance team wouldnt handle this job given how slowly they fix things in original game and how ugly they do their job. Quick example: loyalist missile redirection was fixed in EQ in 2016, now the question is the fix in the main game?

In any case there is one major issue with mod: its intellectual property. It doesn't belong to FAF, it doesn't belong to Exotic's team, nor 2-3 teams before. It belongs to Brute51 and he set some restrictions on how we could change the mod. We certainly crossed the border a little and it cost us a shitstorm a couple times. I personally would scrap 1/4 of what people call "faction identity", but i was not allowed to do so. Orbital bombardment that was mentioned here is one of those things. However one thing is random russian noname doing small things and other is legal entity from Europe changing everything completely.

My conclusion is FAF does not have resources to implement mod.

This project was cool, but right now its barely living corpse or better say cadaver. When i first saw Sanctuary trailer I noticed familiar style, concepts and assets there. Why do you think EDA was the first faction you saw on screen? Fair to say Nomads will be finished. In other game...

Than why can't UEF destroyer have proper torpedoes than? The problem with UEF t2 navy is not the Cooper, but the Valiant.

Give Valiant (let's say) 120-150 DPS for torpedoes, but remove torpedo defence from it entirely. One on one UEF destroyer would match Sera destroyer underwater. Meanwhile UEF destroyer wouldn't break through torp defence of 2 t2 subs meaning you'd have to rely on adding Coopers into mix not only for shooting more torps to break torp defence, but also for defending from torps.

I wanted to use this concept for Nomad t2 navy, but sadly won't happen.

Honestly torp-torp defence balance never took a good look by balance team for years. There were cases with some units shooting torp defence in opposite direction for years and nobody noticed that. Torps, depth charges, torp defence need to be rebalanced from scratch.

Such Cooper would make t2 subs even more useless. With 80 range Coopers would annihilate t3 subs. What's even the point to make OP anti-sub unit even more OP?

If anything needs to be done is UEF having proper t2 destroyer.

Not sure if you need to copy Absolver completely. Hover/amphibious ability is something you would never use so might as well just not bother with it.

Could make use of Cybran T3 MAA ground weapon. Change it to some anti-shield rockets and get it to launch at 65-75 range with low arc like Hoplite.

However what to do with aeon Absolver? Delete?

Years pass, people still propose nuke subs to be reworked into billy nuke launcher...

I did try that in Nomads and both the result and feedback I recieved weren't really good.

Let's be short:

1. Most naval units have damn TMD with huge range. Billy nuke as it is won't break through single cruiser/battleship/ect defence.
2. Naval units are spread too much so you wouldnt kill many units pre missile meaning its inefficient against t1-t2 things.
3. T3 units are too tanky. Billy nuke would be inefficient against Battleships even if it somehow hits them.
4. Stacking Billy nuke with cruiser/torrent missile valley leaves little to no chance to defend the land firebase.
5. Single Loyalist would kill your nuke sub and everything nearby because FAF can't copy EQ features since 2016.

Current nuke subs are fine as they are for FFA games. Much easier to hide, much harder to understand who launched it. In most cases it is used for cybran because stealth is too cool, but sometimes could be used by other factions. This IS what should be done for all factions.

IMO if nuke subs needed a billy, they should get it instead of their TML weapon (most of the time this TML is useless anyway), not instead of actual nuke.