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:
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:
@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:
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.
As for repair itself it would make sense if it didn't use mass for repair at all, but used more power instead. This would give alternative to just reclaim your damaged units and also add an option to use power overflow if it happened. Although would not let you quick-repair some expensive structures like nuke or game ender.
To think of it, why do we still have 2 different upgrade mechanics to begin with?
Factories and cybran shields use mechanic that was invented in FAF that takes total cost of next stage and applies a discount according to current cost of building. This allowed to get rid of such things as cheap rebuild and veterancy not taking full unit cost into account. For example currently Cybran ED5 shield costs 4.26k mass, but each stage costs 160m->300(460-160)m->800(1260-460)->1200(2460-1260)m->1000(4260-1260m). You dont build new structure from scratch, you just add more parts to existing structure so it is logical it costs less to upgrade rather than building new.
Other factions' shields and mexes use old upgrade mechanic that uses full price of unit every time you start an upgrade. This ofc allows you to exploit self-destruction of t2 mex to reclaim 800 mass and build t3 mex. With new upgrade mechanic upgrade would cost 4600 mass and building from scratch would cost 4600+900+36=5536, making self-destruct almost never efficient.
I remember talking about it to JaggedAppliance years ago. He said its weird to have two different mechanics. Years passed, nothing changed.
I guess its easier to ignore the problem than solving it.
@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 if i remember it correctly in EQ the unit gets turned right after it got built, not while the process is happening.
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.
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.
@jip You just need to enable stealth for a couple ticks once in a while so main unit disappears from radar...
The way FAF uses tree groups is just a walkaround from how ugly the patrol or manual reclaim mechanics work:
-For patrol reclaim: engineer logic is fcked and for some reason they waste of lot of time to pack/unpack their claw between reclaiming multiple things.
-For manual reclaim: 1) You wouldn't click every tree manually which allows engineers to reclaim without claw unpack animation 2) FAF rejected all sorts of area reclaim and consideres it game-breaking mechanic despite such things exist in other RTS. (nobody misses stone clicking there, but i guess in FAF clicking stones is so much funnier than remaining SCFA gameplay)
Instead FAF abuses attack move from factory - and that is actually a bug abuse which AFAIK didn't exist in GPG.
May be fix factory attack move and introduce proper area reclaim so people wouldn't waste half of their life clicking every stone on the map?
Some time ago it was more efficient to just break tree groups because it gave more mass, these days it better not to break trees because it is soooooooo much faster and gives more E. You have one number of trees, why do they give different amount of resources if they groupped of separated? All tree groups should automaticly break once game starts.
Jamming is not that useful once you scouted the initial unit which causes blips. Is it also possible to "refresh" the icon of initial unit once the vision is lost on it?
Aka worse stealth: you know that unit is somewhere in area, but don't know where exactly to manually target it.