I'd say it is quite important for the community to have good looking leaderboards, but they are quite lacking now imo. It's very basic/bland and doesn't give enough information at all. It's quite obvious when you compare it to something like the aoe2 leaderboards:

By far the most important one to add is the current rating. It is absolutely crucial to properly understand the players strenght. Most other categories are not as crucial but still very nice to have just to liven it up and give some interesting data.

The layout of the black row > grey row > black row is also a must imo. Especially if there is more information it improves readability a lot and it's so standard i'm surprised it isn't in the client. It should also be in the Coop rankings and custom games table tab. Just noticed it already exists in the live replays tab.

Currently you can see a players information by rightclicking > show user info, but left clicking does nothing. A bit weird to me but maybe i'm nitpicking.

Also speaking off the player graph:


You can see very vaguely see some indications on the faf graph but if you compare it to the aoe2 graph the constrast is lacking.

Also maybe an idea to mix the different rating graphs? Maybe it's personal preference but i feel like it looks a lot nicer. Most chess sites do it this way as well.

Also a little bug: You can drag away the information on the leaderboards without being able to get it back:

I know i was a bit blunt but i just think these would be some nice improvements.

Kisses from the big man

Sorry guys but this is a serious gaming community. If you want to have fun maybe try out the #memes channel on the faf discord. Thanks in advance

The problem

Most top players in faf use lots of hotkeys, as is the case with all rts games. However even though faf has tons of different possible hotkey binds you can use they end up being unusable for 1 simple reason: The lack of keys on your keyboard to assign hotkeys to. This is especially noticeable in faf because unlike other rts games there currently isn't (fully) a system in place to work around this issue.

Let me take Aoe2 (and sc2 to a lesser extent) as an example. Aoe2 has, just like faf, a lot of different hotkeys to work with. However In Aoe2 you have the ability to overload hotkeys which drastically improves the efficiency of using your keys to bind hotkeys to. You have a worker selected? Press D to make a stable. You have a stable selected? Press D to make a knight. You have a unit selected? Press D to make them go into defensive stance. Meanwhile on faf you assign D to dive your t1 subs and now the D-key is completely unusable for anything else.

Let me try to emphasize just how bad this is.

A UEF land fac has 20 possible units it can make. Just assigning hotkeys to those units already takes up every single letter key that's in a realistic range of your hand. You are somewhat spared by the current hotbuilding key binds that are currently available by being able to merge land/air/navy & build hotkeys together, but at this point you've only covered the basic hotkeys and already lost 20 keys. General unit commands like move, attack, patrol, stop, assist, reclaim, capture and repair need to be added too. Then you have tons of other often used hotkeys too like drop (from trans), OC, pause, repeat, launch tml, etc, etc. At this point i have only touched the more common hotkeys and haven't even begun assigning them for unit abilities, selection or other features.

The solution

As mentioned earlier there is already somewhat of a solution to this issue and that is the current hotkey combination list under hotbuilding. Although it isn't perfect, if it would be possible to add whatever combination of hotkeys to any button(s) you want it would already be a lot better than the current situation.

So what i'm envisioning is a mod with some sort of template that allows people that have no understanding of coding to easily adjust a few values to construct their own hotkey combination. For example You should be able to assign dive, drop, launch tml and enable/disable shields all to a single hotkey. What i think is most important is that there should be some sort of extensive instruction file in the mod for how to properly use it.

If anyone has a different idea or solution that's viable feel free to share it.

All in all the mod should allow of better competitive play since a better hotkey setup allows for more possibilities.

17/06 19:30 CET on https://www.twitch.tv/stellartactician

There will be a Q&A session about balance changes that are in beta (some adjustments will be made in the next few days).

This will be a mid patch Q&A which means no changes are finalized yet so if you have strong opinions about a change this would be the moment to voice them.

We hereby like to announce bullys disqualification from the tournament due to him having renamed and this will confuse the viewers too much.

I kinda agree with thomas on the point that the game is pretty linear/predictable and there's not a lot of variation that you can do strategy wise. Nowhere near the lvl of other rts games that is anyway. I do not however think that making factions tech stages and/or units more balanced towards each other is something that negatively impacts that. I'm not saying here that all units should become similar to eachother. I'm saying each unit should have their own unique strength that's good in atleast 1 scenario.

If we would go back to old balance then there would be tons of units that would literally never be made and could simply be removed from the game. Aeon t2 stage was so bad you would always rush t3 land. I'm not saying the old t3 land rush power spike for aeon was a bad thing, but the lack of t2 certainly was.

In an ideal world we would have both together, and it is kinda true to some aspect that some of the strongest units were made weaker to be more balanced. Maybe too much, idk, it's hard to tell, but i still do think that some of them were more than justified considering their dominance.

I'm not sure what your (thomas) idea is for an sacu change that would make is less linear to fit in the tech paths that exist in the game. It kinda feels like an empty shout that everyone agrees with. Let's make these units special and unique so they're great to play with! Sure, how?

Personally my ideal future vision of the game is that it gets unit upgrades, armor types and weapon types all balanced to make the game a lot more complex and interesting. I wouldn't even mind adding new units. You can make snipers have special penetration dmg against heavy armored units like percies while making them tickle titans, you can add an expensive upgrade to give spearheads a homing ability, etc. The problem however with this together with other suggestions that were proposed in this topic is if people even want this and from the general understanding i have the answer tends to be no. It's to leave the base game as it is aside from some minor balance changes. This aside from the fact that making such things will cost a tremendous amount of time and manpower which faf in general doesn't have a lot of.

One remark to the OP: I honestly don't know why you even wrote this. Balance team members, both past and current, tend to be evolved in tons of different areas in the community. They make youtube content, cast for FAFlive on twitch (that was co created by a balance team member), make maps, are in the matchmaker team, are faf moderators, host tourneys (some donate their own money), you can continue. Most are in the faf association as well.

Now why do you think these people tend to be on the balance team. Do you think this is because they care about faf and want to help it in some way? Nah no way right. They're just evil dictators that want to change the balance in their favor to win some more games.

At the end of the day everyone spends their free time to try and help improve the game. Now you can disagree with the changes made, but instead of screaming like this maybe it would be more usefull to start a proper discussion where you use proper arguments instead of going full conspiracy theory.

Honestly i dont understand why its so hard to understand. I play in this community to 1. Play the game and 2. Have fun with friends. If you remove a fun feature then ofc the overall experience is gonna leed to being less fun.

If anything, the fact that this apparently was such a big issue is only evidence that a lot of people like to use this feature. You have clans where people pick similar style names (snf), you have tournaments where players rename with their teammates (last rainbowcup where a team renamed to the 4 ninja turtles), you have random waves of renames of multiple groups of people which just creates fun moments for the community. I and some friends renamed to dave1 to dave9 like 5 years ago. We would all join a lobby only to hear responses like "aaah watch out here come the daves", and something like that would be the talk for an entire week because its a small community.

I personally have never heard anyone complain about this in my 8 years on faf. I even had a mod at some point join some joke renames as well.

You say that we're just here to see robots fight. Well youre wrong. Im here to see robots fight WHILE having a fun time with friends. The community at this point is way more important to me than any gameplay.

Waiting for the moment ftx can give his acu to me so it can be of some use after min 5

I think you misunderstood. You're supposed to delete all your maps before leaving

After 10 to 15 years of using the rating system i'd say it's way too late to change stuff like this tbh. Rating is way too ingrained into the faf culture and honestly it's kinda impossible to play without it.

At the very least they should be able to build a radar

Isn't that kind of a useless statement? Old and/or experienced players are the only ones who are willing to run in an election like this.

The long term plan for sacu's is to make the presets more specialized and more viable to encourage different kinds of sacu upgrades throughout the game. For example having viable engineer presets, viable combat presets, viable army support presets, etc.

One of the main reasons for nerfing the current base sacu statline is because it makes certain paths obsolete. For example you barely ever need engineer presets because a rambo sacu can just throw down a sam right at the frontline in 10 seconds. Since you make more than 1 it means you have insane bp in your combat units at the front making engineer presets useless.

Hp and damage have the same reason al be it less impactfull. A good example for this is when a gc walks into a ras boy farm and dies to ras boys because 8 ras boys have the same dps as a gc, which makes no sense at all.

Therefore the basic sacu hp dps and bp will be nerfed, but the upgrades will be balanced out to negate the effect. That means that shield and nano upgrades will give extra more hp that was removed from the base statline, same for the engineer and gun upgrades.

There was an option to choose to make it work in reverse. This means keeping the base sacu as it is but making certain upgrades lose you different stats. Like gun giving you reduced bp, or engineer/ras giving you reduced hp/dps. There are quite some problems with this however. First of all it's gonna be very clunky because what if you manually upgrade your sacu to have both ras and engineering quite? Should it lose double as much? It's also very unintuitive when players upgrade their sacu and then it becomes weaker in areas. There isn't anything like this currently in faf so we felt like it wouldn't fit in.

The 1 downside of this all is that the base sacu becomes even weaker than it currently is but it was always a trap to begin with. It has always been bad to make because it is not specialized in anything. It's bad to use as bp cause why not use t3 engineers instead. It's bad to use to fight because why not make actual combat units instead. It would be nice to have it be decent, but so far none of us could think of a way to make it work properly.

Some ui improvements (not necessarily small suggestions but i'll post them anyway):

• Make live replays tab background like https://puu.sh/ID0mp/be76fb4c07.png instead of https://puu.sh/ID0lX/89e099d628.png to improve visibility. Should do the same for the leaderboards tab.
• Add more data to the leaderboards, like rating and win percentage
• Add some indication of the current game time of people playing a game in the userlist. Right now it shows you the map and the swords to see that they're in a match but there is no way of telling how long the game has been going on for aside for manually searching for the game in the live replays tab (where you don't have an input field to search for something). So preferably somewhere in this popup window https://puu.sh/ID0pW/347c5f15ef.png it shows you the ingame time and/or somewhere in the personal chat window https://puu.sh/ID0qk/b9bbf4348b.png

Considering the amount of times i've seen "you're chasing away all the contributors!" in the last week i feel like i have to point out that developers are not the only contributors and i can't help but notice that most of the support ftx actually gets is from active contributors.

Hello. I just discovered FAF two days ago, I’m greatly enjoying this game, and the community is great. I have a professional SC2 background and I was gifted with enormous dexterity allowing to be a perfect specimen for RTS competitive gameplay domination. I have watched every single Gyle and BRNK video up to date saturating myself with deep lore and gameplay knowledge. I have finished at least 2 coop missions on Hard and played 3 games vs Sorian AI Adaptive and 2 games vs Sorian AI Rush with a perfect score and finishing the games in under 50 minutes. If I were to guess I would say I’m pretty decent at most gameplay elements, in particular I'm really good at micro and usually dominate my opponent in a straightforward fashion. Also I’m really good at ecoing but I’m struggling with this one thing... Could someone please tell me when to upgrade my Mass Extractors to Tech 2? Thanks in advance.

I could not find any coop related tabs/topics on the forum or discord so i'm putting this here. No clue if it just doesn't exist or if i'm just blind.

This is a list of both client and co-op mission improvements i could think of. I've written this in a bit of a forcefull way since i was too lazy to add "imo" or "i think" everywhere, so just keep in mind that it's just my opinion

Client improvements:

Most important of all is that the leaderbord needs to be reset. Right now there are still top scores that had cheating enabled. It doesn't matter for more casual players who just want to play the missions together, but for anyone who likes to compete (speedrunning is a pretty big thing afterall) the entire leaderbord and by extent playing co-op to set good scores is essentially irrelevant which is a big shame.

Some less important improvement is adding a map preview when you host. You can see the map preview in the lobby regardless so it's not spoiling anything, but not seeing a map preview in the client makes it not only hard to select the right missions (usually you remember missions by how the map looks) but it also makes the co-op tab feel really empty.

I also have no idea what the impact of secondary objectives are. I know you don't need them to get placed on the leaderbord, but why should i do them then? Do i get a time bonus? The importance isn't that i know the answer, but that the answer gets communicated towards the player in the co-op tab.

There is also pretty poor communication of what is and isn't allowed as game options. If i host a co-op game i can turn adjustable gamespeed or cheating on. Which of these enabled/disabled will disable the ability to get on the leaderboards? I know adjustable game speed doesn't (or atleast it didn't use to) and that one, although less than cheating, still has a huge impact on the efficiency of playing the game. So either it should somehow be communicated in the host or players simply shouldn't be allowed to pick those options to level the playing field.

Missions improvements:

This section is mostly meant for people who make (or want to make) co-op missions (if there are still any left). Basically there is one big problem with the way current co-op missions are designed and that is that they all play the same boring way. It generally goes like this:

• Spawn into a half dead base with some remaining structures/units
• big first wave that's hard to defend
• you survive the wave, the map expands and there are some bases that send you units slowly increasing in scale
• you turtle until you can efficiently kill the base
• repeat the last 2 stept 2 times.
• the end

The problem with this is that the answer is almost always turtling. The most efficient way to end almost any co-op as uef is to spam novaxes and just go down the list of targets. Aeon does the same but makes a para first into arties, sera probably just makes 2 yolo's and who knows what cybran does, beetles i guess.

So co-op's need to be made less static for them to be more fun. To solve this in the most basic way possible is to disable game enders + novax to force people to actually fight with units instead of sitting in their base after walls of pd's. To solve this in a more interesting way is to force the player to not just stick to their main base (especially not early on). I have made a great co-op example including a beautifull map design

• You can spawn in a corner of the map, fight of the first wave. Map expands and you see you're in a valley. There's an 8 min timer before a gc + accompanying army comes to kill you, so you're forced to kill the enemy defenses on the cliffs take over the positions ans set up your new base there where the gc can't come.
• After the gc showed up and killed your valley base the map expands and it shows an allied base, it will start evaccing civilians to a gateway thats controlled by the enemy, so you have to protect it (make it get attacked by bombers or some shit as well, but don't make it too retarded like u lose the mission if u lose 3/20 or something) and secure the gateway.
• After they have evacced next map expand that shows you the huge scary enemy base with lots of shit. It sends a new big wave including air attacks from the cliff side. Now you just have to defend and kill the enemy commander(s)/base(s).

So now the player has spend a lot of time actually doing co-op missions instead of just sitting at home and turtling up. He has more incentive to keep using actual units to break the bases since he already has a better setup for it (since he had to make units to escort the civilians). You can furthermore incentivize him more by having the allied base be an actual ai base that sends units to push the enemy so you're encouraged to accompany his troops.

This is just one example how to make an interactive mission and far from the only way of doing it, but i feel the main difference is that this makes it an actual mission instead of it just being survival 2.0.

Now that i think about it adding timers to clearing out enemy bases could potentially also work to force the player to attack it instead of turtling (but it could potentially be obnoxious as well).

So since some certain balance team communication things were brought up i decided to do a Q&A for balance related stuff upcomming sunday. This isn't meant as some official faf balance team Q&A session or anything. Just supposed to be a chill session to answer people's balance questions.

Current plan is to just do this live on twitch since it seems like the easiest place to do so.

So it's 19/02 19:30 CET on https://www.twitch.tv/stellartactician

I have no idea how many people are interested in this so i'm not sure how much time this is gonna take but i guess we'll see. If people like it enough maybe it can become a reoccuring thing.

If someone has a better idea than this let me know.

The rule about not being able to discuss specific reports is the dumbest rule in the history of faf

Nobody dislikes someone creating a mod like this, but if you blame an entire faf team of corruption then its drew that started the insults. It shouldnt be very surprising then that some people respond in kind since he set the tone of the topic. Nobody likes to be insulted for their volunteer work.