Posts made by TheWeakie

Makes no sense for me. You fight the entire tourney as a team and in the finals ur broken up and have to face eachother?

i have no clue what that means

Sighing up

I never knew that military ranks were based on a persons height

@miki1900 amen brother

irreal missiles are everywhere

Lets gooo grimplex and azot

TheWeakie (2300)
Ctrl-K (1817)
FtxCommando (1728)

Combined rating of 5845

Don't understand how you think telebilly is strong whatsoever. Especially with the latest tele nerf it takes like 1.5 min before you can fire the 2nd missile which is enough time for everyone to build some tmd. Killed 15k mass in a core base? It still cost you 20k mass + the insane e requirements to make the telebilly. At the end of the day making tele billy defense is also around 10x as cheap as telelazer def

If you want to stop others from doing it its not a ui mod but a sim mod

Noticed the same issue last weekend in some games

Okay a small 3 days later than planned but better late than never.

What i will write here is the vision that i have on where to take the sacu rebalance. Note that a lot is still up for debate and nothing is set in stone.

The global picture

So i assume everyone knows that aside from ras boys other sacu's are barely seen in the average teamgame. The reason is simple: they're just not good enough because of a multitude of issues. They cost too much mass or e, take too long to build or just have upgrades that aren't worth getting. Generally speaking sacu's are a giant untapped resource that's kind of just sitting in the game being ignored by almost everybody.

Therefore they're gonna get rebalanced so they will be worth making. The general idea is to create 3 main sacu presets for each faction. A rambo preset, a support preset (more info on this later) and an engineer preset (of course there are also other more faction specific niche presets). The rambo preset will basically work the same as the current presets do (but better balanced) while the support presets are an entirely new (mostly) preset that's meant to support big armies. The engineer preset kind of speaks for itself, but the main difference is that they will be more usefull at the front than they currently are.

The way i envision the impact of this is that in mid to lategame land armies you will see multiple sacu groups as part of the bigger army, instead of evergrowing numbers of t4's.

The details

To allow the 3 main sacu presets to exist we first need to look at the current sacu upgrades, their presets and the sacu's themselves. It is extremely important that wrong upgrades do not overlap with different presets as this might make some presets obsolete.

So first of all the base sacu's. They will be nerfed for 1 simple reason. Not because they are strong but because them existing as they do now interferes with the plan of having 3 main sacu presets. A few examples:

• The base bp of sacu's needs to be nerfed substantially to make engineer sacu's (especially at the front) ever worth it. There is currently zero use cases for an engineer sacu because rambo sacu's already have so much inherent bp on them that coupled with all the survivability upgrades they are simply that much better than engineer presets on the front. You can outbuild a single t3 gunship with a rambo sacu.
• The base hp of sacu's needs to be nerfed to give the planned support presets a possible counter: sniping them for their lower hp.
• It also makes no sense that the non rambo presets basically have the same dps as a percy when they're clearly not meant for fighting. I remember a specific game where i walked a gc into a group of 20 ras boys and i managed to kill 3 ras boys before their combined 6k dps (2.5x the gc dps) killed my gc in about 20 seconds. That kind of stuff should simply not be possible.

The base sacu will get some buffs in return although we haven't discussed the details yet. It's probably gonna be something like a cheaper mass cost and/or lower bt, but it is important to keep in mind that most likely base sacu's are always gonna be too bad to build because they try to do too much at once. The moment it is made a viable option for anything it will almost instantly become OP since it's viable to do that one thing plus has the additional benefits.

The way gateways are balanced will also be changed quite a lot. I want them to work in a similar style as factories: You have multiple of them with some adjacency. Gateways always had terrible adjacency because with it ras boys would become way too strong, so the plan is to buff the adjacency anyway to become similar to t3 land facs in efficiency, and nerf ras boys as much as it's necessary to not make them stronger.

More specific details

So the support presets are probably the most controversial but also the most exciting changes for me. 1 faction already has a set of 3 support upgrades that should work pretty well: UEF sacu's with a jamming, sensor and shield field upgrade (although obviously it needs to be rebalanced to be worth making). The other factions right now are lacking these upgrades though. We have come up with a few possible ideas but like i said at the start nothing is set in stone, so please mention it if you have a good idea. Maybe it will be used.

The current plan is for sera to get a regen field which has the same function as the current regen field on the normal acu. The plan for aeon is for them to get a chrono support acu (again similar function as the normal acu). Both of these kind of fit their faction theme since the main acu already has these upgrades. It's probably gonna be relatively hard to balance these upgrades properly since the effect can be very strong, but i believe that with enough testing it will be possible.

Cybran is by far the toughest one for me though and aside from a multitude of ideas we haven't exactly gotten many concrete ideas for them yet. A big issue is that both their sacu's and acu have a lot of niche upgrades that don't necessarily fit into a preset. Right now the only support upgrade that exists on the sacu is the sam upgrade, which is fine but nowhere near enough.

Here are a couple of ideas that we came up with/ got mentioned:

• Have a damage aura that damages enemy units (so the opposite of regen aura). You can combine it with cloak which is an almost unused upgrade to walk into enemy armies to damage them. It sounds cool but the main issue with this is that it isn't a support upgrade. That isn't necessarily the worst for cybran since they're kinda known as the aggressive faction, but it's also kinda easy to counter with spyplanes (although funnily enough you can have the sam upgrade on them as well to shoot them down)
• Have a damage aura that increases the damage of your own units that surround it. This feels kinda lame for me personally though.
• Have a speed aura since cybran is known to be the raid focussed faction. The issues with this however is that it's mostly useless in a straight fight (unlike the other support upgrades) and it won't work on a lot of maps where flanking is not really an option. It also is awkward that sacu's are very slow themselves and buffing the speed of units around you will make other units slowly leave it.

If you think you have a better idea we would be happy to see it.

All in all right now we are in the conceptual phase. We (think) we got the general idea down and will slowly start implementing these on fafbeta. Obviously a big overhaul like this needs quite a lot of testing and even then there will be no way we get it right the first time, but considering the current state of sacu's we have very little to lose imo.

Ill try to give a thorough explanation when i got time this weekend (or u can hop on stream to ask)

From experience i can say that the mex slider was way more accurate than the terrain sliders. I would set the mountain slider to max and half my maps wouldnt generate a single mountain.

@blackyps said in New Map Generator Options:

Isn't the small islands style not more or less an archipelago?

Not quite sure since i almost always used the sliders to create maps (will check it tonight) but generally speaking mapgen was quite bad at creating good water maps

There is a big reason why all the og adaptive maps have tons of different mex (and reclaim) settings. It allows u to play the same map in a completely different style

The mex slider is an insanely big deal and probably the most important slider since it completely changes how maps are supposed to be played.

Also since the other sliders were removed id really like to be some sort of archipelago style setting.

Yoooo the return of ftx and auto

@toka said in T3 Land is kinda unbalanced now:

What I do not really get is the build cost nerf.I do not get why sera snipers got nerf in build cost more than the aeon ones and the difference in nerf is 10%!

This was probably done (don't exactly remember since it was 1.5 years ago) to make both snipersbots have the mass mass to bt ratio. The buildtimes were always the same but the sera sniper has always been 10% more expensive than the aeon one. (more dps, more hp, more range in 2nd fire mode + the best mobile shield in the game to support it). The general rule of thumb when deciding on unit bt is for it to have similar/same ratio's as similar type units. For example each frigate has a different mass cost and bt but each of them have the same ratio. You can see this as "sera sniper was always supposed to have more bt but it didn't, this fixed the wrong stat".

@toka said in T3 Land is kinda unbalanced now:

Together with the patch 3750 the energy cost was increased three times and mass cost was decreased by 10%. I do not feel this was needed that much. For example in case of sera, sniper was the best unit on t3 stage not because it was imbalanced, but because t3 tank is not as good compared to percivals, harbs and bricks. However, when we get an army of percies against army of snipers, together with t2 shields u make just a little bit of balance when percies attack, because tons of shields absorb damage and recharge, allowing percies to barely suffer damage when they get to the target. Only bricks used to have no real counter against snipers. Ok, this is just my opinion, can be argueable.
But the damage radius nerf was something that was reason for not seeing snipers in lobbies anymore, i literally almost never see people spaming them, specially for sera, cause it makes barely sense now to use them against any other faction, UEF counters them easily with t3 mml (they are faster and have more range then snipers and tbh I have never seen someone doding anything with snipers, cause they are not moblie, logically), about bricks I will talk a bit later, cause I have more to say about them.
Summing up, we see that snipers were nerfed with no real compensation for that, cause the nerf was way too strong and the other units were buffed in the patch 3775.

Just to give you some insight: The old snipers were close to an autowin tool in high lvl lobbies and completely unfun to play against. You could not catch them because they would kill everything trying to chase it down and often the only potential counter would be a specific t4 (fatty or ahwassa) or a t2 arty base. The issue however was that you would start scaling your sniperbots from the moment you reached the t3 stage and they would snowball farming free damage over time. I remember seeing yudi making such an obese sniperbot/shield stack that even a mega getting close to it would live for 15 seconds before it would die to the second sniper volley.

The main idea behind the patch 3775 change was to revamp it in a way to make it more fun to play with/against it.

• Increase the e cost by a lot for 2 reasons:
  - You can't blatantly rush t3 land and instantly start spamming snipers. The idea is that you should build main t3 tanks instead and only after you build your first t3 pgen you can start spamming snipers. This prevents the snowbal sniper blob from forming this early into the game.
  - It makes it harder to maintain a massive sniperbot stack since it requires a lot of shields with e drain + it requires extra e drain on the factories making more sniperbots
• Decrease the max radius and unit movement speed so there should be a lot more active gameplay involved when playing with or against sniperbots since you won't have as much room available to move around (just for reference aeon snipers still have almost double a percies range + higher speed). The goal was to make sniperbots feel more similar (to some degree) as how you would use mongoose, where you can abuse the higher range and relatively fast speed on them, but you have to pay more attention since the difference in ranges is smaller. Compared to the previous sniperbot gameplay of having a massive stack slowly move forwards while everything runs away from it this seemed like an improvement to the gameplay.

The lowered masscost was supposed to counteract these changes. I did however just now when writing this post realise that buildtimes weren't changed together with the masscost. I don't remember whether that was done on purpose or not, but it is important to note that with a bigger unit revamp like this it's impossible to foresee all the consequences of said change. I do think that lowering their unit bt by a bit would make sense though since you still wouldn't be able to rush them out (since lowered bt would increase the e drain on the fac even more).

I don't really recognize some of the problems you describe though. Percies with shields pushing into snipers with shields still is no easy thing at all. A very important thing to keep in mind is that you need to get close with your percies, but othuums and harbs beat percies mass to mass in close range (especially with your own mobile shields). And even if the percies win the brawl with the harbs/othuums your snipers are still at the back doing free damage over time. The brawl most likely got most of the percy shields down so your snipers can finish them off. If the percies don't commit to the brawl and back off slightly when the harbs are coming for them you can just copy his movement with your harbs. This leads to a lot of back and forth movement while your snipers keep doing damage (i know you said there's a shield stack, but realistically speaking you should not have that many shields to just prevent damage for free and if you do your opponent should have a way bigger army).

@toka said in T3 Land is kinda unbalanced now:

You can say that they got buffed, but looking to other units, except for harbs, percies and bricks have gained more buff in speed, looking for a percentage, you can calculate if you want, whereas harbs have gained almost same speed buff.
Now let's talk about bricks, why the hell they got buffed so much? I literally see no reason for that. Compared to percies, they can be used against t1, t2,t3 and t4, whereas percies are used mainly against t2-t3 and can be countered by t1 spam. Percies used to be better in the case of the battle against t3 and t4 units, because of the range, but now bricks:
A) have same range
B) have more hp
C) have better speed
D) wider range of use
This even not talking about bricks against othuums and harbs. Harbs in general are not bad.
The main problem I have seen in cybran is lack of mobile shields, but this can not be balanced just by making bricks op.
So this is my opinion about the t3 units.
It would have been a bullshit without my personal suggestion on balance.
My suggestion would be following:
Nerf bricks and give cybran mobile stealth generator an ability of regen aura (I think this is a good fit for cybran cause all the mechanics consider them having low hp but regen). This might be too strong, so also making a new unit (regen aura generator) is not as bad.
About othuums I have just an overview of how they whould be. Eather make them very fast or make them having more hp.
Snipers in my opinion should get the old range of attack, cost can remain same.

First of all the easy things. The speed buffs were more of a "lets increase t3 land unit general effectiveness vs t4's by a bit". This followed a 0.1 speed increase for almost all t2 land units over a year ago btw. Aside from that i think this change can be mostly ignored for t3 land balance.

The brick range was simply needed since the lack of mobile shields made bricks almost unplayable in teamgames. I remember some games vs blodir where i had a gun/nano uef acu (early game upgrades) and i managed to kill 20 to 30 bricks with it. Now imagine an acu with a shield upgrade as well. There is just nothing cybran could do against it. I know there are issues that the +2 range causes, because outside of acu's bricks were already a solid unit even without the extra range increase (i dislike the change myself as well, but think it's a necessary evil until we have a better solution). This change is supposed to be (partially?) removed when the cybran absolver is there, but the details on that are yet to be decided.

Othuums i agree are too bad to properly compete currently, hence why this is currently on fafdevelop.
https://puu.sh/K8SKc/c0a3602617.png
Not saying this is the only change they will get (after all balancing is a continuous process) but othuums are definitely on my radar as a problem child.

My man vindex finished the school of grimplex i see

Ftx