OMG DOOD!! How did we not notice that seraphim is LITERALLY UNPLAYABLE until just now?!? I just lost a game as SERAPHIM because my opponent made a GUNCOM and did a T2 LAND PUSH!! It was TOTALLY UNSTOPPABLE because the GAME IS BROKEN!!! I can even construct an UNLIMITED NUMBER of scenarios IN MY MIND and ON PAPER which PROVE IT.

(also it is just a fact that it takes more than one energy storage to kill and obsidian or ilshavoh with overcharge. Stop trying to argue against objective facts or you will be banned!)

The unit cap in ladder games should be increased. On maps like Seton's Clutch the mexes and storages alone take up 1/4 of the 1000 unit cap. Most of the time the 'Unit Cap Reached' window does not even pop-up and it takes some time to realize that none of your factories are producing anything because you are at the unit cap. In team games the unit cap can go much higher, and you also get your dead teammates unit cap added on when they die.

There is no role for the firebeetle in the Cybran arsenal. For early snipes and raids they have jesters. For ambushing armies they have deceivers and normal land units. They have renegades with high aoe for anti-army, sniping ringed mexes, killing lots of engineers, etc. They have corsairs for sniping units and pgens. They have TML-4, the fasted firing and flying TML that also splits into 4 missiles, for sniping structures or anything you can hit with it. They even have a cloaked and stealthed laser ACU for doing whatever with. Anything you want to do, Cybran already has a better tool for it than the firebeetle.

The only thing fireebeetles do is confuse noobs who don't understand how cloak and stealth work, or remember them actually being good some time in ancient history. Nobody else ever uses them.

Despite firebeetles being the most pointless unit in the game, they get the most attention from everyone. Keyser, the Game Councillor and the most intelligent Frenchman in the entire FAF community, has spent most of his adult life rebalancing firebeetles. Each balance patch totally changes the unit to do something even more bizarre and even more useless.

The only sensible thing to do is remove them from the game so that so many great minds are not doomed to eternally rebalance them and talk about them on the forums. It might also be possible to reskin them and give them to another faction that doesn't already have superior units in every possible role.

He is correct that Seraphim is quite weak in the T2 stage, but I don't think it is any worse than Cybran (which everyone thinks is OP). It is more an issue of UEF being too strong on the T2 stage since they get mobile shields + mongoose, pillars, and a very strong ACU all at the same stage of the game. Similar issue with Aeon.

I think mobile shields need to be nerfed in some way. They could be made to die when the shield bubble is overcharged, which there is already a PR for on GitHub. Another potential addition to this would be to give them a death weapon that activates when they are hit with overcharge, or other weapon that deals large overkill damage, so that they damage nearby units when they die. As if the shield was being overloaded by this additional damage or whatever.

I admit I was incorrect about it taking more than one energy storage to kill those units and I should be banned for spreading this misinformation. I was confused since it does take more than the minimum required overcharge energy to kill them and I mistakenly believed keyser knew what he was talking about.

I don't think veterancy makes the game better. You try to kill some unit and then it gets some more health and then you get mad. The person who owns the unit should be happy enough that the unit has killed 2x its mass cost already, they don't need some cheat health and regen bonus win more mechanic.

I think the root of the problem is that water is very inconsistent and poorly designed in this game. There are about 10 different types of water in the game and you cannot distinguish between them in any way other than trial and error. Mapmakers have a huge amount of responsibility to design their maps to have clear and consistent mechanics, but 99% of them aren't even aware of this and just try to make pretty maps. You can never create good balance and clear consistent mechanics under these circumstances.

The only consistent mechanic shared by all water is that hover units can go over it and amphibious units through it as long as there isn't a cliff blocking them (which can also be unclear).

Otherwise, water always has these unknowns:

• Is it deep enough to protect unit X from surface fire?
• Is it deep enough for torpedos and depth charges to work?
• Is it deep enough to build a navy factory?
• Is it deep enough for navy units to travel through?
• Is it deep enough to hide submerged unit X from AoE with radius Y?
• Will the seafloor kill my units if I drop them there?
• Can my amphibious units cross there or is there some underwater terrain issue?

If subs were capable of adjusting their depth like air units it would still never be clear if they are deep enough to be safe from AoE with radius X since the depth of the water can vary significantly. You don't want to make underwater units immune to all AoE just because they went 1 inch under the surface either because that is stupid and still inconsistent. You could make the AoE some sort of ellipsoid shape so it doesn't penetrate as deep into the water, but that doesn't address the issue, if anything it becomes less clear what can hit what. You could make water have a dampening effect (pun intended) so that damage taken from AoE is reduced with depth, still inconsistent and unclear. The way it currently is, where submerged units stay at a consistent depth at all times and take AoE damage if they are within range, is probably the most consistency you can get.

I think placing so much power and responsibility in the hands of the map makers is the biggest design flaw in Supreme Commander. It is the cause of this problem and several related problems which all have no solutions. When I was thinking about what I would want from a new Supreme Commander type of game this is the first thing I had to find a solution for.

Why is there a 46 post thread just for two people to post their applications? I don't want to read all this shit.

I thought that Support Command Units were supposed to be like the ACU only you get to have more. The ACU only has 10 buildpower when it gates in and I don't understand why Support Command Units would have any more. They should have to be upgraded to get more buildpower or combat abilities the same as a normal ACU would, just with a different set of upgrades.

no UI mods should be allowed that give units "AI" aka allow translations of sentences like "if this then this else this" or "in case of this, this" into orders, but only "this, then this, then this". There can be no decision making that unit itself does (aka giving commands on its own without player), but any order queue of any orders that player wants to give them or manipulate, they should be able to do effortlessly and is fine.

Great, this means that disperse move, spread move, spread attack, and whatever else are all cheating because when you give an order to an entire group of units they give themselves new individual orders based on some decision-making code in the UI mod.

Why are you all considering shift-g, some random spread move thing added by FAF, a core game mechanic? It isn't a game mechanic at all. It is just a UI mod that wouldn't ever have existed if not for FAF. FAF gave you this ability in the first place and now they are considering removing it since it allows people to easily make cheats. Hardly a dictator's playground.

I am not convinced that cheating is a big problem, or that it ever will be, but I also don't think spread move improves the game anyway. I have seen countless games that could have been interesting be prematurely ended because of shift-g surrounding an ACU after it was out of position for 1 second. Despite this, you guys still make the argument that shift-g only enhances the skill of the game and makes it better? Wouldn't it take a bit more skill to have manually microd all of the units to block the ACU, so it took some effort and APM to get the win instead of a single key combo? How about being clever and hiding some stuff in a part of the map that normally wouldn't get scouted? That won't work anymore because your opponent will just make 10 scouts and give a split move to scout the entire map and find your stuff on accident, might as well remove fog of war. Split move also gives you quite good automatic micro for many units. Just spam a bunch of move orders and hit a key and they will move around in unpredictable directions dodging everything. Combine this with target priorities and it is even more busted. None of these things enhance the game or increase the skill cap they just reduce micro that would have been impressive to perform and watch before into something everyone can do with the press of a button. As the power of these things becomes more realized micro will become less of a novelty and more of a mandatory part of the game.

Even without the threat of cheat mods, I would prefer to remove the ability for UI mods to issue move orders. Now that so much attention has been called to this I expect more people to start pushing the boundaries of what can be done and the line between acceptable and cheating will not be so clear. More people will probably start using actual cheat mods as well now that everyone is saying how easy it is and that they are difficult to detect. Allowing this ability to exist in the first place was a mistake and now it should be corrected.

The only thing that needs fixed is #3202 so we can actually see the player's eco in replays and casts again. Can't even tell me to do it myself since it is only a matter of undoing the stuff broken by the last patch!

Just have to point out that removing the ability to assist quantum gateways is an extremely stupid idea. Flux economy and controlling the amount of buildpower you use on something is the bedrock mechanic which the entire game is built on. Excluding launchers, which have some weird behavior when mass stalling that I think is stupid, everything obeys the elegant and simple rules of mass, energy, and buildtime. You cannot just say that this one type of factory is impossible to assist because you don't like the units it produces or because of quantum magic, it would be an unforgivable sin going against the main design principle of the game.

If you want assistance to have less of an impact on quantum gateways you just increase the buildpower of the gateway and increase the buildtime of the SCU so that the external buildpower has less of an effect. Exactly the same thing that was already done with nuke launchers.

It only affects factory attack moves and not regular attack moves. I also don't know if neutral civilians have the same effect as enemy units or not.

Things only need work when they are bad or broken. I don't work on my truck every day. Outside of some simple maintenance every few months, it does what it is supposed to do without any work required from me. If my neighbor is constantly working on his truck I don't assume that his truck is better than mine, I assume it is worse because it requires a lot of work. That's the same way I feel about these clients.

The python client works just fine and occasionally requires some maintenance every few months. Some random person comes along and fixes it rather quickly. A couple of the tabs don't work because they use old PHP stuff that was deleted for whatever reason. I doubt it would take much to get them working with the new API, I can use the API in my web browser so it seems pretty simple, but nobody cares about those tabs anyway. The Java client is constantly getting lots of work because it sucks and still needs a lot of work.

On the topic of client tabs. It seems pretty stupid for these things to even be implemented in the client. It would be most efficient to implement them as web pages. This would make it possible to have replays, mods, maps, and leaderboards on the FAF website without requiring any client. The clients could simply display these pages and the tabs would be consistent and functional in both clients for free. This effort doesn't have to be duplicated and shouldn't be. Blodir created an online replay tool, and the leaderboards are already online, so this is clearly possible.

I can see an immense amount of work going into the Java client but I still see all of the issues I mentioned remaining year after year, most of which were reported even before it was made the official client. I can see virtually no work going into the Python client yet it remains mostly functional and preferred by many people. I'm fairly confident it would take less work to fix the tabs in the python client and keep it running than to bring the Java client up to my standards. It would even be mostly free if the tabs were online.

Of course, you cannot force people to do this. If they adamantly refuse to work on the Python client for whatever reason then that's how it will be. I can also continue to adamantly believe that is a stupid thing to do and complain about it. I am equally stubborn and refuse to open FAF anytime the Python client is broken and the Java client still sucks. I see them wrestling with Java and JavaFX constantly so it is strange for them to prefer it. In this language and framework, it is apparently a monumental task just to display a chat window and user list without using all of your RAM and CPU. Anyone who can program in Java can program in Python and vice-versa.

Yes, I am grumpy and lazy and won't do any work on either client myself. People do work for free and I complain about it. So it goes.

I don't know why they are not reclaiming. Possibly it is because of the enemy walls next to them, but usually you would see them at least trying to reclaim stuff. Factory attack move doesn't work if any enemy units are nearby, including walls. The engineers just try and fail to reclaim the enemy unit on an endless loop and get nothing done.

Here is my list of reasons for disliking the Java client, just off the top of my head so certainly some are missing:

• The desktop icon doesn't have anti-aliasing.
• Takes longer to open.
• Everything is laggy, unresponsive, and janky.
• Lacks minor nice UI things like highlighting clickable objects when they are moused over (names in user list).
• Have to manually recolor yourself and all your friends in chat.
• Has an annoying dancing ACU GIF.
• UI is inferior in many other ways, takes more clicks/keypresses to do just about everything when compared to python.
• Replay vault is difficult to find so many new players do not realize it even exists.
• Replay vault interface is complex and cumbersome so many do not know how to use it, or if you do it still takes more clicks. The replay vault is critical for player improvement so if new players cannot find and use it they will all suck at the game.
• The notifications are very intrusive so they have to be turned off, which in turn means you cannot see if someone is searching ladder. Even with them enabled it only pops up occasionally. Python is much better since anytime someone is searching it immediately notifies you in an unobtrusive way.
• The Java client uses much more memory and CPU power, to the point it slows down your entire PC.
• Java client doesn't run on 32-bit systems or Windows XP even though the game does.
• Official FAF advice is to close the #aeolus chat tab so it doesn't consume your entire PC, obviously the client is poorly engineered to the extent that it hinders people's FAF experience yet it is made the official client and the only known option for many people.
• Java client has cost FAF a very large amount of developer time for an inferior and unneeded product. Dev power is supposedly scarce around here and this is an egregious waste. The python client could have simply been refactored and improved. Even after several years of work the Java client is not really any better.

Has to be a game patch to change the blueprint to use a separate icon from engineers. Same as was done for SACUs a while ago.

I don't think there is any way to find them besides that, FAF is a mess.