The way it should be

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!)

Yeah, I was also writing a post about how units are balanced relative to each other and not mexes. And how the value of eco structures is totally different on every map because they have different amounts of mexes and reclaim. There is no intricate balance there. It is just random numbers. The same as the 81% reclaim value that nobody seemed opposed to modifying.

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.

The thing that bothers me about T3 mexes is how big of a jump there is between a ringed T2 mex and a ringed T3 mex. You get +18 net income from upgrading a ringed T2 mex to T3. Compared to the +4 and +3 from upgrading a T1 mex to T2 and ringing it. This is because the ringing of the mex is performing double duty in the upgrade cycle. Ringing a T2 mex is cheap enough to be worth it all on its own, but this same investment then gives another +9 mass once the mex is upgraded to T3. Unringed T3 mexes are almost never built. This is about the same as always skipping the T3 mex and going straight to T4 mex (ringed T3 mex), which seems like bad and unintuitive balance to me. The 800 mass invested in storages gives +3 mass then another +9 mass, so you get +12 mass just from and 800 mass investment. Extremely OP.

I guess the way to fix this is to nerf mass storages or the mass storage adjacency bonus in some way.

Someone could just patch the game to automatically run the console command that fixes it.

I think it will be harder for people to learn the game on random maps as opposed to having a set pool. With a set pool, they can look up replays of higher-rated players on the map and see how they play it and what BO they use. They also get to play the map multiple times themselves so they can watch replays and correct their mistakes and then get another shot at it. With random maps neither of those things are possible, they just get one shot on the map and that's it. Random maps take away the quick and easy way to get good and force people to recognize what is good and bad without having the map be a constant factor.

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.

ThomasHiatt 2310

You can kill shielded cybran t2 pgens with tml because the shield bubble barely covers them and isn't enough to stop the aoe damage.

I think it will be harder for people to learn the game on random maps as opposed to having a set pool. With a set pool, they can look up replays of higher-rated players on the map and see how they play it and what BO they use. They also get to play the map multiple times themselves so they can watch replays and correct their mistakes and then get another shot at it. With random maps neither of those things are possible, they just get one shot on the map and that's it. Random maps take away the quick and easy way to get good and force people to recognize what is good and bad without having the map be a constant factor.

Someone could just patch the game to automatically run the console command that fixes it.

Anyone still alive and working on releasing this patch?

Plenty of the people active around my rating level are 16-22 years old. I don't understand why people think the FAF player base is only old people. There aren't many options for people who want to play a good RTS game so they have to come here.

I think watching people fight, be toxic, and get mad is very entertaining. I probably wouldn't spend nearly as much time on FAF if I couldn't watch and participate in it. I do not think it matters if people quit because of it since there is an endless supply of new players anyway. It makes no difference to me if there are 10,000 gap noobs getting mad at each other or just 5,000. I only care about the players who are able to stick out the toxicity or improve anyway.

Sounds quite overpowered to give Aeon and Seraphim the ability to complete their early mexes, pgens, and factories quicker. Then they just get more resources and more units from the start of the game and nothing is fair anymore. ACU can leave the base sooner, can start ecoing faster, the advantage just snowballs from the start of the game.

Also sounds terribly annoying and un-supcom to have to go to your engies every 5 seconds and hit some button to activate an ability like it's starcraft.

When a shield is damaged and has other shields in contact with it there is an overspill damage modifier that determines how much additional damage each overlapping shield receives. I think right now it is around 0.3 for most shields. So if a shield gets hit for 100 damage all overlapping shields will take 30 damage also.

We already have the #newbie IRC channel. It is full of random noobs and no older players bother to go in there to answer questions or anything, so it is just worse than #aeolus.