This thread is to give an overview on the ongiong SCU rebalance which went into beta today and serve as a place for feedback regarding it. Because the current version of the SCU rebalance is just a rough draft and will likely still go through many changes. It will (most likely) not be part of the next balance patch. Nothing of it is yet is final (even adding/removing of upgrades is still possible) and things that are not directly related to balance itself (upgrade and preset names and desciptions, graphic effects,...) are still on a rudimentary level. So please, at the current stage, do not provide feedback related to those things.
If you have feedback/ideas regarding the SCU balance you can give it here. Presenting a reasoning of how a potential change/addition would benefit the game, giving a replay as illustration etc. will significantly increase the chance of your idea being applied.

The SCU balance has two goals. First, to adjust the SCU strenght to the current power of T3 land and second, to increase the strategic diversity in the mid to late T3 and experimental stage, where SCUs should help by adding more strategic choices and help compensating a factions weaknesses.

In the SCU rebalance all ACU presets fits into one of 3 categories.

1. Rambo - pretty seflexplanatory, serves as a combat unit that performs well when microed. Rambo upgrades are for the most the same as in the current balance, with only a few things added and some obsolete/inferior upgrades and presets removed.
2. Support - is supposed to be used together with a large T3 (and T4 army) to provide buffs/bonuses to it, which are different for each faction. All support presets have the engineering upgrade.
3. Special - anything that doesnt fit in the first two categories, like RAS, TML, ...
   For this purpose the place of some upgrades position (left arm/right arm/torso) was changed, so that essential rambo and support upgrades are on the same position, to prevent a mixed category.

Before going into the individual changes for each faction, I will list a few general changes that were applied to all SCUs.

All unupgraded SCUs bt (buildtime) got significantly decreased.
Most upgrades energy cost was significantly reduced. These two changes are needed to make building SCUs a viable choice in 1v1.
The strenght of offensive and defensive upgrades was reduced, to bring them closer to the strenght of T3.
Obsolete/missleading upgrades and presets were removed.
The SCU bp (buildpower) was significantly reduced, to give the engineering upgrade a meaningfull role in the game, because currently the raw SCU bp is so large a few rambo SCUs at the front can easily build defensive structures even without the engineering upgrade.
RAS SCUs bt got heavily increased.

After this I will come the the individual faction presets. For each preset i will only list the fully upgraded version here. In the game you will also find rambo/support presets which lack the more expensive upgrades, so they can be build earlier in the game (so that e.g. for sera you can also build rambo SCUs without the expensive oc upgrade in the midstage of the T3 phase where you can't afford the full rambo preset yet.) Especially these incomplete presets are just a guesses of what might be relevant and will be adjusted/removed if found to have no practical use.

Aeon

The Aeon have 2 rambo presets and and support preset. The first rambo preset is the same AoE preset as in the current balance. The second one has, instead of weapon AoE, a new upgrade which increases the projectiles dps, giving it high single target damage compared to other rambo presets AoE. The Aeon rambo SCU still has the highest range of all SCUs. The Support preset has the chrono upgrade, which works as a weaker version of the ACU chrono and should make kiting, aswell as overwhelming an enemy army significantly easier than it currently is for aeon. Multiple chrono SCUs do not provide stacking effects, though they can cover a larger area.

Cybran

The Cybran have 1 rambo preset and 2 support presets. The rambo preset is the same as in current balance (AoE stun). The first support preset provides a large stealthfield (it can easily stealth an entire army). The second support preset provides a speed buff field, which increases the movement speed of its surrounding, non experimental, units. Both support presets also have the aa upgrade. Multiple speed buff fields do not stack.

Seraphim

The Seraphim have 1 rambo preset and 1 support preset. The rambo preset is the overcharge preset from the current balance (gunrange+nano+oc). The support preset gives a regen field, which gives surrounding units additional health regeneration based on their max hp (it does not add hp like the ACU regen field), which has a max value for each tech tier. Multiple regen fields do stack additively.

The UEF have 1 rambo and 1 support preset. The rambo preset has AoE and an increased RoF, but has the lowest range of all rambo SCUs. The support SCU has the intel upgrade (which also provides jamming) and the bubble shield upgrade. While the bubble shield strenght was significantly reduced (in current balance it is even stronger than the ACUs bubble shield upgrade), its size was increased aswell, so that it is better at shielding UEF T3/T4 armies.

the goal is to balance the game towards an expansion heavy playstyle, while keeping it from drowning in midless yolo (T1) spam and ideally at high strategic diversity, while keeping an eye on teamgames on (somewhat) competetive maps.
gap/2gap/astro/pass is not one of them.

"a bit 'cheaty'"
no, its cheaty and would result in a ban if used in competetive games

It seems i missed the balance patch where overcharging a shielded unit does also kill the p gens supporting the shield

moses, play a reasonable amount of 1v1.

1st the reason for T3 land being "more defensive" is that each dead T3 land unit on enemy territory is a T2 mex in reclaim.
2nd raducing fac bp as you suggest would result in more units in production at once->making engie assist more of a requirement early on and thereby even making T3 support facs less usefull. the reason they exist is that they are nice, easy to get bp (just upgrade your t2 facs) without getting your T3 stuck in some clusterfuck of assisting engies.
Economic drain is a no argument, since you just need to upgrade less facs, untill oyu have the eco to support it (it would only result in having to build double the facs later on having double stuck in production).
Also you dont need T3 eco for T3 spam, and usually get it way before.
also how does every fac cost 3-5k mass? 1 T3 supportfac is 1440 mass (~800 for the upgrade from t2). only the HQ is that expensive

" In QA and Customer Interfacing"

This isnt QA and customer interfacing, its improving the game for competetive gameplay, a job being done by ppl in their free time.
for easy acess you got aeolus.

This is not sufficient to "Showcase the Problem" (you litterally ignore the entire rest of the T2 stage, faction design, how these units are used ingame and micropotential).
You litterally only say that wagner raw stats are weaker without even showing why it would be an issue.

you completely ignore the game situation these upgrades exist in. e.g. cybran intentionally being weak in T2 rambo stage, allways try looking at the big picture, because upgraded acus rerely appear on their own

I have to agree with morax, the potential of getting matched in the same team as someone 1k lower rated (vs possibly a team of 2 premade 1700s) is an issue, especially if those are the only games I get (3 times in a row after waiting 10-15 min for a proper game each time).
Since for me que times tend to be long already I dont think having to cancle the queue every 7 min to prevent getting an unplayable game is a good solution to the problem, because it will just get anoying to cancel the queue for the 20th time and then getting an inbalanced game the 21st time because I forgot to cancel it just one time during the waiting sim.
Furthermore i dont think that too large rating differences between players in a team should happen at all (no matter if the resulting game should be balanced or not). Once the difference is (approximately) 600+ it will lead to bad game,ending in a survival or cheese/sniperush for the higher rated player.

"a bit 'cheaty'"
no, its cheaty and would result in a ban if used in competetive games

the problem with teamgames is the maplayout aka 10 ACUs on a 10x10 without any space to raid. because of the map being clumped that way agression is limited to (heavily/all in) pushing or ecoing/turteling. No mex change wil change that. It will just be a continious forward/backward on the same lane. fixing that would require sth like nerfing ACU and pd into utter oblivion. Only in teamgames you have the abomination of ppl possibly building multiple T3 mexes before T3 land on a regular basis.
There is no point ruining 1v1 balance for that, especially since the usual team isnt able to properly coordinate more than 2 players either

the goal for SCUs is giving additional options at the T3 stage. One option is using SCUs as a support unit for your army, using either support presets or rambo presets that interact well with your army (like cyb rambo stun helps a brick army with kiting).
in addition to that there should also be the option of using rambo scus as your main combat unit (maybe together with some t3 backup to prevent them getting overrun). considering they all have a pretty low dps/mass it will be a constant drain (over a long time) on apm for those more enjoying single unit micro (where if you fail your micro you will just get run over).
considering that i dont see any reason why gateways should not be assistable, especially since economy scales aswell and high cost SCUs (e.g. oc) would take ages to build.
So i dont see any reason why SCU production should not be scalable. only thing that change would adress is hive ras scu spam which might then just change to adjacency gate spam

one of the main mechanics is being able to swich assist around and making quick tech/strategy swiches that way, especially because scus should also be an offensive option making them unassistable will be a pointless nerf for 1v1, while on sth like setons you might spam a few gates with mex adjacency and some fab adjacency

you completely ignore the game situation these upgrades exist in. e.g. cybran intentionally being weak in T2 rambo stage, allways try looking at the big picture, because upgraded acus rerely appear on their own

In current balance all rambo SCUs except aeon have the same range (35), you might have been building one of the useless presets where the SCU had OC but not range (sensors). The range was the gunupgrade was slightly reduced because currently they could kite even percies. The reason rmbo SCUs were not op in 1v1 was their insane bt and e cost, so it required too much investment to get them, but because this patch aimes to fix that issue unnerfed SCUs would be straight op. (e.g. in current balance aeon rambo SCUs (the 4.4k mass) have 40 range vs 34 percy range and more hp/mass than the percies)
Since UEF already has percies they are not rly in need of another slow, longrange combat unit,the idea is to make it sth different.

in beta all SCUsn are selectable together with armies

"Was 20 as a number chosen specifically/Specific Reason?"

Yes it was chosen so low, so that a small group of rambo SCUs (3-4) cant easily spam up T2 shields/sams/pds.

This thread is to give an overview on the ongiong SCU rebalance which went into beta today and serve as a place for feedback regarding it. Because the current version of the SCU rebalance is just a rough draft and will likely still go through many changes. It will (most likely) not be part of the next balance patch. Nothing of it is yet is final (even adding/removing of upgrades is still possible) and things that are not directly related to balance itself (upgrade and preset names and desciptions, graphic effects,...) are still on a rudimentary level. So please, at the current stage, do not provide feedback related to those things.
If you have feedback/ideas regarding the SCU balance you can give it here. Presenting a reasoning of how a potential change/addition would benefit the game, giving a replay as illustration etc. will significantly increase the chance of your idea being applied.

The SCU balance has two goals. First, to adjust the SCU strenght to the current power of T3 land and second, to increase the strategic diversity in the mid to late T3 and experimental stage, where SCUs should help by adding more strategic choices and help compensating a factions weaknesses.

In the SCU rebalance all ACU presets fits into one of 3 categories.

1. Rambo - pretty seflexplanatory, serves as a combat unit that performs well when microed. Rambo upgrades are for the most the same as in the current balance, with only a few things added and some obsolete/inferior upgrades and presets removed.
2. Support - is supposed to be used together with a large T3 (and T4 army) to provide buffs/bonuses to it, which are different for each faction. All support presets have the engineering upgrade.
3. Special - anything that doesnt fit in the first two categories, like RAS, TML, ...
   For this purpose the place of some upgrades position (left arm/right arm/torso) was changed, so that essential rambo and support upgrades are on the same position, to prevent a mixed category.

Before going into the individual changes for each faction, I will list a few general changes that were applied to all SCUs.

All unupgraded SCUs bt (buildtime) got significantly decreased.
Most upgrades energy cost was significantly reduced. These two changes are needed to make building SCUs a viable choice in 1v1.
The strenght of offensive and defensive upgrades was reduced, to bring them closer to the strenght of T3.
Obsolete/missleading upgrades and presets were removed.
The SCU bp (buildpower) was significantly reduced, to give the engineering upgrade a meaningfull role in the game, because currently the raw SCU bp is so large a few rambo SCUs at the front can easily build defensive structures even without the engineering upgrade.
RAS SCUs bt got heavily increased.

After this I will come the the individual faction presets. For each preset i will only list the fully upgraded version here. In the game you will also find rambo/support presets which lack the more expensive upgrades, so they can be build earlier in the game (so that e.g. for sera you can also build rambo SCUs without the expensive oc upgrade in the midstage of the T3 phase where you can't afford the full rambo preset yet.) Especially these incomplete presets are just a guesses of what might be relevant and will be adjusted/removed if found to have no practical use.

Aeon

The Aeon have 2 rambo presets and and support preset. The first rambo preset is the same AoE preset as in the current balance. The second one has, instead of weapon AoE, a new upgrade which increases the projectiles dps, giving it high single target damage compared to other rambo presets AoE. The Aeon rambo SCU still has the highest range of all SCUs. The Support preset has the chrono upgrade, which works as a weaker version of the ACU chrono and should make kiting, aswell as overwhelming an enemy army significantly easier than it currently is for aeon. Multiple chrono SCUs do not provide stacking effects, though they can cover a larger area.

Cybran

The Cybran have 1 rambo preset and 2 support presets. The rambo preset is the same as in current balance (AoE stun). The first support preset provides a large stealthfield (it can easily stealth an entire army). The second support preset provides a speed buff field, which increases the movement speed of its surrounding, non experimental, units. Both support presets also have the aa upgrade. Multiple speed buff fields do not stack.

Seraphim

The Seraphim have 1 rambo preset and 1 support preset. The rambo preset is the overcharge preset from the current balance (gunrange+nano+oc). The support preset gives a regen field, which gives surrounding units additional health regeneration based on their max hp (it does not add hp like the ACU regen field), which has a max value for each tech tier. Multiple regen fields do stack additively.

The UEF have 1 rambo and 1 support preset. The rambo preset has AoE and an increased RoF, but has the lowest range of all rambo SCUs. The support SCU has the intel upgrade (which also provides jamming) and the bubble shield upgrade. While the bubble shield strenght was significantly reduced (in current balance it is even stronger than the ACUs bubble shield upgrade), its size was increased aswell, so that it is better at shielding UEF T3/T4 armies.