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.

@thewheelie @Tagada

this is what rust looks like from my experience

Dear @nine2 , the POs accusations in this thread are posed towards you and you allone. Please refrain from defecting from the topic or use this thread to accuse other persons, if you want to accuse them please do so in a different thread.
Regarding the topic itself: Sadly you, @nine2 have not been contributing towards a constructive debete on the issue you yourself brought up. When asked questions you deflected from them or left them unanswered. While the whole debate was going you were not trying to calm the debate down (which imo is the only reasonable thing to do atm since it devolved into an open argument between different council members) but instead you actively contributed to an even more heated debate unnecessary overly emotional wording.
At the current point my main issue with you is not that you broke a pledge. You continiously actated confrontational and provocative, seemingly without even noticing it, prooving a terrible lack of judgement, which imo is one of the worst things possible. Since you do not seem to learn from your misstakes and at all, I have to expect you to act with poor judgement in the future aswell.
In case this is just a massive missunderstanding, please elaborate what your deliberation process was in your actions in the last 3 days, especially regarding the original post, your post here https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1712/curbing-toxicity-in-faf/3 and the news post. As long as you cannot explicitly state what in each case

1. your goal was
2. possible strategies to reach your goal were
3. why you decided for the strategy you chose

with clear logical reasoning as in detail as possible (I will not accept any non logical agrumentation as an answer), I do not think that you are fit for your position. Please be aware that I will judge your fitness as a councillor based on your answer. I will use failures and incompletnesses in your logic against you, since I believe logical thinking and good judgement to be a core competence a councillor has to posess.

@nine2 what is the reason you waited untill now (19 hours before the discussion priod ends) to make this post? The Election started 24 days ago, there were Pages of discussion, the topix of toxidity was discussed there aswell. I am sure to ensure an indepth disccusion of the issues you brought up, it would have been in the best interest of the debate to bring them up as early as possible.
I fear as long as you fail to present a good reason it will be hard believing that this entire discussion is supposed to be a productive contribution to the PC discussion. (if your answer is, that you didnt manage to make the post in time, then please exlain why you did not consider making the this post after the election. I am sure that it could serve the purpose of discussing the topic of toxidity aswell)

Because from my perspecitive you chose the worst time possible to achieve a productive discussion.

Signing up Turinturambar, 4762 (CPU) rating!

1st raing is not sth to boost your ego, but to guarantee balanced games. dont even consider messing with it for any reason thats not rating related, since unintended longterm effects could be introduced that break rating completely in the long run (do you even know how trueskill works?).
2nd fighting untill the end isnt a great think in every case either. if 1 player just drags out a game for no reason he can waste the time of 4-6 players for no reason at all.
3rd what you say doesnt apply to every map, or slot on a map (over the time of the entire game!), dont assume the map you play -which, from what I see is mostly dual gap ................ - is the only one. the only thing your rule would do is artificially tanking the reating of airslots etc., making rating an even worse metric in generic teamgames (Where the host can chose his slot and the slot of every other paly in the game!)

Dear @nine2 , it has been about a day since I asked you about the timing of this post and I havent received an answer yet https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1695/council-of-setons-exposed-part-1/48 (or did I miss it?). In case I did not miss your answer, please consider answering my question or give me an ETA when you will answer it (if you you have to give an ETA, I would like to hear a reason for the delay aswell, if possible, since you still have the ttime to make posts on the forum).

Please keep in mind, that, as long as you fail providing a satisfying answer, I will have provide the answer myself, which means I either have to assume that you are not interested in admittting a misstake on your side, or you are not interested in communicating in general, or (the worst case) your post was not aimed to contribute to the debate in a productive way, adressing the topic of toxidity in general and especially in ftxcommando's conduct, but only to lower his chances in the election as much as possible.
Either of these conclusions does not show professional conduct from your side (to various degrees), to a degree which I do not think to be acceptable for a councillor.

I hope you can explain your actions and clean up any possible doubts and missunderstandings. In case it was a mistake on your side, I think it would be helpfull for everyone, if you could explain what consequences you drew from it and how these conclusions will influence your future conduct, to regain the confidence in your ability to manage your role as a councillor with the distance and reasonability it requires.

P.S. From my perspective the issue of you showing inappropriate conduct in your role as councillor keeps getting even more urgent with your conduct in this thread https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1712/curbing-toxicity-in-faf/6 . I wish to stress that no other councillor showed siding towards a single party in the election as clear as this (as far as I remember, please correct me if I am wrong so I can ask them aswell to explain their conduct):

"A dozen very loud angry voices have united recently to take me down about my strong stance on toxicity. But we have ten thousand active players.

If you are done with all the attitude in FAF, show it with your vote on election day."

This statement is not neutral. It lacks any broad reasoning for your position, deliberating why you support the person you are supporting.
I hope you can, in addition to providing reasoning to the timing of your post also provide a reasoning why you think this conduct is justified. If your position on what the the role and conduct of a councillor are supposed to be differ from the position I have (as stated above), I think it would benefit the debate if you could explain your idea of what the conduct of a councillor is supposed to be.

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.

As some might have already noticed there was a change to how FAF lobby calculates the CPU score, as such it would be good idea to actually find the limits of thenew CPU rating. Prior efforts reached ratings of 2177 (by me) which was bested by kekomander with a rating of 2385.
The current record is 4762 by me (after running the test for 26 min).
I challenge all of faf to reach an even greater score! Let us find the limits of FAF CPU rating! I believe together we can at least reach 10k!

autocappng mexes doesnt change the meta on all 38 rocks inbetween trees maps, some automatd reclaiming does.

2018

2018

Turin 2030

why is there only 1 mapgen icon, even though there are 3 mapgen options?

@blodir these numbers are for a PC, not a laptop.

IF i understand your proposed RAS change correctly, it results in the following issue.
A resource discount below the value loss from ctrking a structure allows building a structure and then reclaiming it to generate additional income. This becomes especially extreme for the soothsayer, which has a ratio of about 4mass/bt (other usable buildings would be between 1-2), resulting in an additional income of about 4x28x0.06 = 6.7 (with 28 being the SCUs halfed bp (using the adjusted engineering upgrade on top of this would tripple the income!) and 0.06 = 0.81 -0.75 being the amount of reclaim left after ctrking sth minus the cost to build them with a 25% discount. In case of the 100% discount for sera, this is an effecive income of 90 mass!).

Signing up

@femboy said in Targeting without altering movement orders:

I guess it’s more of a team game issue than ladder. Pretty annoying not being able to do that on 1v1 where it can matter so much.

It was allmost 100% a ladder issue. THe main issue was not only, that a 2 second missstep could cause defeat, but even more, that once a critical mass was reached it was possible to suicide ones army into the opponents army + acu to get a kill, no matter if the opponents army was a bit larger or not. because enemy units cannot be bocked very well, and, because with snipemode the army couldnt tank enemy fire either, just having 40 tanks and suiciding them+your own ACU into the enemy army would be enough to kill an enemy ACU that stands in the front row of his tanks.
Snipemode therefore made it very risky to use your acu to poke at the enemy army, instead one had to put the ACU in the 3rd to last row to be actually safe. Even more, it made retreating harder, since you could not sacrifice a part of your army to tank for your ACU while kiting backwards, because your opponent could allways turn on snipemode, forcing you to send a larger part of your army to your ACU to be safe.
Both these effects had a very bad impact in 5x5 and 10x10 gameplay.
On 5x5 you must use your ACU to trade or you lose. Since your ACU is at the front (and due to trading it will soon be at 5-8k HP) your opponent could allways! all in with his tanks and ACU and in the worst case get a draw out of it. Thefore even when a palyer would be significantly ahead the game could still end in a draw (he only needed to deal 2.5-5.5k dmg for that which is very easy with snipemode+shift g), since you cannot just send your ACU back on a 5x5 without completely losing your advantage in the next 3 minutes.
On 10x10 maps being forced to send most of your units to your com, while also being forced to play safer (to not die to a random all in - just reacting 2-3 seconds to late could already cause a draw) caused 10x10 to be rather stale and static since one needed most units with the ACU to not get randonly all in-ed (so less units available everywhere else) but also had to play more defensive to not randomly die. On top of that, snipemode is even worse with high tech units, due to their higher range ond conentration of dps, making it allmost impossible to survive a random shift g+snipemode of any (non obsidian) T2 unit into your army - your com would die even before your could rly use your army to block the enemy army.

@arran said in Titan shield recharge after collapse OP.:

Problem
The Titan's personal shield comes back online too fast after being reduced to 0.

This explains nowhere why this actually would be a problem INGAME. The argument faction A has X, so faction B needs it aswell is a fallacy and shouldn't have a place in balance discussions.
If you want to actually make a point, please expand on your reasoning, either based on ingame balance, or based on overall unit design principals (in which case it would be, to provide a concept on how shield reachging in general, or for all all units that fit a certain role (harbs and titans do not necessarily fit into the same role...), should be done in a comprehensive manner).

In the current form you only argument is jealousy.

I definetly agree with the idea of making game visuals more intuitive, as long as it doesn't affect balance.
Just out of my head I see 2 possible effects your way of changing the shield bubble could have.

1. Overspill: if I remember correctly how overspill works, and understand your idea correctly, the resulting shield would be smaller, therefore also reducing the area other shieldbats would take overspill damage in. This might be an issue due to the stranght of shieldboats.
2. Interactions with air. From how I understand your idea, you move the centr of the shield upwards while reducing the shield radius. This might move the top of the shield higher (or lower the the reduction in the sheld radius is sufficiently large), which can change the interactions of shieldboats with air, making it easier/more difficicult to move an airunit inside the shield bubble to snipe the shieldboat.

Therefore such a change might need some testing and adjustments.