Have recently been thinking on this, right now introducing a friend to FAF also, I have been exclusive ladder player so far, and quit for a few years up until november 2020... some thoughts:

• Why did my eco suddenly crap out?!
  • Starcraft 1 Says "Not enough minerals." and displayed "Not enough minerals... mine more minerals."
    FAF should say (yes audio) "Power Stall" and display text "power down shields, radars and stop aircraft production"
  • The post-game score screen should flag power stall and mass stall events.
• Game introduction is rough, because the rating system completely ignores friendly games and games vs. AI.
  • Give AI players a fixed rating for teamgames.
  • Give checkbox for AI players to appear in ladder for low rated players
  • Allow practice games, uneven games etc should be rated at max 0 - and always as if a victory for the negative rated players (you are bound to have learned something).
• Team games... I still struggle today. Long ago, when I made my account, I got a 1200 rating for free. I am affraid to join team games, I just play ladder 1v1 - soon hopefully ladder 2v2.

I thought you said merge them into support factories, would that not be a solution?

Allow Aeon and Seraphim engineers to "Garrison" into T2 and T3 (support) factories, just like with air transports. For example 16 T1 engineers into T2 factory and 32 T1 into T3 factory. (and offcourse T2 and T3 engineers to ratio)

All "Garrisoned" buildpower is made available to the Factory.

@BlackYps said in Why would you have left FAF?:

Well do you want it? Being toxic is already forbidden behaviour, but you need to actually report the people or nothing will happen.

I think nice people will generally feel it is inappropriate to report people for "not being nice".

If this actually needs to be reported then say so:

• Put a thin banner above the custom games list stating for example:
• "Please report players for verbal harassment and toxic behavior to help us keep the community a friendly place for everyone."

I was turned off on teamgames by 2 toxic incidents (out of 3 games tried) around 2013-2014, then did nothing but ladder 1v1.
When I try teamgames now (a whopping 2 or 3 times discounting 2v2) my experience is the same. Small sample size sure.

Looking at the streets in real life though, and social media, there is a lot more toxicity in society and even violence now.
I wouldn't be surprised if toxicity has somewhat increased here proportional to real world attitudes, but my experiences don't reflect that.

@CheeseBerry said in Why would you have left FAF?:

@biass said in Why would you have left FAF?:

Sure, people can be toxic - But a lot of the time it's unfortunately warranted.

What do you mean about it being warranted?

I did a lot of 1v1, where you spam T1, so I entered teamgame and spammed T1. Apparently I was going to feed mass to the enemy and "lose us the game" - second game one player gave helpful ping on my T1 army and said "ctrl-K"

Technically they were correct, it is a shame that many people think that being right and a noob being wrong warrants toxic behavior.

I don't know a better living RTS that is diverse enough to reward my preferred playstyle and tactics.

This used to be Starcraft 2, I was waiting for the last great patch that never came (because top people became FrostGiant). Starcraft 2 had become repetitive and stale for me.

The brick-wall difficulty curve of FAF (1v1) is keeping me here quite well.

@FtXCommando said in Unusual tactic in 1v1 ladder games:

It’s why these guys are the gatekeepers of this rating. Every 400 rated dude that learned to just make tanks and send them into the enemy needs to learn that they actually need to think about what their tank attack is gaining/losing from the attack.

Must admit this is completely true, I hit a wall in ladder until I figured that out. Completely different from Starcraft 2, my previous go-to RTS.

@Wainan said in Merge engineers into support engineers to circumvent pathing issues.:

@Valki that would also have the effect of meaning that you couldn't raid a factory's buildpower. At the moment you can do a runby and kill assisting engineers for relatively low dps, but if the BP was internal to the factory you'd need to do thousands of damage to affect their production capacity.

That is part of the point I believe, out of desperation they are about to add Engineering stations to Aeon and Seraphim. Engineering stations have 1000 HP and 3000 HP for UEF, while T3 engineers have 700 HP. Aeon T1 engineer has 120 HP.

They are immune to light splash attack, but you can lose them easier than the same BP in Engineering Stations - unless you are being hit by really large splash attacks. A percival will never have killed so many engineers in so little time if he snipes a loaded up factory

@Wainan said in Team Matchmaker - hard to get games to develop rating:

I'd be happy to be on the opposing team in a custom 2v2 so say hi if we're online at the same time.

I did play with Runefinger yesterday and got myself killed very stupidly so I'll try not to do that again.

Thanks, iwill add you to friends when I am online.

@Jip said in A community effort on a map layout:

@Valki I'm a bit skeptic because the topic states that I won't remake a map. Given, this is not a Supreme Commander map (yet) but it does open the gate to other remakes of maps of other games and I'm not too fan of doing remakes.

Therefore I'm giving a heads up: if I do the map then it won't be a 100% perfect match with the original. The layout will of course be representative to the original.

I'm sorry for missing that, otherwise I would have acknowledged it and made the point that importing a different meta can be very interesting.

I have been thinking on Starcraft 2 and FAF meta a lot recently, and I have been examining maps and that's when I concluded this is closest. IF you do this map then by all means deviate significantly to make sure it does actually work for FAF

@Jip said in A community effort on a map layout:

With that said, I'll leave it to the others to give their feedback as to whether they agree if it is competitively interesting or not . I appreciate that @arma473 is using up some of his time to join the discussion!

I would be very interesting to hear that as well.

I'd say that using APM to increase effectiveness is desired.
Using APM to prevent a counter is not.

In Starcraft 2 all pro terrans split marines vs. banelings, but banelings are still a counter against marines.
A baneling army attack oneshots marines. Player APM determines how many marines survive, but if they survive they are in no shape to immediately attack.

Subs come in 0.1 dps/mass, battleships at 5.1 hp/mass - it takes almost 1 minute for subs to kill a battleship, not accounting for the sub army DPS dropping as subs are destroyed. Taking 1 minute to kill something is already bad in an RTS for a close range unit.

@sprouto said in Make t3 navy more exciting!?!:

It's an unintended side-effect of AOE which can easily be addressed either by altering the elevation value of the subs (which won't work on maps that have ultra-shallow water) or by having AOE range reduced whenever such projectiles impact water (which is a natural behavior).

Something was changed with the CZAR no longer killing ASF.

Is it not possible to give submerged subs the same treatment against all direct fire splash effects?

@soulgamer31br said in Change Mantis to T1 tank icon:

Besides, if most players dont suffer from this "problem", then it seems unecessary to add this change to the upcoming patch notes. From what ive read, only one or two people complained about this, and its getting changed/has changed anyway, which doesnt sound fair to me.

This line of reasoning isn't fair.

It has bothered me but I didn't think I could change it. If I now complain about this you will say it wont count.
THis is a good change, most people will be happy about it.

@corvathranoob Battleships protect cruisers or carriers, cruisers protect torpedo bombers, torpedo bombers counter subs

But yes, before we can truly analyze sub & battleship balance the ground fire exploit must be hotfixed (I wish)

@auricocorico said in Few thoughts about t1 AA and MAA:

Following the recent discussions about AA, here's few ideas :
2- Static AA could have a lower E cost
Here's one replay : https://replay.faforever.com/14291094
In this situation, if my opponent goes for a bomb on my fac, I have no choice but to build a static turret to scare away the bomber and start producing again. Cybran can also be forced into static AA turret if they want to defend their pgens, becuase of the MAA slow projectiles.
Problem : static AA, while cheap in mass and fast to build is a bit hard on power, and you often want to make them in situation where your power is low, because it's early game or because you're trying to defend against a uef bomber raid on your pgens ..
Solution : make the static AA cheaper in E, like 1500->1000 E for example. For all faction or just for factions with weak pgens/AA (aeon and cybran ?). That way the counterplay doesn't rape your eco that much.

I have been introducing a new player to the game, this is would be of great help for giving new players a better experience.

Thing that happened to him, multiple times, also to me in the past:

1. Air attack
2. Panic build too many anti-air structures just like in Starcraft 2
3. "Why am I stalling power -400?"

Last night, real game
https://replay.faforever.com/14274895

ACU shoots on Aeon PD under construction instead of something else. The ACU will keep shooting at it, hitting the ground, achieving nothing.

This is a bug.

He said he tried to manually focus the real PD, but when he moved it resumed shooting the PD under construction which was unhittable with direct fire.

Can't the TrueSkill algorithm be made to work faster?

If there is a significant rating difference between team members, let it learn multiple times from the same game for the lower rated player.

Example 500 & 1500 vs 2 x 1000. 1500 player gets one normal rating adjustment. 500 player gets rating adjustment (1500/500=) 3 times in a row or multiplied 3 times. Now a 500 player who should be 800 rated gets there faster and less people post on the forums, otherwise his rating drops faster so next time they play 2x 900.

@H-master said in Why would you have left FAF?:

Very late reply from me to the original post.

But the reason why I would leave FaF is, that the majority of the player base has a very different taste in maps than me. At almost any given the majority of maps being hosted consists of dual gap, astro etc. This means that it takes longer for a normal map lobby to fill, so longer lobby sim time. When having a full time job and a being married there isn't that much game time to start with.

Luckily, there are more players than there used to be, who like normal maps. So it still makes sense to open FaF.

This has been discussed extensively I assume, but still this is the number one downside of FaF for me.

Married + part time + primary caregiver also suffers from the time issue. I would love to have a FAF mod "Action FAF" or something that optimizes the game for much shorter and more reliable playtimes.

Alas, I don't have time to make that

Why would a 10k energy cloak toggle not work?

It prevents the Monkeylord from being discovered randomly by ASF, bombers, and raiders. Now it remains invisible until it approaches your omni radar, unless the opponent has set up a good T3 air scout patrol.

@FtXCommando said in Aeon T1 PD under construction cannot be hit sometimes:

That’s because Aeon structures begin underground and rise up unlike the other factions.

Yes, that is why this happens.

However this is not desirable as it can be exploited and has in fact affected games I was in.