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.

Why is everyone going nuts on the hidden global rating? For most of its existence Starcraft 2 has hidden it.

Sure, they show it now, but hiding it can only be considered sensible if they did it.

If those decals don't matter for gameplay, is it possible for one player to play without the decals while the other does?

In that case, make a normal and high res version of each map where the latter has no or small size decals.

Automatcher only ever downloads normal versions. With a button you can download all high res maps at once.

@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 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.

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.

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

Except subs still have a game usage beyond alt clicking at a battleship and seeing who wins the boxing match.

That is your (justified) concern, we do not know for sure that will happen. However, I hope you too can admit that the current ground-fire meta is silly on face value. Again, some silly things are kept for skill reasons or otherwise, however, we should just try if we can remove the silly things.

To re-iterate my point, with some clarification:

Sub Grounf Fire Nerf

• Because ground-firing subs feels wrong
• Because some consider that the subs are pushed out of the game at T3
• Acknowledging this might adversely affect the T3 high skill water meta

The following change is implemented:

• Direct fire splash damage against subs is reduced by 95-100%

Near future:

• Players are asked to watch the T3 navy game carefully and report to the balance team
• The balance team will revisit this issue the next patch, and possibly revert this change

@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.

@biass I'm just asking a question about how this works, not making a declaration to be disected.

Edit to: Energy is unlimited but requires investment.

Hope you are happy now and can either answer the questions in the topic or just leave it if you are not interested to provide info or speculate.

@evan_ said in Make T3 massfabs easy: drain 0 E and increase price by 3/5's of a T3 PGEN:

To be honest, removing their power cost and adding part of the cost of a T3 pgen in it to compensate will make it worse in some situations.

Indeed, but this benefit is not core to FAF balance as the meta is RAS ACU's anyway.

The improved ease and accessibility would increase the use of the Mass Fabs and it is pretty common for the easy low APM option not to be the most efficient.

However, a baseline base with mass fab lines is a better place, look and explosiveness than RAS ACU's in my opinion.
Let the RAS ACU's be a medium APM player style.

@evan_ said in Make T3 massfabs easy: drain 0 E and increase price by 3/5's of a T3 PGEN:

(you yourself show a template that does this).

As I said I will make new silly templates, I am thinking of an adjacency grid of 5 mass fabs with room for factories to be placed seperately.

Replays store information like chess moves - the only way to get the state of the board back is to play all moves

@napspan behold my silly templates

I would still use the enhanced T3 Mass Fab in a silly template though, this time for adjacency.

But drawing lines is something people do very easily, it takes 1 click + 1 hold click. This means you can develop eco with limited APM, though someone who optimizes for adjacency still has a significant advantage over you.

@maudlin27 said in Make T3 massfabs easy: drain 0 E and increase price by 3/5's of a T3 PGEN:

If making such a change I'd suggest still having an e cost so power stalling costs you mass - e.g. this could just be the same as a T2 mass fab (-100 e) so it's far less proportionately while still punishing you for stalling (and meaning that if you mindlessly spam them forever you'll also end up stalling)

That sounds quite reasonable, that is twice the E drain of a T3 Mass Extractor.

Also was it not only about "punishing" but also to maintain some kind of build balance? Think I once heard somethng like that. You could hardly build PGens during a heavy power stall if you also had mass heavy projects going on if mass production didn't drop during a stall.

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

Corvettes are smaller than frigates

Yes, though wikipedia says "slightly smaller" 2000 tons used to be considered the limit, but a 3000 ton class is claiming Corvette title now too, vs frigates that are 2500-7200 tons.

I don't know how often you use Aeon Shards, but their behavior and maneuverability is basically what I suggest - the size of the Corvette should be larger than the Shard, smaller than Frigates, but ultimately that decision should be dictated by being properly recognizable.

Obviously, they would be very "power dense" carrying advanced looking weapons to be credibly better than frigates. The Cybran could for example launch "Iridium rockets" similar to the Hoplite Rocket Bot. That weapon is smaller than the "Proton Cannon" used by regular ships, but it is visually credible that the "Iridium Rockets" are better and deal more effective dps. Personally I would make them homing for the Corvette and reduce the fire rate to tune the effective DPS to fit the "Advanced Weapons" look with the desired DPS.

For Aeon I think the Obilivion Cannon carried by the Specter gunship looks right, for UEF the Heavy Plasma Cannon of the Titan looks right. Seraphim as mentioned a Shie-eih Auto-Cannon like the Frigate and a Thuntho Artillery Cannon like the Zthuee because Seraphim are weird and don't follow the rules.

Secondary weapon loadout should be determined but I don't expect the balance to require them to have significant or any anti-sub or anti-air weaponry.

Problem
T3 Mass Fabs are weak as it is, lacking a clear role with T2 Mass Fabs being more efficient and RAS SCU's offering more utility. T3 Mass Fabs can become the easiest late game eco option by this change, and possibly result in more explosive (=interesting) bases.

Solution
Integrate T3 Pgen into MassFab by simply adding 3/5s of the Pgen cost to the MassFab. Now, people can simply order engineers to build lines of T3 Mass Fabs.

T3 Mass Fabricator
Build costs:

• 120,000 E --> 155,000 E
• 4,000 M --> 6,000 M
• 5,000 B --> 9,000 B

Yield

• -1,500 E --> 0 E
• 16 M

The same will not apply to T2 Mass Fabs, as they are already the better choice.

Justify the Solution
With T3 Mass Fabs not draining energy they are easy. If you don't care to optimize you can just take a T3 engineer and draw a line of T3 Mass Fabs without worrying about power stalls. This will make this easier than making RAS SCU's.

T3 Mass Fabs with integrated power will cost significantly less building space so the building has a better payback per build area. However, unlike T3 Pgen + old Mass Fab, you cannot turn off the Mass Fabs to get more power to resolve a stall so you also lose some utility. - I think this balances out.

While easier to build, with lines of T3 Mass Fabs, they are also easier to destroy especially if you really do build continuous lines as the buildings are volatile. Hopefully this will also result in more chain explosions.

I still think a new unit "T3 Corvette" would be better. It frees up the frigate from any relevance in T3 so it can be balanced for T1 and early T2.

The Corvettes in the meantime can be optimized to fulfill the T3 role they need to fill. Make their speed high and acceleration very high, to micro against battleships and destroyers and offcourse raid.

Also make them awesome by including faction identity:

• Aeon: Hover Corvette (slower over land)
• Cybran: Permanent stealth, "cloak pulse" (click to spend 10k stored energy to be cloaked for 20 seconds)
• UEF: Personal shield, slow acceleration, armor to reduce splash damage
• Seraphim: Zthuee++ artillery secondary weapon

@jip I disagree on the effect, it is just a 0.5 second debuff to speed, acceleration, turret rotation etc for units applied every 0.5 seconds.

Affecting projectiles properly would be more difficult I guess.

Visibility requires a good volunteer artist I agree.

Is there a reason by the way why the chrono dampener stuns?

Constantly slowing down all enemy units and projectiles in range would be less oppressive than a stun mechanic while still powerful, rewarding micro. Stun seems to be out of favor in any game nowadays.

I don't get all the extreme sentiments. Auroras already always fight with radar coverage provided by a radar-50 scout that is distance 5 behind them, if not in range of some kind of static or flying radar.

Microing the auroras properly is a much bigger part of playing Aeon than including a scout in your factory queue.