I think that those of us who have played the game for years underestimate how skilled we are and how difficult it is to do even basic stuff.

People host "noob" games and it's for under 1000 rating. That is not noobs. That is top 8000 in the world. Could there be some way to define and enforce what a 'noob' is, and stop 600-rated players hosting games with noob in the title? Anybody who knows a semi efficient build order is not a noob.

A friend has just started playing FAF after playing LAN FA about eight years ago. He hasn't got a clue what he's doing and I woke up to a message saying he's getting discouraged because he doesn't feel like he gets the game.

Hopefully I'll be able to help him get his head round it but most new players probably don't have that level of support.

I'll report back with how things go with my friend. Perhaps his insights will be useful at finding a way to retain players.

It seems that you're bothered, @randomwheelchair

@cocAurico I think it might be more noob friendly in a way because there's no meta to learn (apart from MAKE MOAR TANKS)

I'd love a mod that makes players on a team all have similar colours if possible please. So Team one would be light blue, dark blue, light green, dark green, turquoise and team 2 would be red, dark red, pink, orange, yellow for instance.

I get so confused in team games and the built-in option turns the entire team the exact same colour which creates its own problems.

In case it's relevant I use this icon mod already so please only spend time on it if they would work together. https://wiki.faforever.com/index.php?title=Advanced_Strategic_Icons

One thing that comes to mind that I've really noticed with my friend is that new players are attracted to big maps and big weapons. I'm sure we all went through that phase when we started playing and it's a terrible noob trap.

Why would I make T1 tanks when I could make a Monkeylord?

To learn to play the game you need to be able to play 5k and 10k land maps. That's the fundamental building block that allows you to progress to maps that allow experimentals and battleships.

Let's think around that, how do we convince new players that they will get the most rewarding gameplay from learning how to do T1 spam? And how do we help them get to a stage where they can comfortably make ten factories and 300 Mantis?

I've had an idea, it might be bit leftfield but hear me out.

Firstly, I don't know if this is possible. Secondly, I'm not a coder so I wouldn't be able to help build it.

Caveats aside, what is the biggest stumbling block? It's the damned economy, especially power stalls and also mass overflow. Somebody mentioned that Starcraft warns you when you're low on resources or whatever, and perhaps we could adapt that and make it a soft training tool.

If there was an algorithm that looked at the buildings under construction (and their projected completion times) and could give the player a message that said "IN 35 SECONDS YOU WILL POWER STALL. BUILD POWER GENERATORS NOW" that would help to avoid the situation of being down at the bottom of a hole with no resources coming in. As I say, not a coder, but it does strike me as being pretty complex to figure all that stuff out so may not be viable.

Also you could have messages like "YOU WILL REACH MASS STORAGE LIMIT IN 20 SECONDS. BUILD FACTORIES OR ENGINEERS NOW" and "YOU ARE POWER STALLING. TURN OFF AIR FACTORIES AND RADAR AND BUILD POWER GENERATORS"

Now, I don't envision these being obligatory for all players. Perhaps new players would have them for a certain number of games, or they could be toggleable (default ON). Also, and very importantly, they would be obnoxious as fuck. Flashing text in the middle of the screen, klaxons etc. Without consciously realising it, the desire to get rid of these annoying intrusions would guide players towards more efficient play. Instead of hurting people's egos by having a person tell them where they're going wrong, we use psychology to steer them in the right direction. I don't want that damned annoying klaxon so I'm going to make enough power gens before I make my air factory. Ha! Beat you, you stupid system!

And then without realising it, they've learnt without realising they were learning. And everybody hates a school day.

Is it correct to include the total output of the upgraded mexes when calculating their time to pay off? I had assumed you had to count the T2 output as +4 because it's already at +2 before the upgrade. In that case time to payoff would be 225s which would be 12.5x the time.

Also the cost of ringing should be 800 (cost of 4x storage). That would make 266 seconds to pay off based on +3 mass.

Assuming that is the correct way to calculate it, you then get 300 seconds to pay back a +18 T3 mex.

I recently got back into FA after years away. I remember the days of v3599 when Restorer spam ruined every game for an idea of how long ago!

Because the balance was less refined in those days there were certain things that you just never did but that I see people do often now. I want to understand if those things have all been fixed or if I'm just watching noobs make mistakes. I'm not great at understanding how stat tweaks affect the viability of units so I'm hoping the forum can give me an overview please.

Some specific questions I've got:

Fixed T1 and T2 AA was never used because it was much less value for money than mobile. I see people using static AA quite a lot now, is it viable? Can anyone help me to understand any tradeoffs?

Similar with PD. I see quite a lot of T1 PD in 1v1s. Is this because I'm still relatively low level (I'm ranked about #2000) or have they become more affordable? I feel like I find them harder to overcome than I used to but I can't tell if that's just that my skill is much lower now than it used to be.

T2 static arty: this was hardly ever worth building, but I see them quite regularly now. Have they been made more viable?

Rhino vs Wagner: it used to be that the Rhino was a waste of time and you'd pretty much always use Wagners. I see that the Wagner has been nerfed but I don't fully understand this in context.

Engineering stations: it used to be common to see fields of UEF and Cybran engineering stations. Did the engie mod/HQ patch make this unviable? Is it now player's choice what they use to boost a factory's production (instead of just using T1 engy spam or engineering stations)?

And in general, does every unit now do what you'd expect it to do for a sensible cost? Have the 'noob traps' all been removed? Are there any particular peculiarities in unit behaviour/cost or meta that I should be aware of?

I started back on FA in December after about six or seven years away. Took me a while to get back into the basic groove but I think I've got it mostly now.

SInce I hit 800 in 1v1 and the map pool changed, I've been getting utterly trounced. Usually if I get beaten I can see why, but on some of these games I'm really struggling to figure out what happened. To me it looks like my opponent is turtling in their base, out-ecoing me and also managing to create enough units to keep me at bay.

This is a big change from what I'm used to. This ability to sit in base and tech up seems more like SupCom1 than FA and I really don't know how to approach it.

Here are a couple of replays where in my old-FA mindset I should have won easily on just map control, but that didn't happen.

https://replay.faforever.com/13590623

https://replay.faforever.com/13595031

Any advice would be gratefully received.

I would be very happy to see anybody who is rude get an automatic month ban.

For a point of comparison, Planetary Annihilation does it slightly differently.

In that, there are specific amounts that given builder units use per second, for the sake of an example say 10 metal and 100 energy.

In PA, if you're metal-stalling at 50% then your builder will only use 5 metal (as in FA), but the energy usage will not reduce.

It means that you don't have the catastrophic energy stalls that can happen after fixing a mass stall. It's a simpler version of the system that doesn't ruin it in the way that Supcom2 does.

Sounds like the Nvidia driver bug. See if anything here helps

https://forum.faforever.com/topic/779/nvidia-driver-performance-problem?_=1614686802147

Gamespeed is locked as standard, have you enabled it in the lobby options menu?

There are various options that cause a game to be unranked. I think adjustable speed might be one of them and that won't affect anything material about how the game plays.

FA will run fine with any ping below 500, assuming that the connections are otherwise stable.

I think it's quicker to reclaim and rebuild

I'm set to UK keyboard but whenever I have FAF running " and @ (and other keys like | and ~) are swapped around as if I was set to US keyboard, even in other programs like Chrome.

Does anybody else have this issue?

@cocAurico I think it might be more noob friendly in a way because there's no meta to learn (apart from MAKE MOAR TANKS)

@Sheikah #aeolus or something different?

@Sheikah is showing up simply being logged into FAF?