[WIP] The Realm Community Balance Mod

It used to shoot out of both barrels at the same time. If people chose to spam Cougars it could get a little laggy. We wanted to keep the fast rate of fire.

We ended up doubling projectile damage and making the Cougar alternate barrels. We get the same result, it retains the same feel, and you half the amount of projectiles and fix the lag issue.

Now the problem is that effects don't support alternating barrels. We can only choose between no muzzle flashes, or muzzle flashes on both barrels. I found that although the Cougar looks a little underwhelming without muzzle flashes, it looks significantly worse with an overload of muzzle flashes.

I noticed that Infernos seem to be problematic when using area attacks - they just stop together with the Bolo tanks once those are in firing range and don't move forward any further.

Bolos? What are those?

I'll see if I can tweak the aggressive distance.

New update out on PAMM.

• Now works with all new commanders
• New tac nuke effect (still a wip)
• A host of minor tweaks/fixes

Is there a simple summary of the current balance of this mod?

I'd like to try some of the balance mods but i'd liketo get an overview of what is changed and what the overall gameplay is like without reading through every single change to every single unit.

Not at this time. We are working on it though.

The simple summary would be:
Economy: Metal is scarcer (or rather mex produce 5 instead of 7) and a lot more things drain power making both equally important. T2 Eco is not always better. T2 in generally is not better and costlier but it's more specialised and can easily be fed by T1 economy.
Tanks: They are faster and more heavily armoured and costlier. They also have good AA options and generally they are better for fast attacks. Think of them as your cavalry.
Bots: They are slow, cheap and weak in small numbers but they deathball terribly well. Initially they are more suited to support your base defences and wait for their numbers to grow and when they attack they should take a more strategic approach to base defences. They should be treated more as an infantry.
Aircraft: They pay for their high speed and high damage with their increased energy consumption. They are your best choice when attacking sea for land or vice-versa and they have some insanely strong T2 units. Think of them as support and special operations.
Naval: Naval is a lot faster than vanilla and is based on a principle that bigger ships have better engine to size ration and thus are faster. T1 Naval is a mix of highly agile raiding unit, all-round support ship and your mainstay destroyer, T2 naval has some insanely powerful ships.
Orbital: Orbital is a support and transitional layer and has been moved to T2 because it still causes stalemates and taking a moon is still mostly a guaranteed victory (that is something uber will need to change). It has it's own holy trinity of counters where orbital missiles are good against Aurora (Fighter), Aurora is good against AEGIS (anchors) and AEGIS is a movable weapons platform that can hit air and orbital. Also SXX is not a super weapon any more.
General notes on balance: The circle of life is bots and naval beat tanks, tanks beat air, air beats bots and naval. T2 is not better, it's specialised and can easily be run on a T1 economy. And economy and pacing is A WHOLE LOT slower than vanilla.

If you want more check this post I made on PA matches forums a while ago.

Inferno drops might be a wee bit OP.

Or they might be extremely OP and in dire need of a fix.

They can be pretty devastating. However to successfully pull one off the enemy need to have a significant lack of AA, and you need to make sure the enemy doesn't catch onto what you are doing.

I will keep an eye on this, but at the moment it seems to be limited to severely punishing people for a gaping hole in their defences in the mid/late game.

Updated to pre release 10.

• Should have cleaned up the last of the custom commander issues.
• Spinner no longer shoots ground.
• A bunch of minor tweaks that nobody will notice.

@garat take note - this is how you do patch notes.

You used to play planetside2, no? If those guys gave patch notes like that... Well...

Planetside 2 players 'd be all like...

Snicker. Only if I want people yelling at me. Think Trophy has it right.

Here let me help

Reduced the amount of time that an anti-nuke that missed its target will fly in the air.
Tweaked guard radius for orbital missile; increased detonation range.
Tweaked orbital sniper?
More behavioral tweaks for orbital missile.
Fab and gun turrets on advanced combat fabrication bot aim independantly.
Comsplosions in the orbital layer no longer affect the ground or air layers.
Tweaked some explosions.
Skitter model changed to older one complete with weapon; feedback on whether you like this change or dislike it is appreciated.
Mine explosion radius halved.
Spinner health reduced by 50, range increased by 10, no longer shoots ground/naval.
Fixed all commander tool issues.

Updated to prerelease 11.

• Compatible with the new commanders.
• The Spinner can now shoot land once again, however it's significantly less powerful.
• Another small bug fix todo with the Uber cannon.

I like this mod! You have put in much hard work I can see. The movement of tanks and bots have a certain feel of realism to it.

Thought I'd try this out and so far I'm enjoying it. Got a couple of questions though ...

1) Does the AI *really* suck with this mod?? As in, substantially worse than normal?
2) On my computer it seems to break Hotbuild2 and Highlighted Buildings - is that usual or specific to my machine?

1) Yes the AI has troubles dealing with lowered Economy, with supporting factory first and surprisingly with orbital. Lowered economy makes any AI but Relentelss and absurd just braindead. Also since any AI checks if it can't support a factory/unit before it builds them means that AI will always build enough economy first to support the commander And the factory meaning you will never see factory first. It also doesn't seem to quite figure it if it's alone on the planet meaning that it will not build orbital unless it sees you with an orbital launcher and orbital units. If you set its economy rating at 1.2-1.4, set it to absurd and play on one planet it will prove quite the opponent.
2) Hotbuild is uses blueprint info network, which doesn't support server mods, so naturally Hotbuild brakes (I had to stop using it myself). Not sure about highlighted building as I don't know what that mod does or how it works.

In some ways the AI is better than in vanilla, but in other ways it's worse. However it's not broken and if you're play an absurd AI then it can get quite challenging if you let it be for the first five minutes.

Any mod that plays with hotkeys/straticons/build icons will break for RCBM.

Thanks, bumping the AI econ up to 1.4 made a massive difference! Now the main downside is I can use RCBM or Hotbuild2, but not both :-(

To be hones for the last hour I've been playing with the local AI settings. I can't guarantee that the AI will do massive counters just yet, but I'm working on convincing it to go factory first.