Community UberBalance Games!

Hey guys!

Just keeping along the lines of this "let's show them how to walk" theme I've been pulling lately.
I'm online right now, with a game open to test the Community UberBalance, a mod where everything is LITERALLY more interesting, fun, and balanced.

You don't have to be a forum warrior to join. You don't have to be a pro to help contribute. All you need to do is change that MODS filter to ANY and join in!!

I'll be playing games for a few hours to get feedback and more tests on how the mod plays out.

Join for AWESOME!

Quite the self confidence.

I'll give this a test later but I'm not available right now...

I suppose ripping apart someone's 14 months of work and making it amazing in less than three days of man-hours does that to a person.

Especially someone with my swagger. If only it were contagious..... :\

Can you list the changes here? Would read it.

Here ya go! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1icQB1bjPm02eLIoy19Q0CoZyhO655Jj8qxpfrLdslAs/edit#gid=0

Eh, for a vanilla rebalance, this is decent. For instance. Grenadiers. Useless in vanilla. Possible to use here. Tanks are useful compared to sheer dox. Spinners and air are more useful in light of less dox coverage across them. T2 is introduced also and are made more massable and less a landslide, like what most dreamed from alpha.

I don't get why it attempts to fix energy balance by buffing t1 pgen. Does that help expansion? I'd rather see changes to the efficiency of workers/the price of buildings instead.

I personally think looking at those numbers you might want to tweak the leviathan... Currently it can be killed in 1 pass by 2 x t1 bomber. That is waaaay to week for the biggest combat unit in the game (besides super weapons at least). Personally the leviathan should be like a millennium was in TA: very sturdy, very expensive and slow. The changes to the weapons are ok I think, if it were me I'd just increase cost and make the health much higher (maybe try 10k and work from there?)...

It makes people expand. That's honestly it. It forces the efficient meta towards expansion, instead of SPAM FACTORIES. I completely and utterly forced it, tbh. I have to get more testing in to figure out if I need to look deeper.

EDIT: I do need to look deeper, but not in that direction. Power is still a serious problem hampering expansion.

Ok, finished a very insightful first game. Grenadier Price has been increased to 55. It's just waaaay to good compared to the Dox. Early game, dox are better, but mid game, and even into late game, grenadiers just wreck house.

I understand that it's best to give feedback only if you've played it, so i won't give feedback. But then again, after reading the changes in that spreadsheet I don't think i'd want to play it anyway.

• Why are you buffing t1 pgens?
• Why are t2 pgens clearly worse than t1 pgens by 20%? Why would i ever build t2 pgens? lol.
• Why are you increasing naval speed so much? Do you understand the impact this has on macro timings and pacing?
• Why did you decrease acceleration and braking so much? You realise 2/6 acceleration and brake means it's going to take 2 to 5 seconds for my ship to stop moving, change direction, or start moving? How is this even remotely fun when range control is everything?
• Why are you buffing narwhal aa? They are not as weak as everyone seems to think, nor are they the root problem (hint: fighter hp and players not manually targeting bombers is).
• Why are you decreasing naval cost along with these buffs? You realise you've just made narwhal overall ~100% better than it used to be against air?
• Why is naval still so short range for bombarding land?
• Why did you change stingray at all? You havn't objectively accomplished anything with these changes whatsoever.
• Why would you decrease leviathan hp?
• Why did you make scout so cheap?
• Why did you remove dox aa? You realise bot now has no anti air? Dox anti air was not very good to begin with.
• Why did you buff single pd so much? Do you realise how imba this is now? Why would i ever build double pd when single pd is now literally 2x as effective as double pd.
• Why is grenadier buffed so much? You made it 1.3 dps per metal. For comparison tank has 0.28 dps per metal, dox has 0.45. lol.
• Why is this in general discussion?

I'd consider this a "come play with me in this special lobby right now" thread, which is fine here imho.

First off, this is not a game we balance around micro. The balance should reflect this by mitigating the effects it has on gameplay where necessary. That should cross off around 5-6 of your points right there.

• I'm buffing T1 PGens so you don't have to build gazillions of them to expand. Your limiting expansion factor shouldn't be Pgens - it should be metal. You need more metal, so you spend less time playing SimCity in large scale matches and more time figuring out who to attack to get more metal.
• Because they take up less space. I'm actually reevaulating T2 Pgens at the moment. Their costs seem to far outweigh their benefits.
• Yes, elodea. I remember how beta worked. Lakes are now ponds, Oceans are now actually accessible. The way naval is in Vanilla is completely and utterly useless next to land units. Now, as for timings, this makes naval arrive at the enemy base in time to matter. You can project your naval power quicker, but the slow acceleration forces you to commit to a certain extent.
• Also, yes, I know exactly what changes I made. Why are you asking this? I didn't make these changes on a whim. In addition to the work I did over the past two days, I've been writing about and discussing naval balance for a year now.
• Naval cost was too high. It didn't make sense to build naval in even larger ponds because it was such a large investment. I am personally of the opinion that ponds should matter strategically and tactically, so (for me), that means they need to be on the level with land units or much better.
• Narwhals SUCKED for AA DPS. It was pitiful. They now have about 3/2 the effectiveness of a spinner, which is still not amazing considering they cost almost three times as much
• Dox AA was a large part of what was OP about them. Removing it has, in the tests, made the gameplay TONS more diverse and interesting. There's been dox, grenadiers, ants, all sorts of air.....it's been awesome.
• I buffed single PDs so they were much more useful early game and maybe late game. In testing, x2 laser towers are still much better against tanks, but x1 towers are better against dox and such. It's a trade off I like so far, and hope to keep in the future.
• The grenadier numbers are deceiving. It's a dox with nerfed speed, 4/5 an ant's damage, and a 2 second reload. It's a front-loaded alpha unit. Also, it barely lives long enough for DPS to matter. I think I've balanced it with the latest pass (45m -> 55m)

looking at the stats, I think I'll probably stick with Anti-Popcorn for my vanilla balance needs. (although I admit I'm going to be a bit biased here), though I've downloaded it and will give it a more thorough work through.

personally I think you overnerfed the dox. Rather than take away the bot's only AA unit, perhaps look into forcing it into a raiding role. AP does this by buffing all units health (tank still one shots dox though) and major buff to Comfabs, which makes taking dox against ants+comfabs suicide, though there are other things you can do. Heck, for that matter you could take out the dox direct fire weapon and leave it's AA alone, to be combined with grenadiers for anti-ground support.
If you really want to mess with economic buildings, do something about the jig, as it stands there is no need for advanced econ at all if there is a gas giant in the system.

I'll post again when I actually play some games.

Jigs have the same efficiency as an advanced metal extractor. I'm still considering more Jig changes besides the Energy nerf.....I'd like for them to be a sort of T3 level of unit. But we'll see.

I find the dox rather useful still in the early game, but it forces you to move on to other, less spammy units later. This helps preserve the game's sim speed and adds variety while still keeping the dox as a raider (which is what Uber would like it to be for now).

While helping out with sim speed is a bonus, it will (hopefully) be a temporary one as uber continues to work on performance (*cough* multithreaded sim *cough*)
Personally I'm not a fan of units going obsolete, and without ground based AA to bring along with those less spammy units, I find it forces the game too much into the air layer (as you have to have a fighter blob over bot raiding groups, or lose the speed advantage with spinners)

I'm not a big fan of units going obsolete either. Uber decided that one when they made the dox a raider.

• Why are you buffing t1 pgens? so you need 1 less per 3 you build, because you build about 1 too many in vanilla and it drags *** to keep making them?

• Why are t2 pgens clearly worse than t1 pgens by 20%? Why would i ever build t2 pgens? lol. At the moment? They probably need to be more efficient and more health but much more costly to establish. Best WIP Ever?
  
• Why are you increasing naval speed so much? Do you understand the impact this has on macro timings and pacing? Really...
  
• Why did you decrease acceleration and braking so much? You realise 2/6 acceleration and brake means it's going to take 2 to 5 seconds for my ship to stop moving, change direction, or start moving? How is this even remotely fun when range control is everything? Really.
• Why are you buffing narwhal aa? They are not as weak as everyone seems to think, nor are they the root problem (hint: fighter hp and players not manually targeting bombers is). Really!
• Why are you decreasing naval cost along with these buffs? You realise you've just made narwhal overall ~100% better than it used to be against air? REALLY?
• Why is naval still so short range for bombarding land? REALLY!
• Why did you change stingray at all? You havn't objectively accomplished anything with these changes whatsoever. ReAlLy?!?
• Why would you decrease leviathan hp? rEaLlY!?! Okay, in what way does naval function now? It will not be used without changes to make it useful.
  
• Why did you make scout so cheap? Meh. It isn't gamebreaking. Hard to say a weaponless unit is gamebreaking.
  
• Why did you remove dox aa? You realise bot now has no anti air? Dox anti air was not very good to begin with. Oh, I didn't realize Uber removed the stinger bot, so it doesn't have AA... YES HE KNOWS, you use missile tower or spinners for AA, or you just spread your dox out via sheer speed and swarm in on a target, they have plenty of speed so it doesn't even take micro to raid something necesarily.
  
• Why did you buff single pd so much? Do you realise how imba this is now? Why would i ever build double pd when single pd is now literally 2x as effective as double pd. double pd is still more dense effect per placement as well as range enough to effectively use a wall and cushion from now useful grenadiers. Could still use a bit more difference, but single pd are cheap yet easy to kill still.
  
• Why is grenadier buffed so much? You made it 1.3 dps per metal. For comparison tank has 0.28 dps per metal, dox has 0.45. lol. They weren't used before. Admit, they look tasty now no? I think the idea was, ant-like damage and cheaper, but slower and more expensive than dox and half the ant rate of fire. So basically, spam them and drop their first shot on tanks and buildings, not against fullscale armies. If they competitively DO win against full scale armies, they will continue to gain in cost and lose in ROF until they dont
  
• Why is this in general discussion? This is the 2nd related thread in Gen. Discuss., and 1 more exist in balance discuss. Also should be one in mod subforum. However, report them if you want, but 1 is about fixing balance, one is about vanilla balance difference, one is about setting up games to test it with the modmaker, and the wip/rel should be in PAMM and mod subforum.

well it can´t be your main assaultunit as that role belongs to the bolo/ant, no?