The Case for Increasing Unit Health

You seemed to be implying that Uber should make that change to unit health, and I'm pointing out that mods let you do it, so why should Uber change the vanilla flavour, so to speak? If they wanted to, they'd have surely done it already. Nothing wrong in trying mods obviously. I'm not saying that is invalid. To me, asking Uber to increase unit health and then immediately saying that mods do exactly that, was contradictory.

Yes. Uber should make the change to unit health.

Why should Uber change the vanilla flavor? Because chocolate is better.

"If they wanted to, they'd have surely done it already." Not true at all. They want to change naval, they want to change the dox, but they haven't already.

What's more, there have been many times that Uber has been straight up wrong about balance. There have been a number of balances throughout the Alpha and Beta periods that were just straight up bad. We had to constantly hound Uber in order to get them to change the balance. Two balances in particular I remember that were just absolutely horrible, but Uber was convinced that they were great. It took us hours of playing the game with Uber employees to convince them that they were wrong. So just because "Uber probably has considered it" doesn't mean that Uber made the right choice and just because "Uber probably has considered it" doesn't mean we shouldn't be vocal about what we would like for balance changes.

There is absolutely nothing "contradictory" about asking Uber to make a change and having a mod that already does it. The two are 100% completely separate entities. If someone made a mod that added in the Uber Cannon or someone made a mod that fixes naval, should Uber now not add in the unit cannon or fix naval balance because "a mod did it?"

My line of thinking was that unit health is such a basic, overall, across the board aspect of the game that I'm fairly sure Uber have settled on what we've got now for a reason. Balancing individual units is of course very difficult, and a long and extremely iterative process. But an across the board change of unit health is very simple, and doesn't exactly change the balance, it just shortens or lengthens individual conflicts. That was where I was coming from.

Also you can't just state that chocolate is better than vanilla dude

Obviously I can't speak for Uber, I'm only guessing. But I'm fairly sure they've settled on the overall level of unit health for a reason. I think they want the shorter conflicts and a heavier focus on large armies and constant production of more units.

Anyway, this little debate has been going on far too long! Probably time to end it

That reason being performance. Low time-to-kill keeps the unit count down, which in turn keeps the sim from slowing to a crawl. There was once a balance change (in a mod?) utilising significantly higher fire rates for a certain unit that had to be reverted due to incurring heavy performance drops.

TL;DR: Balance and performance sadly are an interdependent lot.

A very good point, I had not thought of that. Of course I'm sure the server will be optimised in the coming months, hopefully significantly, so this should be less of an issue in the future. But it is certainly something to bear in mind!

They've settled on "basic, overall, across the board aspects of the game" that were very bad decisions. The trippling of the economic production of T2 being an easy and clear example.

Just because "Uber has probably thought about it and chose it" isn't valid reasoning.

Except if you play games with increased unit health, there isn't much of a unit count difference. Nor does it even increase the game time.

If they really made the decision based on unit health, then it was a poor one. Also, if they made that choice, then why is the dox so cheap? If they really were making that choice for performance than the dox should be more expensive and have more health so they aren't so numerous.

brian is correct about unit counts, even with the buffed combat fabs, in the long run unit numbers don't really get any higher in anti-popcorn.

Either you keep your existing units alive with com fabs (sucking back lots of metal) or letting them die and building new ones with that metal, the numbers generally stay the same. In the short term they might be higher, but it never takes long for the larger blobs to find each other and blow each other up, with or without com fabs.

AP is almost up to 300 downloads on PAMM now, so at least people are trying it out.

I am a macro focused player and i see great advantages in this. The main one is have more time to monitor a battle, IMO is actualy the micro player who gets the advantage in quick battles. The other thing is, due to units dying very fast, it is hard to reinforce. So you stay in your base just chilling, wile build a blob to then attack (very boring to watch and play), cause the defending army has an advantage just by being closer to its factories.

Also on the "this has been done by a mod front", a smart developer doesn't reinvent the wheel, if you are seeing a mod that has a lot of downloads and you are planing on making balance changes it's only smart to check that mod out for inspiration. Smart developers play a bit of the mods the community has made, just to get inspiration.

The other thing is sometimes people make mods to show the developer that their ideas work in practice and, in this case, I must say they do. And there have been already a few changes that appeared first in mods that later uber has implemented in the game. So I'm not saying Uber doesn't make use of it's modders ideas, I'm saying this is a case where they should.

Agree 100%

I'd like nothing better than if uber made anti popcorn the vanilla balance. I seriously doubt they will but one can hope. The complete redo mods might be trickier since so much time went into them though

With a slight speed decrease to comphensate (-2 to "lights" and -1 to "meds") to comphensate, the game would still benefit from increasing unit health by x2 across the board, with variations for certain units like bots and planes not getting as significant a buff but enough where it makes sense.

This would also be a balance adjustment to the Dox as it would nerf them more than the rest but not by an unuseable amount.

The point is, battles would last longer, but the speed decrease would prevent units from just soaking damage to perimeter run into a base and snipe something inside. Nonetheless, units would last long enough to destroy the 3x health buffed buildings of current vanilla, and that would be nice along with units lasting long enough to occupy a minute of each other's time, as well as combat fabbers benefiting from it with a bigger repair-rate.

decreasing unit speed would slow everything down though, including rates of expansion etc. which I don't think is a desirable effect.

Simple way to prevent perimeter running (or atleast keep it as is) is increase the dps of base defenses (in anti-popcorn, x2 ROF for turrets, x2 damage for artillery types and AA atm.).

Eh, tbh turrets need a buff like that anyway, but perimeter running would still be possible. Tbh, if left only to combat units, expansion would be EASIER and not harder, because establishing something is as fast but sending units to attack upon it isn't.

The notion that increasing a game's length increases enjoyment is both a massive generalisation, and incredibly flawed.

I think we've already established that health increases on the order talked about here do not increase game length to any significant degree

The game length does not increase with more unit health.

Neither of those posts are what I said, mind. And my post was directed at what the OP stated.

Increasing unit health does not increase the game time nor did I ever convey that increasing game time increases enjoyment nor did I ever convey that I want to increase game time.

keep in mind, he said "battle" in the OP, not "game"

big difference.

Correct.

Individual engagements last longer, but not the entire match.

So, we're delving into semantics again, hoorah. Well, at least it wasn't me this time

This is from the OP.

You can call it a match, game, battle, portion of gameplay, whatever you want. The notion that the episode of content is more enjoyable simply by lasting longer is also flawed (and a huge generaliation).

Furthermore, you cannot presume that making individual engagement lasting longer has no impact on the duration of the entire game. To pick a popular (eSports-related) example, duration of a match (along with match pacing) is a popular subject of discussion in popular MOBAs (speaking specifically about League, DotA 2 and Heroes of Newerth here, me being familiar with the second and very familiar with the third). Control of game length and how that impacts on a viewer's enjoyment, relating length of time spent performing each ingame activity (i.e. an engagement or "teamfight") to the overall game length.

Your idea is flawed. I ask you to expand on it more, instead of telling me "some dudes who play this mod that probably include me like this, so you should totally do it".