PTE Build 76412-pte now live (updated with new build 12/16/14)

People are going to do it anyway. I'm fairly against structures that only counter a single unit/weapon.

Read my other post then. Maybe the commander is given an anti UC drop pod weapon to counter commander snipes but whatever is decided they need to make it so that you can't spam UC defenses over your whole planet. You gotta remember the UC can only fire 12 units at a time.

right, and by the time someone manages to spam umbrellas pretty much everywhere, and enough of them to counter a unit cannon (even when firing at a lower rate) You're going to have more than one unit cannon.

Seems like a good change. Guessing less bomber drops hit the ships now which can help with air-naval balance. Roll of time decrease is so great. Does the frigate kill air better now?

Two of them build metal extractors then stopped, not sure about last one.
As I said it's never happen to me before that more than one AI stuck like that, but possible it's just was some kind of "luck".

Yeah probably. I guess we won't know until it's tested more. I still think the idea of the commander having an anti-UC weapon is a good idea though.

well he currently does, it's called his AA missiles

I haven't played much of the PTE, so I actually don't know how effective AA is against the pods. If it's too effective then fighters on planet patrol will be too much of a hard counter, but if it's inneffective then the commander is still susceptible to snipes.

It honestly depends. A single commander can't kill every boombot out of the 12 I can launch at him, but a single commander plus an AA turret or two survives unscathed.

Not really. @tvinita, just to reiterate:

Narwhals suck relative to every other naval unit - and comparably, their aa is worthless. I should have not have built any lol.

I feel like going mostly air would wreck naval right now for that reason.

Also, I discussed this with Xankar after the game, and the map feels really small tbh. Can it be larger? That would be nice. More ships! T2! (not).

Does anybody know, if there are any performance-improvements planned?
Since some versions, I am experiencing a huge slow-down if I am playing on a larger system (let's say 4-7 planets - depends on biomes)
I know that a huge number of units slows the game down, but in my opinion it makes a game nearly unplayable. It is very strange to see that a nuke needs about 10 seconds to start from the launcher. Also you can't start surprising attacks, because the enemy has enough time to recognise and react on it.

The map seemed fine to me. Also, the narwhal speed increase did make them better at AA than you might think because they can position themselves better now. Is it enough? I don't know. I only played one game of this and I really can't say more without playing another 10 or 50.

I feel like bombers should be something that has high payoff but high risk. They shouldn't be useable for a commander snipe unless the commander is totally undefended.

My thoughts for changes to bombers...

There should be two types of bombers.

One with lower cost and low damage missles that can take out smaller groups of expanding fabbers and still good at dox defense, but would be useless at a commander snipe.

The other one would be high cost, with a massive payload (maybe massive is a bit much, but a decent payload at least), and must be reasonably hard to kill (high health) which can be used for surgical strikes at the commander or other key targets, but because of it's awesome but volatile payload, if it gets taken down by AA (fighters or spinners) then it goes off with a boom and destroys it's escort.

must resist urge to get banned for dirty joke...

Gjere

It should only take one game to realise this. Will 1 narwhal kill it's cost? If not than air is x2 times better due to speed. Not saying narwhals need to be op but if they can't defend their regatta until it reaches enemy territory than air is the better option.

A narwhal has worse AA than a T1 Spinner, FYI.

That's quite bad aa. If those numbers are unchanged it means:

narwhal: hp: 750, metal cost: 450, aa dps: 37.5
t1 bomber: hp: 240, metal cost: 240, damage is a bit errmm pa-db has no good value on the dps of a bomber, but it seems to do 150 damage per bomb and I think it probably hits with at least 2 if it targets a (now not so extremely big?) ship.

Not entirely sure on the pure "hp and dps for metal" comparision due to the instable dps of bombers, but I think everyone will agree that the narwhal is far away from totally outmatching bombers in direct fights. Considering that the narwhal is a ship that is
a) slow
and
b) bound to water
it probably should see a buff that makes t1 air unable to fight against it at all.
Looking at the general hp values of ships (http://pa-db.com/table/naval?version=74525 (stable)) they all look tiny compared to t1 bomber dps. Having a 4800 metal ship that dies to a few t1 bombers is kinda weird.
I'd look into something like all hp x3 and all aa dps x2 for ships maybe. Dunno how that affects other things though.

>naval balances
>unit cannon added

I still think that Naval should be superior to every other unit in the game - at least, in regards to relative opportunity cost for certain situations. Tbh, the latest naval game we had on my really, really unbalanced water world was almost completely decided by air superiority. It wasn't about where the navy was (that was just the finishing blow).

For example, I used air to kill all the fabbers, mex, and radar in BananaMans base, then moved in with ~15 or so t1 naval units to grind through the energy plants and factories. There really wasn't much he could do about it, and it was a huge win for us for about ten minutes, when they sniped one of our bases in much the same way.