Build 77337-pte now up

I'd still rather build just the air fabbers to avoid the 2 factory start. I really only ever use air fabbers, except when building t2 vehicle factory.

You mean it forced players to actually invade or destroy planets rather than turtle up and snipe at eachother with dozens of nukes or SSX. You may call it a grind but I call it playing the game.

With the Pelican now being T1 it makes sense to rebalance things though. As long as the Astraeus can do the job, that's perfectly fine.

@theseeker2

Try playing a big game sometime and you'll see what we're talking about here.

By the way the spectate slot only works if you have can spectate as your option instead of can play. Is that a feature or bug? It is grayed out when you have can play even if there are open spectate slots.

... I only play big games

Doesn't this mean the opposite? That only fighters would be killed (still downloading, so can't check the files)?

Played a small game for testing.

I really love the fireing speed of the kraken, looks like a great surprise attack
Also loved that if you place the kraken underneath an enemy factory, that the wreckage blocks the missiles ^^

Bugs: Stingray doesn't fire on units which are walking in the water with the top part of the unit above the water level. My enemy commander was escaping in shallow waters I had stingrays after him, but they didn't fire until the commander was completely out of the water instead of him having wet feet... Was kinda annoying.

Naval still needs serious pathing improvements along the shores and shallow waters, boats often steer themselves in shallow water where they get stuck. Also sand-diggers:


I guess the sub pathing needs to be a little bit more off-shore, might require a range balance though

Orbital fighters have armortype orbital, which means that they take 5% damage from jigsplosions.

This would also have applied to structures, but now they use a armortype structure, which means they take normal damage from the jigsplosion.

PLEASE, work on pathing. I'm asking nicely!

My commander got nuked after being scouted, and I new he would do it, so i sent my commander away, he walked into a mountain, nukes fell, boom.

The pathing is my number 1 complaint.

Wow, how did I read that as saying orbital structures were given AT_Orbital? No wonder I was confused.

Watch the latest clan wars match between BRN and PAG. You'll see how putting a com in a pelican can be super cheesy and annoying.

updating OP with 77202-pte hotfixes

_"- Stealth Submarine added to game"_

This is a mistake imo. If you're going to add stealth elements you're committing yourself to basically an entirely new layer of play. Stealth and anti stealth units, intelligence and counter intelligence, etc. I think that whole direction is a mistaken given my experience with Cybrans in FAF.

Subs cool.

Now...

I can haz hover navigational layer?
I can haz buildings built on the sea floor?

@totalannihilation actually made a map once where this was possible. He set the water depth so high that sea structures could be built on the bottom of the ocean if you lowered the camera below sea level.

Thoughts on the PTE

The new eco balance is really great and we can now get more fabbers out than before. I have even been able to proxy a little, which is a nice change. 3-fab starts are going to be a lot more common early game, but in the mid game I think most of the time the biggest differences will be just these two things;

• We can now play just the same as before with less energy plants. This makes killing energy a lot more important because you can cripple a whole economy with just a few kills. It's not a bad thing and it probably adds something new to raiding where you will need to choose between killing energy and killing metal.
• You can build advanced factories a lot faster now. In stable you can have unlimited metal but still only be able to put the commander and one or two fabbers on the factory because you will be spending so much energy. Now you can put an extra fabber or two on the advanced factory and rush it out as long as you have the metal.

The addition of subs at first seems to have some positives and negatives, but it's possible that I just need to start thinking differently to play it correctly.

• Subs are really good at killing other ships. This is your best unit for killing other ships between bases because you can make so many.
• Torpedo launchers think subs are delicious and they will eat them all. If you build just a few of these subs really can't touch your base.
• Orcas can kill torpedo launchers slowly at range, but you have to assume the other player will send their own units to fight you. They can build mostly subs because all they need to do is fight you in the open ocean just past the range of your torpedo launchers.
• Narwhals seem like a really powerful multi-role support unit. I like them, but I don't see them being the main unit in the sea. It's possible that I'm underestimating these though.

The end result here is that the t1 naval war is just all about turtling until you can get out your t2 naval and move in. This really slows down the game a lot even when there is one player clearly ahead.

Example Game (Replay ID 5916706571671922114)
*Edit* A new build was released immediately after this game and the replay seems to have been lost.

In this example game, I played against @cola_colin on Meso. Early on you can see that he accidentally forgot about his bot factory. Normally he would have sent a few bots to guard the islands and prevent my fabber drop, so I think we can say that the meta on this map will involve early dox trying to secure the islands before a drop.

We fought to a stalemate for a long time on the main island. The goal on Meso has always been to take the easy cheap metal on the main island and then defend it while getting easy mex kills, but you don't want to commit too much to the land war. The metal spots you gain from winning that main island are not quite enough to justify playing a full land war here, so we just try to raid when we can and bait the other player into putting too much focus into land. By winning the other islands, I was able to force him to make the sub-optimal choice to focus on the main island and win it.

In the current stable balance, this would be enough to let me push in by sea and take his naval base. I was surprised here by how easy it was for him to turtle and it seems that there was nothing I could do to take the base with t1 naval. The game slowed down for a while because I was forced to build up an advanced economy to support bigger ships. I see now that I should have done this faster to win quickly.

Long-term turtling still doesn't win games. He couldn't take enough metal spots to compete with me, so I just slowly built up and diversified so that he wouldn't be able to counter everything I had. By the end, I was sending in advanced air and building anchors around his base. I never really did break his defenses but it was clearly over.

Two releases in the same day?! Life is good

hmmm I keep getting "Connection to Server lost" while I am picking a landing location.. 2 metal planets 500 radius.
1 v AI
US Central Servers
Windows 7 X64 8G ram

Are you running any server mods?

no mods

I'll try a "verify"

nope, still happening

Even GW's lose connection before I can pick a landing site.. doh!