Build 77337-pte now up

In the live build right now it's pretty easy to set up an unassailable position of massive blobs of jigs on a gas giant that there aren't really many good options for addressing. Even if you manage to blow up a jig or two, by the time you're blowing them up there's 15 more and the loss in economy production is negligible. While the jig nuke and the orbital game on the gas giant is something I plan on revisiting in the future alongside other changes that would significantly impact it, right now I'm trying it out as a high risk high reward proposition. This is both to keep a player from being able to easily just lock down a gas giant once left alone for too long, and to get back that chain reaction effect that we also love and really wanted to produce with the jig nuke in the first place.

Tactical Bomber (Hornet)
-- Spread Fire set to True
what does this actaully mean? just that its missiles cause forest fires now or does it fire a volley?

If you have mulitple hornets, they will spread out their targets so they don't all fire on the one enemy unit

I just want to say this here:

90% of the time my team (or myself, depending on the game) begins to colonize a gas giant, it quickly becomes a very, VERY binary position. You either own a sizable base on the Gas Giant or you do not or you are about to get some surprise avengers. Having a sizable number of anchors doesn't really help - and with the current PTE Anchors and their diminishing returns, I highly doubt having a base of any sort on the gas giant will be viable even with the excellent changes. I'm betting it will just deteriorate into orbital fabbers spamming jigs all over the place and an orbital factory or two for development down the road, while avengers hunt them down. Kinda like early game fabber snipes with bombers and dox, except way more significant and with almost no options besides spam more avengers.
More PTE testing is ofc needed to confirm my speculation here - it's only what I am predicting from my personal experience.

Plain and simple, control of the Gas Giant is currently dependent on the following two factors only:

1. The relative number of Avengers you have streaming to the gas giant and present on the gas giant to the enemy player
2. The amount of time you spend microing said avengers to win.

This change to Jigs has made it FAR EASIER to defend gas giants than ever before up to this point (stable).

My core question here is this: Is this Jig change a placeholder until you all can get cracking at a permanent solution for the over-simplified nature of the orbital game and it's buggy behavior? I can see it having a place in a diversified orbital layer, certainly. But at the moment, it feels like a "patch" instead of a real "fix," if you catch my drift here.

Glad to hear you'll be developing the gas giant gameplay more in the future - the Jig nuke works as intended as a placeholder fix, but we really need more depth to it for gas giants to see more use in standard games.

The best idea would probably be to introduce a super weapon that actually works on them, since the Annihilaser and Halleys are both useless for that purpose. Something like a massive bomb that ignites the gas on the entire planet and clears out everything on it. Effects-wise it should be pretty simple - just turn it into a miniature sun for a little while.

EDIT: Of course, the first step would be to add an orbital heavy cruiser, but I assume that's coming at some point as part of a general orbital overhaul.

With the way PTE jigs are, a single well-placed nuke will do the trick nicely.

Only of a missile would kill the target, IIRC.

Haha yes, but the Jig chain reaction will assumedly get toned down once other changes are in place. Right now it's too EASY to wipe out presence on a gas giant - it should be viable to maintain bases there, but also possible to destroy them completely given some effort and skill. That's why a super weapon would be nice, it would alert opponents when it's being built, so they have the opportunity to prevent getting wiped from the gas giant.

This reminds me: We need more orbital units, preferably before this PTE goes live. The monopole balance of avanger vs anchor with the answer always being more avengers is seriously hurting any interesting game play that might happen in orbit as well as severely limiting the balance solutions. Even a simple three way balance (like RCBM) would do.

I would still consider that balance a placeholder - it's much better than what we currently have, but it could still be better, and that requires a fairly small amount of work on Uber's part.

New units take quite a while to make and balance. This round's 3 new units will be what makes it in the live build.

I don't know if it would be possible, but could a jig explosion do more damage if it was triggered by another jig explosion?

I'm thinking something so that if you take out one jig it just does damage to nearby jigs, but if you weaken a couple jigs first or pop several at once with a nuke you can start a chain reaction.

One thought in general: How about letting the player actively select between two different "Jig-Pattern"? Right now they are automatically set in the right location to trigger the chain reaction. I guess it would be nice to have the choice between this very fast and risky and a
Just in general: I´ve got a building suggestion: How about an advanced, fortified version of the Jig that is well-defended, (well-armored and some mounted guns) but BIG and EXPENSIVE in return? So players could first try to "rushjig" to get the resource backbone to be able to build these super platforms OR directly start with one of these but have to manage that the fabber isn´t sniped while setting it up! (Anyways, these big jigs should be quite unefficient...)

Of course it´s a placeholder, we only got two orbital units with attack capabilites right now, one of them Anti-Terrestrial and one Anti-Orbit one!
Imagine Ground only having the Bolo and the Spinner---much fun! You can "balance the **** out of it", but the result would never be really cool!

one serious request i have is
please for the love of god update all the ingame unitdescriptions on the buildbar, what they cost to build how much energy or metal powergens or mexxes generate how much extrastorage you get energyconsumtion of fabbers radar and their health etc.
and most importantly what units do ... there is no implication of doxes being aa-capable or able to travers water same goes for slammers with having torpedoes for example

We're planning on doing a pass on that for next update I believe. Tons of unit changes went through, but we wanted to get balance in a more stable spot before pushing it.

alright then

I love the new changes but I really hope you can wait till monday 2nd feb before publishing them live because this saturday is the final clan wars matches, and all these balance changes are too big for proper 4v4 play to be done right. the matches on saturday will be epic either way but i think they'll be better if the balance changes are postponed

Current plan was tomorrow if it is stable

So now people get unhappy because TOO MANY PATCHES HAPPEN TOO FAST.
Seriously you're too good for us.

Never postpone progress!