Economic Meltdown.

Can't agree more. Despite how much I like the old balance's economy, it now boggles my mind that we didn't start with a factory.

#buildmoreenergy

Its not that bad - seriously, we used to just tell the commander to build power like a maniac till the end of time.

That's what makes me stall energy in the first place.

Starcraft and Generals hardly changed much over their lifetimes, while PA is rather incomplete and the balance is changing far too drastically. PA needs to be fun and worthwhile, the lastest major update made it so much slower and hardly fun compared to what it was.

Clearly you haven't taken into account other then the start of the game, it ripples throughout the entire game. Takes longer to build that extra metal, in that time the fabber could be scouted destroyed and the delays keep on going.

Can you explain this to me a little better please?

The way I see it is, you can still start with 2/3/4 fabbers. And the opponent has the same options. You still build your factory first so the fabbers are still built at the same time. Your fabbers are actually safer if Anything because where you lose the 30 seconds (revised up from 17) is between your first and second factory, given you 30 more seconds to expand relatively safely.

Edit: oh you mean the 2 seconds extra to build mex? Average game you build 20-30. So that's a minute I suppose. Energy is 200m cheaper too iirc.

Just wanted to add my 2 cents into this, although as @clopse said it's only a 50 second loss (i can't believe you actually calculated that =P), new players a)dont' know how to eco b)love rushing t2 and c)don't know how to expand and d) don't notice often enough that their fabs are dead. It's quickly going to become a 30% efficiency game for them, that and the little amount of units they will be able to build seriously reduces the epic-ness of the game and the new balance really just makes it harder for them... imo =)

And also map making.... and the game, so buggy! >.<
But i still love the game haha <3 (maybe i should get online baby photos from me and pa heh jokes)

course it's not cuz of the current balance.

it's because Uber keeps fighting the things that are good for player base perenity, such as global chat. multiplayer-orientation, e-sports orientation.

what about the "egg" It was one of the early features that Uber announced. is it still planned? I would love to choose from some predefined "eggs" (i.e. units and / or buildings dropping with Commander at game start)

I don't think the changes to PA's balance are drastic. And the "fun and worthwhile" is entirely subjetive. The new patch is fun and worthwhile to me. What's not is the lack of ladder players, but that is not an issue that only stems from a few balance numbers and was just as present before.
The patch also is not slower. On Amplus it is possible again to go up to 500+ metal income within a normal game. Yey! More than t1 spamming out of a small base.

The patch is a lot slower because you don't have income anymore to run your factorys. So in your first minutes you have some engineers, a factory, maybe 2 and some eco buildings. Where you would normally have an army already because you would be sitting on a lot more production during the earlygame.

So you favor a game where nothing matters but building factories?

Im just saying why the game slowed down with an explanation that is clear and correct. What i actually favor is a game that is like sc2 where you see the best players in the world randomly use cheeze strats AND ''normal macro style'' strats in the same tournament, both being effective and cool to look at. The excitement gets bigger when something happens that you really didn't expect imo.

SC2: the average game there doesn't start with 2 gates before probes. Not even in the most weird cheese.

I liked the idea of the egg. It was the first sign I saw that Mavor was going mad.

Is a two-factory Dox rush start completely unfeasible?

If you hit a greedy opponent on a small map it can work. Vs a prepared opponent probably not as much.

Colin's right! Uber, we need to be able to build half a factory and it still work! Best idea ever! Colin for President 2015! /trollsarcasm

Versus a prepared opponent, no strategy that they are specifically preparing for should work. If it does, it is overpowered if it can beat it's specific counter.

Dox don't let your opponent much time to even prepare, just guess. That is the strongest thing about them, except when they are strong the opponent always guesses at it, so then it becomes sort of weak. Still, when the opponent goes too much eco or too little agression early, dox still work.

I have stopped playing because of the balance and because they did not address the issues that were causing the game to be stale for me. I feel the eco balance changes were unnecessary. As much as people liked to bitch the balance it was fun to play. The pace was good and there wasn't anything that was ACTUALLY broken. Land was a very good point and there wasn't many genuine complaints. Then they butchered air. Never did anything to make orbital play more enjoyable. Balancing the game should be to make the game more fun.

They didn't do anything about fostering a high level team game scene. This is probably the biggest thing for me. A lot of the high level players who were more into team games, that I know, have gone off the game mostly because of this. We did 4v6s/eco boosting but still won almost all of them regardless.

I had high hopes for PA to grow but I honestly don't feel it will. The reason being is that the game doesn't seem to be improving. It seems that they are just fixing one problem but creating another. They are just tweaking numbers and giving makeshift fixes for fundamental problems.

What are the effects on teamgames actually? I guess all that is different in terms of economy is that you need maybe 1 more minute before you can start to spam units in terms of economy?


I feel the game is improving for sure. Once all parts of the balance have been improved they'll however need to do some PR stuff to get more people to play again, as low player counts are a problem especially at the top of the ladder (or at the top of the higher skill teamgames I guess): You rarely get a good game, as most players are just mediocre.
For that to be solved we need:
- A better tutorial.
- more balance fixes to make the game more interesting. Changing some economy values on the commander is a good foundation, but nobody is gonna start playing over them. It needs cool looking stuff for that. Smoking piles of wreckages that have meaningful gameplay interactions (imagine a PA trailer that features armies that annihilate each other and hugh fields of wreckage result. That's the kind of stuff people get interested into games over. ... SupCom got me hooked that way), rebalanced orbital. Reworked orbital UI. Nice looking unit effects on t1 and t2 units with a balance that favors not only t1 rushes, more interesting maps, etc.
- PR to get people who quit month ago (or never played PA so far) to notice

PA probably has a gigantic pool of players who were disappointed with the release state (or pre release, etc) and quit the game after a few tries. Many of those very likely never read patch notes. Uber needs manages to fix the issues they saw and communicate it to them. I feel they are in the process of fixing the issues, well at least the issues that weren't created from misunderstandings on the side of some players...

EDIT:
Oh another problem that creates rather low activity on the higher end of the ladder is the ladder itself.
- You don't see a win counter
- You don't see a ranked score
- You don't seem to gain anything from winning vs a dozen lower tier players
- You have to beat the people above you to get above them

Now this means that a player in spot 3 is best of NOT playing more than one game per week to stay there. Nobody can come from below and just grind past him. This kills competition for ranked places, especially since:
- you don't see any other measure of progress
- unless you are top 10 you are not even visible to others.

+1... Maybe act of aggression will get team games right