So after playing some games with the Titans balance I've got some feedback about the balance. I've heard @jables saying numerous times that the balance guys were pretty happy with the current balance. I however think it still could use some tweaking here and there and I hope that I can pursuade them to take a look at a few balance choices. If you don't agree with some parts of the post then please feel free to post your own thoughts about it. Air The air games needs some changes. I don’t know if its OP but I do think it can be very tiresome and intensive to play along with the airgame. The bigger the map the worse it gets. It has been discussed intensively in this topic and I think it has some good ideas to try out. https://forums.uberent.com/threads/air.69994/ The air games gives you so much advantages or choices. It has the quick expansion of air fabricators, You can raid undefended spots very easily very quick, they can kill of incoming raiding party’s of dox,they can defend off hover tanks, you can drop an army everywhere, you can kill of most titans with it. T1 Land ( bots and vehicles) The T1 land feels pretty solid. Dox still have there role as raiding units though midgame and lategame its kinda done (depends on the map though). Sparks are nice too and it all balances nice with the tanks in my opinion. T1 hover tank and grenadier aren’t that useful at the moment though. The hover tank can’t be used that much because its vulnerable to air. You can’t send em safely over lava on forge because they will die to air. Same goes for water. That means you need to invest into a naval factory and narwhals to protect your hover tanks but if you go that far then why would you still build hover tanks? Also why can’t you build the hover tanks with t1 naval factory’s? It gives you a quick possibility to get out of the water and start some raiding on the land. Its not a big issue though. Would be fun to try out. Another thing is that hover units in general can’t hover over mines. They get killed which is a bit of an awkward choice. Even casters were like ‘oooh but hover units can hover over mine….. oh they can’t… never mind’. The grenadier is too shitty to use. I understand that they removed their kiting abilities to give em that specific ‘I kill turrets role’ but its a too big of a nerf. Mot has made a topic about the grenadiers right here https://forums.uberent.com/threads/grenadiers.70776/ . Has some good ideas. T2 balance bots vs vehicles The t2 balance is whack. While the switch between t1 and t2 feels good the difference between t2 bots and vehicle bots is insane. T2 vehicles are in my opinion way too tanky. Where you can early on counter t2 bots with t1 spam you can’t with t2 vehicles. Levelers shred and tank a lot of damage and don’t forget the shellers with that range and AOE. Besides that t2 vehicles also have the storm which can counter the air reasonable good! What do t2 bots have? Slammers are nice and I like the balance between slammers and t1 units. The locusts can be very fun to use but are in a straight disadvantage because of how air is balanced out. Bluehawks are only useful for countering orbital which is a very niche market. The subcomm is pretty cool but it doesn’t stand a chance against t2 vehicles. Ofcourse we’ve also got my favorite unit the GIL-E GIL-E sniper bot What have you done to my precious GIL-E uber: it reminds me of someone at uber talking about balance. ‘Balancing is like pulling levers, if you pull one lever two others change of position’. So why on earth was there an uber guy pulling three levers at the same time when rebalancing the GIL-E and said SURPRISE. In vanilla the dynamics between a sheller and a sniper bot were very interesting. While GIL –E weren’t as good as shellers in army vs army situations they were better when you started annihilating a base. This was because Shellers autotargeted the buildings and sniper bots would just kill the closest unit. That means you could counter shellers attacking your base in tricky but doable fun ways and you couldn’t with GIL-E however the GIL-E could get killed by shellers army vs army situations. In Titans the GIL-E shooting through everything got fixed which is a fair thing to do. That however in itself already was a massive nerf for the GIL-E. Why did it got a range decrease? Why did it got a DPS decrease? Why did it got a HP decrease? And to make it even more awkward. Why on earth can GIL-E shoot airplanes? Its true they are a bit cheaper but it just doesn’t balance out against t2 tanks. My recommendation. Keep the projectile thats in it now but give it more DPS. Those shots need to be lethal. They don’t even scratch the surface at the moment. Give it back its hp and range (maybe even increase range slightly a bit) and make it expensive again. Remove that awkward airplane targeting. Actually why not give the second gun the ability to shoot airplanes? It can already target rockets in the sky so it would make more sense to give that gun also the ability to shoot airplanes out of the sky. By doing that you don’t create awkward situations where precious sniper bot bullets gets used to kill of some cheap fighters but actually keep targeting more valuable land targets. That way t2 bots also has a different but cool counter against air. T2 balance general T2 is unlike t1 a huge investment. You can’t simply say ‘oh well I’ll just build my t2 bots and after that I’ll go t2 vehicles’ As soon as you choose for a t2 factory you’ll probably stick with it for a while. I think they should be equal army vs army wise. Right now t2 bots contain units with more of a specialty role (a supporting role) but lack the firepower to actually finish the opponent off. Commander vs T2 Also in relation to the T2: I think the commanders ubercannon should still be useful when defending against t2 units. I think it should be able to kill of t2 units with one shot to buy yourself more time to get your own switch to t2 or to overrun the enemy with t1 on a different front. Right now the commander will never ever stand a chance against T2 units. Make that ubercannon lethal! Naval Balance Naval balance is pretty fun and good ship wise. Torpedo launchers with walls are however really really good. It pushes the gameplay to rush out t2 since you can easily defend against t1 naval and because t2 levi’s have insane range. That means you can kill of torpedo launchers easily and are able to do a lot of damage very quickly after that. Also the nerf to the typhoon was too much. There is also a nice thread out for typhoon balance https://forums.uberent.com/threads/typhoon-feels-overnerfed.70357/ . Still I like naval in general Orbital I do like the orbital balance btw. The only thing that can get awkward is gas giant gameplay. If you leave the enemy alone with the gas giant it can get really hard to kill off at some point. Artemis ftw I guess Zeus Titan And I’ve got a final issue with the Zeus. The Zeus is among all the titans one of the strongest ones and guess what yep its again in the air layer. While all the other titans have a flaw (which is air) the Zeus hasn’t got a proper ground or orbital counter. AA gets shot down by Zeuses easily. That means players need to counter Zeuses with there own air which is a big flaw in my opinion. People don’t always choose to go full on air which already is GG when the opponent has its Zeus out. I mean the guy going Zeuses has a bigger chance of getting air dominance because he needs to invest in air to get that Zeus out. A player who doesn’t add that into consideration is done and will get killed by a zeus sooner or later. Also when stacked there is just no stopping to them. A recent thread also has been made about the zeus https://forums.uberent.com/threads/zeus.70831/#post-1117500.
I agree with your opinion of T1 T2 land and orbital. But I have different opinion about the air and Zeus. The first one is the air, it is OP now. I feel it take too many micro when I am playing the 1 vs 1 ranked game. If you can use bomber to kill the fabricators which wants to expand outside metal extractor in early game, it creates a huge advantage. Unlike the Starcraft, the air in PA is very cheap and easy to spam. And the anti land ability of air is too strong. A group of the land units can be killed by bombers if enemy first snipe at the few spinners precisely. And it is not too difficult. In Starcraft, the land units are the main force, and the air units are support. And all the maps have the similar size. For PA, the size of planet can be very different. In the small planet, land units are the main force. But in the large planet, land units are useless due to their slow speed. And they may be erased on the way if they meet a Zeus. The problem is that: If we nerf the Zeus and the air units, the duration of the game for large planet is increased greatly. Of course we can make the air units as pure support units, but it is the cost. The fighting on the large planet becomes a boxing, the land units of both sides push and back. And the battle seems to be unable to be finished. Due to the huge scale of the PA, I think we should make the land units as the main force for small planet. But don't destroy the air, they are still needed for large planet. Perhaps we can modify them like this way: Let current T1 air units to get the price and the performance of T2 air units. And let current T2 air units become T3 units. Increase the price and the performance of air units except the scout and fabricator, so the air unit won't be the first option in close combat due to its price and nerfed availability. While keep the air units powerful in middle game and late game for large planet. Or just only allow the T2 fabricators to build the air factory. It can become a more strict restriction. By the way, the Zeus isn't as strong as you mentioned. And Zeus is much harder to protect than other titan. For Ares and Atlas, just few spinner and storms can protect them from the enemy bomber. And they get the huge HP pool. But the Zeus can only be protected by fighters. For spinner and T1 AA turret, defending fighters is much more difficult than defending bombers. And more important thing is the land AA units can't keep up with the Zeus. Unlike the Ares and Atlas, Zeus has only 10000HP, the Zeus is often killed by fighters in no time. The damage of hummingbird is 80, just only 125 hits can bring down the Zeus. The price of Zeus is even more expensive than 125 hummingbirds, not to mention hummingbirds may fire more than once when killing a Zeus. You don't really need 125 hummingbirds. Just make sure to spread out the fighters, don't let the Zeus one shoot all the fighters. Killing a Zeus is not a big problem for fighters. I even consider the Zeus is the weakest titan. You can't counter the Zeus if you have no fighters. I feel it is part of the game rather than any problem. It may be just my opinion, I hold some fighters in almost any time.
The problem here is that changing the commander balance for T2 will make the commander way too OP against T1. For example commanders would then be able to kill infernos with one uber cannon. Though I agree commander vs T2 is an issue.
In SC:FA, the commander is an unit with the performance about a T2 to T3 units. But in PA, there are only two tiers: T1 and T2. If the commander can defend a group of T2 units, it is about the performance of a Titan. Unless it is implemented as an upgrade for commander, this kind of performance is game breaking in early game.
Good post yes air can be very good because of sniping off all the fabricators early on. I personally am more in favour of slowing air down a notch. That way you can't be everywhere really quickly and it gives the opponent a longer window to do some sneaky harassment or building aa turrets up at some other place. It'll make you commit more to the choice you made (for instance will I use my air to raid his base and snipe off fabricators or will I use it for defense or attacking incoming army). Besides that it gives the opponent more time to counter the air spam. To be honest I think there have been given some cool ideas in the air topic and I think a few PTE's with different choices would give us the data we need about how to balance out air. Right now its just guessing. Is it? Its true that a few spinners and storms can protect em against enemy air but that still leaves you the option to kill those with long range artillery. Killing a Zeus on the other hand feels so finnicky. I've lost entire air blobs because I wanted to kill it beforehand and man did it still get ugly when I letted that thing into my base so that it would start targeting ground units so my air could do it thing. Its so painful to watch. Especially since thats your only hope to kill those things off. Thats not how it goes for other titans. For rebalancing the Zeus I'd like to have a ground AA T2 unit with long range, slow rate of fire, and high DPS + some AOE to still give you some options to counter Zeuses or other tanky air units. There really isn't apart from going air yourself. Hmm so the reason I came up with this was because if you spread out your t1 army's you can still fairly easy kill a commander. Granted it would nerf the use of inferno's and sparks (inferno's especially). By increasing the damage it would still be killable by spreading out your T1 army's though. T2 however is harder to spread out thus clustering happens more and thus makes the commanders ubercannon more useful when it can kill off levelers with ubercannons. I was rereading my post and maybe its not even necessary. Apparently I just got an issue with how good t2 vehicles is. The balance between t1 units and t2 bots is good. the balance between T1 units and T2 vehicles goes through the windows and the same goes for t2 bots vs t2 vehicles. Maybe T2 vehicles just need some nerfs here and there to get it equal with t2 bots which would also create better dynamics with t1 units and the commander. Just curious Quitch? When was this?
Way toomuch text here, but in the first post i read that T2 bots where not able to take on T1 or something and T2 tanks would be. I have to disagree with that one, T2 bots are good in almost every way you can imagine. Slammers will take out almost any t1 spam except air. You can't say that about anything else but a manhattan from the T2 vehicle factory. I feel like people over estimate the T2 vehicles almost as much as the zeus, to me only shellers are really really good but you can counter them with t1 so thats actually not even true.
imo gil-e should beat bluehawks not through range but antimissilebeam getting close to it .. bluehawks should beat shellers in range, shellers beat gil-e's in range .. hornets should outrange gil-e's but not shellers or bluehawks as they wouldn't need to unless with t1 aa vehicle ... sound good? i am not sure about a general air speeddecrease ...
Yeah its quite a hefty wall of text indeed! But I wanted to make sure that I'd put my feedback in one complete post. Anyways I do like t2 bots balance. Especially when you compare it with t1 dynamics. The only thing that makes me sad is the GIL-E on the bots side I just don't like the t2 bots vs t2 vehicles. T2 vehicles is just really good. Levelers are tanky and the shellers range is like wow. Would mean that you won't see it on a small map and it will on big maps. Thats kinda sad when you've got a lot of choice in the air game. I was thinking about that one too. Could definately be interesting. So what if the sheller got a small range nerf then ? something like this would be viable. About the air me neither but it sounds logical. Instead of the traditional thinking of like: Oooh let me snipe off his fabricators do some scouting over the base and then quickly defend my base against those hovers you'll gonna need to commit your airforce more to one thing instead of everything so it goes like: Ooh let me snipe off his fabbers and ooh **** a hover force. Shall I kill the hovers killing my expansions or shall I kill the fabbers killing his expansion.
Air speed may be the biggest problem. The T1 carpet bomb has to go IMHO, decrease the efficiency with which it kills raids.
the carpet bomb is also for hitting a number of tankier units not just antiraiding ... it still gets easily destroyed by any aa ... speed decrease would be already enough fix doxes to hit it easier .. removing the carped would be too much a nerf
Carpet bomb -> single bomb that does a good amount of damage with some (but not much) splash. Bomber becomes mediocre at thwarting dox and passable instead of excellent at defeating tank blobs, but remains effective at raiding fabbers and destroying structures. Your post is poorly parsed. It does not make me want to read your posts when you use an ellipsis as a period and don't capitalize or include any other punctuation.
don´t expect that to change because i don´t care ... feel free to think of this whatever you want it´s however funny that you only now actualy mention it since i did it like forever so what aircraft should counter raiding doxes then? especialy when they come in huge numbers ... if there isn´t an aircraft that can quiekly deal with mass blobs you may as well not build air at all ..
You don't want an aircraft to counter raiding doxes, not at T1. Raiding doxes should be a force that you can't easily get rid of early game without ground units.
oh sure i do tanks already do this without having the raidingrole even if they are slower and it becomes significantly more difficult with aa all in all it would just become another doxrushphase making air useless if it's not a missilelauncher than a bomber ...
I tripled our downloads in the last week. It's not the vanilla game and usage is spread entirely by word of mouth. People that don't read my mod guide are faced by an increased learning curve. I wouldn't expect Galactic Annihilation to become the dominant game over vanilla and I'm pleased with our current growth. The only way a mod is ever going to gain a playerbase that makes up a significant (>10%) percentage of the playerbase is if it becomes a mod no longer.
downloads don't mean too much what matters is the ammount of players continualy playing it ... PA had 800k copies sold yet only 3 to 400 are playing on average per day and the ballance you have is drastically different than vanilla so who says that your bomber ballance will match well with general vanilla ballance?
I think alpha is a pretty chill guy. If he asked me to lend him my toothbrush, i would do it. I hope Uber will listen to his wise words. He will be our messiah.
