Angry Robots mod 1.0 **Terrible mod name i know. Goal and Scope To make unviable units viable To increase the scope of unit interactivity and strategic choice available To address cookie cutter issues in vanilla PA titans To standardise unit variables so that they mesh together better This mod does not add new units etc. It aims to improve gameplay within the PA: titans design paradigm. You should be able to play this mod in the same way you would an un-modded vanilla game - the only difference being more interesting choices within the existing unit roster. Your feedback improves the mod and my understanding of what the hell i'm doing, so please leave some if you have any. Main improvements Air Air speeds anywhere up to 30% slower with a standardised cap of 60. This was to limit the effectiveness of yolo air balls attacking and defending at the same time. Air fab tuned down to fit on the same power curve as the other basic fabricators. They were putting too much importance on taking and preventing ninja mex. Icarus is now a fun early game unit for harass and anti-harass that excels with dancing. Hornet functions properly as long range missile siege Wyrm launches drone fighters instead of bombs, which means I can make the entry barrier cheaper and less risky instead of having to kestrel spam. Same with angel, lower cost and effectiveness scaled to match. Kestrels better at aoeing light units with rocket pods in hit and run attacks instead of being flying levellers. Land Combat fabs buffed to be mathematically beneficial (instead of detrimental as currently) to your unit composition. Adv combat fabs in particular had some really wonky troll bait unit values. T2 bots a viable choice against t2 vehicles due to specific buffs to sniperbot and slammer (turret yaw rate and 50hp respectively). Sheller vs sniperbot is now an actual fun fight like in beta, and levellers don't completely smash slammers in metal efficiency. Support Commander down from 7000 to 5000 metal cost. Though I'm not entirely sure where on the power curve it sits because lets be honest it's never been used by anyone ever. Your feedback on support commander viability is appreciated. Drifters are faster (+2) and now viable to build despite lack of water. The vehicle factory choice is not just ant spam all day erry day. Long range tank titan no longer has twice the hp as melee titan. It no longer benefits from the crazy 2x health restored per metal repaired. Sea pirahna sight range increased so that it actually functions as a scout and stays viable within mid and late game unit compositions. Carrier attack range slightly greater than leviathan, but the drone fighters expire more health per second. Stingray slightly cheaper Orbital Orbital infrastructure is cheaper and properly fits inline with the t2 metal cost curve. The goal is for orbital to be a respectable build choice within competitive as a different type of supporting playstyle. Rail gun also shoots ground targets. Vanilla orbital was problematic as it takes too much to get units that can interact with the ground layer. And when you do they are easily countered due to always on orbital vision Probe is now viable as a super super fast interplanet warping scout. Want to know what they are doing right this second? Then use a probe instead of a slow radar. Detailed breakdown https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eD6NHeOYNHuNf1hA7GbrDa4H_wuCCOr7lbBNv5793Bc/edit?usp=sharing Known issues: Grenadier is still bad due to the bug which prevents them from attacking at max range. The only solution is to redesign it and I don't have any ideas right now except for an uninteresting rocket bot.
Looking good. Definately will give it a try sometime. Really curious about the airgame. BTW I might have a fix for the grenadier. Been working on t1 arty for the legion which had the same issue. Its an edge case but it should work 9 out of 10 times. I'll let you know.
Cool! We speak about that 2 hours ago with Rataxs, sniper is the way to balance T2 tanks vs T2 bots. I will try your mod
Which I think means roughly incorporate Xenophobia's buildable_types, and then configure the mod priorities so that this mod beats Xenophobia.
Support commanders are pretty devastating, I can see a problem where T2 bots become too good here. Like when you are spamming out several t2 factories, bots will have much Better unit compositions. Air nerf too will help to not allow t2 flak be missed too much. What's the new cf values. Like say 10 levellers against 10 slammers with 6 of the new combat fabbers. Old values both cost 6k. Step in the right direction for sure, and I know how proactive you are with your balancing so I know you will address if needed.
I wanted to try this mod but every time I entered a lobby PA just crashed. Tried with the mod deactivated and worked fine.
@clopse I'm fairly happy with where values are ball parked now so i've released the spreadsheet of values. For your slammer vs leveller scenario, its actually better to do slammer + dox vs leveller than slammer + cfab because the levellers have alot of alpha damage. The cfabs synergise with vehicle compositions that use vanguards or infernos and such. For CF, the value changes were (unit/property/old/new). It's kind of hard to read, but you can check out the spreadsheet in the OP now if you want better idea of what i tried to do cfab metal_cost 250 200 cfab max_health 50 125 cfab move_speed 12 14 cfab max_range 60 75 cfab metal rate 30 45 cfab energy rate 400 600 cfab yaw_rate 360 3600 cfab adv metal_cost 1200 650 cfab adv max_health 150 650 cfab adv move_speed 12 14 cfab adv unittype add 0 unittype_offense cfab adv metal_rate 60 140 cfab adv max_range 75 100 cfab adv yaw_rate 360 3600 @Pieman90 I'm not convinced that zeus is imba. Zeus is ~120 hummingbirds and dies to that very easily from 1 simple move order
The problem is usually when you have a zeus you usually have air control and t2 aa (flak and storms) have little to no effect on the zeus as the zeus and the flak have extremely similar ranges and makes it possible to micro the zeus to destroy the aa w/ out taking any damage. The option to nerf the zeus in of itself isn't necessary but buffing t2 ground based aa is more so. This could be done by increasing flak range, and giving it an additional damage modifier when attacking the zeus (if at all possible). What makes the zeus so strong is the lack of a good ground based counters when you have less air to counter your opponents air along with a zeus. Also note that the zeus does serious damage w/ its wreckage when it falls making it more effective and reducing the opponents ability to defend against more possible zeus. Side note if it's possible to fix the grenadier you could look at the pre Titans version which seemed to be firing at a proper distance
Sometimes a symptom can be mistaken for the root cause of an issue and i think the zeus falls into this camp. It's just a lightning rod (no pun intended!). The arguement that zeus is imba is to say there is a presumption that the player does not have air control, that they cannot get it back, and that it is not because they are simply losing anyway. Quite clearly the maths is telling us that the zeus is very metal inefficient against fighters, and so we should not expect this problem in a game where the winner has not yet been decided. Zeus in vanilla PA titans only has one channel for counter - the air layer. And when the air game itself is problematic, this counter can become lost in the noise. If i have air control, I can just as easily choose to build an ares and win with roughly the same amount of ease. I believe the steps i am taking in this mod to address air snowballing will solve this underlying issues. I have also buffed t2 flak somewhat mainly for other reasons, and while it doesn't outright kill zeus by itself, what it does is provide air clearance for your own hummingbirds to kill it. Additional channels to counter the zeus (or any titan really) such as through the orbital railgun and sniperbot (although sniperbot targeting air is just testing an idea atm) have also been added. The real problem with zeus is a psychological one. The player cannot see any intuitive way to counter it, or they cannot intuit why they cannot counter it and become frustrated. For me, zeus is interesting because its more a case of design issue rather than a balance one. Anyway, before i blab too much. TL;DR: Nerfing zeus was an idea i pondered at first, but i believe it is overkill within the angry robots mod.
How does the Bomber Priority mod affect Angry Robots mod? Wouldn't an angry bomber prioritize anti-air targets? Perhaps also a question for Queller AI because their strategy is built-in.
So I've been playing it today and I like it. Mainly because it still feels the same like vanilla except I get some more choice. I love the change to the Icarus. The way it dances around above dox and all can be really annoying. definately make it worth to build. I know I like the change to levelers. Those things were too tanky and now I know I can buy meself just a bit more time to get the t2 up and running. The slowdown in the airgame was something to get used too. But after the third game I kinda was used to it. What suprises me is then I'm less tended to go and invest heavy micro in air since its slower. So instead of moving all around I qued up a waypoint and just went back to my base and put my attention to other stuff. I'm definately feeling it. Its still fast but not "its everywhere fast". Haven't checked the wyrm or kestrels yet. Kinda hesitant to the role of the wyrm (since its weapon is something else). Just noticed the drifter change. Could be something cool. Don't know it yet. The artemis role is I dunno. I think I need to get used to it. Just wondering, is it counterable through umbrella's too? I remember that I had same feelings about a bluehawk being able to shoot orbital. Got used to that too eventually ( though its still kind funky in my opinion because it takes a while before the rocket is there). I played a few games so I can't really get much into detail and give a strong opinion about stuff but how it plays out for now, I like it more then vanilla (mainly because of the air slowdown and the t2 vehicles being less good). For now I'm recommending it to other players and I'll keep hosting games with this mod on. The bug that the mod keeps saved in the cache should create a sort of exponantial growth in people playing this mod . Maybe fire up something like a supercommander tourney to get players introduced into it? Oh yeah and some things I think you should add in the mod. Incorporate the combat fabber mine line building mod thingy. Incorporate the deselect combat fabricator mod so that people don't reque there combat fabbers by accident when they're supposed to be reclaiming. Also in the air game the air scout is selected when you select all the offensive air. I know a lot of people that strategical place their scouts or create patrol route that at the moment are being cancelled as soon as you click the grab all air button. Thats about it. Good stuff. edit Oooh yeah if you're interested in the replays you can watch these http://pastats.com/chart?gameId=408300 http://pastats.com/chart?gameId=408307 http://pastats.com/chart?gameId=408324 http://pastats.com/chart?gameId=408333
Thanks so much for the replays and feedback! The replays were really helpful in fine tuning numbers for next update, and i agree with your thoughts on artemis. I really do want to see orbital be more a core part of the game though so i've tried one last ditch set of changes to fix it. If it still doesn't feel right or work after this, then it's time to admit defeat and scrap that idea. - Cost shifted from orbital launcher (cheaper) to orbital factory (more expensive), to shift power towards orbital counter with avengers - Artemis slower move, turn, pitch, yaw, rof. More expensive, more energy drain - Set max range much lower as a work around to the game thinking 300 range is actually 500 (uber pls -_-). Umbrella and catapult will outrange it by like ~30% now. Implemented all your suggestions except for the combat fab deselect one. I think the cf is more interesting if you use it as a combat medic that heals and reclaims wreckages with your combat unit group. Uber had the right idea, they just didn't make it a viable thing to do. I wish it was possible to script a button that let you disable or enable that selection behaviour mid-game though. One thing that might help if you tend to accidentally select tree fabbers is to use attack moves. With attack move, combat fab reclaims everything to the waypoint including trees so it shouldn't stop your treeconomy too much.
Alpha, thanks for posting your replays. It's a big help in getting people interested in Angry Robots. I notice some streamers turn off their PA Stats mod while playing Angry Robots. Not sure what that's about.
