Proposed Ground Rebalance

Defensive turrets right now are fairly... OP. How can we fix this?

First, stats.

DPS/Metal
MAA: .13
SLT: .12
DLT: .16
TLT: .24
Dox: .22
Ant: .19
Slammer: .28
Leveler: .32

HP/Metal
MAA: 1.6
SLT: 1.5
DLT: 1.5
TLT: 1.2

Dox: .44
Ant: .56
Slammer: .37
Leveler: .4

Attack Radius:
MAA: 100
Lasers: 120

Dox: 80
Ant: 100
Slammer: 100
Leveler: 120*

*Vision is 100

Also, speed for them:

Dox: 12 (1 2/3 seconds to get in range of an MAA while being fired upon, 3 1/3 seconds to get in range of a laser tower while being fired upon)
Ant: 7 (2.9 seconds to get in range of a laser tower while being fired upon)
Slammer: 11 (1.8seconds to get in range of a laser tower while being fired upon)
Leveler: 7 (2.9 seconds to get in range of a laser tower while being fired upon)*

*Assuming no radar coverage

Doxes, in other words, are awful for a direct assault by design. However, slammers are superior to everything else except for levelers with radar when it comes to direct assault. However, look at the HP/Metal costs for turrets compared to those of bots and tanks. The least efficient turret, the TLT, is 2.1 times as efficient as the most efficient unit, the Ant. There we have a problem.

I propose increasing HP for units until they are at about .8, and specializing turrets to have lower HP/Metal stats across the board.

New HP stats:

MAA: 250 (Trying to make these more used for anti air and the SLT to be more used for early game defense against bots/tanks, See the cost change, also make them immune to AOE attacks for a bomber change that I'm making in another thread)
SLT: 485 (See above)
DLT: 750 (Trying to make this more of a damage dealer and to promote SLT usage in normal defenses as a frontline turret, wait for DPS stats)
TLT: 3500 (Don't worry, giving them a new niche to fill)

Dox: 125 (Trying to keep their old role)
Ant: 180
Slammer: 735 (Hold on, I'll fix these in another wall of text of a thread to make them specialists, focusing on the more broken turrets in this thread)
Leveler: 1275

For DPS, I'm trying to rebalance turrets so that lower HP = Higher DPS. Assault bots will get a DPS/Metal of about .25, and tanks will get one of about .2

New DPS Stats

MAA: 50
SLT: 65
DLT: No change.
TLT: 385

Dox: 45
Ant: 40 (Cost change, hold on)
Slammer: 270
Leveler: 325

Range:

MAA: 130 (How I'll make it more effective vs Aircrafts)
SLT: 120 (Sniper Tower of sorts)
DLT: 110 (Frontline Tower)
TLT: 100 (There to soak up damage, not to do it)

Dox: No Change
Ant: No Change
Slammer: 90 (Just to keep it in line with the dox a bit)
Leveler: 110 (Changing vision to 110 as well)

Cost:

MAA: 400
SLT: 425
DLT: 935
TLT: No Change

Dox: No Change
Ant: 205
Slammer: No Change
Leveler: No Change

I've got another wall of text thread on the way focusing on air, but thoughts on what I've got here first?

My intention isn't to be mean, but I think it's totally pointless talking about unit balance right now.
The most important for unit balance is figuring out the intended roles for the full roster.

For example:
Are we playing with Scouts, marines, assault troops or special high end units right now?
(aka fleas, peewees, zeus or sumos)
For all we know,
The Ants are supposed to be fleas. And Dox supposed to be mech marines.

We have absolutely no idea which piece of the puzzle we have been handed to fiddle with.

We need to know how Uber wants to structure of the roster laid out before we can give useful feedback.
Otherwise, we are just spinning our wheels and not going anywhere.

Bots aren't meant for a direct assault
.
Either use them as shock troops immediately backed up by vehicles or Slammers

Or zig zag towards a defensive line.


Or go around the defenses.

Bots aren't meant to engage stationary defenses. The magic ratio seems to be about 7 bots to 1 AA turret

Defensive turrets aren't OP in my opinion. Nor most people from what I've seen. They were even nerfed a patch or two ago.

They're powerful, but they're supposed to be powerful.

Don't forget, we have a super small unit roster. The game will change drastically when more units are added.

We shouldn't be spending this much time and detail on balancing. Not until we have a full unit roster.

Turrets absolutely have to be cost efficient against units or you would almost never build them compared to building mobile units. In their current state they are in my opinion very well balanced and fulfill their role well.

You should expect that the entire balance may completely change when the balancing phase actually begins.

Yes and the developers letter by neutrino did sort of say that as well.

Autodefense is one of the things that is real important to get right. Most people aren't doing any at the moment leading to very short games.
Its so big you have to fight in several view screens at the same time therefore autodefense gives you time to concentrate on the bigger picture.

What do these three letter acronyms mean? If you want someone to engage in the conversation make it clear what you are talking about.

Additionally, it has been said a dozen times. Balance can not be fully addressed until the unit roster is complete.

As long as we can partially address it.

Missile AA
Single Laser Turret
Double Laser Turret
Triple Laser Turret.

Personally I don't think a simple stats graph can represent the real situation very well at all.

There are too many variables that need to be accounted.


And this is still discounting things such as having turrets intentionally be better then moving units due to not having the ability to move their fire-power.

Id live a more siege/counter-siege type of gameplay between turret and wall placement, and how units work to assault them.

So many people are asking for balance changes or to play with new units, but that's just not feasible based on their dev process.

I think it's more important to see what the full roster will look like.
We don't need to play with it, but just to see it on paper.
That way, we can better assess whether each unit we do play with feels right (as Uber releases them to us).

It's called building bombers and arty to aid in taking down nests (assuming you gave them the time to build them)

You're thinking one dimensional in terms of 'ground vs ground' well there's already arty if you're not already using it, but ships and air are not something to ignore in the tri-assault.

Thanks, that helps.

The defensive turrets should be more efficient than mobile units. One of the benefits you pay for when building a mobile unit is the mobility and with the sacrifice of mobility you should get more staying power.

That's almost universally awful and lame.

Counterplay should be between units. The only correct way to design a base turret is to fill a defensive hole that can't be solved with units.

Mobile war fair only make sense in a RTS game when you don't need to build your own units and economy.

In other words you have described a game that already exists, StarCraft2 (And alternately ruse, but I hated that game), where mobile gameplay is what it is all about.

Your idea is universally awful and lame.

Strip the numbers out of the OP and just talk about the role that each unit should fulfill. I think that there are few people who can understand what you are trying to do looking at your stats alone. It would require us to have memorized the previous values.

It is also quite likely that your proposed changes won't create exactly the effect you want them to create. So further balance changes would need to be done to hone in on your design. But the design would remain unchanged so simply tell us your design without telling us the specific implementation.

I disagree. In fact, I would argue games need to have a better defined difference between 'base' and 'battlefield'. A base is now a collection of structures defended by mobile units, not a huge fortress which requires a whole siege, which houses units, sends out armies...

What's lame is defining a turret that is "like tanks but better" because you don't have any better ideas for base defense. Tanks can defend tanks just fine. It doesn't take a copy/paste with inflated stats (clearly made to hard counter X assault and be hard countered by Y artillery) to protect a base.

There are incredibly sexy ideas for base defense, which wouldn't be appropriate for mobile units, that don't devolve into raw health and damage comparisons. Base defense structures would be a more valid idea if such ideas were actually used.

That, and several factories can punp out 10 units every 10 seconds. I have had 6 t2 bot fabbers work on AA turrets, but you can not build them that fast no matter what. Factories build much faster, that gives you much more units to throw at turrets.