Gameplay, Units & Balance

It looks a bit strange having the basic fabber build such large units like the gate and orbital launcher. Plus I'm worried about the balance implications of having the gate at T1 as I can see it meaning you need a lot more fixed defenses to cover surprise attacks.

Some options that could be considered:

- Gate and Orbital still requires an advanced fabber, but the advanced facs are reduced in cost by a lot (half what they are now maybe?). This would also help improving the use of combat units.

- If you leave orbital at T1 can you make the launcher smaller. Its only visual, but it wouldn't look so odd.

- I dont think the gate should be left at T1 however. I think a T1 transport should be air based carrying up to 6 units, then the gate would act as the advanced transport.

EDIT: I should say I love all the other ideas raised in the OP.

Well it's no worse then having an T1 engineer build a bunch of factory's on a flank.

You could just make it attack ground location. Useless at sniping single mobile units, useful for hitting moving blobs.

I was thinking we should have a higher capacity T1 transport, something like 20, more along the lines of the UEF T3 transport. How could it hurt? It only goes with the "scale" of things. Plus I was thinking it be some sort of "transformer" in a sense, so that it doesn't look odd when transporting only a few units.

That's exactly what I thought when I saw this post. The whole reason why people don't rely on land armies (in general) is nothing to do with their cost.

Defenses are very strong. The range of the pelter/holkins/catapult (and in general, range and mobility of units) is simply a more important "balancing factor" than anything else. You can expect a single pelter to chew 50 tanks into 35.

People use defences because they invalidate armies completely in this game. People use the super units and t2 bombers because there aren't effective defences against them.

Add into that the fact that land units simply take too long to get anywhere and putting production into land armies becomes a complete waste late game on a large planet.

Making units cheaper just means that time where you can expect 50 tanks to roll into your base isn't 10 minutes in, but significantly closer.


Edit: although having said that, 10 second build time for Ants seems pretty good to me XD

All of that sounded great.

If you do that you have to build all the facs and then all the units. Plenty of time to be spotted. A gate is near instant.

neutrino: will the full unit list be released soon?

Thanks for the update! Sounds good to me.

And by the way: we created a German translation of this post.
Feel free to use, but if you do: be nice and give credit

If you make all artillery attack ground, but still accurate enough to hit a single target, you are essentially forcing all players to ensure their units never stop moving. Units that are not moving (most likely because of player inattention) are just like structures in most respects, except the player can issue move orders.

I read in your suggestion, "what if artillery didn't lead shots?" Which would eliminate the problem of move spamming, but still makes player micro significant, just in a different way. Players will have to ensure that every unit they own is always in constant motion, because otherwise their stationary units are vulnerable to being sniped by accurate artillery (and forcing the artillery user to manually target fire units that are not currently moving, because shooting moving ones is wasteful).

If instead artillery has a random deflection, then artillery is superficially just as effective against structures as it is against mobile units. It won't kill either right away (probably) but with a large enough volley, or firing for enough time, or with a bit of luck, it will kill the target.

However, a unit can respond to an artillery bombardment by moving. A structure can never do this, making artillery intrinsically more effective against structures because sustained bombardment is guaranteed to work... eventually. You cannot move a structure, and you cannot use a structure to go find or engage enemy artillery. Units can displace to destroy the enemy's information about where they are. Such as using mobile artillery hidden within the fog of war that are standing within a static gun's attack range- the mobile artillery can displace to avoid counter-battery fire.

Always aiming at a position on the ground would work well in conjunction with true imprecision (not imprecision created by flight time). But allowing artillery to lead shots would also work with true imprecision. The random deflection causes player micro of the artillery targets to matter less, and allows artillery to be cheaper and more powerful because it kills specific targets more slowly. Artillery being too effective at killing specific targets is exactly why they are so effective as a long-range defensive turret. The best way to make them function as powerful fire support instead of a defense turret is to make them imprecise.

Here's some of what the forum has voiced. Cata's should not be homing and auto-fire to nerf them down from being the single best unit to kill a com.

all you need to build is one, within half of it's range of a com and the com can neither leave the range nor get to the cata in time to destroy it without being killed given he starts moving the second the cata is finished. There simply is no getting out. (even an aestreus somewhere wouldn't get there in time)

also many people have voiced that rather than build navy they rather use pelters or holkins as t2 navy has laughable range which makes them miserable over expensive units that are two-hit kills for bombers. the range at the very least on the battleship needs to be turned up a bunch of notches.

there are a bunch of other notes about balance from people all over the forum.

maybe we should regroup them and finally unite them all in one balance thread. this one?

If it's randomly deflecting, it misses structures and single targets, but still hits large blobs of mobile armies. It's not very effective against single targets or static targets, and is not What You See Is What You Get, because there's an element of luck involved.

Please, please, please, kindly answer this questions i've asked dozens of time and never got any answer (I understand this is probably lower priority but, please kindly answer) :
Air bombers flight model is awesome, from the very beginning of alpha. Very nice curves.
Air fighters flight model is far from being awesome (much more moving like land units).
Are there any short/middle/long term plans to work on improving Air fighters flight model ?
Thanks

Advanced factories cannot be reduced in cost. Im assuming you did NOT play alpha?

dose bluebottles so sloooooooow

are they powered by sail

at least it saves on energy

It wasn't stable on my PC during alpha. I assume it lead to a leap straight to t2? In that case just make the orbital launcher a bit smaller and move the gate to t2.

I am for the imprecision factor.
Artillery are not snipers, they should be used to break static defences and buildings, and/or to thin/weaken an incoming force.
Now the problem is to tune carefully this factor to not break the unit.
A good tuning would make them still useful on structures, while weakening the incoming units (and limiting the "always on the move" exploit).
Make it too large, and we will face the problem you're talking about : luck.
And altrough luck is good in little dose, it is bad if determinant in a battle.

(add to this the travel time, splash radius, lob angle, lock-on time... What a nightmare... Happy it is not my job to balance units !)

Artillery are inherently strong against structures simply because they outrange them. Not every shot has to connect for artillery bombardment to have predictable results, even if a single individual shot is unpredictable. Making them miss softens their DPS, but against larger targets and larger groups of targets this reduction becomes less important. This is not a random effect.

An artillery shell's inaccuracy is WYSIWYG- the shell physically falls on a patch of ground and explodes, damaging any units hit. If the shell lands too far from a unit, it does not damage that unit. The shell doesn't randomly just fail to deal damage by some arbitrary dice roll- it depends where the unit is and where the explosion is.

As for aiming, ideally the player is shown a circle indicating the maximum deflection when giving a manual fire order to artillery. "Shells will land somewhere in this circle."

Seems like really great changes, without exception.

Love it

Isn't this how TA did it for Berthas / Intimidators. I always found those units much more useful both as offensive weapons and defensive weapons than any of the arty units in Supcom. Of course TA's LRPCs got more and more accurate & precise as they got more kills. If was always funny to see a LRPC with a few hundred kills tag a construction plane that was in the process of building something