Discussion: Early Game Commander Rushes

Seems like a relatively complicated solution compared to proper balnce. KISS

My concern is not so much the complication as much as the violation of the WYSIWYG mindset.

Mike

So, make the blast of a Commander powerful enough to kill all the Commanders that are in its radius. Perhaps the blast should create a wave able to destroy all Commanders in a wide enough area (for an very arbitrary design decision). Or just disabling them for a while.

Such an additional wave could affect exclusively Commander units, because... we decided that way. That's because.

That way you will avoid to use your Commander against any other Commander, 'cos the net result will merely end up a draw. Unless a Team tries a Commanders rush, and will lose all of them.

Sorry, don't like it. If the death explosion will become that strong, we'll see much more suicide-commanders in 1v1, from players who're just frustrated and want a draw.

And arbitrary stats (like it only affects commander units) should be prevented, too.

And that's just 1v1s. In multi-commander army matches suicide comms will be even more common.

Very well, then. So, you guys, need to find an other solution

Several have been suggested. We'll see what Uber does.

However, with the lowering of unit costs, Commander rushes seem a lot less powerful – simply because it's easier to pump out a lot of units. We'll see how things go.

Well Commanders should be more deadly on death = meaning that hes blow should be bigger and with greater power. In the other Hand you can make an alternative way of fight like Immune for all teams for 3-5mins( like we seen it in TA - you were unable to kill enemy, but in that case you would be unable to use your comm weap vs another comm for that time). After that Immune pass enemy should have army/def big enough to take off comm.

Arbitrary rules like that are dumb.

Btw. The main reason for a combat commander is to fight off early rushes.

So we can't really nerf the defensive power of the commander, since it's needed.

I don't wanna nerf commander offensive powers, I meant to add "option"(for those that really wish before you hit RDY) like 2-3min Immune before starting warfare, but that would only be for coom vs comm not comm vs any other units. that would prevent from dump rush.
Or in the other hand make them blow badly. There are many ways to defend at early stage, and loosing comm at early stage is not best idea.

Unless players spawn close together, most com rushes seem to happen between 5 and 10 minutes though.

well then at least you can watch nice fireworks hehe

I'm not sure if this is even worth addressing!

I'm not trying to be a jerk, but quite literally there isn't an easy way to solve commander rushing without creating a way to rush commanders.

You can't balance these problems:

• 2v1: 2 Commanders will always be better then one.
• Creating a way to destroy commanders 'easily' will revers the effect, you'll have that counter being rushed on your commander. the SC2 guys will remember the old cannon rush and C&C:Generals players will remember bunker rushing
• Commanders are already very fragile late game (past the 20 minute mark your commander can't stop moving or it will be gibbed) so making them weaker will make it harder later. Making them stronger will make comm rushing stronger.

Really you can make only make it less beneficial to comm rush. My opinion (keep in mind my wife thinks that's not worth anything) is that we won't be able to solve comm rushing.


There are the best options I've got from the previous 15 pages:

1. Supreme Commander had a good idea (albeit I didn't like it's implementation). Having upgrades to your commander (with long build times) would mean that your commander is weaker at the start and can be stronger in the late game.
2. Making commanders extremely expensive (time and resources) to repair. This way damage done to your commander earlier will set you back later, this would encourage to use the comm as a last resort only. I'd like to add that making the commander unable to be repaired and having him auto-repair slowly would really make players consider not using him.
3. Increasing the commander non-combat abilities: Making the commander a better base-builder would make players take a bigger hit from having it wander the map.

These are my thoughts, I honestly think these are the pick of the litter

I have a suggestion for a new unit to impede commander rushes. My idea is a very powerful point defense structure with a firing range equal to a commander. Think something like the Annihilator from TA but with a much shorter range, if you're familiar with that. It would fire slow, once every 5-10 secs, use a significant amount of power to fire (5-10k), and cost about the same as a pelter. Give it the same damage as a nuke (I think nukes do something like 10k damage) with no splash and a very fast projectile. Standard units would easily be able to overwhelm a defensive structure like this due to the slow fire rate and no splash, but commanders wouldn't dare go near a cannon like that. The short range and high firing cost would make it rather unwieldy to use offensively, and if you are letting enemy engineers build point defense in your base, you've pretty much already lost.

Read my above post: creating this unit would change comm rushing to rushing comms. A couple of escorted fabs would be become a more lethal early game problem then the one that is being discussed.

The annihilator (a personal favourite, we should totally make a T2 version for PA) was an expensive unit, for good reason. This unit would unfortunately render the high health units useless, as it would one shot anything.

These kind of units would struggle to work as it would need to be manually targeted on high hp units, increasing the skill cap for a problem that most new players are struggling with.

I'm not sure there is really a problem, but making commander leave a wreck when they die would add a nice tradeoff. ( not to much metal, it should not be an incencitive to self destruct your commander )

That's already there.

When the commander dies, his wreckage is there and is reclaimable.

Thanks, I did miss it.
But how did I miss it!? Oh it's a best 1000 metal ( 750? I'm not sure of the ratio ) ... so you car rebuild 4 ants with one commander wreckage! With that quantity of metal, it's quite irrelevent.

Any source on how much metal it is? I've been curious.

I've reclaimed a commander a few times in gameplay and it always took quite some time. Seemed to feel like more than 1k.

All this discussion still going on? Have you guys tried the patch yet? Commander rush is always a suicide now.