OMG Uber Cannon is so OP. Fix now!

1. How would you "suspect" someone is going to air drop? Clopse's move is made before you could have scouted it. His scout finds the base and his commander was literally two seconds behind. I think clopse's point is that you must go first air because it's impossible to scout it out.

To me the simple fix would be to move the transport to T2 without any other adjustments. Problem solved.

We'll see how it plays out though.

I always build fighters instead of scouts. But building fighters right off the bat shouldn't be a requirement. This game is supposed to be about variety, not the same thing every time. Also due to randomness of planet generation that leaves way too much up to chance.

You can't take out your opponent's energy reserves when you have a Commander in your base and your opponent's base is on the other side of the planet. And you can't chase down the com with units since you no longer have a base and the com can easily take out units.

I'd be fine with laser defense towers dealing extra damage against commanders. But still. That's kinda hackish.

Increasing the Uber Cannon fire cost would be a good idea.

There's benefits of comms taking out comms with the explosions. But the concern is with Army game types. Take out an enemy commander, if not multiple commanders, plus a lot of their base? The most effective strategy would be to put an commander in your opponent's base.

The outcomes always benefit the attacker.

Scenario 1: Take out multiple commanders with the explosion
Scenario 2: Make an even Commander trade, plus take out a large portion of the defender's base. Guaranteed no way to mess it up advantage to the suicide attacker
Scenario 3: Defending Commanders run away from the attacking Commander and the attacking Commander destroys the base at will.

The results are that the attacker always comes out on top and never loses out. That means the only valid strategy with the army game type is to comm rush.

I'd like the transport to stay t1, but have it not be able to drop a comm. Either that or disable the uber cannon if oyu comm isn't near any friendly structures.

Yes we really need a hotfix for this, since you're right - unless you go fighter first you will lose. And I don't trust gentlemen's agreements since there's nothing holding the enemy back from exploiting it.

I hate you Uber, i got this patch 1am and could not resist. Now i am sleepy at work it will be hard day.

Amen, brother.

All I was trying to point out is that these issues can be dealt with. It is something that's been 'a thing' for a while and has already been well dealt with in my experience.

With respect to the laser towers, in Spring they didn't make them stronger, but instead made them much cheaper. The light laser tower out ranges the d-gun and allot of short range units and is very cheap. It was the default early defence weapon and 2 of them together could kill a com quite quickly which does go a long way to deter walking into a base.

Air transports were also very weak so a single aa tower or fighters would shoot down a com in a transport if your opponent went that route. The result is that it is a viable move but its a risky one and so even in team games was the exception rather than the rule.

You're correct about the explosions taking out other commanders- although in practice given the commanders slow speed compared to other units it is very difficult to get him into the position you described. Usually what happened was a com would attempt to bomb- you walk away with your com and move units in. He dies with minimal damage to your base. If an enemy commander makes it into the middle of your base more than 5 mins into a game you must already be loosing anyway.

Then we run into, "build a fighter first or lose." PA is supposed to be about diversity and different strategies.

You must not have watched any of ZaphodX's multi-commnader matches.

As far as TA is concerned there is a problem. No rushing before 15 mins is the solution we use there. In team games at 15 mins the weakest player on one team can try to com bomb the strongest on the other. And try they do if the other player doesn't play safe. It's an option because you can move your commander off screen and time it so he reappears in the edge of their base and flying over their commander. And either self d or get shot down.

In PA the commander will be safer in the middle of the base so should easily spot the enemy commander land and avoid. Or have it so the commanders explosion in the air doesn't effect the ground. So don't see a problem there.

I can't think of a solution for the team games we have now other than some way to ban air lifting commanders with the transport. Then I can't see much of a problem with a com explosion killing the opponents commander too.

Would you do this in a 3v3 game early if you couldn't play after the com dies?

I know this isn't ideal, using arbitrary rules, but how about if the commander explosion only kills other commanders in 1v1 games or FFA? That way, it discourages rushing in those game types, and in army games you can't kill off 3 comms with 1 suicide comm.

True... do you have a link to a relevant match? I'd be interested to give it a watch (sorry if I'm sounding lazy- Zaphod's done rather allot of streams).

Yeah, the last thing we want is to end up with the TA situation where the problem was never solved in the mechanics leading to all sorts of gentleman's rules which in turn leads to arguments about what counts as a commander rush, etc.

Give it a break. Stop theory crafting based on wild knee-jerk assumptions. You might have to adjust your scouting, your builds and your responses to NEW threats. It doesn't mean it's automatically OP, it means there are new powerful strategies and collectively the player base needs to adapt and learn how to counter them. Commander rushing got nerfed hard in the last patch due to lots of units. This patch you can't repair your commander quickly and the metal cost of repair isn't worth the cost of the units you kill. Let's see how it actually plays out. Oh incidentally if you run into me in a game in the next few days prepare for some crazy sh!t coming your way ^^

Challenge accepted.

How is it theory crafting? Did you watch the video? I never said it was op. Just that it is stupid and bad for the game. If someone can give me a non air first way of beating this then there is no problem as far as I am concerned.

Well unless you need to go cray cray on walls and turrets to defend your energy. Bearing in mind the game was over shortly after 3 minutes. How much of this can you do and preserve energy to spam ubercharges unlike your opponent with infinite shots at your base.

Scouting won't help too much unless you are lucky and find his base and he is unlucky and doesn't find yours in time.

Simple disable the Uber Cannon first x minutes.
Ah we'll see how it plays...

Play it out guys and we'll see where the results end up.

Believe me, we've had a lot of internal discussions about these issues. We want to see what you guys come up with. There are a lot of knobs that can be turned if necessary, but we want to see that it is actually necessary.

..... playerkick on commdeath and one comm per player control .... no early commrush if players want to stay in .... unless they realy know what they are doing
gentlemansrules wont mater once ladder gets officialy out.. same for no rush ... moving transports entirely to t2 is a bad idea imo .... it doest make any sense for when you can built capsuletransports from the orbital launcher in the same techlevel as this is by default a more advanced building

I love that you are making big changes in different places between builds. What does the beta exist for, if not to rigourously test how these mechanics play together and what is broken, or not?
Keep up the good work!

P.S. I think people should remember this before getting antsy that others don't agree (not thinking of anyone in particular). We should all be working together to help tear PA a new one each build