Laser turrets are too cheap/T1 land armies have vanished

So it's the walls, not the turrets at all?
That would make this topic highly confusing.

Well:

My post was meant to address the current situation. Further changes of other units can always affect the balancing.

Nevertheless:
1) With low cost, you build when it is clear where the units come from, so it will always have units coming by (I don't know if the cost is linear to the building time; so a longer building time would also fix this issue).
2) Even if this doesn't happen: Say you got a metal spot and build 1 turret and some T1 raiding force comes in. If the player scouts the turret they will leave the spot alone and have to go elsewhere. That is not really a loss for you unless the tower is very expensive, because you prevented your enemy from doing something, he loses time, you protected your income. The decision: "Do I leave this unprotected or do I place a turret?" is not that big if the drawback (loss of metal) for placing a turret is very small.

Drawbacks are only effective if they force you to make decisions. Like the one I pointed out or decisions like: "Will I let my fabber build another turret for x seconds or will I go on to the next Metal spot and leave this place unprotected?"

I'm talking about the 2 barreled ones. And I'm not saying that "being stationary" as one feature alone is not a drawback.

I think the problem is totally with the towers. Walls simply emphasise the problem and are in themselves an issue I suspect that'll need to be addressed, but you don't need them to get towers everywhere and have hugely favourable confrontations in terms of metal.

Right now the only way to break through heavy turret play is T2. T1 has no tools to trade with turrets at least a tiny bit effectively. Obviously turrets must trade better with units to justify their existence but right now the balance feels way off in favour of turrets. Introducing t1 artillery or increasing the cost of turrets should fix the problem. Artillery will be nice which will add more depth to t1 units. In case they dont want to do this, the increase of cost will be good so the turret will become a choice instead a no-brain thing to build at each expo.

The problem of turrets is also connected to the economy. T2 Power is more cost effective than T1 and T2 mexes are almost as good as T1. This makes turtling more prevalent because you don't really have to expand that much because you can just tech to T2 and have as good economy as someone who tries to control whole planet with T1.
If we make T1 economy more efficient like it was in Supreme Commander and we couple it with solutions above I hope we will reach good balance of turrets.

Everything is too cheap. I remember back when they removed a whole bunch of the mass from the planet because there was simply too much. The 'fix' for nuke spamming by reducing the cost of all units simply reverted this change again. Its great being able to spam soo many units, but there does need to be a limit income wise.

Would you say it has something to do with the T2 extractors?

T2 extractors have always been a problem, but they are not the source of the problem.

1) Setup enough units outside base to protect fabbers.
2) Build a couple defensive turrets.
3) Build artillary.

The opponent has to come to you, or your artillery kills his turrets.

Does this work?

Just wanted so say guys - I am very glad that you people generally agree that turrets and T1 ground are problematic right now.

Not in T1. The best you could do would be to build a Pelter in range of his turrets, but Pelters are relatively expensive (1500 metal) and not very fast killers. (Really they should probably consider buffing Pelters a bit. I find them to be fairly useless now.) Your opponent will have so much time to deal with it that what's likely to happen is he rushes to T2 and comes out and kills you with his shiny new T2 units.


I think the best solution may be a T1 artillery tank. T2 shellers are excellent and will eventually chew through any static defense line but T1 doesn't have anything like this. I think 3 laser turrets behind walls will quite possibly defeat any number of T1 attackers.

I don't find the T1 flame tank to be that useful either. Its relatively good at soaking up damage but not good enough to challenge T1 turrets.

Basically I think turrets should exist to provide back-up to your own units and to slow down attackers. This works well in T2. You can't just rush through a bunch of turrets but you can push slowly forward with Shellers clearing the path. There's no T1 equivalent.

The main attacks I make in T1 are little raids to try and clear out unprotected T1 mex. I'll attack if there are no turrets up but even one turret with a wall is murderous on T1 units.

If A 2 turret defending 3 mex protect the mex for 15 seconds longer it has earned cost. That's before the 10 ants it will kill in doing so. Even at 600 it's a no brainer. Yes of course they are stationary but you build them in places you know the enemy wants to attack not in the middle of nowhere.

I think the pelter could do with a tweak, it is s useful support against shellers, but for its cost it's no where near as good. Better range, but lower damage, lower splash and lower DPS.

The inferno definitely seems useless, just isn't tanky enough to do its job at that speed.

Im not a fan of artillery range boosts.

But how do you feel about the use of energy costs for all defences to fire?

I was outlining its existing characteristics, not suggesting changes.

I dislike linking energy to defences. Energy is far too variable and the tools far too inadequate to control it properly. You start linking key elements to energy and I want a full control panel of what is using energy to do what and where, with the ability to pause them. And that doesn't sound like fun. Defences are already punished for loss of energy by the loss of radar.

I don't think the pelter is any solution to this. Countering static defenses with more static defenses eventually grinds the game to a halt.

and thats exactly what the t1 turrets are for as counter, and i think why they got so cheap. when t1 turret is too expansive you cannot build it in time before the first dox arrive and destroy your expansion.
think about what was the situation before turrets got cheaper? when units got cheaper turrets were merely useless because you got overun long before you could build one, so this got changed.
the balance is far away from being perfect by now, but the generel idea of having a defence against those small early raids is not wrong in my oppinion.

I'm not a big fan of the t1 crappy unit - t2 awesome unit dichotomy. I think t2 should be more about support and special abilities than a straight upgrade. And then t1 can be buffed to the level of t2

T2 tank should be replaced with a much more expensive bigger sized model. Super-tank with special alt fire abilities

T2 short range tank - temporary speed boost with cooldown.

T1 long range tank - weaker version of commander weapon.

It's not like one or two double laser turrets will destroy a big mass of units. If the opponent builds a few turrets in front of my factories I will go a round his defenses. If he has one or two turrets on sides I will usually brakethrough, if I will not then I will move my units to attack his base from different angle and I will brake through or continue the last step. Eventually he will waste lots of resources on turrets and be unable to expand due to beeing encircled. Turrets are not op in my opinion. Maybe there could be a t1 artilery with longer range like it was in Supcom, but I'm not sure if that would not brake the balance, since how would you counter a t1 mobile artilery which can evade the shoots of artilery?
By the way Pa is getting more like Ta were turrets were really powerful, but maps were smaller giving less opportunities to attack from different angles.

I

I never played supcom. The story seemed too childish. But TA was amazing.