Internal Playtest – Econ Balance Changes and New Teleporter Model - 3/27

It is worth trying, but on single planet games people would just go around making flak and lasers everywhere from orbit.

From what i remember him saying, he actually came in and fixed it after release, rather than being involved in the core design, or was that dorian with the AI (idr)? Regardless, i doubt any one person has creative control over the balance, he may decide the actually balance, but the tiering system would be an issue for the lead designers, rather than a balance issue.

Yeah thought about that too. I don't mind the idea of having a t1 ao bot. Would just tie the layers better imo.

That would encourage people to build umbrellas.

That's bad because i wouldn't be able to do sneaky vanguard-astraeus drops. I vote no.

But that just makes it even easier to lock down a planet. What about an orbital flak unit that blasts the air layer with flak from above? It would make invasions easier and it would also help defend your base from t2 air swarms. It would still be hard to use over another base because umbrellas can kill it fast.

Haha now who is being arbitrary.

Those orbital vanguard drops are a bug exploit anyway. The astraeus shouldn't be dropping from orbit.

That only works because the Astraeus doesn't enter the air layer. When they fix that the Commander will shoot it down himself.

You are mistaken. I was involved with some early balance but I had little to do with the shipping balance.

I was also not involved in FA very much. I had moved on to Demigod.
There is nothing wrong with the tiered system. It's a style of game play. Like all styles, some people love it, same don't.


Also, as far as I know, we only had thoughts about T2 being only "specialized". It's not a hard and fast rule. There is nothing wrong with direct upgrades and through our testing and balancing we found it necessary to have some.

Please! No!

Bug as a feature!

There was one change there that i really like, have you sped up the T1 bots and vehicles? Because they look like they are moving at a very reasonable speed in this play through, and its looking very nice.

We didn't touch speeds... Yet.
This is economy balance. Combat balance comes next.

Hmmm...it's only my opinion of course, but that that was not very reassuring.
It sounds like we are moving in the direction of only building T1 to survive till we reach T2 again.

I'm looking forward to these combat balance changes.

It's gonna be fun watching everyone re-learn how to play.

Ok I was misinformed - I take that back.

I have to say I disagree. Actually making T2 specialist units is awesome from a gameplay and design perspective.

T2 being direct upgrades leads to the following:

- The game becomes a "Who gets T2 first wins" race (we currently have this)
-> Tons of early game strategies get invalidated
- Half of the units are invalidated once a player reaches T2
- There are less unit roles

There are tons of ideas around the forums for making T1 and T2 diverse by not simply increasing their firepower.
A simple example would be a T2 torpedo bomber specialized in taking out ships. Of course normal bombers can hit ships aswell, but a Torpedo bomber can hit ONLY them, but does a lot more damage.

Oh and while I have your attention: Increasing overall unit HP also makes combat a lot more interesting

Hmm its not that hard to get multiple T2 factory's out and build T2 unit spam, or better, assist with a load of units on a factory.
The reason that I (and the others?) go for Nukes or planet smashing and lasers is because that is easyer and less micro heavy and perhaps it is better to deal with that level (beter anti nukes, costlyer but fewer halley's) to achieve more T2 unit combat as well.
(I like the cheaper stronger and smaller teleport )

Just my view on it

The problem with having better units, is thare is no reason AT ALL not to use a better unit.

So if there are going to have to be better units, for some kind of reason.

Then what is the problem with having it in the first tier of units? Why turn this into a tech race game?

The problem is that it takes a really long time for T2 attacks to reach an enemy. Teleporters and transports can help but "keep the teleporter up and running" is almost a separate minigame as the enemy aims to kill it.

Meanwhile, it's very easy to suddenly throw your entire economy into nuke spam or orbital lasers or huge gunship fleets, all of which can demonstrate their usefulness far quicker than a bunch of T2 land factories given the same investment of time and concentration.

This is why I think the solution was actually to let players get to T2 relatively easily but then slow down the T2 economy. Like if a "large economy" was 200 metal/second, you could keep fighting in T1 with some T2 help. "Throwing your entire economy into nukes" would still take a long time to build one and land attacks would have plenty of time to show up and start pushing.

Whereas when a "large economy" is 1000 metal/second or potentially far higher, you can throw all that into a nuke and have it ready to fire before your enemy's equivalent force in ground forces has even arrived, much less started to really pressure you.


Just to be clear, the ratio I see as worrying is "travel time vs metal income". You can solve it by decreasing travel time or decreasing metal income. Nerfing the T2 economy will actually do both....travel time will decrease as bases are forced to expand to get more metal and metal income will decrease by simply removing the T2 mex from the game (I would then set the T1 mex to maybe 14/second and see how that feels.)

I like the idea of big orbital armored transports taking ground units to invade planets, anchors clearing the way, orbital fighters that can enter or attack the air layer clearing the air as discussed deeply on other threads, and SSX and other orbital bombardment units clearing the ground for the transports. yes nukes and asteroid hits can help but the orbital units should be the ones doing the invasion. After the orbital invasion and clearing of a patch of ground by the units in the transports, use some t2 engineers brought by the orbital transports to set up a simple base then a teleporter (which should take a while) to start the main invasion.

In my view of the teleporter it should be hard to build and very hard to destroy (2->4 nukes should kill it.).

for the transport's unloading mechanism I like the idea of a "beam down" or drop pod system.

Relearn? I already forgot how to play! But I'm excited. The new teleporter model is amazing!