Exponential Detriment to Assisting

Right now basic units aren't valid and it's a race to get to Advanced. First person to get there has a huge advantage.

I miss the days of beta where we had dozens and dozens of factories and hundreds and hundreds of basic units. Nukes were rare and it was all about unit quantity and unit movement.

What if assisting had an exponential detriment? The first... three fabbers use the base amount of metal and energy. But then the more fabbers you assist onto the ____, the more energy they consume and eventually start building with less metal.

That'll force us back to building lots of factories, increase the strategy involved, majorly nerf the advanced factory assistance, and whatnot.

I like it but I think it's non-intuitive.

I would be more tempted to suggest that things like nukes and halleys should charge up at a fixed rate rather than let "fabrication" be the driving force of how long it takes them to be ready to fire.

No. Fix t1 turrets, all your problems go away.

Scathis, are you listening at all? FIX THEM. PLEASE.

You miss the point. There is nothing to do with assisting. The problem come from :

1. T2 is too easy to reach
2. T1 becomes useless when T2 is arrived
3. T1 are not a threat in the early game because turrets are insanely strong

I think there are a lot more elegant ways to accomplish this than to add an arbitrary rule. For example, you could make fabbers larger and give them a shorter range so that fewer of them could actually assist the factory. You could make T1 factories cheaper or make factories more energy efficient (or fabbers less energy efficient). You could also add a "warm-up" time to a fabbers nanolathe so that they all take a moment once the factory starts, which acts as a sort of "minimum build time" regardless of how many fabbers you have.

Personally, I think fabbers should be larger regardless, they get lost in the crowd too easily currently.

While I am sure you are a nice guy.

The idea that everything stems from turrets, needs to be taken out side, in the rain and shot.

Not all of the problems.

A lot of them go away, but not all.

Advanced is still too easy to obtain and completely invalidates everything else once it's reached. It's very easy to practically obtain advanced at about 5 minutes. It used to be 10+ minutes.

But right now PA is all about rushing to advanced.

Advanced units need a serious nerfing.

Or, to quite frankly remove the less efficient chaff of T1 units, and have the commander start in T2.

I don't really enjoy micromanaging a pile of factories.
Why should we be forced into doing this?

I like this part however:
"Nukes were rare and it was all about unit quantity and unit movement"
Perhaps nukes should not be treated as a factory. We may actually get to use the units that we build.

Also. I think one of the reasons why we haven't had any balance changes in the past two weeks is because they didn't want to screw over tournament players right before the tournament.

I'm guessing we'll get some big balance changes within the next week or so.

Except you don't have to micromanage factories. Input a build queue, turn on infinite build, and never have to worry about that factory again.

So actually you agree with me, assisting has nothing to do with that.

As I mentioned in the other thread, personally I don't think we need to discourage assisting. I think we need to reduce metal output across the board.

At the moment, you have so much metal by 10 minutes in the game that you can have all t1, t2 and orbital factories up and running. It removes the early play. Turrets are also easy to spam due to lots of resources. The game currently plays like a metal map from TA / TA:Spring (for those who haven't played them the maps allow metal extractors to be built anywhere like in early alpha so energy is the only constraint and people build up very quickly).

I actually quite enjoy a metal map from time to time so it's not all bad- however I do enjoy the early game where you can only afford one factory and building a heavy laser turret is a big decision.

A reduction in economy will encourage fighting over metal deposits, and it also means you have to think carefully when to go t2 (or orbital). If the metal production is much lower assisting isn't really an issue any more- yes you can spam fabbers and throw all your resources into 1 factory, but if you don't have unlimited excess metal to throw into it then it makes no ods.

Finally it would also make capturing metal wreckage important which I like. In TA:Spring in particular, controlling a wreckage field after a large battle is very important as it can give you the resource boost you need to tip the game in your favour. Currently it's very rare to be metal constrained so wreckage is more decoration than anything else.

I have a feeling though that Uber don't see it this way, still all I can do is put the idea forward and see what comes back...

Don't copy bad ideas from SupCom2.

I guess I missed that tutorial, I need to do some searching to see if I can find something...
Thanks

This is a terrible suggestion. If you want to dissuade player from assisting factories, increase their efficiency and possibly their build power. Giving fabricators a build power decided by some arbitrary exponential decay, power or logarithmic function of the number of fabbers assisting alongside it is complex, unintuitive and unnecessary.

There's an icon on the sidebar when you have a factory clicked. It's the one at the bottom. Click on it and it'll switch the factory to infinite build mode.

Eh?
Was that in early beta? Because from what I remember nukes finished off pretty much every game in Beta.

There was a point were nukes became good. Before that indeed nobody build them.

I don't consider it a bad idea.

All assisting, or none is easy to learn (Although you could assist with engineers, there was little point).

buahahaha! you think he listens? if anything about certain playtests we have seen, all he is doing is using a random number generator to pick units, their attributes, and then their values!