Exponential Detriment to Assisting

The generator for the t1 tank name might be unstable.

I think he listens to people who aren't overreacting and being the dark pessimistic guy in the corner.

Seriously. Give him some love and MAYBE he'll give some back.

I dont like the idea of having tons of factories just to achieve an army. Bases can be big enough as is.

If anything it should be reverse, the more you assist something the harder it hits your economy.

An rts should be about tactics, not a race to see who gets where first. I still use the hell out of t1 in late game. I mix infernos, spinners and ants, backed up by t2 mobile artillilary. You would be surprised how much better a large t1 army can fight and survive just by mixing a little t2 in the bunch.

Im not going to say if your idea is good or bad until i see the economy get balanced more by uber.

An rts should be about STRATEGY

There. Fixed it for you.

I like the idea of diminishing returns on adding more fabber assistance - it would allow fabber assistance to still be useful, but not act as a total replacement to building more factories.

And it would also seriously limit the flexibility of reactions to your opponent, leaving you to (in a strategic sense) with any project or strategic play as a bit of a crapshoot.

For that, any the weird arbitrary nature of it as a concept: /unsigned.

There are good arguments either side of the fence on the ability to allow the player to have such a powerful form of build power be so adjustable and moveable, in the form of the engineer.

Allowing a player to use them more like a resource, then a builder unit.

But I am (Rather clearly) on the side of not promoting their use as a build power resource.

Isn't this just an incredibly roundabout way to encourage tier 1 use?

Shouldn't the concept just remain simple, as in making tier 2 different and more specialised rather than stronger?

Encouraging the use of 1 unit, doesn't encourage the use of an entire class of units.

How would you specialise Build power?

Sure, the "advanced" Fab has different blueprints in it, but if you equalise its buildpower with that of a basic Fab then you only need one Adv. Fab to start a building and then just have loads of basic Fabs to do the actual building.

Like the combat fabber, it just needs to become good at doing a particular thing, while having a certain weakness as well. Though I'm not experienced enough with RTS like supcom to really grasp what the gameplay implications are, especially when it comes to optimising build power.

But one idea is for example in exchange for a better build speed you could reduce the mobility of advanced fabbers in some way, perhaps in a different way than just nerfing the movement speed. So that it becomes more viable to use T1 to expand, rather than just expanding with T2 straight away. So that T2 becomes more of a choice when you've actually managed to maintain control over your territory.

It's actually easy when you think about it.
Tier 1 units can't assist Tier 2 structures and vice-versa.

Arbitrary restrictions will bite the forum in the *** when you get 50,000 topics about why my engineers can't assist my other engineers.

They are unintuitive.

That's certainly possible, but it does enforce a style of play onto T2 buildings. If that's a style you're happy with, that's fine... but as a design decision you have to be very aware that it precludes the opposite option.

Scathis has been doing a good job, but I find his attitude towards every balance discussion frankly dismissive. I get that he is concerned that we're all watching the same 5 players in casts and forming balance decisions from that, but frankly it's pretty irritating to see even well-backed consensus responded to with "you just haven't found the right strategies yet". It seems more likely that internal uber gameplay doesn't quite reflect the realities of PA in the wild and that while not every issue this (admit-ably somewhat histrionic) community latches onto reflects an actual balance problem, his stance is frankly a bit extreme and dismissive. We've seen how the majority of Uber plays PA and it doesn't reflect the way most of us play. The game has to have a balance learning curve with enjoyable playstyles for new and old players, but there are some clear design issues and I think the conversation could be much more two way.

Again, I think Scathis has done a great job, but frankly I find a lot of his replies here counter-productive (which may be why he's largely stopped posting). Insulating yourself from the reactive nature of a community is understandable, but flat out denying every problem we raise as 'we haven't found the right strategy' is totally counter productive. T1 units are currently obsolete, but judging by Uber and Meta's responses, they don't seem to really believe this is the case. I think it's time to consider a more receptive stance on some of these basic balance issues. Orbital currently sucks and no one on the Dev team is willing to admit this. They can insulate themselves as much as they want but the result come release may be shocking.

But he is right. The worst thing that can happen in a balance process is to play only for like 3 days and go "X is imba!!!!". It is a pretty good thing to let everything sink in a bit. So "you just haven't found the right strategies yet" indeed.

Oh of course, it is a totally legit concern and it is important to insulate the design process from the influence of a few casters/pros, and the natural reactionary nature of forums. But insulation is as dangerous as it is powerful - once you convince yourself that the fans don't know whats going on, you open yourself up to a really circular design process. Like I said, he's doing a great job, but I am a bit worried by the increasing clash between visions on big number things like the effectiveness of T1 (the devs can be seen in multiple casts and places saying that T1 still works), and inherent problems with orbital (watch the tension between Zaphod and Meta in many casts where Meta kind of tries to push the idea that turrets or orbital are really on track for example). I'd just like to see a tiny bit less 'STFU and figure out new strategies' from Scathis and a little more indication that he is at least open to considering these issues.

edit: one thing I increasingly wonder is if balance couldn't be accelerated a bit by releasing lots of rapid fire changes week to week, testing major endpoints. Try a major turret nerf for a week, then reverse it. Try letting teleporters go one way for a week. See what happens if you slash T1 costs. Just go a bit crazy to see where these endpoints are. That was his own professed philosophy if I remember, but I guess i'm just worried they may feel some things are closer to finished than they really are.

Except for the fact that the meta for the game really promotes econ-booming as a strategy. I still haven't figured out a way to make rushing even vaguely viable online. Other than econbooming and techbooming. Both of which ought to have been countered by a viable rush strategy which simply doesn't exist.

An exponential detriment to assisting might be a bit unintuitive, but what about just having all fabbers provide 50% of their metal rate when assisting factories/nukes (while still using the same energy amount)? This reduces the power of mass assist, but in a way that's easier to understand.

The best thing for anyone who claims we haven't found a counter strategy is to provide one. Just one. Not all of them, but just one. Even if it results in RPS.

One plausible reason why people haven't found a strategy would be no strategy exists.