[Poll] Balancing Assisting

Here is a suggestion how to make diminish returns with manageable downsides: Make engineers assisting cost +1 energy for each previous assister already assigned. So for first 0 energy penalty, for the second 1, +2 for the third for 3 in total, for 4th +3 for 6 etc. This way for some economies it makes sense to assist and for others not and for all economies in the limit going all engineers assisting is a losing proposition.

An additional engineer costs 1001 energy.



That rate of drop off is too slow.

I think Cola has this right. It's not a good concept that SupCom2 introduced.

SupCom2 engineers that assist factroys are usually bad enough at it, that assisting with more then one is kind of a waste of time.....not that assisting had a cost, there is a reason why you would not what to "encourage" assisting for free.


I still like the casual spin on the macro RTS genre, and would bloody love to see the good parts of SC2 taken and improved, whilst firmly keeping in mind what it did wrong.

But that's for another day, and another topic. As has been said, every game has it's fans, every game.

Nukes and Artillery aren't the only tactics available for busting Turtles. If Ground combat-Defences are balanced properly and your opponent has a huge economy and a tonne of Factories, he should be able to overwhelm your defences.

Also the idea is to remove Nuke-Spam altogether and have minimum build times on Factories by making it so that after 5 Assisting Fabbers (or so) building doesn't get much faster. That way, turtling in your base churning out a Nuke every minute is removed as a tactic and people have an incentive for playing with units other than a Nuke Factory and a couple of hundred Fabricators.

I'm looking forward to Anti-Asteroid Nukes as per the Kickstarter video too
But I think Interplanetary Warfare should be the domain of Orbital Bombardment (Orbital Units which Bomb/Laser the ground). Turning an entire planet into a Nuke Silo to win a system seems boring to me.

Make it 10 then. Anyways it raises quite quickly. Or we can make it add the previous too. If anyone wants to sell me rice for starting with 1 grain on the first and second for a full chess boards worth of squares I will pay them 1000 euros for it if they can deliver.

Even if the drop off rate weren't too slow, an Economic cost would not have any impact. Mass Assisting already messes up the economy with the see-saw demand 200+ Fabbers put out. We need a fix which goes to the source - that is Fabber spam being used to spam Nukes/Sniper bots/Vanguards for an easy Micro win.
Besides which, late-game economies are huge. You would still end up with a buttload of Fabricators assisting and building Nukes so quickly they invalidated other modes of play. The only difference would be a need to make more Storage/Generators.

It's not Energy or Metal that need to be controlled, but Time. I.e. the building efficiency of the Assisting Fabricators after the fifth Assisting Fabricator should drop off extremely sharply to ensure Nuke Spam dies and expansion of Factories is always preferable (long term) to Assisting one Factory with a tonne of Fabricators.

isnt there an indirect minimum build time allready?
the factory stops when the tank or bot runs out of it, so it doesnt matter how fast you produce the tank, there will always be a pause between them

There is, yes. But that couple of second pause between builds is negligible compared to Unassisted Vs. Dozens of Fabricators Assisting.
Also doesn't really come into it when you're spamming out Nukes.

I find nukes to be a very strange thing.

You assist the silo like it's a factory, but the nuke it's self is more like a bullet.

And then the bullet can be shot down like a unit.


So is it the nuke a unit or not?

They're a strange mix between a Missile and a high-value 'Unit'.
Assisting just needs quickly diminishing returns and any Factory should never be more than 125% Productive IMO.
I think over-Assisting kills the need for expansion. I'm sure you remember SupCom's Engineers crowding one T3 Air Factory and just spamming.
Two Factories should always be better than one :/

Well the thing is, you can't assist other turrets and units shoot.

So why can you assist nuke silos, if they are just elaborate turrets?


But if they are a factory, then why is there only once counter to the nuke unit?

SupCom had Missile Launchers which built missiles. Catapults kind of impose a time.
I'm comfortable with Nukes being Assistable as they're a resource sink. That is, provided they can't get more than 125% efficient - hopefully we will get other kinds and this strange Missile class will be less of a hybrid.

Yeah, maybe.

Id prefer they be treated like actual units, with lot's of counters and tactics, just like most units.

That's partly why we need a Mobile Anti-Nuke. But the primary problem for me is in the way you get people not even bothering to build more than a couple of Factories, using Fabricators to spam more Fabricators and then using those hundreds of Fabricators to build Nukes in a matter of seconds.
That is a problem with Assisting. I've edited my OP to provide a clear vision of the changes which I feel would shift the focus away from this style of play (which is, unfortunately, by far the most common).

I love spamming factorys!

Not gonna lie, I have used the 250+ Bot Assisting Nuke Tactic many times. It's dull as hell but the only way to win when any Army you send out gets nuked/destroyed by Air. And no number of Mobile Anti-Nukes or Flak is gonna stop a Nuke every minute lol.

True, although I do find that my ground forces are fairly decent even against enemy aircraft.

And I find that the nuke a minute this only happens when the player doing so is uncontested on another planet.

Just like bombers, some get through, some don't.

It's strategy that a player uses it's units to their fullest potential, so facing that many nukes is expected where you can least defend them.

Saying that "one always get through" mean that you are playing against an opponent who is doing this deliberately, not that they are by essence unstoppable.

Yeah Ground-Air has gotten better.

As per my OP, I host 10-Player FFA on an 800 Radius and it's often a case of Nuke spam winning the day.
The difference is, if one Nuke gets through then that's your entire Army gone. Nukes need to take longer to build so that whoever is only building Nukes can be overwhelmed by a sustained attack. They shouldn't be something that's spammed. If you're going to have a lot of Nukes then you make a lot of Nuke Factories and hope you have enough time to make a massive silo full of them. Otherwise that guy churning out a Nuke (or several) a minute will be unstoppable.

Well of course nukes have the potential to wipe an army in a single shot, however there are ways to deal with this.

The use of transports, and preventing your force from clumping up should help against enemy nukes, or at least get them to waste their shots.

Small raiding groups of AA and artillery should draw enough attention from your enemy to divert significant attention away from un-attacked borders for you and other players to bring them down.

Of course FFA's are usually always won by those who either fight last, or are simply left alone after being attacked.

Try to use your intelligence to decipher who is attempt this tactic, and form temporary coalitions to deal with them, rat them out, tell everyone about their base, where their nukes are, what they defences are and the like.

Get the other players to go all out in desperations while you hold some of your forces back, whilst leading the charge as a act of 'good faith', allowing you to defeat multiple players at once, who have expended their forces.

FFA's are weird like that....they don't conform to the normal one team vs another kinda formula, where you have one enemy force to fight, even if commanded by many players.

I'm kind of thinking that nukes should be treated as a turret with recharging ammunition, but their rate of recharge should not be increased by excess power after a certain point (200%)


I'm not sure if T2 is a problem with assist, or how much better than T1 T2 is. In most cases players don't assist T1.