[Poll] Balancing Assisting

Transports at the moment can't carry multiple units. In the Battle of the Beasts Tournament they were just used to snipe Commanders with Vanguards in some Starcraft-Style Micro which, apart from being boring, repetative and frustrating has no place in a Macro game.

If you don't clump your forces up you get taken out by Air.
If you use teleports, you get nuked.

Raiding groups won't stop them sending a nuke at your army blob. At least if Nukes couldn't be built so quickly your second blob would get to the opponent before another Nuke could be built.

These problems are in big Team Games too. In the Tournament we saw Nuke-Rushing flattening bases before armies could even be built.

I agree diplomacy is important, but really we're just making the best of some dodgy gameplay elements.

But you can't super charge other turrets, so why is the nuke except from the rest? That seems kinda silly to me to have one of exclusions like that.

How does increased energy demand not address right into this situation? Fabber spam happens because it's cost efficent way of having build power. The additional need to make storage/generaotrs is not trivial. If you need to have x4 the infrastructure to properly spam there is atleast a significant timing difference. There also things like a non-assister being able to get more nukes / whatever when he builds "naturally". That mass going into power generators isn't nothing. You can by build power with mass and energy by making engineers. A nerf to building power directly would be very hard to convey. On the other hand energy is quite a direct signal as the player has a pretty steady feedback relationship with the storage bars.

At additional 200 energy per assister using 5 assisters would consume 9000 energy 3000 which of it would be penalty, that requires about double the amount of power gens to support than with unasssited, at 9 assisters you would use 4 times the energy infrastructure and at 17 ten times. Is this steep enough?

And you can't affect nuke spam amount by division of engineering power between the launcher and assisters. There will be just more launchers. I guess limiting assisting impact only affects at what point you can start purchasing nuke launch power. But with exponential economy requiring "fresh" separate engineering power will just trivially delay the nuke deployment as you use "traditional" engineering power to purchase it anyway.

I think because it takes an offensive role and is so devastating, the option to try and get it built quicker is valuable.

So? Build transports 1 to 1, its not really that hard. And there is always going to be starcraft like micro you can do, doesn't mean that the payoff will be worth the effort most of the time.

And really you don't need to clump up as much as you would think, you can even send out small groups of AA with the exact purpose to drawn aircraft attention, as most of the time is a good trade.

Raiding groups will however force your enemy to respond to your attacks, and if all they have is nukes, then how do the defend themselves? Your remaining army should be safe in your base.

But overall, I see problems with assisting, and the WHOLE nuke game mechanic in it's entirety.

I am aware, that wasn't my point.

My point was that if it treated like a turret, then you should have NO ability to assist it's ability to fire, just like other turrets.

Well it's not really a Turret as it (should) take ages to use, and is a single-use devastating weapon.

I see where you're coming from and agree an economic incentive would be more obvious, however I don't like the prospect of Economies getting tanked because of too many assisting Engineers. And as I said the workaround would just be a larger economy. You would still get people spamming Nukes. I think my OP provides a solution which wouldn't need penalties to the economy and would encourage players to focus on expanding Factories and Units, rather than expanding their economy in order to absorb Economic penalties and be able to Nuke Spam. With my system we'd get Armies for extra Economic output. With yours, we'd get more Eco for more of the same, with resources sinking into penalties and not into units which run around shooting things.

And yes, there would be more Launchers. But as I said in my OP, they would a long time to build, and then the Nukes would take a long time to build. And by that time, your opponent may have a dozen or more Land factories, and you may have an army on your doorstep.

Well, no it's not.

It functions as a manual use artillery turret.

No single use about it.

But a turret none the less, put under the factory tab, with a counter like it's a factory that builds units.

So I don't understand why is gets to be a hybreed, but with out such diverse counters or weak-points.

*shrug* I see what you mean. Because it's so powerful people like the option of sinking some extra resources in.

Then like a turret, they should be building more, not uberpowering just the one.

Hence my OP. No more than 125% Efficiency

Heh, id prefer 100% naturally, or a properly balanced game with interesting counters to everything that don't reply prevention tactics, or shooting at bullets instead of units.

You can dance around your limit by making more engineers ie turning it into an economic nerf. The economy will just be stalling on engineers being built. Our proposals have very similar economic effects. In my proposal the incentives for going factories/armies is very similar fewer ecolimiter drawbacks in comparison.
And yes, there would be more Launchers. But as I said in my OP, they would a long time to build, and then the Nukes would take a long time to build. And by that time, your opponent may have a dozen or more Land factories, and you may have an army on your doorstep.[/quote] The long build time will be countered by the proportional increase in engineers. And the nuke build time will affect only the launch of the first nuke. Subsequent nukes will not be affected. Thus nuke spam will be largely unaffected.

Well actually my OP states that Assisted Factory efficiencies would be locked at 125% (+10% if you had a Commander Assisting). So no you couldn't get above the limit and spam by making more engineers. Something could only be built so much faster than its base rate.

Also as I said, the Economy would go directly into producing things, not onto penalties for assisting with a load of engineers because doing so would have no effect in my system.

As far as I am aware, turrets do not charge like a capacitor. If there is X energy available in storage, they fire. If you have 100,000 energy in storage 1000 energy per shot, and 1200 energy income you can continue to fire into infinity.

Bearing in mind that here, turrets are pelters.

My idea of the charging time was to give it a minimum build time and to cap the amount of extra energy that can go into making the nuke fire faster.

Building a new launcher would create that many more assister slots. You would just trade the annoyance of nuke assisting into being annoyed by nuke launcher spam. This is even true with 100% locked efficiency.

Realise that capping the per launcher "nuking power" doesn't limit the per player "nuking power". If you are trying to suggest that the per player "nuking power" should be capped or hindered that is way more radical a change (maybe make uranium a new resource or something?). And it would not have that much to do with engineers.

I just don't like why it should be treated any differently to other artillery.

Short of having like 50 Launchers all staggered to finish within a minute of each other there would be no way of working around fixed build times as you suggest. That would be a huge economic drain, take time to set up and wouldn't be economically viable compared with how many Factories and armies could be built in the time it took to set up. It's not like you're building 50 Launchers simultaneously the moment you hit T2 - remember that construction would have fixed build times too. The scenario you imagine would take an inordinate amount of time to set up.
Besides which, this is about more than nukes. Two Factories should always be able to build faster than one. Macro!

You don't need to, note that the 50 launchers would be staggered over 50 minutes and the battery would be fully operational when the first launcher is (when you have paid substantially less than 50 launchers) as the launchers can fire just-in-time.

Wouldn't it be macro either way? There is less to argue at that front because you are "pro unit spam". I do wonder what would need to change in unit spam for it to be objectionable for the same reasons nuke spam is? I am guessing that if you could store "unit build power" in that you would have a factory not spitting any units and then later having "spurts" of units would that be the relevant change?

I guess with nukes it's more important to reach "outnuking" than actually score kills with nukes. With units it seems doing stuff when you don't have a swarm yet is reasonable (althought it could be argued that T1 should be skipped ie that half a tank called a unit cannon is not worth the time wait till you can make vanguards). It seems also that with units it's okay to have "if you can make more units you should". Having "if you can make more nukes you should" seems more objectionable. Maybe increasing the bad consequences of "overnuking" should be increased. Theorethically you could use the mass used in a nuke elsewhere but I have a hard time thinking of a way that has a payoff sooner than a nuke hits (units have to walk etc). One such downside could be having to reveal the launch location (such as in defcon) (why is my orbital radar not seeing it does it really fly low enough to be in air?) but it seems like too small of a downside. Game mechanically it could be interesting to having to aim the nuke before the missile starts building only having the option to not fire if the location is no longer relevant, that way the nonrecoupablessness would be the cost.

Actually it seems that making nukes non-backoffable might be the thing, it should be hard to bounce back to other strategies once you go nuclear. Now the engineers with their flexibility cover too much of the inflexibility that the facility needs to have. I guess in an ideal "overnuker loses" faces a situation where they either have anti-nuked targets and sparse targets making firing at antinukes ineffective and firing at sparse targets too overkill to be worth the cost, the nuke(s) they have built will turn into dead weigth. I guess the game has too much supply for dense targets for that situation to arise naturally (or something for the metagame just to take into account?). Even a place heavily riddeled with antinukes is dense enough to be worth nuking if at all possible througt overloading. So if you can build them you can always launch them profitably (or have already won). Hmm if you could build significantly cheaper fake versions of structures you could provide more sparse victims to nukes. Anyway the propabability of wasting a nuke seems that it should be increased.

How about this: All engineers to be used in a nuke launcher need to be present at laying down of the structure and are sacrificed to be part of the launcher permanently? This increases the build power cost of nukes as they can't be part of the unit spam machinery as the nuke is building (and can't contribute to it), as well as increasing sunk costs of the launcher,

sounds like another interesting option. I just think that in general, making an anti-nuke missile (or other form of ammunition for nuke defense) should be cheap or free. This would change the gameplay to focus much less on overwhelming their nuke defense, and make it focus on destroying their defense with armies or whatnot.