Internal Playtest – Unit Balance Changes, Econ Changes, Combat vs Turrets, Nav Fixes

In brief, lets all cool our insula's people and stick to blowing up robots. Pic is only tangentially related. Time to go to work, may the planets be ever falling on your head.

Let's get back on track

I admit to have freaked out pretty much when I've seen the LiveStream. Sorry for that. But I frankly completely dislike the direction taken by this experimental test.

So, if you want feedback from us, here comes my 2cents.

T2 needs to be an entirely different things than T1, and not a direct upgrade. How can you avoid to invalidate T1 when T2 is the same, just more powerful?

This happens way too much in PA, perhaps Navy is the only part where this is not so evident. How ironic.

Simplicity is always the key, really always in design. T1 should be the fundamental part of the game, we should be able to stay just with it and have the basic units available already. Because it's easy to understand what it does, it is flexible, and players will be able to develop multiple strategies at ease. Even newbies. That's fun.

Upgrades are no fun, they simply add stress. Fail.

New possibilities, on the other hand, are fun because they add creativity.

T2 should add specialized roles, enabling players to explore different tactics, but not just a different strategy.

I explain better. So far T2 is just a better strategy. If you do not switch into T2 with the right tempo, you're screwed. How this add fun to the game? It add complexity in the form of time, and stress on the player. It is no fun.

People stop playing no fun games pretty quickly. And game that adds unnecessary stress, are no fun.

In order to slow down the switch into T2 you made T2 much more expensive, and consequently T2 eco much more efficient. This screws the game pretty much.

Instead, keep T1 and T2 eco very close, with a minimal advantage for T2, so that expansion and territorial domination will always be important. Also, you will not have that rampage in the eco, where there isn't anything that expensive we can build, anyway.

Avoid simply upgrades and buffing to units (T1/T2 tanks, T1/T2 flamethrowers, T2/T2 bomber and fighters, T1/T2 Laser Turrets... what the heck... this game seems based on direct upgrades in every part!).

And instead make T1 and T2 units different. Really different, not just longer range, higher damage, more HP... c'mon, you can do much better than that!

When T1 and T2 units will no longer be a copy of each other with some buffs, but complementary to each other, balancing will be much easier and the game more fun to play.

Stop trying to invalidate the very reason of the Unit Cannon to be. Teleporters will never be enough, they're really a different thing. And Annihilate a planet is fun at first, but it becomes boring pretty fast. So we need a better Orbital gameplay.

But a better Orbital doesn't come magically changing or buffing Anchors. You need to add more units in the pot, where is no other solution, really. If I saw it right, this experiment with Anchors is pathetic.

Also, stop pushing on your ideas that the game has a solution. I've seen walls becoming stronger and stronger after every critic, so that you have now to screw Turrets and Units in order to deal with it. Please refrain from this reactions to feedback, making some units so strong than we will regret made fun of it, like the Vanguards.

It looks like you have an idea, and pursue it, despite what ever feedback you get from the Community. And it looks like you went pretty far in this.

Scathis, I'm speaking with you

These changes sound pretty good, especially the cost of nukes and anti-nukes. It will mean more large scale warfare than just popping nukes at each other.

Just read through this thread... Wow! That's allot of drama.

Imo the only thing Brian did wrong here was his wording, his concerns aren't unreasonable.

Personally I'd very much like the devs to keep us in the loop on these tests as it gives its the opportunity to comment. What would be even better would be for them to enable the proposed new launcher that allows us multiple versions of the game as I agree the proof is in the pudding so to speak.

What looks like a bad idea on paper might actually work well (just as good ideas in theory often fail).

This might also have to do with the fact that T2 factories are super large - I often find myself troubled finding the space to build lots of T2 factories. Why are they bigger anyway? The units which come out are not really bigger at all.

Have you thought about tuning T2 down overall - you know, more towards a "specialist" role - so T2 is not such a big upgrade as it is now?

That's what I would LOVE to see.

That's one of the best ways to make sure that all units are valid at all stages of the game.

I think it may be useful to move the conversation away from picking on someone's foibles, and back towards constructive analysis of the balance presented in the playtest.

Believe me, I very much understand and praise the value of experimentation. It comes with the job. I also think it's very very important that these experiments don't happen in a vacuum. Your best opportunity to show people that you are on the right track is to show them the results of these experiments and say "look, we tried what you asked for, and it doesn't work".

With that in mind, the solution is not less experimentation, but more experimentation. You guys have presented a testable hypothesis - that ramping up adv. eco and adv. cost will increase the value of basic units by making them proportionally cheaper compared to adv. Thus player will have more options, and the game will be interesting. That is a hypothesis which is testable, and may even be accurate.

However, many individuals in the community have a corollary to that hypothesis. Namely that the economic output of the adv. mex is so much greater than basic, that the most critical component of the game will be focused around the correct time to switch to adv. The contention is that placing such a large weight on this one decision is not really that much fun, and subtracts from other gains which your proposed system may make. Instead the suggestion is made that basic and advanced should be brought closer together in terms of economic and combat effectiveness. This is also a testable hypothesis.

Although I'm sure it comes as no suprise what my suggestion is, I'm going to say it anyway. Why not treat this as scientifically as possible. You've done one set of experiments. Why not do the other set as well? Again, these would be tests with no expectation to make it in the final game, and would be just as temporary and experimental as the ones you've just carried out. Stream them just as much as you have done with these tests, and then everyone has evidence to say which is the better approach, if any.

The best possible solution would be to use the launcher's build options system to release two different builds, with a controlled selection of balance changes, and see which one becomes more popular amongst players. However, I can understand why this may be difficult for you to do if it involves splitting server resources between the two builds, so it's only something I would suggest if it is reasonably achievable with the present time and manpower constraints.

If you are confident that these changes are the best way to improve the game, then the best way to show this is to demonstrate that changes to the contrary don't work. I cannot speak for the community here, but I suspect that this suggestion would be supported and would help a lot of people understand the issues at work here.

This is a visual feedback to let players understand very quickly that these factories are advanced.

Science! It simply works!


Have you tried a balance build with shorter range and/or weaker shots for turrets. Making them shoot one more time at a dox or an ant to take it down would make a huge difference.

-Off topic: @YourLocalMadSci, I know everything is with safety important in your thread(s), but my suggestion would be that you could make a tl;dr at the end of your posts, that not only counts for you, but you normally make long posts and it is not so easy and fluid to read for a non-native English speaker so only a little suggestion.

This should rather be solved by making the factories themselves more distinct instead of a poor "let's make them bigger" band-aid fix.

While on the subject of experimentation - what would be the chances of making something available so that willing community members could test experimental builds out too? As has been said in several places, the only way to really know how the changes affect balance is to play them.

I know you've still got that experimental cross-platform launcher kicking around somewhere; given the increasing emphasis on experimentation of late, it strikes me as the ideal time to put something out that enables people to do some of the testing for you.

I bet Uber will find the sweet spot, balancing a game is very hard. First they need to find the limits, like when does the game start to become boring with expensive T2 or inexpensive. Afterwards they search why the game starts to become less fun and then they will try to balance it so that the best of both is the end result. But the biggest problem is: you cannot please everyone.

We should tell them what exactly we don't like about these changes, why and how we think it will be better. Then the team can think about these things and consider what the best option will be.

So for me: I like the idea to make more T2 factories more quickly when you are at T2. But I do not think that a huge increase of economy will solve this because when someone finally hits T2 they will have a mayor advantage above people who are still at T1 because they can get a lot of factories running quickly. So a solution will be to nerf T2 units so that the T2 advantage on the unit side is not that big. I do like the idea of T2 being specialized whereas T1 are the standard units like tanks, artillery etc. and T2 are special units like snipers or medics or inferno's.

I also am not sure about anchors attacking the ground, they now look like orbital invasion fleets. But if they are balanced right with the umbrella's and fighters I guess it will be okay. I prefer to use anchors to get a fabber through to build a foothold on the planet with a teleporter. But if someone has turrets or defences everywhere around the planet there should be a way to attack an area so maybe ground attacking anchors will serve this instead of having to nuke that area first.

Doxes as grenadiers, hmm I liked them how they were. Maybe we could use an additional grenadier unit? I also liked how the walls around a turret really defended the turret so maybe lower the health of walls so a normal T1 army can really get through a wall instead of being popcorned by the turret. So the wall should be destroyed a bit more quickly when a small army of T1 units are all shooting at it. But walls should not become that weak that they are unusable. Because I like to use walls to direct the enemy armies to places where my defences are higher. So I build a wall and leave a pretty big hole in it somewhere where there are not that many buildings in my base so I can defend that hole more easily.
Grenadiers can be nice if they do not have that much damage, so that we have the time to send our own armies to deal with the grenadiers attacking over the walls.

I like the nerf on T2 air because a 50 unit T2 gunship fleet almost always succeeded in a commander snipe. So I guess if they are not slowed too much that this is a nice change. The flak cannons should be dealing with the T2 air just like the turrets do on land. But the planes should not be shot down too easily so that they do have a chance to destroy the turret. I had a game once where I had a 200 unit fleet of T1 air units which all were destroyed before coming in firing range of a T2 ship. So that was really annoying to see my fleet disappear before they even fired a shot.

Nukes should be a bit more expensive when the econ is a more but not too much so that a few antinukes that build quickly will be build much faster than the nukes. Otherwise you can just keep trying to nuke but the cheap antinukes make them unusable.

Also the costs of T2 buildings have to be changed if the economy is a lot higher in T2.

For the rest, nice to see you guys try some economy things. I am sure that these experiments will result in a well balanced game in the end.

Another possibility might be that, because Scathis has personal access to the dev team, he can afford to give them really bad balance changes and instruct them to play a certain way in spite of it, to see how it behaves in certain scenarios or playstyles. Whereas if you made such a change 'live' to uncontrolled playtesters, they'd almost certainly do nothing more than abuse the hell out of whatever is overpowered for the moment, and not probe the nuances of, say, an SXX/anchor combined arms fleet.

That's kinda the point. If something is abusable, then there is no point in ignoring it and telling people that they are "playing wrong". Such abuses need to be found, and if there is one thing that good players are good at, it is finding the best ways to min-max the system and find exploits.

I'm in the process of trying to figure out how to do a 'virtual pull a strategy from a hat' so we can test stuff like that. At the moment it looks like it will just rely on someone doing an actual hat-pull and then assigning starts to players and monitoring the game - which is probably a good solution anyway, to have the puppetmaster as a spectator.

Cleaned up the thread a bit. Please keep to the topic, and use the report function if you have any issues with a post.

Carry on

I'm not sure what the best fix for T1 and turrets is, I think it's great they are trying out some more radical stuff there though. Lots of good ideas in this thread, and Uber has shown they can come up with some excellent and nuanced solutions - just look at the very elegant fix to com rushes (the change in com health + uber cannon buff). What I want to see more than anything however is an attempt to introduce simple planet-to-planet raider units. 1 ground, 1 air, 1 bot, expensive, T2 units, highly inefficient for on planet war but but good enough to pump out 20 or 30 and begin a land invasion. I am willing to wait and see if Anchor shooting down can fix it, but I'm a big fan of the theory that orbital should be supplemental + information based and not a primary means of invasion.

I still vote for individual unit health having relevance (as per TA), rather than substituting the Health stat for unit quantity. When things die so quick it really messes up the ability to balance, as the range of useful values is so limited - rate of fire and AOE are drastically increased in effectiveness (and must therefore be used carefully), and actual damage matters less (only the boundaries between killing things in 1/2/3 hits actually matters). Range becomes all-powerful, as even a small range difference can allow massive casualties to be inflicted with little to none taken.

I really don't get why this isn't considered by Uber.

Agreed, and this also feeds back into the inaccuracy thread as well; many units are just too accurate! Even at max range, most units can hit their targets a very high percentage of the time, reducing scope for differentiation via accuracy as well.