Unlimited Assisting, Game-Ending Weapons and Factory Redundancy

I want both I like explosions.
I just want people to have a silo of 20 Nuke Factories that have taken a while to build in order to devastate on this scale, rather than pumping out a nuke a minute.

This is an cool idea.
The efficiency-cap I suggest (and you find issue with) and the Fabricator-slot cap you suggest are effectively the same thing. It would take a finite number of Fabricators in my system to reach peak efficiency (I suggested in another thread that Adv. Fabs +5% and Basic add 2.5%).

Just so there are no misunderstandings, by 125% I meant the base 100% + 25% Assisting power (though obviously this could be changed for better balance). I picked this number because that way building a new Factory (100%) is always more efficient and cheaper in the long run than fully Assisting for up to four Factories (500%).

I have to disagree with you here. I don't think being able to build a Nuke (or more) a minute is ever going to be good for balance. Nor is being able to build a Holkins/Catapult near instantaneously.
If we only capped Assisting for unit factories then we'd still have these modes of play invalidating most others (as they do now).
I agree game-enders need counters - preferably multiple counters to provide many different options/strategies. I use anti-nukes. However turning my entire economy into an anti-nuke silo because that other guy's turned his economy into a nuke-silo isn't what the spirit of this genre is about for me. That's missile command.

Also, technically with increased cost where you could only afford 2 nukes at a time, not only is that still commander-killing, but you could still spam to bypass antinukes. All you would have to do, is stagger the build of silos, and store them to use at once. So basically, build 2 nukes, build 2 more nukes, build 2 more nukes, fire 6 at once, if you wish then turn power off to 4 and build 2 at a time until you are back up to 6 or just use 2 it would be up to you.

Generally, if I were to come up with a half *** guess on a number of nukes that would feel balanced, I would guess 2 because that is enough to kill a commander, as opposed to the current 6 one could generate and I believe that is even less than 2 minutes where I suggest 2 minutes. 6 feels like enough to cleanse the surface of an entire planet, and 2 feels like enough to kill a commander still and still enough to stockpile nukes as long as you don't plan on having 6 a minute and instead building up slowly to 6.

That's what I meant with easy to build counters. If someone is using 100% their economy to build game enders you will obviously need to invest at least 50% of your in countering otherwise these aren't really game enders (and in this game oyu need some game ender otherwise we can expect 3-6 hour games to be a lot more common). Similarly of enemy would have sent an army of 100 vanguards you'd need something as efficient if not more than that to stop it and that's what I'm suggesting. So if for example the enemy is throwing 100% of their economy into nukes and oyu both have the same economy you'd only need to throw 50% of yours into it. In other words, he can force your game, but can't force a win.

What if the costs of factories were drastically reduced? They all became incredibly cheap so that way it would be stupid not to build a ton of factories.

T1 factories now actually cost 3 T1 fabricators in cost.

I honestly think its the versatility of fabricators that warrants the assisting of one factory instead of building more.

The reason you couldn't do mega-assisting in TA was two-fold - the constructors had limited range and the pathfinding was bad. You couldn't realistically assist a factory with more than a handful of land constructors (let's ignore aircraft for now).

I am very opposed to any arbitrary limit on assisting such as efficiency drop-off or anything that isn't immediately obvious, it's just not in the spirit of these games.

Obviously we can't limit the nanolathe range or break the pathfinding, but I have a potential solution!

How about if each factory has six 'USB ports' sticking out of it, three on each side? A factory can only be assisted by a fabber that is plugged into one of its expansion ports. It's arbitrary, but it would make sense visually and hence not confuse anyone. The nano-streams would do something visual like make the port glow and increase the amount of nanites spraying out of the factory's own nanolathes.

If you selected say 12 fabbers and tell them to go assist a factory, six will plug in and then the other six will revert to idle, meaning that they aren't tied up in a meaningless venture as would happen with diminishing returns.

I dont know if this has already been mentioned or not, but one of the reasons that this is so much of an issue is that mavor decided to remove 'build time' as a discrete balancing factor. Nukes in supcom FA couldnt meaningfully be assisted because they had an ENORMOUS build time cost, and only the launcher could really help.

With build time linked to total mass cost, it makes balancing a bit tricker.

That could work, if done correctly.
Maybe if the price reduction only effected T1 factories, and they were like, 250/300 metal each, but T2 factories stayed the same.

Hm... that'd actually be very interesting.

I think making Factories more economically viable than an army of Assisting engineers would probably be best balanced with more factories being more efficient/less demanding. In the system I proposed, having 4 Assisted Factories (500% Efficiency) would cost more long term than 5 Unassisted Factories (500%) because of the resources all those Assisters consume. So it would be cheaper in terms of operating costs to expand rather than to Assist.

Build time doesn't make sense in the games streaming economy, and is arbitrary.

Currently metal spent is metal output * time.

So for a 32000 nuke, if I spend 1000 metal per sec on it I can pump it out in 32 seconds. If 500, 64.

That makes more sense to me than a nuke always has to be built in 9 minutes.

A cool down would mean your secind nuke would be x minutes away, regardless of how much metal you spent on it. Which makes sense, nukes should not be spammed, given their power.


Trophy, you did not consider how the economy actually works. Your idea is not realistic.

Have you played SC:FA lately/at all? It did make for some very un-intuitive results, but build time can make an effect in a streaming economy, and definitely did in supcom. The idea is that the unit itself had a modifier on how quickly units could deposit mass to it, (as well as energy cost per mass) and in the case of nukes, that modifier was so massive that assisting nukes was essentially impossible.

A fabber had like 3 build power, and the nuke launcher had like 3,000 or something absurdly large. That way, you couldn't meaningfully assist a nuke launcher, even though the nuke wasn't terribly expensive, it just took way to much buildpower to make.

Sorry if I didn't make myself clearer earlier. Its been a while since I played it too.

That is a proportionality thing. Not a minimum build time. We're about to get that for T2 in general.

I misunderstood.

Simple, deactivate factory assist. Easy to implement. Easy to understand.

And then increase the energy effeciency of factories.

That way assisting stays in, since I don't think it should be removed, but it remains in a way that would make it a poor choice in the majority of situations. It'll increase the number of factories required to sustain an army, increase the size of bases, give validity to large armies once again, and more.

And if we drastically reduce the cost of advanced factories and the advanced economy along with it, it'll give validity to basic units if we nerf all advanced units along with it.

Viola. A balanced game.

Not really. But it's a step.

Cello, a well written post.

Yeah, I like this, it wouldn't fix everything but it'd definitely get us closer to the grandiose feel of beta.
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+1 for cheap armies. I too want Assisting to remain if it can, but feel it should be the go-to in desperate situations; not the default. Diminishing returns/economic inefficiency could be alternatives for a production-speed efficiency cap on Factories.

I have 145 hours of SupCom FA played and who knows how many on FAF. It's an extremely fun game Don't get me wrong. However I do think Assisting needs some sort of cap so that people don't end up always rushing for binary play. We should have armies marching across continents, and nukes slowly preparing in the background in an ideal world ^^