WARNING: Wall of Text Stats with no numbers given should come from here: http://pa-db.com/?version=64498 (stable) I was bored so I figured that rather than doing the Language Arts homework that's due tomorrow, I'd come up with some numbers for T2 that would make it more specialized. Stats that were not touched should be those of the current stable build for the most part (Although some of the stats should be like those of the PTE, such as turrets), and those that were touched are changed based on the balance of the stable build. Factories Generally I'm trying to bring the cost of these more in line with T1, along with their production. The determining factor for if you should build these or not should be if the units they build are useful to you at the moment or not, not so much if you can afford it (Although it should still be an investment that you don't want to get too many of them out too quickly; think of how you build pelters). Generally I'm multiplying the cost of the respective T1 factory by 2.25 to get the new costs. Also, in an effort to delay early air harass and make opening builds a bit less gambly (I'm building stingers just in case my opponent builds early bombers although I don't know if he built them because I didn't go air first just to see if he went air first or if my stingers are going to be completely useless because he built dox instead), air is receiving a small nerf in the form of being moved to T1.5 (Meaning the com can't build it). I also considered increasing the costs of all T1 factories by 50% to make them more of an investment, but chose not to as this would make factory early builds less viable and also increase the waiting time before your first factory is done more than I want to have happen. T1 Air: No Longer Buildable by Commanders T1 Vehicle: Energy Usage: 560 (Now bots use 25% less metal, but vehicles use 25% less energy. A fair system.) T2 Air: Cost: 1620 Metal Usage: 16 Energy Usage: 2060 T2 Bot: Cost: 1350 Metal Usage: 20 Energy Usage: 1690 T2 Vehicle: Cost: 1350 Metal Usage: 24 Energy Usage: 1400 T2 Naval: Cost: 1890 Metal Usage: 28 Energy Usage: 2300 Economy T2 metal is an investment to make use of only after expanding becomes cost inefficient due to your opponent's harassment and/or defense of their mexes. As such, although it retains a cost of 750, its production is being reduced to 7. T2 power is something that I struggled coming up with; I settled on increasing their health to that of the com to allow them to survive nukes; their cost has been increased to accommodate this: they are now around 20% less efficient than T1 power. A few changes to T1 eco as well, revolving around making metal the limiting factor early game rather than energy. T1 Metal Extractor: Cost: 225 T1 Energy Plant: Cost: 350 Energy Production: 675 T2 Metal Extractor: Name: Armored Metal Extractor (Could go with advanced, but this name suits their new capabilities better as they aren't quite as advanced vs basic mexes compared to how they were before; their main advantage over basic other than the fact that they can be built on top of them is that they have a much higher health) Metal Production: 7 T2 Energy Plant: Name: Heavy Energy Plant (These do produce much more than basic energy plants, although less efficiently, so armored isn't saying enough about them vs T1 pgens; advanced doesn't say their strength, however) Health: 12500 Cost: 3500 Fabbers This is fairly balanced as it stands now, with T1 fabbers being more efficient cost wise than T2 fabbers, but T2 fabbers having significantly more health. Little change here, other than a reduction in cost for all T2 fabbers to match the new rates for T2 metal being applied. Out of laziness I'm not putting the exact numbers here right now. T1 Naval: Health: 50 -> 100 ORSpeed: 10 -> 12 I like the former option. Ships should be sturdy and not get taken out by bombers in one shot. A difference of 2 speed isn't too big. Some other people will likely disagree with me there though. Commander: Metal Cost: 12500 (I feel like repairing the com should be a bit more viable. It should be costly, but not THAT costly.) Transportable via Pelican: No. Combat Units Ah, the meat of this thread. Some "direct upgrade" style units like the leveler and hornet just need a few tweaks to be fine where they are, whereas others like the Slammer and the Peregrine need some changes to make it so that the same metal cost in them doesn't annihilate their basic brethren. Similar method doesn't mean direct upgrade as I've stated before, and several mitigating factors prevent the leveler, the hornet, and the peregrine from being more useful than the same metal cost in basic units. The slammer has been given a new role however, and a few units have switched factories. Nearly all T2 units are having their cost reduced to account for the change in T2 factory metal usage. The vanguard/inferno stands as the only unit to be removed due to their similarity and the fact that I don't want inferno drops to ruin early game. The Advanced Combat fabber is also removed to reduce fabber overlap. Air combat is being made a bit less instakill, and scouts should now have enough HP to survive one volley from a single dox. Inferno/Vanguard: Merged/Removed Availability: T2 Vehicle Factory Cost: 360 Health: 1250 Damage per Shot: 125 Pounder(Scamper/Ant/UC/Whatever Uber Refers to it as Internally): "The tanks felt too squishy so we buffed them in a way that didn't allow them to do what another unit did almost as well" Speed: 8 HP: 180 Damage per Shot: 30 Skitter: A bit better at scouting. Cost: 60 HP: 25 Spinner: Trying to differentiate them from Stingers. Less burst damage, higher sustained damage, higher HP, higher cost, lower speed. HP: 120 Speed: 10 Rate of Fire: .33 Seconds Damage per Shot: 20 Pelican: Because the two problems with them are no longer problems. Availability: T1 Air Factory Hummingbird: Makes air combat a bit less binary. Damage per Shot: 30 Rate of Fire: .66 Seconds Bumblebee: Give it a higher damage per shot, making it better vs structures. Damage vs units is for the most part ineffective as most of the time the unit is hit by the splash, not the bomb. Cost: 220 Damage: 400 Boom: A buff that makes them better vs dox. Cost: 70 HP: 25 Fabrication Bot Combat: Specializing them. Availability: T2 Bot Factory? Not sure where they should be. Name: Combat Fabrication Bot Cannot: Assist construction. Automatically: Repairs. If the player has a negative metal economy and there is room for 600 metal in storage, they will also reclaim. Cost: 360 Orca: Speed buff. Speed: 9 Narwhal: Speed Buff Speed: 9 AA Gun Range: 125 Leveller: A glass cannon that needs to be escorted by pounders to be effective and is easily defeated by strafing doxen. Cost: 240 Damage per Shot: 50 (50 per barrel, 100 in total) HP: 400 Speed: 6 Turret Turn Rate: 20% Slower. Turret rotation Limit: 270 Degrees (Has a blind spot in rear). Sheller: A medium range artillery useful for attacking base defenses but slow and easily destroyed by mobile units. Cost: 360 Speed: 4 Can Attack while Moving: Nope. Weapon Range: 160 Damage: 100 Splash: 25 in a radius of 5. Attack Delay After halting Movement: 2 seconds. Slammer: A heavy shotgun infantry unit excellent at ranges <40 whose damage falls off the farther the enemy gets. Minor knockback effect. Cost: 300 HP: 350 Shots per Volley: 3 per arm. Damage per Shot: 25 Range: 70 Rate of Fire: 2 seconds. Knockback per Shot: 2 Gil-E: Whereas the sheller is an anti turret unit, the Gil-E is used to thin out armies long before they arrive. They are slower than other infantry and have a long reload time on their weapon along with having lower HP than most units on the field. Cost: 360 HP: 80 Speed: 7 Rate of Fire: 6 seconds. Advanced Combat Fabrication Bot: Removed. Peregrine: A heavier version of the Hummingbird, the Peregrine has a small AoE effect that makes it particularly effective against bunched up aircraft. It is slightly slower to compensate. Cost: 300 HP: 90 Damage per Shot: 50 Splash per Shot: 30 Rate of Fire: 1 Missile per Second Max Speed: 80 Kestrel: A glass cannon, the kestrel punishes tank armies and defense structures that nobody bothered to put AA near. Its small HP means that it cannot deal with AA at all. Cost: 320 HP: 80 Damage per Shot: 15 Range: 70 Hornet: The hornet has one job: Drop the bombs on the army. Low damage per shot makes it ineffective vs structures. HP: 220 Cost: 500 Damage per Shot (Not Splash): 160 New Unit: Heavy Transport: A heavy transport with increased HP and cost. Can carry commanders. Name: Osprey HP: 250 Cost: 300 Speed: 70. Vision Radius: 120. Radar Radius: 220. Acceleration: 30 Breaking Rate: 45 Turn Rate: 40 Stingray: A long range missile ship that needs to be escorted in order to be effective. Cost: 2240 Attack Range: 500 Vision Range: 300 Damage per Shot: 1000 Rate of Fire: 8 seconds Energy cost per Shot: 675 Leviathan: A heavy battleship excellent at long range but very vulnerable against anything that gets close. Cost: 2520 Max Attack Range: 350 Min Attack Range: 150 Vision Range: 250 Additional numbers coming soon™.
Defenses Single Laser Defense Tower: Having both a slightly longer range than other towers and a better metal/dps ratio, the Single Laser Defense Tower is best used with walls. Cost: 300 HP: 600 Weapon Range: 130 Damage per Shot: 100 Rate of Fire: .75 Seconds Double Laser Defense Tower: Having a lower DPS/Metal but a higher HP/Metal than the single laser defense tower, the double laser defense tower is better vs organized assaults. Cost: 500 Damage per Shot: 100 HP: 1750 Triple Laser Defense Tower: The ultimate in anti T1 turrets, these are very powerful structures used to prevent any and all T1 assaults. Cost: 900 HP: 3200 Damage per Shot: 160 Weapon Range: 110
Please no. Hard counters are so boring. Why not make it a specialist units with high alpha, long range and long reload time focussing on taking down high hp units? *cough* Annihilator *cough*
I like the idea of giving the advanced laser defense towers longer range. Not sure about the alpha... since that mean they would only be good against Infernos and Vanguards. I say have the Advanced Laser Defense tower have slightly more dps than the double, but decently longer range. Like, 140 or 160. I also think it'd be awesome if the towers worked in kinda a gatling gun style. For the double laser defense tower, the two barrels alternated in fire. Same goes for the tripple. It'd look awesome and would spread out the damage. But that's starting to get off topic.
I don't like the idea of removing/merging the vanguard, don't reduce unit diversity! Instead, just completely remodel the vanguard. It currently has radar, that's different. Let's just remove its weapon, and make it a mobile radar wall. Very tanky, and can detect units, but cannot defend itself.
Balance as flat as that would mean everything is build-able within minutes, if not seconds. I want some progression and risk vs reward when teching up. A T2 factory that costs only 1350 would mean your enemy could get one up even before you scout them on a large map, let alone being able to see it coming up during the game and being able to react to it. Also speed: 4 is crazy slow, it'd make the Sheller basically a turret that you have to transport in a Pelican.
... Are you insane, or are you intentionally misunderstanding what "flat balance" means? Here's a hint; it doesn't mean that everything costs the same.
I think that the single laser tower should be something like a sniper, longer range than any of the towers with slow fire rate but hits hard with deadly accuracy. It's downsides would be it's slow fire rate and the fact it can only attack one unit at a time, the double laser tower would be a bit of a middle man, the average dps for a turret and average range, etc... The Triple however would work a bit like a short ranged gattling gun, very high fire rate and quite a bit of sway but low damage projectiles, basically your standard issue anti mob turret dealing damage over a wide area because of it's inaccuracy and fire rate. But das jus' me.
Until I read your post, I was unsure what felt wrong about this balance. I thought burnt custard had it right, but I wasn't sure...... Stuart, placing t2 that low will cause everyone to build t2 immediately. Even with the reduction in t2 mex, that will still cause problems. As it stands, I'd love to test this if we could. It sounds interesting. The problem in the pte right now is that t2 never gets used. It gets built, sure, but both sides are so busy spamming tanks or grenadiers that we don't have the eco for t2. It should be cheaper. But not so cheap you could feasibly build t2 vehicles as your third or fourth factory. That's insane. Mattrmunson would drop vanguards into the enemy base at 5 minutes - as would every other player with any brains. Shellers too. You have to remember why speed is a huge deal. If you slow a unit down, for it to survive and be useful, it needs to be more powerful than the fast raiders. Shelters are easy enough to out micro. Don't make them useless. Noone would build them simply because they slow down your army. This dramatically increases the chances your attack will be noticed in time for a reaction. Most attacks are about avoiding defenses and finding what is vulnerable. Slowing them to a crawl is suicide. Let's get rid of one or the other. IDC which. By get rid of, I mean to fundamentally change or remove the unit. Unit diversity is already suffering with the unit copying from t1 to t2.
Exactly what I thought! I'm very against the complete invalidation of previous tiers in pretty much everything so I came up with that for turrets so they'd actually have different roles from each other; all serve a purpose. Single being to take out tougher units at longer ranges or for taking out those units that the other towers just can't hit, the double would be the standard issue turret useful in many situations- very versatile, and the triple would be the anti-mob close quarters turret.
Or you could possibly change their roles up a bit whilst keeping to their "flame tank" style, a simple thing would be to make one of them the tanky base breaker whilst the other one could be an anti-personnel flame tank, it would have a longer range with a wider area to which the fire is spread with dps lowered significantly. This makes for a unit that is mean't to slowly tank damage whilst dishing out low damage over a wide area to deal with lower healthed units such as bots and the other is the slow moving base breaker style unit which tanks damage and does a very high dps to a very small range and only one unit at a time.
It isn't exactly a hard counter; grenadiers or some other T1 arty unit would still outrange it. Its meant to stop frontal assaults and increase the variety in unit composition. While hard counters can be boring, making nothing but one unit is much more boring than rock paper scissors. I don't want them to be much more expensive than T1, because then the units they produce would have to be good enough to justify that. It's that line of thinking that brought us the previous balance patch. In TA you wouldn't avoid building T2 over another factory because of the cost vs another T1 factory, but rather because it wouldn't benefit you at that time. Although this was partially because everything in TA was pretty dang expensive... If there was stuff to reclaim, you would reclaim it. You'd have people reclaiming there T2 factory after they got a T2 fabber out, which they would build not to build eco but rather to build a BB. I'd love to make everything more expensive and more of an investment, but then there'd be more waiting time for the first T1 fac and early factory builds would be even less viable. We could make the first fac free like ZK did, but in any case it's a fine line to walk between factory spam and fabber spam. Speaking of which, I'm not really sure why everyone has an aversion to fabber spam. I guess an army of 20 fabbers assisting a factory isn't as epic feeling as 10 factories making something? As for the sheller speed, its only 1 less than it was in the old patch. Obviously that wasn't quite slow enough for them to be annoying to use when they aren't being made in a proxy. See above. Then those edge cases can be balanced out. Make infernoguards require the heavy transport or even be untransportable, if needed (I'd really prefer them to be transportable though...). The armor system might be applicable here, although I'd rather it didn't have to be used because WYSIWYG and because they should be good vs buildings. I really think the major problem with transports right now is actually how instantaneous they are; in TA the transports took some time to accelerate and had to decelerate in order to drop; the deceleration also took time. In PA the transports could be moving full speed over a target and then could suddenly drop instantly, wait a few seconds, pick them up again, and be moving at full speed within two seconds. As for the speed, it's only 1 slower than they are ATM and shouldn't be a huge change. We can play around with it. These aren't final stats, these are just numbers to plug into a PTE and toy around with that can be balanced further. As I've said before, the reason to go T2 should be because the enemy is using a certain unit or has fortified themselves in a certain way that unit x is good against. While you could go T2 early in this, would you? Expansion would be a better source of metal and most of the units are better against late game armies. The key is making it so that you don't want to go T2 early, not that you can't as I've said before. If you try to go with the latter option, then someone will find that they can if they do x and ruin your balance. If you go with the former option, then it becomes much easier to balance.
Before we go farther, you have to remember WHY you play PA. The point of the game is to win. There are ways to win, habits, strategies, and micro tactics that help you get there, but the whole point i to kill the commander. You put the means to do that within my reach, and I am going to take it. By giving T2 (with its access to nukes, advanced artillery, and Halleys, as well as T2 fabricators) to me at 3-4 minutes, I can GUARANTEE that not only will T2 be rushed on a regular basis, it will be necessary. You'll be pulling the late game backwards by ten minutes. Most 1v1s right now last around 12 - 15 minutes, and barely scratch the mid-game. You'll be pulling in Advanced tactics like nuclear RUSHING to a true possibility - when they really shouldn't be. Honestly, a lot of this comes from my preference for stages and a clear line between early, mid, and late game. You start to blur those lines, suddenly things can get out of hand - too many levers, see. The combinations of strategies could both be endless and singular. One chief strategy (like, rushing T2 air and gunship harass, for example) TO RULE THEM ALL. I hope I don't have to explain why that could be a terrible downside....
T2 artillery are useless against small armies and won't be an issue. Nukes will, but nukes need to be balanced anyway and what this does is bring that issue to the forefront. Anything else should be balanced on a case by case basis. Don't change the entire balance because of a few edge cases.
