[WIP] The Realm Community Balance Mod

Do the scouts land? The do in the game so cant be killed except by grounfd units, havnt checked the numbers but what is the radius of the peeper radar?

We've not gotten to those changes as of this moment. Just land and Eco balance atm. If the Peeper does have a radar I'll have to make sure to disable it.

Thanks for the heads up.

Nah my mistake, I mean it has a greater los, than most units, 200 radius in stable which is close eough to 260 for a fraction the cost.

Indeed. That seems... powerful. It's possible that the rebalance of the Air combat will limit its usability beyond the early game however. We'll see.

Changes are still coming in quite quickly and as soon as the whole mod is (mostly) done we'll settle into some serious testing. At the moment we're just seeing if anything we do is actually breaking anything.

Is there any particular place you'd like comments about implementation to go? 'Cause I've got a couple of things I'd like to talk about, but I'm fairly sure they're a bit more technical than most people would want to read about in this thread.

nahhh where else?

btw guys, I'd just like to say I support what you're doing here.

Start a PM conversation
Make sure to invite MadSci; he's the brains when it comes to technical implementation.

On a side note, the small poking I did this morning still shows that Factory first is probably not completely viable due to the tradition straight into energy stall. (10 seconds of -500 -> ~7 secs[ish, longer due to stall] of -2000 -> -1350... etc etc. I think the stall would be around 30 secs if you just build your way out while still using the factory)

not 100% sure what should be done to change this, but personally I'd lean towards reducing the factory's energy costs. (Although, that has a lot of other implications. Hence why it's only an leaning)

perhaps a bigger start storage?

Which would have to be: 500 * 10 + 7 * 2500 + 7 * 1350 + 7 * 700 + 7 * 50 = 5000 + 17500 + 9450 + 4900 + 350 = ~37200 e

Now, I'm not certain if that would actually be problematic, but that's about twice what was originally proposed. So there's definitely a case for looking towards other options.

that's fiiiine

right?

That's too much. Rather increase com energy production. Making the com storage that huge delays the need for energy storages way to much.

What's so cool about having to build a storage building?

I roughly predict this would make it slightly easier to play, not having to worry about energy stalls in a very short time of medium over-use.

I'm gonna give this a try tomorrow or in two days at least. I'm curious to see if sidegrades really was (or wasn't) the best idea for PA. I hope it is.

Bare in mind that there's likely very little of the combat balance changes implemented. The release version is, I believe, only the fabber/factory changes at this time, meaning that rushing T2 is probably a really attractive option atm. (Although, the units would cost more than the factory >.>)

We just did a handful of mini-rough-raw-playtests and it was really fun.

Apparently I'm really good when I'm building Ants!

Mike

Those were terrific fun to watch, actually.

You should be able to see the replay at:
Twitch
YouTube

I shall hopefully be streaming further playtests as we start to flesh it out a bit more.

I liked the playtest that I watched. Sadly, so many things weren't quite scaled, work in progress obviously. The overall tone was better than vanilla PA though. What they did, was double the health, which is slightly too much normally, then increased the dps, but not the shot, ever so slightly, well actually they completely did retunes, but it amounts to the same, units last about 50% longer, meaning everything takes 1-2 shots more and actually has time to barely seek cover, which in an of itself should make combat fabbers useful if they are ever set back to old regular fabber power with normal range just as a placeholder as they haven't changed it in the mod yet, and most the units feel very niche whether t2 or t1.

One thing I liked when I saw, was sheller. It seemed in a good spot, it was supposed to fire slower, but I liked how it fires currently, it cost energy and does half the damage per shot (?) but it does do great carpet aoe when about 10 of them make it rain and they damage without much risk to their own health so the weaker tunedown seemingly works. Still not sure about if it fires slower but we can see nonetheless.

Good Job Gents, and much fun was had, I am glad to see modding bringing so much to the table and so much enjoyment as well. If you gave some access to the mod (I know you want it in a fully playable state) I am sure nearly everyone else would play it more than anything.

Just watched this (part of it anyway; first 20 minutes so far), pretty fun to see!

I wanted to comment on wrongcat's difficulties in seeing the games in the server browser. Two things:

1) If you want to see modded games, you have to look at the filters on the left side of the server browser and switch off of just seeing non-modded games. It's the last filter in the list.

2) If the modded game you're looking for has Cheats enabled, you need to be running a stock client mod yourself (provided in the stockmods/client folder) that makes cheat games visible. This is a barrier to entry that we put in so that innocent players don't accidentally step into cheating games; the implication is that if you can set yourself up to use a mod, you probably know what you're doing.

In short, we want modded games to be easy to see, but still something you have to choose (hence the filter in the browser), but cheating games to be harder to see.

Hope that helps! And glad to see you folks having fun on your mod!