Balance Changes Summary 69564

Its the same with the vanguard saying its way to overpowered. And then there's the whole t2 invalidating t1...

i like direct upgrades, however, everything about T2 should be scaled down about 25% in damage, health, cost and ...factory size...? just so that they do still have some cool impact, but can be taken down by T1

Uhh, the tech is there. I've tested it on dox, actually.

I also think it'd be cool if we got some stealth bots, maybe even a stealth field bot at T2
Maybe even stealth fabricators...

Oh.
Cool!

I just think this is approaching the problem backwards in a sense. I'm not sure there is room for Eco and Fac First builds to be both equally viable in as broad a set of circumstances as possible. In short, I don't think it'll ever be a "Choice", it'll always be a "Calculation", which is fine, lets just not sugar coat it you know?

So that leaves us with trying to create more choices at the beginning of the game, you actually laid out very well the current issues.

Vehicle Factory is fine, or at least it appears to be simply because it's the default option currently, hard to say for sure right now. We can use it as the "Control" Factory that the rest are balanced against , maybe going back afterwards and making additional tweaks as required.

Naval is extremely situational, and the causes of all that are pretty much unique to the Naval aspect of things and it will take more than just stat changes to make it viable IMO.

Air is Risky, maybe it's simply a case of being too risky? Can we find some way of tweaking the amount of risk involved to make it more viable as a first Factory? I think the Commander's AA weapon will need to be carefully balanced to make it work in addition to anything else done.

Bots are......up in the air, depending who you ask they're either just fine or completely useless. The large spread of opinion tells me there is a lot going on here. I'm sure many feel that bringing back the Stinger is a good first step but I'm not sure it would do anything on it's own. If we're correct in saying that Air is too risky then is the Stinger even a factor in Bot First viability? I'd say bringing back the Stinger is still something that needs to be looked at, especially if our aim to to try and make all factories viable most of the time but in terms of why bots aren't viable right now it doesn't seem like a big contributer.

So what is the problem then? There are a few things we can say with some level of certainty, Advanced Bots are very workable where they are right now, still some tweaking needed most likely but they're in the right ball park at least so we know for our purposes we can focus on the Basic half of it. The idea of "Cheap but plentiful" Uber has for Bots is workable, mostly it's just a matter of fine tunning but it's not something that can just be solved with unit Stats. Maybe we should be looking at the Factory itself?

So lets look at it, It is identical to the Vehicle factory, which could be of of the main underlying issues here, and the change mentioned above(Dox Cost reduced to 45 Metal) would actually make it worse. Up front, I will say that I don't know the exact mechanics of Factory roll-off, so I'm just kinda guessing here thought the exact answer doesn't really change the outcome, just how severe it is. Anyways, so Dox now cost 45 metal, meaning the Bot factory can build a Dox every 3 seconds.....except that's not true with Roll-off, it actually potentially makes the Bot factory horribly in-efficient! Lets say that, for the sake of easy maths that the roll off time is 1 second for everything. This means that a Bot factory building Doxes spends 25% of it's time accomplishing nothing. By comparison, a Vehicle factory building Ants only spends about 9% of it's time doing nothing. That doesn't sound like a lot, and it might not amount to much if this was a standard RTS, but this is PA, and we're expected to use 3.3 Dox for Every Ant, except that the Ants take less time to build because of roll off on top of all the other potential issues that might mean we need actually more than 3.3 Dox for every Ant and simply lowering the cost isn't going to help any more.

How to work around this? Well the obvious way is to bump up the Dox's Cost again, maybe even beyond it's original 90 metal, and tweak it's stats so it's functional as the "core" bot unit. This does move away from the "Cheap but plentiful" concept but they would be easier to balance if they weren't so far apart in terms of overall power level. If we want to stick to the "Cheap but plentiful" concept we would, in addition to tweaks to the Dox's capabilities look into doing something to the Bot factory to make up for it's increased inefficiency. Maybe a Cost reduction, so that over time you can build more factories to offset the inefficiency but this only really manifests itself in the long term and you start being able to build more factories than a tanking player(assuming you don't jump to Advanced as well). Another option is messing with the rolloff time but as I said, I don't know the specific of how it works so yeah....maybe? One thing that could work, maybe in addition with a slightly cheaper factory, is a lower energy consumption, meaning you need less power overall letting you build more factories and units.

Heck maybe part of the issue is that right now Uber is telling us that they want bots to be "Cheap but plentiful" yet so far only the Dox and Boom actually fit under that heading, the Grenadier is still comparatively expensive at 120Metal(8s to build) and Even Fabbers are at 200M(13s to build) then here are the Combat Fabbers at the very expensive end costing720M(48s to build) and maybe we need a full pass on the rest of the Basic Bots to have them line up better with the Dox and Boom to see what actual issues we'll be facing.

That also brings up the interesting question of "What about the Advanced Bots? They're on the exact same price range as vehicles(well with the Vanguard Nerf Cost increase Bots won't have anything to match that) so they don't even fit into the "Cheap but plentiful" concept. If that intended thats....okay, it's a little awkward but it's workable. If Uber does intend make similar changes to Advanced Bots as they did to the Basic Bots I can see them wanting to "figure it out" using Basic first.

Maybe we need to revisit the 3x HP buff the Eco structures got, slowly stepping it back until we get to nice area where bots can raid better.

Maybe Bots need someway to offset the Vehicle's advantages, sure Tanks might be only half as fast which, in theory, allows Bots to force engagements at their own discretion but, unless there is outside Radar support it's very hard for Bots to do that because they can only see as far as they can shoot, which means that by the time they can actually see what they're engaging they've already taken attrition damage. Maybe we should re-purpose the Grenadier, making more of a light mortar bot and give it say, 65 Vision Range and 80 Radar Range, up it's cost a touch to re-enforce the idea that you shouldn't just be building them and instead spreading them into your force, much like how Aeon needed T1 Souts to make full use of their Aurora's range, Dox need some of the new Grenadiers to let them do better engagements. It's true that it won't prevent attrition damage but at least helps to let you know what's going on around you and lets you pull off better engagements than you could with Dox alone.

And....oh my, that's turned into quite the word wall.....with a quite a few topics, I guess I'll stop here for now? We do need to keep in mind that none of the stuff I've talked about should be seen as a "Silver Bullet" for the problem at hand, some of these ideas might be more effective than others but we can't lock down onto just one of them and push it to fix something it couldn't fix on it's own in the first place.

Mike

Myself and BurntCustard have tested some things over the past few hours, and we discovered that bots first is a good option. Now, without further testing, this statement really doesn't mean much. I'll let you guys figure out how it works More testing is needed, but I still think bots need to be reworked again.

What about keeping rolloff time the same and making the bot factory itself cheaper?

I touched on that, it would work in the long run once you start having "Extra" factories compared to a player building Vehicle Factories. The Catch is that unless you massively cut the cost you might not get that many factories until after the point where you should be building Advanced units instead. I also went on to suggest more of an "indirect" reduction by making the Factory's lathes cheaper to run, requiring less PGens and allowing you to build more other things, more Dox, more factories or whatever else.

As I said, there isn't going to be a single "Silver Bullet" to solve this but I do think a factory cost reduction of some sort is likely part of the overall solution.

Mike

Okay, change noted for the dox but uh.... are boom bots now exactly the same cost?!

Naval isn't as situational when you can spawn anywhere first. Then you can choose at the beginning of the match if you want to go naval first.

I could dig bot aa and just redirecting t1 aa to AOE or high alpha. Give the vehicle aa the opposite (aoe or alpha).

I think the cost reduction is very powerful. It brings use to them albeit still being fairly weak. I would actually agree increasing the grenadier damage a bit and the dox rate of fire a bit and keeping the health piss poor. That way, grenadiers carry tank dps for cheap but vaporize to dox, and dox don't do dps quick enough to ants. Note that grenadier current take 2x longer for their weapon to go from fired to hit than the ant does, so ants kill dox 1:1 on their first shot while dox kill 2x more grenadiers than the grenadiers kill dox but to amplify that too just increase dox hitscan.

With the above, the dox could keep their weaker range too, and still have both a use and a sufficient strength against bases.

Yes, but dox are sustainable, they don't spend themselves to do damage. Boom spend themselves to do damage but do huge initial damage. Booms are 45 for the most damage any single unit can do, and dox are 45 for a living-until-shot machine-gunner.

So basically, it depends if you have to kill a single target no matter what which booms can do, or if you are attacking multiple undefended targets which 10 dox can kill more than 10 mex or assist tanks in killing tanks or soak a shot or two of damage.

OVERALL: This balance IS getting closer, but I do agree t2 strength and bots BOTH need some reconsideration. T2 is just not working out, its impossible to balance huge cost for huge effect, that line is impossible to land on, if you lower the t2 unit strength then you have a huge area of nearly-balanced you can set them per-cost to, instead of a line where +1 is OP and -1 is useless.

I didn't read any of the arguments above.
I really like what you guys done with early game economy and AA. Less time following the same building pattern, less commander pgen duty, less commander bomber snipes.

3000 energy might seem to much at first after previous stable build, but hey, everyone gets this advantage. It only eliminates boring early game stuff and allows you to concentrate more on building firepower.

And with new metal income, I don't even mind spawning in circle that has only one metal spot, as long there is metal around. Really, your comm only needs do build one mex after factory and fabbers will do the rest.

If lone bomber sees commander, bomber is dead. Rockets do good job at following them. So, less air superiority at early game fabber harassment.

Good job overall.

A few issues: scrollwheel zoom feels weird in this build. It's.. uhm... feels too slow?
Also, in PTE it felt like UI and 3D performance was noticeably higher, I don't get this feeling in new build for some reason (tried small planet 1v1 and it was worse then same planet and 3 AI back in PTE). But I'm talking about feels here, didn't measure anything actually.

Main issue with vanguards highlighted.

They are balanced around the fact that they COULD be kited.

Eventually.

Manually.

While the attacker has only to issue a single attack order, the defender has to kite a lot. And even most basic maneuvers make kiting more than just ... difficult.

"Skilled" players with micro-focused play style can defend rather well against Vanguards, but they are still OP against moderate play styles.

Nice, cool to see the reasoning behind the changes.

As with every previous patch I predict over the next few weeks the open-minded competitive players will develop new meta-strategies that disprove the knee-jerk criticism from armchair theorists.

What about, on top of this, we actually also increase the vehicle rolloff by an additional 1-2 seconds?

All factories used to have longer roll-off, it is good that it encourages more factories than assistance. For vehicles to have even longer roll-off, wouldn't be terrible.

I would say almost get rid of bot roll-off, but that would technically create a mild glitch where bot factories can be infinite-assisted.

If Mered said it is close to being bot and vehicle viable this patch, I believe maybe they played a few games and think Uber is in fact close. In that case, only a close-fix is needed. Maybe cheaper bot factory, that gets it done before vehicles which boosts it's raiding and massing faster than vehicles. Maybe different rolloff times so initial massing is better for bots than vehicles. Maybe better dox stats. Maybe one or all of them.

If this was the goal, you should only have added +600 energy or starting storage. +3000 energy and 3x metal is not very interesting because there is no other choice but 2 factories straight off.

Yes, there are differences between bot, vehicle, and air but this doesn't mean anything if the only choice becomes to build them all at the same time. You havn't considered preserving the tradeoffs between resource expansion and unit timings, another very important part of RTS.

It was a huge decision how many pgens were built between first and second factory. How much macro you wanted, and how long you were willing to trade off that important 2nd factory choice. This was lending itself to be a large part in differentiating between bot, vehicle, and air because it actually meant that if you went vehicles, you were vulnerable to air first for a while. And vice versa for air.

You also know +3000 energy x3 metal is a problem when you have to buff commander weapons to such crazy levels as have been done. Essentially 400 dps aa flak on commander? The second highest aa is only 75 dps and does no splash. Instead of making rushing just very costly to the macro, you've blanket removed all possible air activity anywhere near a commander just because our new starting conditions make it too easy otherwise.

I think it would help if the Vehicle factory and Bot factory had some differences I also think the fabers them self should have differences.

I like the idea of the bot factory having a faster roll of time and taking less energy (it is manipulating less matter after all). If those two changes were added maybe the initial cost could be left alone.

Both the t1 fabber and t2 fabber should be more efficient than the vehicle fabbers or cost less.

I think we need a unit to have vision or we need a new unit that is a scout for bots. This quiet frankly is a bigger problem than the lack of AA.

You know, apart from balance entirely, I always thought it was dumb that commanders didn't come with AA and torpedoes. It just doesn't make any sense to me.

I'd just like to say, one more time, that the reduced vision range on bots in general makes they very weak at their intended raiding purpose. Back in alpha for a while dox melted buildings like butter but couldn't fight ants head-on. They had easily enough speed to get out of the way if used correctly. Even though dox still move very fast, you will lose huge numbers now because they will get blindsided.

Please reconsider the state of scouting!

weird, i usually get an email each time Garat posts on the Build tracking thread, this time it didn't happen

You will only ever get one alert for posts in a thread being watched until you visit the thread again - if you got a previous alert but didn't actually open up the thread, you wouldn't have got a new one when the next post was made.

This can be somewhat easy to do if you read the alert in an email, but never visit the thread on the forum, for example.