Vanguard Balance Suggestion: Make them the Vehicle Bomb Bot

It's a rather simple and easy fix.

Remove the Vanguard gun and turn it into a slow moving, heavily armored bomb with a large AOE.

This will keep the Vanguard in their role of a moving wall, and make them very good at destroying enemy bases. But it'll keep them from being the massive steamrolling OP units that they are currently.

Even if the Vanguard isn't turned into a moving explosive, it would be a fun vehicle to add.

Another Vanguard thread, wohooo!

What you're describing is very similar to the Vanguard "Boom Tank" from Boom Bot Wars So many capital letters! So that's kind of cool. They're fun to use, but I'd rather they kept their cannon in the actual game.

Also they should look more like this:

Id settle for several fixes.

One is for it to do as much damage as it does, but one-time use, like this thread.

Another is for it to carry bots. Make it carry booms, then it can still snipe commander, make it carry infantry, then it can rock a base IF bots are balanced.

Another, is just to give it a slightly better dox gun. It becomes the anti infantry vehicle. Which ants are not considering they kill 1 at a time and waste dps in doing that. At least the vanguard wouldn't instantly screw up every single thing it touched.

Yupp. Another Vanguard thread.

Because Vanguards are broken and Uber hasn't fixed them yet.

Has a top 20 or so player won with 1500 cost Vanguards against an opponent with greater eco/army cost yet?

Yupp.

They were common in the Uber tournament.

You also can't determine the entire game balance based on what the top 20 players use. It's a nice gauge, but you can't ignore the entire player base and only look at what the top 20 players are doing.

As I said earlier, I think the silver bullet for fixing the Vanguard is making their fire time suuuuuuper huge, as in, their RoF is somewhere around three times that the Uber cannon from the commander. That way, microing against them and having empty space behind aren't dual requirements, and if they get into the mix they can only loose a volley before getting, eventually, shot down. This is essentially like Brian's suggestion in the OP, except they're still around to tank damage. At critical mass, though, I just realized, they are still going to wreck everything no problem ez pz. Then we ought perhaps adjust their hitpoints downward to nudge that critical mass up to an acceptable level, but not to remove it completely, for what purpose would it serve if there were tides of useless close range tanks who couldn't get close in?

Why can't we just make an individual balance thread for each unit? I don't want to make my own thread, but this certainly isn't derailing Brian's thread. It seems as of now Uber is not going to make any so-called 'drastic' changes to the core mechanics and role of each unit, no matter how much I would love this sort of experimentation more frequently and see no need to keep it one way or the other depending on the stage of development, so something like a boom bot seems out of the question.

The Uber tourney was played last patch, so the Vanguards were 1200?

Got another example? Pastats or replay links or YouTube videos would be cool. If you can't find any of those I'm not going to assume Vanguards aren't terribly unbalanced, just that we haven't had enough time playing proper games this patch to determine how overpowered they really are.

Easy example with the latest patch:



I've also played matches against the AI and played matches against other players, and talked about this with other players.

Beyond that, I won't be Google for you.

A 25% cost increase doesn't do nearly enough to negate how powerful Vanguards are.

Watched it.. Twice ^^ That's some pretty convincing evidence! It was weird how captains pgens and factories didn't shoot back, must be a bug

You've helped sway my opinion a bit, but I still feel like I'd much rather have 60 Ants than 6 Vanguards. Hmmmmm.

Captainconundrum always had more units than the other guy for the entirety of the match and Captainconundrum did a lot of raiding throughout the match, but it didn't matter because: Vanguards.

Futhermore, the other guy could have played quite a lot better and gotten out T2 faster, and mixed in Shellers with Vanguards for even more effectiveness.

I've even seen reports of people getting out a T2 factory within 4:30. That's just stupid.

Both players could have done various things better, but the main point is, expanding and raiding doesn't matter when T2 is what it is.

More units, yes. More metal invested in units..... oh no. Definitely not.

Ooh analysis time! I'm pretty sure that although CaptinConundrum had more units, he had nothing compared to woobiebears first terrifying wave of 6 Vanguards + a few random tanks. That's like 70 Ants worth, but Captains biggest fighting force nearby was 8 Ants - around 10:1 odds aint gonna end well. Captain was loosing engagements all over the map he could have won. I swear at one point I saw 1 of woobies Infernos take out 6 Ants that were shooting metal storage (those storages have a lot of HP) and I was like WTF is this. Although Captain had 2x eco, he wasted a lot of it compared to woobie who wasted very little, and what he didn't waste just went into producing factories and fabricators instead of stuff with guns.

4:30? Learn2play noobs.

2:53.

As if that's better?

How is that NOT OP?

2:53?!?

That's NUTS.

Ugh.

I hated the Gunship build... I think I'm going to hate this build...

I'd say give the vanguard the weapon that the cougar has in RCBM, the one that just eats bots up. this means that the vanguard will be a very good meatshield that is also good at taking care of bot rushes but doesnt have good dmg overall, making the inferno the wall breaker while the vanguard is again a meatshield specialized in destroying bots

Just because you CAN, doesn't mean you SHOULD It is a little insane though. Wait... no, no it's not. This is insane:


2:25.


(Clearly different game, the first was against AI.) Honestly I felt sorry for infinitycore, he didn't know what hit him. Plus I was being a right penis face and firing all 4 commander weapons at him at the same time.

This rush wouldn't work on larger planets - say.. big enough that a T1 radar won't see your enemies spawn. I think a good "fix" for it would be to get the Vanguard using energy when it shoots. That would massively slow down their RoF if they're rushed too early.

Do you have the game ID for that? I'd love to take a look at it.

Adding the ammo system to the Vanguard, but wouldn't completely fix the issue. It'd just mean you build one or two more power plants before rushing and/or turning of your factories when the vanguards reach the enemy base.

Which one? And can I extract replay IDs from the my recent replays list in game?

One or two (or three or four, or five), extra pgens would reeeaaally slow this down. The commander Uber Cannon uses 2500 energy for 4 seconds to reload, and Vanguards could be similar.

Yeah, there's a column on the right with the game ID in the replays.

You can also get the game ID for the replay if you used PA Stats.