Build 77337-pte now up

I've seen this posted a few times before, but... reclaimable rocks please. With the combat fabber cost reduced, reclaiming trees is something reasonable to do now (heck I do it pretty much every time I play on meso and even use those trees as my main source of metal income). Having that alternative source of metal income is something that I believe is worth consideration. Anyways, just something to note I suppose (and also a bit of my own bias)

Oh and also, wreckage reclaiming. ColaColin has already gone into enough depth with this one so I don't see any reason to elaborate on this myself.

Right so, so some people want them to act as combat units, even before the cost reduction, and others want to use them for economy. Do we need to split it into two more specialized units?

We need a better selection system, especially once you add orbital units into the picture.
I hope we'll see some orbital improvements that include UI improvents to better control that layer once the navy and t1 economy balance are "done"

I think staying as one unit is good. I still want them to work better in combat (more HP?), but usually I'll want to move my army separately still. If the selection was changed (to fabber type selection instead of combat units), then on the odd occasion I want to move both my army and the fabbers / combat fabbers, I can hold down shift when I box select the army.

Oh well, I totally forgot the combat fabbers, since they were too expensive as units - unless there were no mexes and a lot of trees. Until 76843-pte, thanks for that

The first time I stumbled upon the combat fabber (this was in late gamma), I felt a bit silly while I tried to persuade it to support my normal fabbers I think this is another thing that isn't intuitive the first time you discover it.
But yeah, I know why this quirkyness is there, and sadly, I see no elegant solution for it either. But adding another unintuitive thing into the game because there are already unintuitive things present, isn't really satisfying. We can do better than this, I hope
Can we at least change the icon of the orbital fabber, to something that is distinguishable from the rest of fabbers (like it is on the combat fabber)?

I can just tell you that they are "banding" units. Bombers are good point attackers. And 100 Bombers aren´t that much better than ten bombers, as long as your order isn´t as simple as "destroy this Anti-Nuke-Laucher over there"! (due to their long cooldown!)
100 Kestrels are a killer force, (litterally base-annihilators) while ten kestrels are only some king of strong!
Yes, you need masses of them to rock. But they do rock! Believe me or try it out for yourself!

Thinking about orbital fabbers, I think they need reclaim. Now that does open up problems for silly orbital stats so my solution here would be make the umbrella significantly cheaper (so that it can be rushed quickly if under orbital reclaim attack early game), and then reduce its rate of fire to prevent it becoming op. After all we have a range of t2 units which are now anti orbital so imo umbrella can become the cheap t1 solution.

Agreed. I think whenever possible, just like the evolution of real war, a balance change should favor addition of new counter technologies or price changes. Unringing the bell should be avoided, try to keep the narrative consistent. Retcon should always be a last resort in my opinion.

Also sorry for double post... @sorian with respect to the combat fab, I'd like to see its ability to assist put back.

I don't understand the issue of assisting stuff anyway. I mean I think assisting one factory should be a valid choice instead of building multiple (ideally this would be balanced such that multi factories are more efficient over a period of time once the metal cost had been paid back). That would probably require too much eco tweaking however.

For that matter I'm also a fan of not arbitrarily limiting weapons to specific layers. If something can shoot something else should be based on the properties of the weapon itself as specified in the jsons. This is a game with simulated projectiles after all. Why can aa units only shoot at air? Why can't fighter missiles hit ground?

Again I'm guessing this isn't something that will change (and I'm very happy with the direction of these changes, so not really a complaint), still in an ideal world I'd avoid hard counters and arbitrary limits wherever possible.

Agreed and agreed.

More and more I'm thinking about trying to make a bunch of modular simple mods to remove these RTS invisible wall equivalents. Seems faster and easier than trying to petition the devs hehe. But here I am typing my mind anyway

It annoys me when combat technologies we have right now in the Stupid Ages is absent from the future purely to preserve the paper, rock, scissors concept of balance. (Like where are my cruise missiles and kamikaze fighters?)

"To unbalance it." ~The Oracle

I'm of the opinion that meaning can always be changed by the addition of context. If some change leads to some "OP" (grrr) tactic, then simply add something to counter it, and keep doing that.

If you make a mod that removes all the rps stuff, I'd play it balancing that type of game is difficult (which is why the hard counters got added in the first place) but not impossible (ta, spring rts etc).

I think it's not totally unreasonable to have a few in vanilla to be fair to the devs. Still I think the engine is sophisticated enough to allow a purely physics based balance so would be fun to try

I've already begun I'll pm you.

Your arguement is still fine imo. Reclaim isn't assist, and assist isn't reclaim.

Balance aspect
Was fine and literally 100% counterable even when the fabs are in your base already by sending 2 or 3 air fabbers in random directions and building umbrellas. Randomly walk about commander untill one of them is finished, then gg you win.

Fun aspect
At the end of the day if uber doesn't find orbital reclaim fun, then they won't include it unfortunately. They're being irrational about it though by not giving the majority of the community time to evolve to new creative concepts. For example, i can point to the pte and how combat fabbers can reclaim battleships, narwhals, metal extractors etc. which is essentially the same concept whereby you need to build certain units to counter it. That said, it's well within their right to change the design how they see fit i suppose

400 T1 bombers have (combined):

• More HP: 3000 -> 4000
  
• Double the DPS: 1600 -> 3200
  
• More speed: 60 -> 75
  
• More vision: 4x as many units, each with 4x the vision area, so if spread out SIXTEEN TIMES
  
• Massive bonus that you don't need several expensive T2 factories to build

Not to mention the biggest problem which is the relative costs where it's better to build 1 bomber and 4 fighters than 1 kestrel (which dies to 1 fighter).

In comparison to air, we don't see land or naval t2 suffer from this specific issue as much because they can fire back at units in their own sphere.

Would be bad if the glasscannon could be replaced with an aerial tank, wouldn´t it?!
As I already said: Bombers are point attackers (you might call them salve-attackers), while Kestrels are constant attackers. Their behaviour make bombers the perfect unit for commander snipes but believe me: Kestrels are better at wiping away bases that don´t feature a commander! To speak in damage values:A bomber does overkill, Kestrel doesn´t! Bomber got reload, Kestrel doesn´t! Bombers can even easily be killed by Doxes, a Kestrel outperforms Doxes!

(BTW: Kestrels are good for CommanderSnipes as well, just not as good as Bombers. But Kestrels can be used for defense, which is ugly bad if you use bombers! (they tend to fly in AA wherever it stands, as they cannot hover the like Kestrels do)

My general point is just: If Kestrels will ever be buffed everybody will see them as OP units. They fit in right now, neither too strong nor to weak units!

I wish I could selecrt orbital unit and righclick on planet icon in planet list and orbital unit would go there (random spot). Right now It's very hard for me to scout many different planets, since you have to go to every planet and back

Um, guys, you do realize that combat fabbers draw 0 energy, right? Everybody would just start the building with normal fabber then switch to combat fabber, which would bring a ton of mandatory micro to stay competitive and make energy much less relevant. On a factory, i imagine, one assisting combat fabber would decrease energy draw by 80%? Since (t1 vehicle) factory has 15 metal draw and combat fabber 60.

One thing I love in PTE balance is that mixed build orders work much better than all tank or all bot strats. I like to have 1 or 2 bot factories for every 3-4 tank factories, and it really pays off now to have a single bot factory turning out the occasional combat fab. Because the combat fabs are cheap enough to just intermix throughout your army, you've always got a few in a blob. This means it's way more intuitive now to throw up forward walls as you can just select your whole blob and quick spam some lines of control. Battles also feel more dynamic now as combat fabs can turn an inferno sortie into something quite dangerous, and are now priority targets. I really like this change.

I think armies building their own walls and teleporters is generally going to have some interesting effects on the meta.

I would agree with you, but have you tried spamming them out with your tank+combat fabber blobs? By mid to late game you'll easily have 3-8 combat fabs on the front. Those suckers can still get out a teleporter pretty darn fast. Because they are tankier now you also really need to fight for them.

I think t1 combat fabs need a slight range bump. Right now they basically need to be on the front lines to be effective as healers, which basically ends up with them unprotected out in the front. I think they could be given a slight nerf in build rate but bump in range and be perfect.