True Economy This simple mod aims to address the broken Commander reclaim tactic so that you can play the game as intended by the developers. Not by eliminating the tactic altogether but by making it an interesting choice. What does the mod do? Commander metal value is decreased by 75% Vanilla: 25,000 True Economy: 6,250 What seems like a big nerf is only because it is ludicrous to begin with. You'll still have ~200 seconds of +30 metal income if you choose to reclaim but will noticeably pay for it in commander hp. Testing shows that there is room for it to drop further but let's start conservatively. Why is Commander reclaim a problem? The tactic is not a choice but a mandatory action. It provides at minimum around +30% more production and metal spent at the same timings, which can snowball into something bigger. It scales with # of commanders. Team games see incredible volatility with prolonged metal income advantages sometimes up to +100%. Reclaiming commander is generally a better choice than reclaiming trees. Unintuitive and counter-intuitive to the new player, significantly increasing the gap between new and experienced due to arbitrary knowledge. Long-term player retention suffers when people meet this tactic for the first time and experience something like a brick wall that leaves them feeling more cheated than outplayed. Significantly breaks energy pipeline timings that form the backbone of assumptions used in balancing other variables. Increases volatility and undermines comparability between games. This causes difficulty both for people trying to learn from past performances and for people trying to balance systems across all skill levels. It forces gameplay into a tighter set of standard cookie cutter strategies and build orders that are specifically able to benefit from the tactic. It is anti-climactic for the game to end because someone reclaimed themselves to death. Repairing Commanders is often counter-intuitively game losing due to the vast amount of metal required to do so. This false choice is not apparent to spectators, and commanders deliberately walking around at half health for the rest of the game represents a mismatch between the ingame reality and the spectator reality. Spectators become frustrated with players not taking actions which are seemingly intuitive. Commander reclaim is overwhelmingly a bigger determinate of who will win than any other factor. Compatibility Classic Titans Legion faction mod
Its only a mater of time before this optional mod will be silently included into the legion expansion code. Wizard's 2nd Rule: Harm can result from good intention. (Stone of Tears) http://sot.wikia.com/wiki/Wizard's_Rules
Stitch costs 250 metal and dies in one shot from just about anything. It has 30 reclaim per second at 60 range. A commander has 12500 HP and costs 6250 metal, for two HP per metal. Thus stitch does 60 DPS to a commander and 0.24 DPS/metal (bigger is better). An ant has 100 range, does 42 dps, has 250 HP, and costs 150 metal for a dps/metal of 0.28. Ant > Stitch with this mod. EDIT: If you were talking about repairing com, it's not too powerful and is still fairly expensive, but repairing being 4x useful is an improvement I'd say.
I don't think he meant commander snipe, perhaps he meant commander rush. The math might make repair more effective.
Commander heals stats for combat fabbers: MLA T1 heals 60 HP/sec MLA T2 heals 120 HP/sec Legion T1 heals 90 HP/sec Definitely something that can't be sustained until significantly into T2 stages. Oh yeah, this change should be in the core game.
Just testing this a bit now, looks like a real nice value for commander. Just a general observation, if you have a commander being reclaimed and repaired the commander will loose health. Tried it with several units, factories and commanders will lose health but walls stay even. Something to do with a units armor?
If you reclaim a unit or building to death, it only gives you 50% of the metal. The remaining 50% metal is the wreckage. However, you still need to pay the 100% price of metal to fixed it from 0.01% hp to full HP. Not only the commander but also other units or buildings follow this rule. The reclaim is a loan, and players need to pay the double price to fix it back.
If you reclaim a unit or building to death, it only gives you 50% of the metal. The remaining 50% metal is the wreckage. [/QUOTE] This ratio can be adjusted with wreckage_health_frac, albeit somewhat non-intuitively. A unit has 1 parts in life (value to reclaim to death) and wreckage_health_frac parts in death. So 50% would be frac 1.0.
Heard in the game lobby that reclaim is being taken away. Permanently. Heard it secondhand that "Mikeyh is the God of PA now." Im not tooting my own horn but I predicted this from happening when this mod was shoehorned in.
It is very unlikely for balance changes, such as those done in this mod or others to be implemented into PA. Not that uber isn't open to solving issues, but it won't be through balance.
I like this choice but I think something even better would be to disable commander reclaim altogether.
