Multi-threading, Performance and AI Improvements Updates 112176 / 112209 / 112214

Balance

• Advanced Air, Bot, Vehicle and Naval Factory cost increased by 25% to 4,500 (minor delay to T2 rush)
• much needed
• Slammer cost increased to 500 (minor adjustment against Leveler)
• Solar Array cost decreased to 1,600 (minor adjustment against land-based advanced power)
• It will be interesting to see how this has an effect on the game.
• Gil-E vision increased to 220 (vision now matches weapon range)
• Slightly bugged, at least in my game I could see strategic icons with my gil-e's past their fog of war vision radius. (see image)
• Bluehawk range increase to 220 (buff as a counter e.g. Kaiju)
• Pelican health increased to 200 with group (formation) preference set to back (increased survivability)
• A ridiculous amount of health compared to other air units, why 2x a bomber in health?
• Instead of dying to 2 galata shots or 4 volleys of galata aoe, its now 8 direct shots or 20 volleys of galata aoe. This makes air defense even more useless.
• A storm does a solid 30 splash with a variable expanding circle of 60 damage. That means that it takes 3 shots from a storm directly underneath a pelican to kill it, meaning a single pelican can drop an inferno or even a boom bot on top of advanced aa and still potentially survive.
• as seen here:
• Stingray vision increased to 250 with new radar and sonar of 350 (new cruiser role as naval radar)
• I really like this change, it gives this unit a whole new identity without buffing its seldom used but excellent stats
• Typhoon vision increased to 250 with drone guard radius of 250 and passive health regen reduced to -2 (20 seconds)
• The Typhoon is the most useless, out of place, waste of resources this game has to offer. Aside from the fact that a game where the air units have unlimited range doesn't need a mobile air factory, typhoons try to fulfill that task by making a significantly expensive unit that not only auto suicides, but can't be controlled and deploys in a way that it gets only one shot of its weapon off before being killed. The leviathan provides greater damage at longer range for a cheaper price, and if anti air is needed, then just another t1 air factory with 25 fighters that also draws the same amount of metal is always a better choice.
• Making the squalls uncontrollable only makes it more useless.
• Although with the server/sim changes I can now actually build them without the sim speed crapping out. This use to take 10 or 11 but now I can have more then 80 firing at once and the game is smooth as butter, very impressive.
• Kaiju rate of fire decreased to 0.5 shots per second (minor nerf)
• Inconsequential in my opinion.

No idea if this is bug, but in my game, sim fps went down to nothing for couple minutes, until someone left, then it happened again.

starcraft also has airunits with unlimited range, the typhoon is basically a navalversion of the carrier ..
also unlike the leviathan typhoondrones also can attack air .. squalls being controllable is not neccesary imo ..

Starcraft! I don't want to hear that ugly word here ;-)

the star-craft version is relatively much faster and also flies

drop a unit in front of a single anti air? thats sound rather great than annoying

i just got a inferno drop now. two infernnos dropped, they killed one of my mex, and then my t1 tanks destroyed the last inforno. was fun

The Pelican buff is a good thing . Currently its pretty rare to see a peldrop, Now those who scout will be rewarded with early warning.
Galata creep is a very real thing and should be considered cyber bullying , pel drops will now be a thing that you see mid teir players using and not just the best of the best pulling it off.

please bring back orbital assist and reclaim by the space fabber thingies.... to ground factories... that are on the ground.

Your interceptors now need to get off 5 shots instead of just 1 to down a pelican. Five is five times bigger than one and you will notice soon. You can scout all you want, but if those pelicans are spread out or defended at all, they are landing. You will soon watch as pelicans fly past/through enemy interceptors and land since it now takes five times longer for a humming birb to down them.

Its a really cool concept, I like the idea of moving armies around fast. I would love to see them take three shots or something reasonable. But it's overkill and this will only make air even more critical, and you will see countless vanguard drops. You will see vanguard drops that fly right through enemy air force and ground AA to get the com snipe.

Actually it takes only 3 times the shots, not 5, since the hummingbird does 80 damage per rocket. the problem was that previously 1 hummingbird could take them all out in no time, every second was a dead pelican. Important note is that pelicans are still not that great of an idea for transporting entire armies, so stick to big squadrons at best, due to how they impact your total airforce size (less fighters = you can loose it all) Second, having pelicans forces you to fight, since when you kite you loose all of those expensive units instantaneously.

Another interesting thing we might see is a return of pelicans as meat shields, im yet to test how that works out (since they can take one more shot when compared to fighters

that´s not the point it´s about the droncarriermechanic which is also used in red alert 2 and 3 ..
the carrier doesn´t need to fly ..

the pelicans are probably the worst change i have ever seen in PA

im not gonna sit here for hours and dissect exactly why, i think metapod has already done that and anyone with 2 eyes and a brain would know what im talking about.

anyone who actually plays the game with an ounce of skill and has two brain cells to rub together would have realised that they (the pelican) would render all static defenses and aa useless and completely change the 1v1 meta and all other meta.

I now have absolutely no faith in who ever is balancing this game because for some reason they decided it would be okay to be able to drop something directly over a storm with a pelican...the balance is garbage and the fact that the guy in charge of the balance is closed to all criticisms of the new balance and has a team of scrubs and noobs with no idea what they are talking about whispering into his ear doesn't make me confident about the future of this game.

extremely disappointed but honestly not surprised when i think about the caliber of the people who are responsible...

titan sized thumb down.

Has anyone tested performance? I couldn't do it and probably won't be able to play until sunday.

You didn't address the accessibility issue at all?

To be fair, boom are hardly a t1 bot, being all-or-none in nature. And, if the dox were walking backward, they'd annihilate it, but honestly, why are Dox the best AA? That's ridiculous, give a real AA bot, maybe give bots t1 flak and t2 aa-missile (bluehawk) or something, and then buff AA to do close to what Dox currently do for their worth.

If I didn't have so much on my plate, I'd create a balance mod again.

You have to understand that murderface is probably upset because he probably loves this game, and as someone who can play on a high level, or at least understands the high level of skill, it hurts to see this happen to the game. The majority of high level players KNOW this pelican thing is a mistake. Its a bad feeling all around because the person/people responsible for this balance put a lot of work in and made some real improvements, but this one thing just sort of negates their hard work. I don't know how this pelcian thing made it into the game without any sort of testing but it seems like it did.

Nik and maybe some other new champions are excited about it because I think they are ready to adapt to it and start winning in a new way, but they aren't really thinking about the whole player base in my opinion. Still i see others who are noobs commenting about it with a weak understanding about competetive play. I may have made some mistakes about the shots required to kill and the specifics, but the point still stands.

Pelicans need to either be more expensive, slower, less armor or even a T2 unit.

cooome oooon neon, please show me how 10 bombers kill an atlas in the next gif

when was the last time you used a kaiju alone on the surface? or a tank force without AA? Or left your dox to stay in one place while, say an inferno or a bomber is approaching 5 steps in any other direction and that pelican was dead, not to mention that the whole idea is using them as supplements to galata and spinners, not as substitutes

= PA is perfectly balanced, when it no langer matters which units you build. And then it gets boring =

pelicans control awkwardly and require a relatively large apm investment for a normal player. you could buff their health 5x and they would still see very little use by the average joe. even at my level of play there are very few players who could sacrifice the factory ouput, apm and everything losing them entails to reliably use pelican strats, pretty much no matter how tough they get.

personally I think the pelican should get some more buffs, guns on the sides and a spot in the t2 air factory. maybe that should be a new unit actually. just leave the old pelican alone if that's the case.

the patch has gone live and the pelipocalypse hasn't hit yet as far as I can tell. why are there no replays demonstrating this grave imbalance yet?