At the moment it seems to take 8-9 shots from a L1 tank to kill a L1 mex (based on in game experience rather than the stats). While this may not sound too bad it makes raiding in the game much harder. If a L1 tank can kill a mex in one pass (typically 3-4 shots) then it produces a much more fluid game. This would not hurt turtle type player too much as they tend to have units and defences around their mex. However when you get a crazy expander player it is very difficult to drive them back. It takes a significant amount of time to clear an undefended outlying cluster of mex. I believe that when building an outlying cluster of mex there should be a very clear trade off between the position being defensible and the economic outlay. At the moment you can have undefended clusters and use the L1 mex armour to buy time to reinforce most positions. The reason I don’t like this is that instead of producing fluid back and fore raiding & building you tend to get the first person to build to be entrenched at that spot. There used to be an old TA map called comet catcher that exemplified the raiding kind of play, you had to expand like crazy but you also expected to be raided like crazy and it produced a very back and forth style of game play which I found very fun (and quite intense). The territory held would change rapidly rather than forming static WW1 style front lines. I personally would like to see PA have more of this kind of game play and I feel reducing the HP of the L1 mex (relative to the L1 tank) would achieve that.
So use 4 tanks and kill it in 2 shots. 4 is hardly a lot of tanks, it's a perfectly viable raiding party. A single tank a raiding party does not make.
I would like to see mex to be: a) cheaper, quickly build b) give less income c) have less health => lots of fights over lots of mex without drowning the player in resources and without crippling a player for losing a few mex. So yeah basically lots of fighting without rigid player territories.
This would provide a way to distinguish between Advanced Mex as well without any of the gimmicks from the 'upgrade resources' thread. Mex would be extremely fragile, give solid metal, cost nearly nothing to build. It will pay for itself within a minute of being built. Advanced mex would be only slightly more health, give slightly more metal, cost ALOT to build. It will pay for itself in over 5 minutes of build. Some people think metal income in everything so eventually you would never build anything but advanced mex and so 'high cost' doesn't create a choice. I think if you make BOTH mexes almost equally fragile, as well as make the advanced provide only a modest increase in metal (<= +50%) then such a balance mechanic would provide choice between Mex and Advanced Mex. If you dont think you can defend it from raiding for at least 5-6 minutes, build normal Mex.
Why would I ever build a t2 mex if it only gives slightly more metal but costs "ALOT" more? It does need to give an income that relates to it's cost in some way or we will rarely ever see t2 mex.
I'd vote for: T1 mex - cheap, quick and fragile T2 mex - expensive, slow to build, but more tanky. Perhaps slightly higher income to offset higher build cost.
I'd like to see T1 mex as is (I don't think they have too much health, but I'm also no expert at balancing), and the T2 mex be armed and armoured to justify the extra cost; make it a T1 with a built in AA / PD turret and more health. It doesn't necessarily need to produce more, the "upgrade" is the extra health and defense capability. Yeah, ok I have played UEF in SupCom 2, and I do tend to turtle
That's another idea i can get behind! As for the turret idea....... i dunno. I think that it would be hard to balance vs. mex->turret that you can already do. Mex->turret will start producing faster anyways, and stand alone turrets would always have a greater range due to placement factors
I'm not sure about this as a balance direction. In this suggestion, the T2 mex is still strictly better than the T1, with the single balance lever being cost. Although cost is a viable balance lever in a lot of circumstances, late game econo-buildings is not the best. The reason for this is that as economies grow and escalate, affording these late-game features will eventually hit a point of being a negligible fraction of a players income, thus the T1-T2 upgrade will always become a 100% optimal solution. This would necessitate alteration of the "always growing" aspect of TA style economies which is something I really enjoy. I would actually prefer going in the opposite direction: T1 mex - cheap, quick and decent health, slightly tanky. T2 mex - more expensive, noticeably higher income, but fragile with less health per unit of metal extraction capacity. There are a number of rationales behind this. The first being that the positioning of which extractors are upgraded becomes important. Front-line extractors would probably get destroyed easily, and probably not be worth the investment, while more secure extractors are a safer bet. The most important fact is that although a T2 based economy can be more powerful, it also becomes more fragile. If a player upgrades his economy without taking territory, they still get the necessary boost to make it worthwhile, but their economy becomes more fragile, and much more susceptible to raiding. This adds a way for cunning-but-behind players to potentially stage a comeback, by making use of this weakness. By extension, it makes early game economies less efficient, but more robust. The early game is more resistant to econo-raids, as they take longer to destroy metal production. However they are still perfectly viable, as all this does is increase the time taken for a raid to become effective, not grant returning fire-power to destroy or chase off the raiding forces.
I agree with above. Make the current mex slightly tankier. Then reduce advanced mex health to the current health of the basic mex. I would drop the advanced mex metal income to 14 but keep the cost high, say 3400. That would make normal mex pay for itself after 45 seconds while advanced would take 4 minutes (versus the current 3). After 8 minutes an advanced mex will have made more net metal income than a normal mex. From then on you get double income from that metal spot. This is much more risk reward than straight upgrade cause you don't get ahead unless it lives for 8 minutes. Normal mexes will always have a role to be placed on disputed spots. Making fragile advanced mexes in a disputed area would be a bad play. Right now it only takes 4 minutes for an advanced to outpace a normal mex in net metal prod. After that its a massive 3.4x as much metal income. This makes advanced almost always better to build.
Make the L1 mex any 'tankier' and you will destroy the flow of the game, you might as well remove every unit but the the l1 mex, fab and catapult as that is all that will get built by any competent player.
