OMG Uber Cannon is so OP. Fix now!

I use to hate how worthless the commanders where until this build. Im in love, put combat engys behind him and he is a force to recon with.

I have now played at least 5 games against one of the current top players and more games too. Myself and matiz are trying hard to find a build which can work without the need for going air. No joy so far. But we have another few trys in us. If anyone has suggestions of what we should try plz put them here and we will be happy to try them.

The lowest I ended up on was little over 3k. That means before his commander died I was on 5k hp. Which is little over 7 more uber cannons(at 700 damage). Which is 70k more energy needed just to kill my commander and hope he still has more than 2k hp remaining to get the win.

In the current build I'd say the PA commander is more powerful. Backed up by energy there's no land force that can threaten him. The d-gun had a tiny range in a game dominated by long range missiles.

He's more blunt, not more powerful. A Commander than can turn invisible and destroy anything with a single shot vs a Commander who can not do either of those things. TA's Commanders also went nuclear in such a way as to instantly destroy anything (including other Commanders) that dared to be so close, thus deterring Com-Rushes with the threat of mutually assured destruction.

TA's Commander, his abilities, his weapons and his final moments of existence, are on a different level to PA's; it's not even a contest.

If you would, could you try some strategies around AA Bots/Vehicles, some around building walls (Commanders build them super fast), if it's effective in water starts, and on desert biome planets. Desert planets now have a lot of verticality and can have powerful choke points for starting bases.

I'd like to hear your results so I can see if I can match them up with stats.

I really can't think of any game where players have had this amount of influence on balance before the game is even released. I can't imagine it being possible for the game to be released with bad balance if you guys keep listening to the players like that!

You say that like it's an undeniably good thing. It has pros and cons just like any other level of player and community involvement.

It is a good thing when the game is being made by such an experienced team. Scathis and the rest aren't going to just give in to demands and create unbalanced units because people said to, but they know that they can benefit a lot from community feedback.

We'll see, we'll see.

I don't doubt their experience, but the feedback from the players is far from biased.

A fact in which we are very well aware.

Which is why we have other sources of feedback. Internal playtests, other play groups, gameplay stats, etc.

Far from biased? Or far from unbiased?

Anyway.. carry on.

Mistakes were made. I am shamed.

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In any case, Garat, you asked me to play a few games; the results:

How much health does the Commander have? Is it still one hundred and fifty times the health of a Dox?
Why is this thing stated like a Tank? I can just walk into someone's base and categorically take it apart without a care in the world.

I just played my first game in the patch. Was fast. Pretty damn fast.
Lol at commanders in transports. xD
Let's see if we can fix this...

FTFY

Approach it from the "we need to see for sure that it's truly broken before we can talk solutions".

I cannot think of anything that can possibly work against this so far.
Since the attack happens at ~2:00 there is not much a player could build before it happens.

t1 aa bots: Are just out of range and useless once the drop is finished. Since he has air scouts in front of him he can easily drop out of range and walk a few meters. Since he has an early storage and I have not (it hurts a lot to build it, making it by default would result in losses in normal games vs normal people who do not do this) his uber cannon is far far better than mine.

bomb bots: 5k (I was wrong, only 1k meh...) damage would be really cool vs the commander. However they have 10 hp. They never get close the commander. They do, but 1k damage is nott that much and it is not reasonable to get that many of them (especially since half of them still die to t1 air scouts or the commander) The bots should maybe have enough hp to close in on a commander.

So yeah, air first with fighters would work. But pushing everyone onto air first is a bad idea I think.

Incidentally, this is another reason I like FFA (preferably 5 way or more) rather than 1v1.

Silly things like comm rushes might work in 1v1 but in a FFA they usually just mean that both you and the person you rushed are going to be the first two knocked out of the game. While you're doing your goofy transport com rush on your neighbor, the other 3 people are quite possibly expanding rapidly to T2 and will end up showing up at your base with T2 flamethrowers while you're still having a T1 slap-fest with your neighbor.

I realize 1v1 needs to be balanced as well, but I think 1v1, in every RTS game, always has some goofy "all or nothing" type strategies that aren't much fun and incidentally don't work if you want to win FFA matches.

Look, Scathis, I really like what you do around here, this balance is usually awesome and new and stuff.

But here are my rubs with the new build that just don't sit well:

Players like Clopse and Gunshin and myself will be playing our 1v1's and winning them in 5 minutes or less.

We could do Clopse's way (really risky) or we could do the Inferno drop at 4 minutes, followed by a commander drop at 5 minutes. Instant victory. The only way to counter this is to spam air, and only air, from the beginning, and hope your fighters can shoot down the transports before they drop their payloads.

I've killed three people this way already, and I've only been playing for 8 hours since it came out last night. I'd also like to point out that I managed to do this IN A FFA too. (I went on to win this FFA too). I dropped a couple infernos near the guys energy and factories, and starting eating his base. A few minutes later, I dropped my com a little north of him and build a bot fac. Two minutes after that, Green was Annihilated, and there WAS NOTHING HE COULD DO TO STOP ME.

The only way to stop this strat is by predicting it - which is nigh impossible in the early game without completely ruining your mid-game position. If you try to go all out to stop this, the enemy can expand without any hinderance at all.

Late game, transports are incredibly well balanced. But early game, it breaks everything, because it stunts games to a few minutes when they could be an enjoyable, well fought contest.

Also: I love what you did to the Stingray. My only question is, why?
My other question is more blunt. WHY ON EARTH DID YOU BUFF THE T2 FIGHTER?!

Thanks Everything else seems to be on target though.....as much as it can be.

Garat, it is well and truly broken. I'm sorry. I wish it wasn't, and I wish I didn't have to write such a long post about it, because I'm usually the guy in favor of crazy balance changes :/

My personal solution would be to start by slowing down transports and making their turning radius wider. Maybe make them behave more like bombers.

I just realized the boom do only 1k damage
Meh.

EDIT
And they have so low hp they die to a few hits of t1 air scouts. They really need much more health to be useful at all

Keeping the air transports cheap or making them even cheaper and then putting them in the advanced air factory would fix all this. You lose the ability to do early-game drops, but you can use the later on without really hurting your ability to use the advanced air factories for other things too much.

I don't particularly see a downside to this. Even if the transport rush is totally counterable, I'm not sure how on-board I am with the idea of early T1 transports in general. All it really seems to do is de-emphasize your starting location. You can always pick up fabricators and zip them to wherever you want and start secondary bases rapidly without the overhead of using air fabrication units.

Is that what we wanted?

What exactly IS the use-case for early transports?

Making air transports T2 basically forces everyone to spend at least some time and effort on their actual landing location. Transports will be available to help you branch out faster but I feel that's more appropriate in T2 than T1.