OMG Uber Cannon is so OP. Fix now!

if you want to build them on mass ... build more factories ... simple as that ...

Is fabbers healing your comm really a good idea in an energy-limited commander battle? Wouldn't that energy be better spent on the uber cannon now that healing commanders costs more and the uber cannon is amazing?

Air first and air scout into a couple of interceptors seems to be the only reasonable answer. You have to intercept transporter.
There might be some answers like mass walls/turrets or AA bots or 2x storage into pgens or bomb bots but they all rely on the fact that you 100% know that it is coming. The problem is that you have to do it blindly and you end up riddiculously behind vs anything else. And even all those solutions might not work vs someone who does the rush perfectly. It comes at 2 minute mark and you can't do any scouting or adapting.

also:

I think making commander strong is great idea. Commander should be able to turn battles in your favour but there should be always a risk that you might loose game. In previous patch risk/reward ratio was in favour of staying in base with commander most of the times which wasn't that fun, commander didn't feel like strong awesome unit. In this patch risk/reward ratio is unfortunately too much in favour of rushing. But the idea was great, I really want to do strong attacks with commanders.

I think it's good to keep commander as strong as it is now. Changing some stuff around commander, that would make commrushing worse, would be ideal change.

Which is luck based, and if your opponent is smart and has fighters out front, even more luck based.

It also sets you back since you're building fighters instead of fabbers.

And also forcing us to go air first, which is binary and bad for gameplay.

You couldnt 'full on win' with a rush at any point in this games history unless your commander is part of that rush. This has merely made it worse since the com is 100x better at killing buildings.

Another possible fix.

Lower the Uber Cannon's recharge rate and give it a bunch of storage.

This would allow players to fire off 5 or so shots in rapid succession, but then have to wait to recharge or suffer a reduced fire rate.

This would also increase the skill and strategy involved with the Uber Cannon. When to use it, how rapid of usage, and the like.

I think this should be done regardless of whether this commander rush is an issue or not.

This is good thinking alright. However the problem I see is just the sheer power of commander rush. Was powerful enough without the über cannon spam. Now you have the air which makes it super easy to our maneuver their commander and then run. If both players just get a few charges each the aggressive commander is not at too much risk. Ruin the enemy's economy and retreat back to his base.

The dgun in TA is much more powerful and the same problem has been there for over 16 years. The only solution the players there could come up with was a no com rush rule. Surely in this day and age we can prevent this without needing rules players must obey.

TA:esc has improved llt and hlts ,commanders can't be air lifted, dgun has longer reload times and very strong t2 units which made it a non issue.

Supcom:FA's solution to have comm explosion to 4k hp could help here as well

This would pretty much do it. If you did a commander drop, both commanders would end up dead.

Note that you can't really repair commanders to counter sustained damage anymore.
The old rushes relied on that you used the commander as a damage sponge so you could kill the enemy units and repaired the commander for a low cost.
This new type of commander is more like kill everything in range and either win out straight or retreat before taking too much damage.

Yeah was supposed to add this in somewhere but rushed it. TA commander explosion would also take out the enemy, no matter what the % health.

I think it is also more efficient to use whatever energy you do have for the uber cannon rather than repair. Repairing a commander in a duel would only work if you have a lot of excess energy (Probably thousands)

Commander explosions killing Commanders would kill the Army game type.

It'd be the issue we're having, but worse.

You would always have to rush your opponent. You would take out one or more commanders, and destroy a lot of your opponent's base.

There is no downside to a suicide commander rush in the army game type when there's an exchange like that. It benefits the attacker and there is no risk of a downside.

That's true for explosions that kill other commanders. However, an explosion carefully balanced to do just enough damage that it kills a commander that has taken as many hits from an uber cannon as you expect in this commander drop attack would work correctly. You wouldn't get the chain reaction explosions unless both commanders are already pretty heavily damaged.

You should note how big the change is. A single fabricator will repair the Commander at 5hp/s. Before it was 50hp/s. Repairing your Commander is a huge economic burden in the current build, and its no longer viable to repair the Commander while fighting.

This weren't the intention with the explosion nerf. SupCom have had a long history of dealing with commander rushing balance wise, from vanilla to Forged Alliance. From the beginning ACUs would destroy eachother in 1 overcharge, be transportable by t1 transports and blow up like nukes destroying each other. I really dislike draws and being able to force a draw when you think you are losing is not fun. 4000 damage would just increase the amount of draws and the com rusher would only be more likely to suffer a draw while he would still win some games. A full blown commander killer explosion would force the rusher to avoid the enemy commander but still allow him to destroy everything else and play chicken with the enemy commander while the defenders best outcome is a draw. Not a good solution in my opinion.

Yeah this makes sense. Now after I've just tried to use my memory a bit more, 6 years ago in supcom I actually thought 4k is too much dmg indeed. Yeah other solutions would be better probably. I'd like to see a solution that meets those 3 conditions:
1. Commander is still strong and can be used offensively with great effect.
2. If you defend properly you can win
3. If you fail to attack you cannot force the draw.
Those are very simple but I can't actually come up with perfect solution atm. The easiest would be to prevent commander from being transported by transporter but can't we come up with something better?

Bringing FA is a really good idea.

The FA community by now actually came to the conclusion that it is too much and reduced it to 2,5k. Worked out well.

Generally FA has all issues in terms of commander rushing solved:

- Commanders can not be transported by t1 transports. This makes sure that their movement speed, that balances them in the early game, cannot be artificially increased before the player has access to stuff that can deal with fast commanders.
- Commanders cannot deal that much damage vs buildings. So it is not possible to rush in and just kill all pgens.
- overcharge is rather weak vs other commanders
- the damage of a commander explosions is 2,5k vs mobile units and only 500 vs buildings. So combombing a base does not even kill most t1 buildings.

FA developed to be like this after years for a reason, PA probably can learn a bit from this for sure.

I agree that air play is very dull right now. I don't like the air gamble shenanigans we have to choose from. It's all just one minded fighter zerg blogs or bomber snipes in the air theater, when there is so much going on with land. Air is distracting from land units when they should be more cohesive.