Unlimited Assisting, Game-Ending Weapons and Factory Redundancy

There is no difference - all the builders assisting the factory/nuke launcher suffer the same penalty. Fabbers working on a building would suffer no penalty (this means that building costs would need to be balanced accordingly).

Rather than implementing a counterintuitive 'can assist but only sometimes' mechanism, why not take one of two approaches (or a mix of both):

1. Rebalance so buildings cost is very low, and fabbers have a very low output, relatively raising the cost of all units.
2. Just raise the cost of fabbers, to match that of a factory. Thus relying on fabbers becomes a liability and a non trivial expense. This should encourage early game heckling. Since fabbers are to much of a resource sink to have veritable armies of them and they become worth protecting.

Solve the issue by making it a moot issue, so where you need to assisting is still straightforward. Obviously, I know this is all theory and probably missing some key factors, but w/e.

I like fabbers being a more expensive unit.

I don't mind assist limits, just possibly unnecesary like unit caps and expirimentals and upgrade style t2.

I think metal needs adjustment anyways, so we should wait until after that to make decisions. This next update adjusts economy, actually it needs t2 via cost adjustment, buffs t2 income only in perspective of t1 spending, and buffs t1 basically. This may help the situation...

...but ultimately my guess is they need to lower t2 income more afterwards, keep t2 cost, and increase factory rolloff time and add it to nuke launcher.

based on the fact that, you see t1 armies mass produced under t1 budget, but less this turret buff update, yet you don't see overly assisted build in t1, because the eco is limiting

I like the unlimited assisting. If you have the economy for it, why not? Then roloff time should be the most spam reducing factor so that building another factory will be more efficient.

This is more to do with how exponentially crazy tech 2 metal and power is. If it didn't give so much power and metal, this would be self limiting as you'd then have to be more thrifty about what to assist.

If I have an entire planets worth of tech 2 eco however, i do expect to be able to unlimited assist if i so desire. Hard limits are very 'gamey', they should be fixed by balance changes, not caps. Caps are horrific and make a game very restrictive, and its no secret why many of the first ts mods do

However, I disagree with assisting being better than having multiple factories. When making tank armies or plane armies, i much prefer to have multiple factories as they build much quicker, with or so fabbers assisting each factory.

This will fast outproduce the enemy. The other night i had literally 20 tech level one aircraft factories, assisted in this manner, and i was producing a ridiculous number of planes - much faster than id have been able to make with one factory alone.

Personally I still prefer the solution I mentioned in other threads of just having a limit on how many fabbers can assist anything; balanced for the advanced fabbers of course. Simple and intuitive gameplay wise that way.

No it wouldn't.

It's more a phylosophical problem with regard to how you want to the game to feel.

Personally I recognize two ways a strategy game can play out, and these decitions are virtually set in stone based on the over arching design; independent of any number tweaking or anything.

The Multi-Objective Maze Method

Essentially speed is important but is not as important as actually navigating the "maze of posibilities" and making judgements based on what you judge the other player is doing. Much like some of the more sophisticated games of cards there's no 100% guarantee of success and re-applying the same cookie cutter technique multiple times may lead to a guaranteed loss if the opponent is aware of it.

Games of this type are balanced with variety in options rather then numbers on units; outside of changes in numbers that simply produce a "different unit." The reason for this is because numbers are essentially just "speed" and you can't navigate the maze properly with "speed" alone.

Visually it would look something like this,



The Drag-Race Method

In certain strategy games you might as well be called the "QTE method" because of how button mashy dependent it can get.

It's probably easier to explain with a illustration first,



Essentially unlike the maze method where you have intermediary victory conditions, the method is quite linear and "easy to understand." Much like a drag race the objective to reach a end point and during the race you may fall behind, catch-up, overtake, fall behind again, and so on.

Generally this method is a lot more convenient to balance with numbers since it's similar in design to a car race. Give each car different perks that all sum up to the same total and it's balanced even if you go too far in one direction or another.

Another advantage of this method is that from a game design point of view you can start with unit designs first, balance/gameplay later, as there is no inherent complexity other then "get this/that faster." It's also much much more accessible, largely because as you can tell from the two images there's not much depth to it, every strategy works much the same way.

As I illustrated in the graph picture above the game can be really biased if the players don't start on a "fair" map hence why most games that employ this method use symmetrical maps.

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Aside from saying that the current game is obviously of the drag-race category I won't mention different games since that's really besides the point. However I'll mention one game franchise, which had both in it's lifetime and hence illustrates it's not black&white or a difference in aesthetics: starcraft1 is of the maze method, starcraft2 is of the drag-race method.

The question really is, if I can assist a nuke so crazily, why don't I assist a catapult, or an advanced laser turret?


Definitely advocating for a long cooldown timer on the nukelauncher. A few minutes at least.

This and a limit on how many fabbers can assist a nuke launcher

No..arbitrary assit limits are unintuitive and are in direct contrast of Mavor's What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get doctrine which is a very important factor to improve playability.
If nukes have a fixed "set up time" / "cooldown timer" or whatever you call it (and factories have a well balanced rolloff time) there is an automatic limit to how fast you can spam stuff by assisting things.
If a nuke takes 30 seconds to get ready to fire it doesn't matter if you can produce a new nuke in 1 second..you won't get more effective. You need to build more nuke launchers to build more nukes faster. The same goes for factories.

I very strongly find it to be THE exact opposite.

I look at a bunch fabbers, I expect the guy to have the ability to build a lot of buildings simultaniously (which doesn't happen I might add! the interface just makes you build in sequence) not be able to build "units" at an alarming rate, instant nukes, instant defenses and whatever else. In any other game this would be considered an "exploit."

Similarly, if I see player A with 40 factories and player B with a handful of factories and a bunch of builders I expect player A to be able to build a lot of units, not for them to be "evenly matched" or even worse "player B has more production."

The way fabricators work as the most powerful offensive unit in the game (they can literally instantly build pelters/hawkins/turrets so long as you have enough and are positioned right and decimate) is definitely not "what you see is what you get." I see a shitty unit that builds buildings, not a more dangerous unit then commanders themselves.

Controlling fabbers is also a lot more annoying then controlling a set of factories. I understand it may be different for different people but for me "playability" is scraping the bottom of the barrel in a fabber focused gameplay style.

I've watched a few FAF casts, and I have to say, they're pretty fun. I think people complaining about assists and turtles and such are making it out to be a bigger issue than it actually is.

To be fair, SupCom was kind of a game built for turtles.

But it was fun! I don't see how mindlessly spamming units is any more fun than hiding in ten layers of shields and launching nukes like a psychopathic Soviet submarine commander.

I win.

This is Planetary Annihilation, though, globe-trotting warfare, massive army confrontation, orbital moon-sized nuking stations, ASTEROIDS USED AS WEAPONS, MATE.

Hiding behind nuke-spam, (inb4 the gif) though indeed is explosive fun, just isn't as great to watch as creating an army the size of China and knocking on busting down your enemies door and opening fire because a few minutes ago he sent a small group of doxen to attack some of your mexes.

You mean....This gif?



Why not both anyway? INVADE THE NUCLEAR WASTELAND!

I wouldn't mind having both, but balancing both might be an issue.

I agree that we need additional limitation on assisting in this game. The old fashioned "it's less effective than a factory" doesn't cut it when you are overproducing resources by 500-1000% (which can easily be the case one you own a planet). There should be a limit when assisting adds nothing to the speed (3 people will easily carry a canoe while 1 will struggle, but sending 10 people would be overkill). That's how assisting should work and still be less effective than a new factory. Now setting a global limit that oyu can only assist up to 125% efficiency is a bit harsh. Nukes would take forever to build even at 125% build power, Halleys as well (and contrary to the nuke those aren't used just for game ending). On the other hand 125% build speed increase on a t1 bot factory is seriously overkill. Also having any limit like that is unintuitive. We need a better solution, maybe each factory has a limited number of slots that can be filled by fabbers and those slots are visible and easily recognisable.



As for game enders: I like them and they should remain where they are. The only thing wrong with them is when they are too hard to counter. In order for something to be a definite game ender and not OP requires a counter that only counters this specific game ender is somehow attractive enough not to spamm about, but still quick enough to be build in time to stop that game ender should it be scouted (the upcoming, upgraded and fixed anti nuke is such a defense: You'd never build everywhere, out of the blue, just because you can, you'd only build it to defend a specific point and to counter nukes). Even asteroid smashing and metal planet death stars should have their specific counters that work in a similar way.

It would be nice if the 20 or so fabbers sitting on a nuke silo would actually be more useful spread out on ten different factories.
So I guess this would require, limiting how much you could speed up a factory or building with fabbers. Say, a cap of 2x build speed for any building, with a hard limit to ten fabbers. Any more and they just ignore the command to assist that building.
I also like the increased roll off time idea.
Anyway, just my thoughts on the matter.

I still just think, that an average planet should generate enough metal on a hemisphere of it (when sized ideally for a 1v1), to fund just a single nuke to be assisted to make within 2 minutes, as well as allow some factory production and such. How many fabbers would that be, 20 or 30 maybe? So yeah, basically make just enough metal for a players to use about 40 fabbers to spend every last drop of their metal.

The game would still progress highly like this too. Have mutliplanet games? Well, when one players snags 1 whole planet or 2 half planets, they would get twice the allowance of fabbers. One could still have a high cap, one you could even manage to spend sure and assist-heavy using it, but still one that lets you produce any expensive toy in mere moments.

Someone above mentioned storage. As if storage actually increased the rate you produce. You could squeeze seconds out of storage, sure. But you couldn't literally produce off storage that you aren't replentishing, it runs out, thus being called storage.

Want a nuke specific fix for this build? Make a nuke cost 2x more, make a nuke launcher produce 2x more for same efficiency (2x more metal per second, 2x energy cost per second). This is a rough guess, might need be more. However, if the nuke costed more and the launcher built at the old speed just by spending more metal and energy, then a fabber would "seem" to contribute less because it only contributes half the relative build speed increase, and the nuke would seem too expensive to mass assist because it would cost all your economy to properly assist one. Thus, you would build 2 launchers max because even without assist that would spend just about all economy. WALA! Limit on nukes, not artificially provided, but provided by economical balance. Best thing is, you could still chuck them quite often at that marked up cost but at roughly same speed yet less spammed. Nukes are strong, that nerf wouldn't be anything. Ofc adjust antinuke similarly.

Yep, that's why I make the big bucks. (Actually you don't want to know my salary, I serverely lied about the big bucks) Still, I think I come up with some of the most majestic ideas if I do brag so myself.

This. Furthermore, WYSIWYG could easily be worked into the proposed system in my OP with Fabber streams changing colour when something was fully-assisted.
Perhaps we could have a balance in which we had unlimited assisting, but the efficiency returns began to drop off; after 125% each new assister would only add 1 or 0.5%. That doesn't sound much, but remember if I've got my standard 200 Assisters then we'd still end up with a Factory operating at 275% Efficiency. Even a 199% cap would encourage expansion.