PTE Playtest – Talking Balance and Changes – 5/2

http://www.twitch.tv/metabolical/b/525224161

• The playtest starts with poking around in the system editor. Talking about issues with planet generation, fixes, lighting, and more.
• Then they talked about costs of various orbital things, like Anchors, Orbital Fabricators, and Laser Satellites. Making suggestions on how to balance those units and make them viable.
• Then a bunch of dead air…
• Pelters are more accurate.
• Talk about vehicle and bot balance… and how the Dox is completely pointless.
• ZaphodX and burntcustard play against each other on a 2 planet system and are making a point to go orbital.
• ZaphodX gets hit by the walking Commander but and complains about it. Hopefully Uber fixes that sooner.
• The icons look sharper thanks to the recent update. Excellent.
• The health bars seem sharper as well.
• Meta talks more about how they balance by feel
• The shadows and edges of the unit seem sharper as well.
• Radar blips go away when you zoom in. They’re gonna fix that.
• Lots of T1 units being built. Interesting that neither of them went for T2 units before going Orbital. The question is whether this is because of balance changes and improvements to T1 units, or because they decided to push orbital and try it out.
• In my experience, it is always better to go T2 before going orbital because of the massive amounts of eco that T2 provides.
• Meta wanted burntcustard to build an Anchor over a contested area – which is an awesome move. But since the orbital fabber costs 9,000 metal, burntcustard couldn’t justify it
• New unit? Looks like an advanced grenadier/artillery bot? It didn’t have an icon, it looked different than a Gil-E because the cannon was off to the side.
  Gil-E has a new unit model!
• Zaphod self destructed. It wa
• It’s interesting that neither player went to T2 very quickly, and ZaphodX conceded the match when he had T2 and burntcustard didn’t have T2.
• burntcustard said basic metal extractors produce 5 metal a second, and meta is thinking about increasing their costs again.
• They then talked about assisting, and burntcustard talked about how assisting is less effective anymore.
• Meta is thinking that combat fabbers can’t assist in construction.
• Another Planetary Annihilation matche between ZaphodX and burntcustars
• Metabolical put on a task for a developer to fix the really annoying walking commander bug! Woohoo!!!
• Bug where fighters landed inside the ground.
• In the second match neither player went to T2 very quickly. Not sure why.
• Meta said there will be improvement to Spectator mode, specifically the economy UI. It’ll be easier to intuitively understand.
• Both players went Orbital before T2. Very interesting choice.
• The Uber cannon recharge bar works. Very useful addition.
• burntcustard’s Commander was more concerned about shooting at the wall rather than the Commander standing in front of it.
• Orbital fabbers cannot reclaim from space, but they can repair from space.
• Scouts don’t have guns on them anymore.
• Meta then fired up the test server and did some poking around.
• Bomb bots can’t manually target Advanced Power Plants. :-/
• Then they got together a large Bomb Bot FFA match. Such a fun game mode!
• Wow mines have a large AOE!

you know that most of this info, that you ask questions about is in the gamma forums?
like => t2 is not so massive eco advantage anymore, the mex produce only 5, same like t1. there is no reason to rush to t2.

the new unit is the new model for sniper bot, its also in the gamma forums for a few days xD

They updated the Gil-E model in the PTE stream, is this what you saw?

Now that's a cool looking model!

ZaphodX is a great caster and great tutor, but as a player, even if very strong, he's a bit of a drama

Couldn't figure out a nice way to quote, so I'll just copy pasta

• Pelters are more accurate.

This was due to the Uber dev who changed the accuracy not knowing how the (in)accuracy value worked and it was set way too high before. Pelters still suck (like all defences in PTE), but they're not so "broken" anymore.

• Lots of T1 units being built. Interesting that neither of them went for T2 units before going Orbital. The question is whether this is because of balance changes and improvements to T1 units, or because they decided to push orbital and try it out.
• In my experience, it is always better to go T2 before going orbital because of the massive amounts of eco that T2 provides.
• It’s interesting that neither player went to T2 very quickly, and ZaphodX conceded the match when he had T2 and burntcustard didn’t have T2.
• In the second match neither player went to T2 very quickly. Not sure why.
• Both players went Orbital before T2. Very interesting choice.

Have you even played the PTE Brian? D: We were trying to test the orbital, but it didn't go well because we both like winning and sticking to known-to-work strategies. And I did a stupid and sent away an astraeus to a moon before picking up a unit lol.

• They then talked about assisting, and burntcustard talked about how assisting is less effective anymore.

Um assisting is just as good in the PTE, perhaps even slightly better because of combat fabbers being so efficient. I was talking about how I like the current system where the more fabbers you have assisting, the less efficient it becomes - and more vulnerable, fabbers are made of paper. Adding a 50th T1 fabricator to your T2 air factory? That's going to give you like a 0.5% boost and is a waste of 200 metal. BECAUSE I like the current balance with normal fabbers, combat fabbers might be TOO good with assisting. They are also considered by the unit selection to be combat units, not fabbers, so it's awkward not to accidentally select them when picking up units from a factory (if you want them to keep assisting the factory). Because of this, we bring up the next point...

• Meta is thinking that combat fabbers can’t assist in construction.

We talk about how one of the main reasons to build combat fabbers right now in the PTE is that they have different roles, so can be just about always doing something. They can help with building stuff like an army, and then repairing the army when it goes to attack. If the building-stuff attribute was removed and they could only repair, they'd have to be made cheaper.

• Orbital fabbers cannot reclaim from space, but they can repair from space.

This seems kind of buggy and unintuitive - I assume it'll be worked on

I've just tested out the latest PTE build and I must admit I like it.

The trees give a nice M boost early game which is helpful for getting an extra factory or 2.

As for the difference between dox and grenadiers- these feel rather like the difference between the Pewee and the Hammer from TA. An improvement would be to make the grenadier slower firing (with higher damage per shot and possible slower projectile speed) as that would help differentiate them a bit more. As it stands they're a bit too similar for the distinction to be important however a few tweaks should be good, personally I rather like having both.

The other changes are nice- the lower output of Metal extractors and especially T2 is good. It makes going T2 a much tougher decision. I also noted that when playing a hard ai on a map with lots of metal I *didn't* get nuked at all (I stopped it from launching a couple mind you). The metal income is much lower, however with tree reclaim it's not enough to cause much problems. By the end of the game on a decent size map I still had over 1000 m income to play with (enough to push whatever strategy I felt like) however it took quite a bit longer to get there and required a large area of map control. I think this will make games with less metal / more players (so less space) more interesting as you'll have to carefully manage your base and production to reach a specific goal.

T1 is definitely the primary focus now rather than rushing T2. Also things like combat fabbers are more important as your units are more valuable now. I also had some direct confrontation between a large force of t1 tanks and some of the ai's triple tower turrets and amazingly the tanks were able to fight back. It probably took about 100 tanks to overwhelm 3 triple barrel turrets (without walls) however this is definitely an improvement on before.

Overall I rather like the latest PTE.

One minor bug I noticed- the new sound effect on the Gil-E is distorted (I was using headphones on a medium output setting and normally don't get any distortion) so that might need tweaking a little. Also I wasn't getting any visual effect for the Gil-E weapon.

I've noticed some complaints about performance with burning trees- I didn't notice any slow down on my old laptop, however I have noticed slow down on my faster desktop system. I think the difference is that on this I'm running on pretty much minimum settings, my main system is allot faster so I have things like HDR and Ambient Occlusion turned on, so perhaps the performance issues people are mentioning are a result of the combination of fire + HDR?

Hmm not sure I understand you correct, but t2 mex gives 24 metal not 5.

The T2 mex only gives 5 metal in the latest PTE build. So T2 + T1 = 10 metal per mex spot.

I'm still waiting to see if the current drag build for turrets UI changes ect is there to stay because i really hope it don't because they should not shaft a brilliant build UI. Just because potentially a couple of people don't know how to drag build turrets around their base without breaking their eco : \ and there appears to be some major path finding bugs in these latest test build so lets hope they get ironed out before its released : )

One last thing.. Is it intention that you can not set laser sats on area patrol?
as you can only area attack with them at the moment and its not very efficient right now as they tend to move in a blob all at once.

but other than that great stuff : )

Incorrect. T2 mex in latest PTE build is 24; it's never been 5 (only T1).

Hmmm just played a game, and it showed 24 when I hover over the t2 mex

oh ^^ mixed that up then.

Ah lol- I just checked a replay, it looked like the T2 only gives 5 as when you have a t1 and t2 on the same spot the majority of the hit sphere for the tool tip shows the T1 output rather than the t2. My bad.

Definitely agree on combat fabbers not assisting buildings or construction. 60 metal/sec for only 2K power/sec would otherwise make the other fabbers practically obsolete.

Oh damn, that looks awesome!

Edit:

Hm. I wonder how that will play out.

I predict that it'll make expansion harder and take longer, which in turn makes T2 metal extractors even more important.

Yeah... that's definitely worrying.
Perhaps Uber should make the T2 mexes more expensive instead.

They cost 3000 metal in the PTE. That's 20x the T1, even though they only make 5x the metal/s. They take 2 minutes to pay for themselves, unlike T1 which only take 30 seconds.

One of the reasons they took so long to go T2 is after the other playtest with matiz and custard, matiz said going t2 we'll take longer, and after another game we all agreed. It's not to great to rush, but the eco still rocks.