Lets reimagine the relationship of bots and tanks...

On the balance forum in a topic buried under 4 pages of posts a discussion was had regarding an alternative way of looking at bots where they can remain fast raiders without AA, and yet still remain a viable starting factory.

This is a composite of 3 posts and replies. Keep in mind, because of the character limit I've had to edit out a lot. I didn't exclude the previous replies until my post was rejected... I've enjoyed the dialog on the topic thus far and would like to refine the conversation down a little to address this specific idea rather than the more general discussion on how to make bots useful.

I'm also aware that some of the rebalancing mods have similar approaches to tanks vs bots, and that's great. I'm just hoping for a fruitful dialog all around.


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OK, so, here are my "Make Bots Good" suggestions with caveats made to appeal to compromise with Uber's vision as well.


T1 BOT CHANGES

• Leave the AA bot out, other suggestions will settle that issue.
• Make all bot units "stealth" from radar. Enables their role as mobile raiders.
• Keep Dox range short so they can only attack within the enemies LoS.
• Dramatically reduce the health, DPS, and cost of the Dox. Allow them to build 5 to 1 over Ants and easily overwhelm tanks with numbers, but they will be crazy vulnerable to AoE.
• Increase the splash of the Grenadier, reduce the damage. It becomes an effective Anti-Dox-Bot but can no longer replace the Dox in combat against other units/structures. Reduce the price until it is still situationaly effective vs defenses behind walls.

T1 VEHICLE CHANGES

• Reduce the accuracy of anti-tank weapons (Ants mostly) so that they are likely to miss individual Dox.
• Raise the health and damage of the Ant, but reduce it's fire rate. Better burst damage, higher overall DPS and more survivable against towers, but overall worse against Dox.
• Dramatically reduce the damage of the Inferno, keep its range short and speed low. Add a small AoE to the fire. The AoE and high rate of fire will keep it very effective vs Dox in a standup fight, but it's speed and range will allow Dox to retreat when the Inferno arrives. Ants will replace it as a base breaker unit.

T1 AIR CHANGES

• Double the AoE of the Bumble Bee, but reduce it's damage by half. This will make it very effective vs the uber frail Dox, but will make it less effective against tanks, defenses, and near worthless for Com Snipe.

T1 DEFENSE CHANGES

• Reduce the Cost of the Pelter, quarter the damage, double the fire rate. The Pelter becomes a lethal Anti-Dox weapon and at a reduced price it is viable in the early game, however, because of all bots having stealth it would require an active patrol to keep LoS for max effectiveness.
• Laser towers should fire faster, but with less damage per shot. Similar overall DPS. The extra barrels on the improved towers should chain fire instead of link fire. This will improve their performance against Dox without reducing their Anti-Tank effectiveness.
• Improve Static AA so that it can be effective by itself.

It is possible your starting factory is RPSed by your opponent's first factory (you chose bot, they chose air) but players would also have access to adequate early game defense to repel single factory rushes until they can get a second factory up and running.

In this balance design every factory has a strength and a weakness, and no factory is viable for long without a second factory to support it, however, any two factories would be viable. Players are not pigeon holed into any one factory but are rewarded with greater capabilities for building all factory types.


Bots would be better at raiding and retreating, and would even better at direct field combat against tanks, but would be very weak against fortified positions.

Tanks would be better at crushing bases and breaking towers with their high burst DPS and high health.

Air would remain the most mobile choice and would excel at repelling bot raids, but would lack the raw DPS of a land invasion.


To help the early game balance and support a double factory start...

The commander's base metal and energy production could be raised enough to support two fully functioning factories and cost of factories vs defenses could be balanced so that your starting storage can build 2 factories OR 1 factory and a cluster of defenses. If we don't want to reduce the cost of defenses this would mean that factories cost a lot more, but that's OK, they have 3X the health now, and their production speed can be buffed to match the new cost. Also, better factories reduces the effectiveness of fabber assisting, and that's generally a good thing.

As a community we rant endlessly about the importance of having as many opening moves as possible, I think this would go a long way toward that goal. Your opening move could be:

• Build any 2 complementing factories and start a combined arms attack. This start has a wide variety of mixed forces in the early game.
• Build 2 same-type factories and gamble on your enemy being unprepared for a hard hit of 1 unit type.
  
• Build 1 factory and bunker down with early defenses while you invest in economy. (only half your commanders economy is used if you only build 1 factory, the rest can support fabbers)
• Build 1 factory and gamble on being far enough away to rush T2. (I agree T2 needs rebalancing, but a rush start should be possible)

If we have an opening balance that favors building 1 factory and then spamming units then we've restricted ourselves to only 4 possible starts, because we have 4 opening factory types. Any opening that encourages building more than 1 structure before rushing your attack is better because it means you have opening options other than rushing your first combat unit.

Naval is left in an interesting position, and I wouldn't change it too much Instead of being part of the RPS, naval would be of situational value... it trumps the RPS at the expense of mobility. Naval can easily engage any other unit type, but only if that unit strays over the water or along the shore. Naval starts would be a decision between double naval, or naval and air. Double naval will be a stronger combat position, but naval air would be far more flexible if your enemy started on land.



By themselves every factory would have a critical flaw, Bombers would lack the DPS to engage spinners, Bots lack AA completely, and tanks would be too slow firing to engage Dox. But you could mix and match them to great effect. For example,

Bot and Vehicle factories together.

• Ants would be able to protect your Dox from fast firing low DPS weapons like the reworked pelter or the inferno.
• Spinners would protect your Dox from bombers.
• By far the bulk of your raw DPS would come from the cheap and frail, but deadly Dox, but they need escorting to do more than a quick raid.
• As a mixed force they are slow moving than just bots, but offer huge DPS and strong survivability by pairing repair bots with tanks.

Vehicle and Air factories together.

• You rely on Ants for most of your DPS and destroying AA while AoE bombers protect your tanks from enemy Dox rushes.
• A mix of Spinners and interceptors maintain your strong air superiority.
• Infernos and bombers protect your base from Dox rushes while your main army is away.
• This pair would be flexible, but would need more coordination than all ground forces. The attack would move at tank speeds with air playing backup.

Air and Bot together.

• Your interceptors protect your Dox from bombers while your Dox deliver the bulk of the DPS.
• You would be weak against entrenched positions with pelters and AA, but you are fast enough to go around and chose a more favorable fight.
• Dox are already fast and mobile, with stealth they would be fantastic raiders. Aircraft are ultra-mobile and could be used to support your Dox at the last second so that you don't give up your stealth advantage.

If bots are supposed to be light and fast, then what is the point of the scout vehicle? Checkmate.

All stealth bots is kinda iffy. There are enough places where bots can have a mobility or terrain advantage over vehicles. Just need the actual bots to do it.

To scout?

If the bot factory can live without AA (which literally makes them completely helpless against air), then the vehicle factory can live without a scout (which is literally a low utility bot with wheels).

i´m afraid that would make bots too powerfull and intendet or not it would make pelters and catapults pretty useless against them unless there are units in front of it but that is the reason we use radars in the first place, to not be forced to send units for long range artilery targeting ... shellers may become less usefull as well as bluehawks and gil-e´s ...
i can understand if the intend is making that so some units are more specialised on their actual role of antistructure but i feel this is to drastic of a change ...

as for the other stuff ... i don´t realy know ... could work (shrugs) ...

I honestly think there's only so much one can do with these units on these maps.

I think an important component would be to introduce terrain features that would allow bots to take advantage of their speed and mobility over vehicles, flanking, attacking from above(i.e.canyons), tacking advantage of cover, and all that sorta stuff.

The purpose of radar is twofold. Yes, its primary function is to make high powered dangerous units easy to find. In that department radar is meant to excel, because getting a surprise attack with standard units is bad.

But the point of stealth units is that they aren't high powered death machines. A stealth unit's role is to be sneaky. Sneaky not only lets you avoid enemy patrols to deal devastating backstabs (because patrols are lit up like christmas candles on the radar), it lets them avoid debilitating long range fire from defenses. This gives them a unique advantage where standard units would depend on speed or extreme endurance to breach the front (OP vanguards anyone?).

It was very difficult for any defense in TA to fire beyond its standard vision range. This was an intended weakness that forced players to not be dependent entirely on turrets or radar for their defense.

Some bots simply aren't meant to be sneaky. The dox is clearly supposed to be a fast and dangerous unit. Maybe something else would be suitable for the buff.

So in other words there's still no reason to build a bot factory...EACH factory NEEDS a front line unit role just done in a different way. I'm fine with a light raider bot role but bots still need a front line unit. SO here's my idea....

Dox
-Maintained Damage
-Cheap
-Slow (They have legs think about it wheels are faster than legs...)
-Very High Dps
Ant (Screw the other names)
-Frontloaded Damage
-Good health, great vs defendes
-Costly
-Fast
This means BOTH Dox and Tanks have a front line unit just done in a different way meaning both are good choices for a start build and later down the line to spam up with. Making bots only raiders makes them near useless.

Also due to the lack of the dox having the raider role, the role should be shifted to the Boom or the t1 vehicle scout (Along the lines of a assualt jeep?)

On T1 air units keep both the spinner and the stinger and have them fill the same role but in different ways

Stinger
-Slower
-Cheap
-Sustained DPS
-High DPS
Spinner
-Front loaded damage
-Long range
-Fast
-Lots of swarm missiles with slow reload

This way both T1 bots and Vehicles have both roles just fulfilled in different roles, this way both are needed and useful so players rather than spamming one type of unit (Infernos...looking at you live build) they build a large combination that utilizes all kinds of units.

Stealth just encourages USELESS micro and unneeded strategies and STILL leaves the problem of when it comes to a fight Vehicles are better than bots.

I'm actually not convinced at all that bots should be fast. I would make them as slow as infantry on foot if I were designing from scratch. I only left them fast in the above post as an attempt to appease the larger crowd who believe bots should be fast raiders.

I am however 100% convinced that bots should defeat tanks in a direct fight. If Dox being stealthed is a factor in that fight then I agree it might be better to remove the scout car to preserve Dox stealth as much as possible in an Ants vs Dox brawl.

The crux to my view of Dox is that they should be very cheap, and very low health while maintaining their current DPS. This would mean that any anti-tank weapon with front loaded damage would massively overkill a Dox allowing the rest of the Dox to swarm and kill tanks.

Speed and Stealth are only advocated in my balance proposal because there is a deep rooted belief that Dox are light raiding units... that's fine in my opinion, but if we want them to raid they should be enabled to do so.

The character limit kept me from bringing over a lot of the dialog on the other topic. I agree that not every bot needs stealth, but I would still advocate that the Dox specifically has it so it can be enabled as a raider. After a little off time off the forum mulling it over I think it would be better that way. If only the Dox has stealth then a stealthed raiding party could do a lot of DPS, but they would be extremely vulnerable to any AoE counter attack. It would support raiding, but would not overpower the entire bot class.

In a comment above I agree that not all bots need stealth, but I still feel Dox should have it. With dramatically reduced health Dox would be completely demolished by any AoE artillery fire. Pelters and Shellers would destroy huge numbers of Dox once spotted, and because bots have no AA (especially no stealthed AA) fire flies could patrol the edge of a base for stealthed units never fearing ground fire. Without stealth the raiding Dox would never make it close enough to a base to matter.

I LOVE the idea of bots have terrain advantages over tanks, but that also calls for a change to terrain generation to include areas that tanks can't traverse. I think it would be great, but I also wanted to try and keep my requests for new functionality to an absolute minimum. With the exception of stealth everything else I proposed is entirely within the scope of number tweaking.

Actually if you read all of my post Dox would face smash Ants in the balance I suggested. The inferno would be a mediocre counter of Dox, but would be too slow to hunt them and the grenadier would out range it.

More importantly it needs to be understood that no attempt at "almost equal" will ever work with bots and tanks. We need one to be better than the other in a direct fight, then make that stronger class weak against aircraft while the first loser is powerful vs aircraft. This creates a working rock paper scissors and a balance that favors all three can grow from there. Without a 3 sided relationship bots and vehicles will always be locked in a pissing contest, one will always loose and then it's "the better ground factory" vs air.

Now, as for stealth and micro... I have to disagree 100% there. We're talking about stealth, not cloaking. It would only hide them from radar. The "useless micro" would consist of giving a few fireflies a patrol area order. Problem solved. The stealthed units in question have no AA, so you could fly circles above them all day.

Go play the Realm Re-balance Mod and see this balance between bots and tanks and tell my why this isn't perfect balance...it works so well cloaking from radar is unneeded. I mean don't get me wrong your balance proposal is great and I think it would work, but I strongly feel that there are many other ways to make it work.

The realm balance mod is fun, but it's not the direction uber wants to take this.

I'm actually a big fan of the RCBM, at least in theory. As a father of 5 with a full time job I almost never have time to play anymore. I have read about the Realm's balance mod, and I what I've read sounds great. It's also worth note that they relationship between dox and vehicles is nearly identical to what I'm suggesting. In the RCBM Ants have many times the HP, Damage, and cost of the Dox, but the damage is front loaded and overkills individual ants. This means equal spending between Dox and Ants will favor Dox every time.

It also means that an Ant's massive front loaded DPS makes it ideal for attacking larger and more expensive targets instead of wasting all that damage on a single ant.

Part of my case is that I'm trying to address the balance without changing the core direction Uber has envisioned and finding a way to keep everything useful without completely abandoning the whole system. I want to fix the most broken aspect (bots vs tanks) while making as few changes as possible to the rest of the system.

Either way, hopefully Uber does something to fix the whole problem, maybe some balance changes every day or so in the PTE so we can test them?