Balance Changes Summary 69564

What if the bot factory had multiple build bays per factory? like, each individual factory you build for bots is like 2 of the current factories stuck together, and it builds the first two things in the queue, or heck, just builds two of everything in the queue orders.

The problem with some in this community is they spend too much time telling Uber instead of showing them.

No, the only strategy was MEX, MEX, NRG, MEX (at least in 95% of games). Now I can go bot, vehicle, air or naval, so I have four openings, and on top of that the one I choose makes a huge difference to the rest of my early game.

Clumping all those options together and calling it the only strategy is disingenuous.

The first decision I made in the opening following spawn location was which factory to start with. Factory first cuts out the time wasting and gets me straight into decision making.

Honestly overall I'm not keen on the idea, it would require a lot more engineering work than Uber seems to want to do at this stage and Like I said, there isn't a "Silver Bullet" for this issue and simply "Doubling" the factory's build capability introduces a bunch of new problems as well, like how do you price it it and that balancing it is a bit more awkward now as well.

Mike

I think that the commander changes address another issue. Knowing the correct build of mex mex pgen mex is more difficult/unintuitive for aspiring players than it is for knowing 'hey, I can go factory first!', as the first takes a lot more math than the latter, and many aren't willing to do said math!

Let's be honest, new players are still going to do some version of MEX and PGEN first because of their conditioning with other RTS games. The game will need some sort of tutorial - ingame, youtube, quickstart guide - recommending factory first or you will still have players fighting up a learning curve.

i like the new spawn anywhere feature

I´d suggest that you shouldn´t bring the stinger bot back. Instead of that step you should include small anti-air-capabilities in the DOX. This would solve three problems at the same time:
1. No Anti-Ground & AntiAir-Units yet.
2. Dox are not yet very usefull as rush units
3. No fast Ground AntiAir yet.

BTW: Love the new "BlueCommanderNuke" and "CommanderSpawnRocket".
Little letdown of the new update: UI isn´t stable all the time (selcting units via mouseclickbox doesn´t always works well...)

Mike's long quote is too long, otherwise i would have quoted it. Ran out of character space.

I think factory cost differences would be a great idea, bots are designed to be more annoying rather than a serious threat, also if it bots costs less, it could produce metal slower and therefore offset its abnoxiously long rolloff time. It would also bring a large variety to the start of the game.

It wouldnt be overpowered to go bots purely because the commander's natural defences offset rush assaults.
It would also be a great thing to do about tier 2, because a player going bots will get there first, however, t2 bots are far less useful than t2 vehicles. In terms of building, it makes sense that bots would be the better builders, their units are designed to impede enemies, rather than kill, in order to reach a higher level of technology first.

Lastly,

Don't let it get you down that some people don't like the changes, people don't like change. There will always be a few who rebel against every change made, no matter how rational. Personally i think its too heavy on the production front over storage, as it means metal closeby the commander will sustain them longer (as they won't be grabbing them immediately), i feel like they need more reason to leave the base centre as it is... My answer would be - keep new energy production rate, lower metal production rate, increase metal storage. Try to get it so that getting factory first, and having it constantly build (fabricators for testing), will not run you out of metal and energy when you are trying to fix the problem (constantly building metal and energy)

People keep suggesting this but I don't think you guys realize just how awkward that is to try and make it work. We tried similar things in BlackOps and it just never panned out and SupCom2 even shows us why it doesn't work. Fact is that as soon as you combine the two you make regular AA mostly worthless. In SupCom2 Once Rockheads got AA you never needed to build a dedicated AA unit because even thought the AA capability of a single Rockhead was terrible, it didn't matter because your force was already about 70-90% Rockheads so it was almost impossible for an Air force to actually take out a land force because killing individual units didn't mean anything because you only took out a tiny fraction of the Force's AA capabilities.

At the end of the day, if you want true diversity, Bots will need some form of dedicated AA, at least the return of the Stinger but in a best case scenario something different that compliments the Spinner.

Mike

Considering Dox are terrible against ground too, they basically ARE the dedicated anti-air.