[WIP] The Realm Community Balance Mod

More details, how many enemy tanks were there, what kind were they, what was the terrain like?

Mike

Have you considered lowering rotation speed and increasing the fire wait time?

Indeed. If you sent 2 sniper bots vs 30 tanks expecting to win, then you should really think about the problem harder.

There is no rotation speed as far as I know. Increasing the fire wait time will do nothing except make them useless against air.

No, because that would make it useless in its role as AA, which is meant to be taken fairly seriously.

To everyone else: I've nerfed it's damage more and also upped it's cost slightly. This is as low as I'm willing to go for now. If you want more, show me some videos or catch me for a blind test. I'm not willing to alter it more without some data.

I will now go and test the strength of 30 Cougars vs. an equal amount and equal cost of other units that should counter them.

Here are the results for the old balance (Mad Sci ninja released a new one after I have begun testing:

30 Cougars indeed do wreck everything else with equal cost. They wrecked 22 Tanks, 10 Levellers, 12 Gil-Es and 16 Kestrels with 17, 22, 19 and 21 surviving Cougars respectively. However when they came up against equal numbers they only had a 25% quasi-success rate. They lost miserably against Tanks, Levellers and Kestrels with 17 surviving Tanks, 23 surviving Levellers and 15 surviving Kestrels. They still won against Gil-es with 15 surviving Cougars but only because Gil-Es weren't able to hit them one they got too close.

I will now repeat the test with the new figures.

Here is a new battle report with cougars costing 350 and doing 4 damage.

This time I have only done the cost for cost tests.

Cougar Vs Tank
30 vs 26
Winner: Tank (13 survivors)

Cougar Vs Leveller
30 vs 12
Winner: Cougar (12 survivors)

Cougar vs Gil-E
30 vs 14
Winner: Cougar (12 survivors)

Cougar vs Kestrel
30 vs 19
Winner: Cougars (9 survivors)

Cougar vs Levellers and Tanks
30 vs 5+15
Winner: Levellers and Tanks (5 Leveller and 8 Tank survivors)

Cougar vs Gil-E and Doxen
30 vs 12+15
Winner: Cougar (7 Survivors)

Cougars vs Pelters, Turbolasers, Light laser towers and Walls
30 vs 3+5+15+40
Winner: Defences (2 walls destroyed)

Lessons learned: Perhaps Gil-E and Leveller cost too much. Kestrel needs a slightly bigger weapon energy storage.

Just out of curiosity, what are the role differences between Skitters and Cougars? I get that Skitters are dedicated scouts and raiders, but Cougars seem to just be scaled-up Skitters for a little higher cost.

That's definitely looking better.

This is good work and all but how exactly are you basing it? Are you crashing 30 cougars into 12 levellers? Sounds like you would give the cougars their preferred battle ground and a bad one for levellers. Kite cougars with levellers and see what happens. The idea is to have levellers at their max range picking off the outskirts of the cougar blob. I would imagine different results when micro is used.

Skitters are scout/raider units. They are good vs. undefended targets but weak vs. anything that can shoot back. Cougars are supposed weak crowd control units that should fair be reasonable vs. air and bots, and weak vs. higher hp units. However you should end up paying for the fact they can shoot both land and air.

This may not be the case at the moment, the Cougar's balance still needs time to settle down.

I am not sure how he did it, I haven't had the chance to talk to him yet. From the results it looks like he ran one blob into another. That is the most idea situation for the Cougar seeing as it does more damage (or rather misses less) as it gets closer.

However it is good to see that advanced units don't always win if you don't think about how you use them.

I was crashing cougars against their counters and testing the outcome. I sadly cannot control 2 groups of units that both belong to their own player. So the second best and most equal testing method is crashing them together.

I have written a post that explains some changes and what to expect when playing RCBM for the first time on PA Matches forums in the RCBM Sub-forums.

We've been a little quite of late, and the reason is that we ran into a little issue. Namely, one of our testers got good enough at RCBM to find a globally optimum strategy. A build order was found which was able to massively emphasise expansion to the point of their opponent not being able to do anything.

Expansion should be an important component of the game, of course, however it was possible for a player to ride a stupidly quick expansion curve which snowballed out of all proportion very quickly. As a result, games were decided within the first couple of minutes, but went on for the next 20. We refer to this as a degenerate win condition, which we regard as a big no-no. Expansion will still of course be an important strategy. It just shouldn't be the most important strategy and it certainly shouldn't be the only strategy. We know that vanilla PA can often be summed up by the phrase "expand or die". That's fine for vanilla, but we will feel that RCBM has been a failure if it can be summed up in just three words.

We are looking at making expansion a more risky proposition (at the moment by upping the cost of the basic mex, although this may change). We are also experimenting with having booms as an advanced unit, as they are an excruciatingly powerful raider in the early game. One factory on global patrol and repeat build can shut-down the entire planet to expansion, in a way that is difficult to counter. I'm not 100% happy with this solution, but we will see how it works for now. In the long term, we want to do is shift more of the player's economy onto reclaim, as reclaim is a great comeback mechanic. However, at the moment, we cannot do this in a way which is non-micro-intensive without additional hooks.

We will be examining any other ideas that come up.

Ehhh. It's starting to look a lot like "turtle and rush for Vanguards or die".

rush T2 or die

Hey four words. Clearly better right?

:/

I always thought booms were easily countered by the building of a single laser defense tower, literally made booms useless in the small area they held, however getting fabbers to a mex field without dieing immediately was a problem.

RCBM booms turn into a projectile that goes a small distance for their PBAOE attack which results in them having significantly more range. Problems like this are exactly why I opted not to do the same thing for Statera booms.

They usually died before they launched forward when I played, and when using the double laser tower their range takes out singles booms quite easily.