All the problems with the current balance(its not all bad)

Sorry Uber. I love you guys, but I also need to be straight with you. In this list, I attempt to adhere to yalls stated goals for balance. I'm not here to promote a true balance mod (like rcbm). Im here to say what I believe needs fixed ASAP, whenever possible, or whichever comes first.

Dox are still far too versatile for their cost. They shouldn't be useful late game except for raiding undefended mexes. But they are. A small side effect of their versatility is a drastic increase in Sim slowdowns late game. People build 3 times more dox than any other unit and that slows the game down drastically.
Dropping their vision to 120 and taking away their AA capability should solve the issue rather handily. It'll keep them incredibly good at raiding, but remove their ability to just bum rush an opponent, because bombers could eat large swaths of them.

Boom bots are buggy as hell right now, but their damage when they do work is half what it used to be. They feel weak against bases and HVTs, but meh against armies. I withhold judgment until the bugs are fixed.

Grenadiers are rarely used, and when they are, they don't help much.....I'd love for grenadiers to be viable along with dox, maybe comparable to tanks? In that case, throw some extra damage or aoe on there.

The Stinger (AA): bring it back as a short ranged, cheap companion to the dox for raiding with AA. Makes dox rushers commit to full dox or spend Mex on AA. Diversify!
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Vehicles are fine. Air is also fine. T1 naval is not fine and needs a complete rework from the ground up.
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T2 problems:
The slammer. It still wrecks naval with an insane torp range. It has really good DPs for its range, and is dirt cheap for a t2 unit. The result is that smart players rush slammers, mix them with tanks, and chew through everything. Its not serious, but it needs addressed. Mostly the amphibious part.

The leveler. Give it back its aoe! Wtf. It now is completely useless except against t2 units, and we already have vanguards, shellers, and Bluehawks for that.

T2 naval: give the missile ship either torpedoes or something to counter slammers. If I go t2 naval, it just got real. You shouldn't be able to steamroll it just like that.
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Orbital: its kinda stale.

We need some diversity in units. In addition, stuff from orbital is slow as hell on gas giants. So let's at the very least speed up avengers to speed up play. I'd rather the Awesome Avengers mod was implemented, but I may settle rfor a speed increase.
What we also need is for a new unit that's either long ranged and weak like the t2 bomber, or short ranged and armor heavy.

Jigs are another small but delicious problem. I've had a few discussions with folks in Teamspeak, and the general consensus is that they give too much storage. I'd just cut their storage in half and see how it plays out.
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Discuss! Laugh! Mod in the changes!

Dox: I don't feel qualified to say either way

Boom: agree

Grenadier: I like them, and feel like aoe might be a little strong

Stinger: Ehh, i personally don't feel like it's needed

Naval: agree

Slammer: torpedoes are too good, otherwise a cool unit

Leveller: I don't feel like it needs aoe, but it needs to not be replaced as much by the vanguard

Orbital: Needs a siege unit for anchors, countered by the fighters, countered by anchors.

Jig: I don't like the storage or metal generation, powers all cool in da hood.


Overall, agree.

Title needs to be renamed to "Why Balance Mods Exist Right Now"

dox: perfect right now, better raiders than ants but lose in fights , lose heavily to air but still kill the odd bomber if not microed right.

boom bots: agree, where fine when they could do some damage

grenadiers are good when dox spam starts bringing big loses to head on tank battles.

Stinger: not needed, the 2 factory paper scissors rock we have now is perfect


Slammer: naval hasnt been touched, will wait but seems fine

leveler: fix the shooting the ground bug and its a great base and pd killer

Orbital, no idea what do do with it.

Yeah, but the game isn't an abandoned ten-year-old mess of a project, it's a not yet released, kickstarted triple-A candidate, so it'd be nice if we didn't have to partition the community between all the balance mods. I feel like there's a bit too much of the same in terms of balance concerns around here, but bringing **** up helps compiling the biggest gripes people have with the meta into a fresh PTE build in the future.

Problem is the game releases in a few days and if balance isn't addressed people will leave :L
Also its kinda disappointing that the initial plan was to have all units viable throughout the game now it seems t2 is just dominant.

Yeah but...

He's right..... They'll leave for the balance mods.

Or if Uber does it wrong and the mods are obviously out there then they may not know about said mods and might just leave alltogether, which would suck.

Hardly, they will leave for other games. Pretty sure we're living in an age where most people just don't bother when the game they just paid sixty bucks for isn't working. And I wouldn't worry about those who stay for the balance mods, I'd rather be worried how to consolidate them all into a single solid community.

Just want to make it clear here, in my opinion we should really focus on the idea of making vanilla as good as possible and not trying out various quirky ways of imposing our visions of how the game should be played onto others. Modding is great, it allows us to creatively extend and modify gameplay, but we're not at the stage where partitioning the community into smaller groups focused around particular mods is in any way healthy for its development. I was never a strong supporter of forcefully attracting people to play a game, but PA doesn't need anyone to be forced to like it, we just need to make it so that people don't get discouraged by things that could be avoided.

Which the original point was, this won't happen unless Uber fixes the balance...

Aye, sorry mered, I digressed.

My two cents on Dox balance...

I also wasn't keen on the whole spam dox thing but in all honesty I now think they have a place in this game. It forces people to actually fight in the early game and think about their expansion strategy. Before the dox spam, people would just sit in their little hemisphere of safety and mass up a big army. Yes you need dox in order to counter early dox spam and this forces you to go dox as well as vehicles, not just choose one or the other.

Also try and stop a mass inferno army (with dox only) from rolling over your base and ripping it apart. Yes Dox are mobile and without your own army of dox it is very hard to stop them and they can seem OP, but thats their role. In one on one confrontations where they are forced into a fight (with inferno) then they are going to lose big time.

RTS games are supposed to be hard and it takes time to learn good counter strategies. I am definitely glad that Dox can't fire underwater anymore and the only other change I would like to see is to make the bombers have more splash damage so that they can annihilate large groups of dox. This would mean people need to think about either mixing in some spinners (AA) with their dox, which would make the dox move slower (as a group moves the speed of the slowest unit), or head out without spinners, keeping their agility, but risk being taken out with bombers. For every strategy their should be a good counter, this is the key to balancing an RTS. There's still some more tweaking needed to make Dox balanced.

I just thought of something too. If they introduced unit acceleration into the game, then this would nerf the dox a little bit too. This would mean that they are still good at raiding, but if they extend too far into enemy territory then it would make it harder to retreat. Or possibly make them move slower if they are walking backwards while firing. We need to keep them an agile unit, but give some sort of consequence to their actions. And yes they shouldn't be a viable strategy in the late game, except for raiding undefended Mex and I think this is what I have observed anyway. In the late game there are so many other units on the field that Dox just get eaten up.

People that think dox are op need to start using bombers.

Dox can outrun bombers bombs...

Aparently people cant micro groups of dox to avoid bombers....

The only reason i can see bombers being good is when you overmass DOX instead of transition to tanks.

GOD enough about DOX id rather see other units receive rebalance, like naval, also grenadiers cost wise dont do well enough.

Ehh I feel the direction for bots is just WRONG INTIRELY I feel the RCBM way of doing it is far superior anyways :L

Not anymore.

Yep, Bombers decimate Dox ATM. Whilst Dox can shoot at air, they are highly inaccurate and very rarely hit.

Like to see you try

@mered4

Dox versatility is not an issue or a valid complaint. You cannot on one hand complain about t1 being outclassed by t2, then turn around and say t1 should not be useful during the late game. I once agreed that vision range needed to be reduced, but not anymore with the changes to air.

If and when boombot friendly fire is fixed, the metagame will change drastically. Be careful what you wish for!

Grenadiers are useless not because of their lack of dps (they do alot of dmg). They are useless because they cost so much, die in one shot and have not much range or move speed.

Disagree with nerfing bots against air anymore than they are. Stinger should not be brought back at this point.

There is nothing inherently wrong with t1 naval. It's decent for there being only 2 units. The problem with t1 naval gameplay is commander torpedos, slammers, and overall ship speed across t1 and t2.

t2 naval should not have torpedos. Again, you cry for t2 units not to obsolete t1, and then suggest things like this. Makes no sense.

Orbital is not strategically stale - far from it. And unless you give detailed reasoning and arguements why you believe so, I don't think there is much credibility to this. Mostly a l2p issue.

The problem with gas giants is not avenger speed but pathing, and people creating super huge gas giants. I mean, what do people seriously expect to happen when you create your 9000 radius gas giant.

Storage on jigs doesn't matter one bit. If you are able to spend 6000 metal for only 30 metal income, then cost of storage is not exactly one of your biggest concerns

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What do i think of gameplay right now? Bombers are slightly too strong. Other than that, patch is fun and t1 gameplay is diverse and dynamic entirely thanks to the strength of bombers. Orbital and multiplanet will be fun once people learn how to do it properly. Naval will be decent enough once the obvious issues with non-boat units are fixed. t2 is still too expensive to reasonably consider in 1v1's.

Ehh this is why I feel Ubers balance designs in the core are quite broken, they need to go back to the t2 specialized and the bots as proper assualt units stuff..