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

When I get the time, I'll try primarily air spam and see how that goes.

Mixed army games have been quite balanced for a while, the issue was always the edge cases of dox v. ants or dox v anything.

God I am so sick of the political campaigning for this or that balance change. Balance right now is decent and needs to be focused around effective tweaks. I'm not even going to go into the specifics of this argument because everyone is talking past each other and making their campaign speeches. This place is worse than a republican forum at election time when it comes to discussing balance.

Dude I have read through this thread and you are literally doing nothing but campaigning and cheerleading. Elodea and Mered both have valid points even if the delivery is lacking. You are simply mudding up the discussion with this pointless and vapid cheerleader team mentality BS. If everyone would just drop their agendas and over inflated sense of importance, we might actually have a single balance discussion that doesn't go off the crazy rails.

Please stop digging yourself a bigger and bigger hole.

1) I don't come from other RTS's nor do i have some wealth of 'experience' garnered from playing other games. PA is the first RTS game I have really played in 10 years.
2) Not only am I far from mechanically good or achieving what is possible in PA, being 'mechanically good' isn't some factor you can isolate and cut out like a heart surgeon. If I asked two preschoolers to play chess against each other, because they are both horrible and don't play chess to it's full potential, does it mean chess is a badly designed game?
3) Balance is not a tool you use to dumb down a game to your level. Balance is a tool you use to ensure fair chance of winning between two equally skilled players. And because I'm sure you're going to assume otherwise, let me clarify that I don't think I'm anywhere near the top level possible.

Well before you could spam dox and win, they were better than ants per cost and bombers couldnt hit them becasue they moved too fast. Then your only choice was to build more dox.

Now: dox beats ant
ant and bomber destroys dox
ant, aa, and bomber is pretty close to dox plus fighter (but dox fighter requires much more apm to make it favorable)


Just to take this to your t2 argument a little:
bomber+t2 aa ship and t1 ships beat slammers and most land units. (op)?

If you can't see we are getting closer to having good unit compositions than spam x units than I don't think I could take your balancing arguments seriously in future. I'm sure you are right with the orbital stuff and I would be the first to say that becasue I am an orbital noob. But I do know the basic strategies and composition really well.

Edit: And primary air spam doesnt work too well, requires so much micro and a smart player will switch to ants and aa veh. Spam doesnt work too well this patch. That's the best part.

Please, everyone chill out. Balance feedback is important lets not turn this topic into toxic because i see some agreements aswell.

Which I really like. You have to have mixed armies to win.

I had a long post, but it got erased by the internet.

Also, edited for failure of grammar.

I hope its safe enough to say that i also agree that orbital combat could be improved a lot. If i would write it all down it would sound like a big winepost but in all seriousness i think we could all agree on some things here. For example you can't know where your enemy will land, also you cannot time orbital arrival. Also, a million avengers could be stacked on top of another on the orbital shell. These things dont make sence and im sure if we would look at orbital play more (like custard did a while back) the page could be full with things that can be improved. Thats not a problem but that also has been done already so im leaving it to this for now.

I feel like basic ground based AA does very little against fighters. It might eventually mean that everyone will just spam only fighters and not have basic ground based AA.

I know I don't bother building AA tanks anymore.

Spinners kill a Bumblebee as quickly as a Hummingbird does in raw numbers, and actually kill a Hummingbird faster than another Hummingbird. Except that doesn't happen when they meet.

When zoomed in you see Spinner missiles sort of circling the plane. I don't know if that's still the case, but wonder if it's the reason for their seeming ineffectiveness.

It might very well be, their missle turning rate was reduced a couple builds ago and if they manage to start orbiting a standing plane (and/or have a finite time to explode on their own), then they just miss. I can't recall if a Hummingbird can outrun missles (probably not I'd guess), but if so, then that's another factor.

Dox: Genuinely think they are fine, removing AA capabilities and bringing back stingers I approve of though. (stingers should be very short range, quick firing anti-air, where as the tank version should be longer ranged and slower firing. stingers should also be able to travel underwater and fire torps at the same short range. Essentially split up the OP dox of ol' into two separate units

Tank AA: This really needs to be able to fire very quickly at ground targets at an imminent distance to act as a counter for boom bots, dox would be able to keep out of range easy enough.

Naval: Ahh the proverbial elephant in the room, naval units need a serious health buff, for units that cost so much and move so slow it is inherently depressing to see them dissappear as soon as they close to weapons range. Secondly the commander has way to much range under water. Finally stingray missiles having the capability to strike at under water targets would be good for balance.

Slammer: Needs shorter range torps.

Leveler: Bring back aoe, considering they usually only get one shot off if out numbered, and will end up only killing a single dox or bolo.

Orbital: Avengers should have a higher top speed.

We didn't get a video of the Awesome Avengers mod, but custard made some tweaks I was unable to - and it's awesome. They now strafe targets, which makes for some interesting dogfights.

We basically doubled their speed, and they are so much more fun with the fighter behavior mechanics.