ACU snipes

Nord, you do realise that mass shields not only didn't stop mass strategic bomber use, but turned mass strategic bomber use into practically one of the only ways to successfully assault an enemy position?

Situations exactly like this are what I'm opposed to.

It removes strategy and variability from the game - because all other possibly viable options get removed.

And then to defend against a mass of strat. bombers, you need a mass of ASF.

To defend your mass of strat. bombers against a mass of ASF, you need a larger mass of ASF.

The thing is: this isn't really a question of sniping. Is it still a sign of **** balance? Sure is. But not one of sniping.

By the time you could afford 30 strat bombers the game had stagnated to a point where no more interesting strategies would work. At that point the game needs to end, so another one can begin.

Along with heavy artillery bombardment, massed armoured assault bots, massed t3 gunships, offshore bombardment from cruisers, destroyers and/or battleships, experimentals, nukes, combat upgraded SCUs, teleporting combat upgraded SCUs, some form of combined arms, or any of the strategies I've surely forgotten in the years since I played FA regularly.

But other than those, yeah, one of the only ways...

Of the ones you named, only experimentals and nukes would work. You would simply need far too many of the others for them to be feasible.

Um ok, if you say so.

Besides, if there are a pile of tightly overlapping shields then there are a pile of much more lightly defended generators somewhere else.

All i ask is that the rug not be yanked out from under me because I didn't go down a static, build-this-or-die checklist and camp my minimap.

Knowing the most efficient way to build, and having situational awareness is necessary to play the game well. Do you want a game that requires no skill?

Rugs should be yanked from under you if you're standing on one. Completely covering the floor in carpet is the way to go.

I'm talking about, MUST have anti-nukes or probably die because you get nuke rushed, MUST have ASF cloud or get strat bomber rushed, etc.

And attention splitting is one of the easiest, most boring means of skill gating. It's also something that some people just can't do. =/

You've simply named units and their counters. I could easily extend this to: You HAVE to build units or be swarmed by your enemy's units. Which is how an RTS works.

Sounds like you've already given up. And if you are just going to give up, please consider not stressing yourself out against decent opponents. Try the AIs for instance. I doubt they know how sniping works. Hell, it's what I do since I don't have the patience or time to hone my skills at FA any further.

You don't need to have anti-nukes unless your opponent has actual nukes. What you're talking about is "I don't want to be punished for not being aware of the battlefield and my opponent".

The only reason where you MUST have a specific something for no good reason is if it is impossible to detect what your opponent is doing, which means the game fails at giving you enough options to gather intel on your opponent.

Otherwise you're just not paying enough attention.

(How much attention should be given can be debated of course; TA was really bad at this because even if you sent a scout plane over a nuke silo, you had to be watching where it flew because the second it was gone, so was your info on what you saw, making it impossible to scout with multiple planes at once. But more modern games seem to do this just fine, so I'm not worried. Zero-K is especially effective, marking certain units on the map automatically with a team-wide marker, which is awesome.)

Indeed, in FA, this problem is avoided entirely and buildings remain visible after a scout plane has died.

Yeah, so does Zero-K. The markers are just an extra, so that you can be double-sure that you'll spot someone building a critical structure like a nuke launcher. Not sure if it'd also work for super-units, but that'd be another nice extra since units don't show after fog of war comes back up.

I do very much dislike hard counters.

I've given up because I've spent well over a year playing MOBAs, which also demand a lot of attention splitting, and it just doesn't work. I just play and hope I can get by without splitting my attention, which only sort of works sometimes.

AIs are fun for a while, but they get repetitive and boring. Even Sorian ones.

Oh, right, I guess I was imagining all the times I used the others to crack heavily shielded defences/had my own heavily shielded bases broken by each of those things.

Yes some of them are situational, or can be rendered ineffectual with absolutely insane levels of shield and PD stacking - say the main fortress that ends up forming late game on the land bridge on Seton's Clutch. But game balance discussion based around assuming the pathological case of Seton's Clutch are worse than useless - if you stack the deck in favour of defence that heavily then of course turtling works! They are all viable against most mass shielded defences given appropriate amounts of mass invested relative to the mass invested in the defences.

And anyone claiming teleporting combat upgraded SCUs can't take down practically any base is demonstrating a level of ignorance of the game that really should disqualify them from any further attempt to discuss strategy. I'm also going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're including experimental artillery under the banner of experimentals, even though it's a very different strategy than walking a galactic colossus in their front door.

Which has nothing to do with sniping.

Well, if you feel you can't, then there's nothing I can say. It's unreasonable to expect that people who are more skilled than you shouldn't be able to do something that you're not capable of stopping.

Every strategy can become effective with players on both sides that don't know which strategies are cost efficient, or if you go into extreme late game where Paragons and mass fab farms come into the game. Because I can certainly say that with players who do know which strategies are cost efficient stick to those strategies until extreme late game where resources become meaningless.

I don't understand, so instead of a 5 minute battle to kill the commander when he is constantly under attack, he now builds in the face of enemy fire?

I wasn't talking about the game length, just the length of the battle once defenses have been breached.


But this is just my opinion, I don't disagree with the other people here and why they disagree, but I don't think I will be changing my mind for now.

So I apologize in that regard.

I think this discussion has gone off track. It has gone from "How can we protect our commanders from sniping now that shields are not likely to appear in the game?" to "Should commander sniping be a viable option?/Should the commander be useful later into the game so that they don't have to hide?" (Although the original topic has come back a few times.)

To answer the former question: you should be able to surround your commander with turrets and units at the main base of that planet. Any enemy unit(s) that kills your commander in your base without grinding through friendly units means that you weren't paying attention to base defence in the first place and that you would have died not long after had you not been sniped.

To answer the latter questions: Any tactic that can be done should be allowed unless it uses OP units or exploits a game glitch. Also, the commander IS already useful later into the game; if I remember correctly from the trailer, the commander had to go to the moon in order for construction to begin there (though that doesn't seem to be the case with asteroids).

I'm probably wrong about the moon thing, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

Then we'll just have to agree to disagree. I have already presented a multitude of tools to reveal commanders. Units and cloak limitations for direct spotting on the small scale. Infrastructure for inferring and revealing potential locations on the middle scale. Doom weapons for mass revealing on the large scale. If the multitude of spotting tools for every stage of the game isn't enough, then I cede. You can't find or kill an invisible commander through sheer incompetence (luck, maybe). Only actively hunting down the commander will work.

But that seems irrelevant at this point. This thread has gone full circle now that comms can't hide and everything in the universe is rushing to kill it. If the last two pages of confusion haven't clued anyone in yet, it's that your one key unit is always a gigantic bulls eye. No amount of magic numbers or super guns or hyper armor will fix this. The nature and scale of the war is not possible if the commander can not viably draw attention away from himself.

From a lore perspective, it makes sense that the game ending condition will do everything in its power to not be found and encourage alternative targets. From a gameplay perspective, it is important that the comm can survive to the multi-planet stage(and perhaps play an integral role in getting there), otherwise you're missing out on the entire selling point of the game. Nothing I have stated has made sniping impossible. None of it makes sniping non-viable. It only means that comm hunting is a far more involved process than selecting a hundred units/dropships/asteroids and right clicking to end the game.

Besides, those who want a quick, lethal melee should opt for a single planet death match. The challenge of protecting a base on all sides will fulfill all your sniping fantasies.

Huh, I dunno what it is about this particular thread but damn near everyone who's replied to me so far in here has chosen to trim my post in order to take my comments out of context. This has to be a record though, quoting that I said something but not actually including even a single word so you can make an argument that's completely orthogonal to mine and pretend you're arguing against me? Congrats, that's pretty much the ultimate straw man.

I maintain that, barring pathological cases (Seton's late game for example) there are many ways to break a solid defence as long as you are not horribly outmatched economically. Which of those is the best choice depends on the specific conditions of the map/game in question. FA got the offence/defence balance pretty damn right. You can try to turtle, but (outside maps that slant everything in your favour) it won't actually work against a competent opponent.