back to the factory spam

Assisting only gets you so far,
when to many fabbers assist the gain becomes minimal and the time it takes to produce a unit comes down to the time it takes for a unit to leave the factory.
At least thats the case for bots , verhicles and boats.
At that point you gain from more factory's as it speeds up production.

Learning from this,
perhaps Uber should make a longer exit animation for the air factory and for nukes so the same effects extends to them. (Not entirely sure how fast air units can leave their factory)
If a nuke takes 30 seconds to launch, spamming it gets alot harder without building more launchers
And it does not curse with the assisting system where one building being assistable and the other not makes no sence.

Anything that limits the potential of assisting and encourages base expansion is a good thing.

Diminishing returns... going to keep beating this dead horse but I think it's the way to go.

Making Anti-Nuke T1 could certainly be interesting, sadly even at T1 as they currently stand you wouldn't have the Eco to build one vs the needs of expanding your base.

I like the idea of a turning current nukes into a more Tactical nuke (smaller damage, smaller range) and then giving us ICBMs later on.

It was mentioned in another thread of adding the ability to assist other structures. This is an ability I think also has merit in the game (assisting P-Gen, Assisting Radar.. etc)

Wouldn't the non-assisting idea cause more stalemated games? With the current antinuke, you could still spam antinukes (because the building comes with 1), but you couldn't spam nukes.

So I guess the idea is to change the antinuke. Because otherwise nukelaunchers would be pointless. You would just have to scout them and build an antinukebuilding (which you can assist). Then you stop it from building antinukes, because you can simply react to every new nuke by building a new antinukebuilding with assist. You finally get the exact same situation as now (one player spams nukelaunchers, the other tries to defend and if the player with the nukelaunchers has enough economy, he will win). It will just take ages and ages but the result will be the same.

What I also dislike about non-assisting is the problem of the first nuke. You might take away the problem of late-game nukespams. But you have 2 sideeffects:
1) A losing player can't put all his build power in one last nuke, to maybe snipe the enemy and get a surprise win.
2) The player who builds the first nuke, gets to nuke first (if he doesn't totally screw up his economy). He will always nuke you (if the anti-nuke doesn't come with a built-in missle).

The scenarios you listed aren't really issues though.

1) You shouldn't be able to do this IMO. If you're losing, you shouldn't be able to dump all of your economy into an emergency nuke. You should have started building it before you started losing. Nuke's are powerful weapons that should be pre-planned, not tossed up on a whim because you suddenly need one. This is what strategy is all about, pre-planning.

2) This is why you pressure your opponent if you catch them going for a nuke. Since you know nukes are unassistable, you know you have a certain amount of time react. You could either wreck his economy, snipe the nuke, or build an anti-nuke. You now have a *gasp* strategic choice to make, in a strategy game no less...

Assistable nukes have even worse scenarios than the ones you listed:

1) You can stockpile energy/metal storage and then use a huge mass of fabbers to nearly insta-build a nuke, giving your enemy no chance to react to a threat he never knew existed. There is no strategy for the opponent because there is no chance for reaction.

2) An enemy who is threatened by a large land force can quickly stop production and use all their fabbers to dump their economy into an emergency defensive nuke. Once the army is gone they can quickly switch back to producing combat units. There is no strategy here because the nuker was not punished for not having the defensive nuke ready ahead of time and the attacker lost because he failed to protect against a threat that didn't even exist moments ago...

If you can instantly react to any threat by swapping your build power around to the appropriate unit/structure, then where is the strategy?

Yes plz take it off indeed wy do we need a RTS that want be the follower off TAFA and have same options...
+1

I think that Removing assist from nuclear launcher could be not bad, but for the rest nay... I would ever like to see shorter delay between units produced in factory or some lathe "buffer", so assisting would be legit alternative to building lots of factories.

This idea is very good.

My opinion is that Nukes and Anti-Nukes should not be in the Factory menu.
They are weapons, not factories. Weapons cannot be assisted in the current state of the game.
They would require large amounts of energy to fire with a very slow rate of fire. More like a catapult, but it fires nukes at a rate of fire of 1 missile per 4-6 minutes at a massive energy cost per shot. By default it would not auto-target of course. T2 energy and energy storage buildings would be needed in mass numbers to keep it firing; these are big targets that can be easily sniped as a counter. The weapon itself would have to be very expensive on metal to limit spamming multiple launchers.

You are correct that you could not build assist nukes / anti-nukes (the missile itself, not the launcher) in TA.

Supreme Commander allowed build assisting for Nukes / Anti-Nukes, however in Forged Alliance assisting a nuke was made less effective, if I remember correctly they did this by scaling up the build time of a nuke / anti-nuke and the rate at which the launcher built.

This is all from memory but I think this was how it worked

In Supcom:

Any given unit has a metal cost, an energy cost, a build time. Workers have a rate at which they build.

To find out how much a unit will cost (per tick) and how many ticks it will take to build:

(With easy example numbers cause I'm lazy)

Nuke costs: (no assist)

$realBuildTime = $buildTime / $buildRate = 100000 / 100 = 1000 (in game ticks)
Metal Cost Per Tick = $metalCost / $realBuildTime = 1000 / 1000 = 1 Metal Per Tick
Energy Cost Per Tick = $energyCost / $realBuildTime = 10000 / 1000 = 10 Metal Per Tick

Nuke costs: (launcher + 1 engineer)

$metalCost = 1000
$energyCost = 10000
$buildTime = 100000
$launcherBuildRate = 100
$engineerBuildRate = 25
$buildRate = $launcherBuildRate + $engineerBuildRate = 125

$realBuildTime = $buildTime / $buildRate = 100000 / 125 = 800 (in game ticks)
Metal Cost Per Tick = $metalCost / $realBuildTime = 1000 / 800 = 1.25 Metal Per Tick
Energy Cost Per Tick = $energyCost / $realBuildTime = 10000 / 800 = 12.5 Metal Per Tick

SupCom: FA (with less effective assisting)

To make assisting less effective while retaining costs, scale $launcherBuildRate and $buildTime

Nuke costs: (launcher + 1 engineer) Less effective Assisting

$metalCost = 1000
$energyCost = 10000
$buildTime = 10000000
$launcherBuildRate = 10000
$engineerBuildRate = 25
$buildRate = $launcherBuildRate + $engineerBuildRate = 10025

$realBuildTime = $buildTime / $buildRate = 10000000 / 10025 = 997.5 (in game ticks)
Metal Cost Per Tick = $metalCost / $realBuildTime = 1000 / 997.5 = 1.0025 Metal Per Tick
Energy Cost Per Tick = $energyCost / $realBuildTime = 10000 / 997.5 = 10.025 Metal Per Tick

That kind of scaling allows the costs for a nuke to remain the same but the worker's build rate is so much lower than the launcher that it doesn't do much. You can scale this as much as you want, and the nice part is it doesn't affect the overall per tick of an un-assisted nuke, so you don't need to make them crazy expensive to prevent being able to speed assist them.

PA uses a different system, but I'm not entirely sure how it works. The only thing I know is a fabber uses a constant amount of energy no matter what it is assisting.

So they were assistable, but the game mechanics were highly convoluted to make it a very discouraged choice? Then my point still stands, what reason is there for PA to differ from its predecessors in this regard?

The game isn't Red Alert or Command and Conquer. Yet, it might as well be if you take that one signature thing away from it.

However, they started this with the idea to balance it, and the idea was great. You can make factory efficiency game-winning in magnitude compared to wasteful fabbers. You can lock units to a certain build time, and let assisting speed up only a portion, which they called "roll off time" or the time it takes a tank/bot to leave the factory and a new build to begin; With that, if you had 1 factory with 10 fabbers you build tanks instantly but each tank costs 5 seconds anyway, but if you have 3 factories with 3 fabbers you build tanks near-instantly but 3 leave for the same 5 seconds 1 leaves.

They lowered roll-off time. I always thought, dang that rolloff time was a genious idea, along with factory efficiency. I was saddened they reduced roll-off time. If I make a mod, I WANT a factory to be highly signature and for it to be capped a degree, to encourage extensive factory establishment over tiny base heavily assisted.

Add roll-off time for nukes lol. Actually, that only decreases the time for second nukes. So, instead, increase the "build start" for nukes, where when a nuke begins to build, the silo must prepare the build for 15 seconds, just to start building. After launched, takes another 15 seconds to start another build. Having 3 nuke silos, you could assist and each one's reload time be faster. HOWEVER, I don't think it necesary at all and nukes can be heavily-assisted projects in my opinion, that's not really a factory and is a special project type thing. If artillery or catas could be assisted, between giving it a loading time, and giving it a build time, and giving it a cost, and giving it a range, you would still have a personal decision on how many and how assisted you want between covering more range and spending more eco and increasing the fire rate.

This game is cool beans here btw, love this aspect, coming from a more heavily Red Alert player that wasn't so keen on the Total Annihilation assisting being so variant, in PA the assistance and economy are both a lot more hard-number without any guessing games as to how something costs or whatnot.

I don't see the game meant to be like that. Factory spam was a good when it was good, the problem is that people who's not good at box spam will die. When I first learned how to do a bot spam/factory spam, it was already to late, didn't read update logs and was outdated on the "latest/most effecitve" strategy. But as I see this game, and as I want the game is to be a long term game, making late game better and make it harder for early rushes, it removes some of the fun in my opinion. So I disagree with this!

I don't mind assissting structures at all... I did have a problem with that in FA, since not every faction had the same options... since in PA everyone is using the same pool of units, it is more than fair.

It wasn't the only strategy. Even right now, turrets are really good, you really need a huge-production-army to surge against them. I never played big production, its so fascinating but I always played turrets, before they were even popular. I even combine sprawling base with proxy base, I will proxy base early, pelter creep sometimes if I aquire target location within a minute, and I will sprawl the bases together to form an area of coverage. Start with multiple pockets on the edge of empty space, then fill empty space.

Pelters kick ***, they are highly competitive aginst mass army. Heck, those are fairly "earthly" strategies, there are heavenly ones like nuke and t2 and orbital and planetsmash and junk. Vanguard drop? Gil-e? Kestrals? Plenty of things secure a kill, I have no problem with any of them except their numbers be adjusted until they are about as effective as one another and any one of them can win a game with the roughly same cost.

Nukes and specially Anti-Nukes are quite badly designed, if I can add my opinion.

Why does Anti-Nuke takes more room than the Nuke, which is de facto an Interplanetary Missile?

The Nuke is built in a shorter time than one of the anti-nuke missile, even if in theory a nuke's head contains some very rare metal like Uranium and Plutonium. We do not need to simulate reality in a game, but a Nuke explosion cause quite a damage, so...

Nukes are a good fun, but the way they are implemented in PA can heavily be improved.

Anti-Nukes should be easier to build, and you can assist one as much as you want, it doesn't load more than three missiles anyway (with the current design).

Nukes shouldn't be assistable. This way we reduce the need to assist Anti-Nukes as well. Plus the Nuke Missile could be built internally, and only when it's ready taken on the launch pad.

Finally, Nukes should take at least as much real estate as the Anti-Nukes.

Oh, one more.

I would like to try out a Commander capable to shot down Nukes.

That's not that convoluted, it's just some simple arithmetic

As for why PA differs, I think the idea was to make it even easier to figure out what is using your eco.

In TA / SupCom you might have a -10k energy deficit. That -10k could be one worker working on a very expensive unit that builds quickly or it could be 100 builders working on a bunch of little projects.

In PA if you have a -10K energy deficit you know all you have to do is stop 10 T1 workers since they each use 1k energy each no matter what they are working on.

Personally I'm fine with going the TA route and make it so you can't assist nukes (the missile not the launcher), though TA nuke launchers (and anti-nukes) had no limit on the number of missiles that a launcher could store.

That way the speed of which you can nuke is tied to how many launchers you have. Apart from that though I really do like assisting in general and don't want to see it removed from the game.

The SupCom: FA route however seems to make more gameplay sense (you see something that should be assistable and you can assist it), but I'm not sure if it would work since PA uses a set energy cost per worker (and I'm not sure how metal per tick is determined)

Good idea, as long as nukes are as plentiful as they are, or moreso plentiful, so you can bypass the antinuke capability with nuke spam. It would be terrific if it took 3 nukes to commander snipe instead of 2, and 4 to commander snipe if a commander also has an antinuke beside him. As long as nukes are plentiful...

Oh, ahahaha, ahahaha, if added to these? Hell no. Heck, I don't even want these.

I agree with antinuke taking up same structure space, no biggie. Nuke assist, that's as "PA" as hating the president is "American" and driving big dumb trucks are "Texan", don' remove. Antinukes are getting a bit of a buff, the structure is location key so they are taking some of the antinuke cost and putting it into the structure, which means multiple antinuke missiles are cheaper, meaning you can hold off nukes better.

Again, antinukes being fairly special yet fairly limited yet fairly cheap and effective, thats terrific, but you don't then need to nerf nukes, you just need to balance both where anything is possible and you actually have to "play the game", to struggle, to get your victory.

It's not about being fair, its about making the game interesting and strategic. Giving commanders the ability to build nukes for 1 metal would be fair (everybody can do it), but the game wouldn't be very interesting or strategic.

this game is not about 3 factories and 100 fabbers assisting, its about 100 factories with fabbers expanding and repairing