Balance pass 1 - report an observations.

Disclaimer: the following was written on my phone with autocorrect turned off. I apologise for any typos and misspellings. I will correct them once I get home on my pc.

So the new patch has been out for a week now and we now have a prete decent idea where it stands and I believe its feedback time, positive and negative.

Let me start with the positive: Great job mr. Scathis, the new balance feels like a huge walk in the right direction! It is still a bit rough around the edges but none the less, excellent job! I'm looking forward to what future holds.

First to name what feels like its done . Tanks vs bots balance feels great. Both are useful in their own way tanks excell at frontal assaults while bots are excellent raiders, but with the new formation improvements they can be used together in any combination and still be effective. Another thing that feels pretty good is basic air. Bombers are very good and useful now while air fabbers are great at expanding (a tiny bit too great). Basic naval is good and naval starts are actually possible now. Frigates have found their way into a regular mix of mine and advanced naval is damn awesome. Advanced bots also feel like they are roughly where they should be as do levelers and artillery. T2 air units are a lot better balanced as well and everything has its place. So once again: great job.

Now I must sadly note the rough edges. One of the most obvious ones is the new uber cannon. Its awesome, its great, its an improvement but since most of the time your commander is either sitting next to power generators or attacking it can be a bit hard to kill a commander with t1 units so games are guaranteed to last long unless enemy rushes t2 air. We need to open up options to win with t1 either by increasing the time of ubercannon reloads or some other way. Also after that is done it would be nice if we could ubercannon air units so we have a bit better defense against t2 sniping. Because t2 air can still only be countered by t2 which is fine but with t2 air you often don't have enough time to respond if your commander is suddenly jumped. While talking about air the following comes to mind: the recent buff to air fabs has made them great. A bit too great, their expansion rate is slightly too good IMHO. And with the fact that advanced air factory still seems to be the cheapest advanced factory around I can honestly see why most people go air first. I see 2 options here: either make air buildable only by ground fabbers or reduce the efficiency of air fabs to 8/1200 and increase the cost of advanced air factory to be more in line with other factories. Another slight issue are vanguard drops but thats more a problem with vanguards than transports. The fact is vanguards are next to impossible to stop by the commander and even one has a pretty good chance of killing it. I understand the need for such a damage though, but I don't understand why they come with radar. Radar should only come in skitters (and sunfish) and I suggest it does so. Not only will this make skitters (and sunfish) much more useful in the late game but they would then represent the viable alternative to air scouts. But back to vanguards and their damage - the main problem here is strength and cost of walls. We need a unit like the current vanguard to counter them. I wouldn't mind if walls had 2-3k less hp so that way even t1 units could breach them because as it stands they can not. Ok now time to talk abou orbital. The main point here is that it is still unfinished so problems are completely understandable, but we should mention them none the less. Lets start with the units build from the launcher itself. T1 orbital radar is useless a bit because you might as well build an orbital fabber and build an advanced one. That one on the other hand is a bit too good. So heres my idea - switch their roles. Have the T2 orbital radar provide radar coverage on a radius as big if not bigger than now and then have the basic T1 one provide as much vision as a firefly. I believe that would balance them nicely - t1 vision vs t2 much greater coverage. Another unit that needs a bit of fixing first, then balancing is the astraeus. The fact that it doesn't need to land to drop off its cargo is too good but that is more of a technical problem. The real problem is its fragility. With the current hp and when proper landing to drop off will be implemented the viability of using astraeuses as assault transports will drop. Another problem is that they cost too much to mass produce. It takes a considerable amount of time to create enough astraeuses to effectively invade. Now for the orbital fabbers: the only issue I have with them is that they can repair and build ground structures from orbit. They should enter arial level before being able to do so. Avengers are fine and well as are the anchors but like I said in THIS topic, we are missing the rock in this rock-paper-scissors game. Orbital power seems fine to me, given the benefits it has. But I think that the SXX platform costs a bit too much and never sees usage because of that. On the other hand its the orbital fabbers not being able to assist each other glich that is partially to blame. I also think that they should be able to fly between planets.

Well that is all that comes to mind. T1 pgens probably need a slight buff too. But I don't find that too pressing.

Now it may seem that this is more **** talk than praising but keep in mind that shilt talk is accompanied by suggestions on fixing.

Paragraphs are OP, you should abuse them more

Sry. Due to tendency of my phone randomly signing me out of pa forums i actually wrote this on my phones notebook then I copy pasted it here

You wrote all that on a phone? Impressive.

So I just got home and used Chrome to correct a whole lot of typos and misspellings. Should be a lot more readable now.