Build 77337-pte now up

. . . why not?

Ummmm isn't that what we all do here like every single day?

We have an entire balance sub forum just for this specific thing too, just to discuss singular units in the game.

Easy man=) Bombers are good enough. I just create this discussion, cuz Gunships suck in compare with bombers, but i really against "one more bomber" unit.

That all said, custards idea of a 'saturation' heavy bomber could legit be a cool idea for a T2 bomber. (as could be nerfing the T1 bombers ability to snipe fabbers)

Bleah! Im still not a fan of a heavy gunship either, too many bad memory's reinforces by PA's shoddy surface based AA.

Secondary Impressions after Sleeping On It:

I have a proposal. Let's buff transporter health and nerf their speed proportionally. That would lessen the effects of super fast transport expansion, but also encourage *transport large tank army across impassable lava lake* play.

Grenadiers still suck.

Holkins is much better than it was before - 14 sec reload instead of 20 sec. It was a little useful for defensive purposes, but in an actual game I would never build it.

Cheap SXX is awesome and.....somewhat OP. Can't say for sure, it just feels hefty. I like it
Orbital kinda matters now lol

Pelican might be slightly too fast ^^. For example on forge you can air first fly your commander to near their base then spam tanks. Can't really counter it unless you get air first too. But if you go air first you'll die to dox spam most likely.. So it's kinda weird.

Also, i wonder what goal you guys had with reducing the energy? Was it to make the game more forgiving for new players? Or allow more than 3 fabbers at the start?

I'm asking because it hasn't exactly affected the latter. You will probably need to change starting energy income if you wanted to change that because of the pressure you can still put on with just factory heavy spam. I'm not knocking on the changes, think their great, but just saying they might not be accomplishing the goal you were trying to go for (if this was your goal)

Teleporters are a bit too expensive maybe. I get the idea of having a tradeoff with astreus, but it's causing stalemates where teleporters are not able to be built before either the orbital fabs or teleporters are sniped (low build health per sec rate due to high metal cost). And building enough avengers to protect the orbital fabbers comes at too late of a timing.

Grenadier is still very bad, mainly due to being one shot by tanks. It could have tank dmg +1 hp and it would be so much more viable.

Dox didn't need the vision increase, but it's not the biggest issue for the majority of players i guess. Not going to split hairs over this one

The inability for orbital fabs to reclaim wreckage and trees is a problem, makes building teleporters on small/tropical worlds a real pain.

Just don't let it reclaim living stuff.

Every thread must devolve to a balance discussion!

They very much fit the role of anti-building units now don't they?

I think it might cool if @tvinita would give a few thoughts on balance changes he proposes in general. I mean this PTE looks really great and totally makes it obvious that he reads our discussions, but still having his view on the things would be interesting.

I'd hope it was to reduce the weirdness of energy, as I described it all the time. I don't look as much on the first n engineers you make though. 3 and then assault units is totally fine. The real interesting questions are:
- can you effort making a proxy base in one way or another?
- how long until you can make additional engineers, so how fast can (and should) you grow your economy and infrastructure?

I've found it very difficult to put down a teleporter from orbit on certain planets because of forests. Guess landings will be impossible?

@jables - Can orbital fabbers get a 0 damage weapon that can kill off trees from orbit? You can effectively counter teleporters by spawning on very dense vegetation planets

Orbital fabbers should build teles in the orbital layer anyway

EDIT: Astrei also need to be one way, something has to be done about their troll tactics.

Yeah so played a good few games on this today. Really fun, really like the pelicans being t1. adds for loads new strats and early game excitement. But this is a skill gap can opener I reckon. Pro tip, dont lift your commander when beside the enemy air factory and land factory producing aa units. Wasnt the smartest move I have made.

The energy changes have a number of intentions behind them, but I'll try to list the major ones here:

1. Make the energy economy easier to manage for all players.
In the live build right now, when you stall on energy you're screwed. Your everything is running like garbage and your only option is to start micromanaging and telling things to stop doing what they're doing. The expected solution to fixing this is to redirect build power to more energy plants, but because the energy draw is so high you just end up crashing your economy even harder, making the no-brainer solution actually one of the worst things you can do.

With these new new numbers, experienced players have to spend less time micromanaging their economy and more time to spend on making plans and making plays. Meanwhile, new players don't just immediately crash their economy out of the gate because they don't know a build order and think the game sucks because everything's building at 1/3rd speed and they have no idea why.

2. Allow for more fabricators to be running in the early game.
I love fabricators, not just because I'm a turtle but because fabricators build things. The more fabricators you have, the more things you build. The more things you build, the more things explode and the fancier those things get. Basically, more fabricators accelerate the ramp-up time of the game, allowing more cool stuff to start coming into play more quickly.

The added benefit of this is every ounce of build power and fabricator activity isn't as crucial to micromanage because it's not as expensive. You lose a fabber in PTE, hell, you've either got more or you can build more. No big deal.

3. Make the game more about territory control and less about build orders.
Right now in the live build your main growth limitation is energy. Because of this, you will generally just sit in your base and fling units out without really trying to do anything but harass your opponent(s) while you both gradually ramp up automatically as energy plants come online. This produces a lot of back and forth that eventually devolves into one person controlling the majority of the map and slowly rolling over the other player. Now in the PTE build, your main growth limitation is metal. Now we're seeing people claim and make an effort to hold territory that's strategically valuable, actually dig in and set up defensive lines, and other players choosing to strike out against forward positions instead of just slowly trying to roll over the other player's base.

4. Make energy raidable
Energy plants are super tanky in the live build. They're always the absolute last thing to go down when a base is destroyed (excluding walls), and sometimes they'll even survive a base getting destroyed. This means the only real priority target for raiding are the fabricators and metal extractors, which doesn't give you a whole lot of options nor does it give you a particularly satisfying payoff for a very successful raid. This also leads to people just flinging energy around randomly because no matter how much damage it takes it'll probably still be standing by the end, further enforcing energy as more of a slow constant ramp rather than something players can readily influence.

In the PTE, not only can energy be raided, but you can recover from your energy being raided, whereas in the live build every energy plant lost is a significant blow to your progress.

There's a couple of other small things, and some neat things I've been observing in testing that weren't initially intended but still positive. Really though, regardless of what I think something is going to do I tend to concern myself less with what it actually ends up doing and more with whether or not it feels good and is enjoyable to the players. As far as my design philosophy is concerned, if it's enjoyable for everyone that generally trumps everything else.

come to PTE and play the new updates! Map Rigs now up!

And I love you

I still think the fix (or at least a good start) for these is removing the extra income that was given to the commander and replacing it with storage. Being able to go first factory was a great change, but so much income sits with the commander that you have all you need for early aggression, which means an ever escalating arms war you can't afford to pause. Which is why expansion is dead.

I think I said this to custard last night......


And the night before that.

Do you have to do anything special to play the PTE in multiplayer? I can launch against AI no worries, but can't see any other games in the lobby.

The PTE is only known to us weirdos who read the forums, so there are not many players in it usually.