Lately there's been a common theme in games I've lost, and that is the opponent exploiting the huge walking metal bank that is their commander. Reclaiming it with combat fabber gives a significant early economy boost, which seems to give real advantage. You can for example put out very tough dox rush, shutting down any expansions. Or you can go for very early T2. Only difficulty is managing energy, but that seems manageable. It may slow your expansion a bit, but that's ok if you can prevent the enemy from expanding as well. Damaging your own commander may seem risky, but in practice there are not that many ways to snipe it in early game. 1) Is this actually the best opening? Should I just do it every time? Is there anything that might counter it or at least get even? 2) Should it even be a thing, or is it an exploit that should be patched out? It does follow logically from the "rules", but looking from outside it seems very strange. Just imagine exlaining to a new player that the very first thing he should do is to start ripping pieces from his commander unit to build other stuff. Most would call it total nonsense, I expect.
Commanders are 25000 metal. It was 5000 in beta, but there were some instances of reclaim attacks, and it was fairly common to see commander attacks backed by repairing fabbers (which would be combat fabs now) Maybe there is a useful medium somewhere.
So the metal amount was changed to make it more expensive to repair? Well, that makes sense, repair tactics can be quite annoying to play against. But there are always other ways to solve things. Simplest would be to just arbitrarily reduce the efficiency ratio of reclaiming commanders. Or disable it entirely.
Oj m8, Well, comm reclaiming is the new meta, but very risky. I don't think it should be fixed since it's risky and takes some skill to master aswell. For the reclaim to work you need to invest in energy and it will put you behind a little in the beginning. It's a good start but not super OP. More over, uber isn't really working on the game anymore, so don't expect it to be fixed. love, Qzipco
Comm reclaim is pretty broke. You can just look at pa stat replays to see the monstrous difference in economy that results even if all you do is reclaim <10% of commander
The opening is skong as all desu bro, but don't come crying here when you use it and get bumblebee sniped. It doesn't take many of them to nearly do the job already, even having 1/4 less health is dangerous, much less almost 1/2 or more. Dat economy you get from it is strong though, even if dat commander was worth 1/2 in metal, it would still be a potent decisive opening. Hell yeah there are. My mods are very crashy lately and I am balancing time with some other games, otherwise I'd show yet another mod where there is a better number. For the record, that number is 10k-12.5k. I'd prefer the lower, but there is no excuse for anything above the higher. Come to think of it, I think there was a mod I released though didn't publish to PAMM, that only targets commander and colonel changes, so the colonel is a long range t2 fabricator plus combat fabber with the full armor and dps/weapons of an actual commander. CommanderRedux I think? That Colonel even produces economy like a Commander does. And the price of 12.5k IIRC was in test explicitly limiting it being used as an economy farm. Nonetheless the danger of their explosion becoming sympathetic. Now, could you mass produce them? You could produce them comfortably 1 per unit blob if you dumped economy into them. They did a decent job as a unit blob brawler, sure, they were absolutely a unit with the influence to win a land war and secure victory in a game, they are after all an expendable commander with all the health and damage and explosion to go with it so you could frequently suicide rush and combomb your enemy. This still isn't the only thing I believe about game balance either. I also believe the commander can use a 60-80 build arm range, their walking speed coupled with the distance they need to walk to administrate even a small startup base area, is something that can make newbies commit accidental suicide early game with their commander walking distance. Also changed in that mod. This goes for naval too. Their build arm also needs to be 40, 60 even, because they quite literally can almost not even build a factory on some default maps shoreline, they just don't have the reach. For that matter, it would be nice if Halleys could be built on naval. I still support naval teleporters too. And naval and combat units in general being carried in transports. Stop me if you think any of this is wrong though. Humor me. How'd you end it? Make Com more reasonable lower health threshold in trade for actually useful amounts of offense, and lower metal value to boot with that? Because I wouldn't be surprised if you did, it makes sense to me too.
I am curious about this game play. Why not reduce the metal price of commander? This allows players to use the commander as an assault weapon rather than just a weak point. Current commander is too weak in middle game and late game. But even in early game, the commander is still quite fragile.
I think I should mention that reclaiming commander is an expensive loan. If you want to repair your commander later, you need to pay the double price. When player reclaim a building from full hp to death, he can only get 50% metal. The remaining 50% metal is the wreckage. However, when you fix it from 1 HP to full HP, it still cost you 100% price. Thus, if you reclaim your commander 10% hp, you get 1250 metal. But you need to pay 2500 metal to fix it back.
True, but if that helps you get T2 economy running minute or two earlier, it's well worth it. Basically you can pay back when you are rich. Or not pay back at all. Maybe it should be even lower reclaiming efficiency for commanders for better balance. 25% wouldn't be quite so appealing. Risky? Slightly. Mostly just keep an eye for boom bots. Requiring skill? Somewhat. Just not very interesting kind of skill. Well, it's not the worst problem ever, although it does almost feel like cheat mode whenever I end up using it against some... not so strong player in ranked.
So silly question but why not partially reclaim buildings instead? Factories and such would work, without risking your most important asset...
Well, the balance question is mainly about early game when you don't have that many buildings, and the commander has about 40 times more metal than T1 factories. I guess someone could do it, but it would take a lot more attention, and leave your base paper thin, which I'd count more risky.
*continues to ignore advert for the even more annoying "units can fire on each and everything"-problem galactic annihilation has instead*
That's not a problem. Unit turrets take a while to rotate and most projectiles are neither homing nor fast, so this doesn't come into play too often. You still need AA if you want to protect your stuff from a swarm of bumblebees, kestrels, or even icari.
Im actually curious... If you reclaim a factory while building it, do you only lose the health, not the progess? I need to check. Hehehe
