Discussion: Early Game Commander Rushes

Right now PA has a huge balance issue, particularly with large Army matches – early Commander Rushing.

In 1v1s or free for alls, it's balanced because everyone has only one Commander. But in the Army game type, all you need to do to win is attack with 1 more Commander than your opponent has in the area.

Right now, in 4v4 and 5v5 Army Matches, Commander Rushing is way over powered and near uncounterable, especially when paired with the build+shoot bug.

All players need to do to win is Commander rush with 1 more Commander than your opponent has in the area and you win the match. It practically invalidates Army matches larger than 2 or 3 people on a team. And once the aggressing team kills one more Commander than they lose, then they win since nothing can stop Commander rushes.

Right now the only way to stop Commander rushes is to have more Commanders than your opponent or have a sizable force of units. Neither of which are viable counters in early gameplay.

So essentially, we have an automatic game winning mechanic without any counter.

Something needs to be done to balance this mechanic or 4+ players on one team for the Army game type will be completely invalidated unless we spawn on different planets.

I have no clue how to balance this without ruining other aspects of the game though. If we lower the commander health or damage, then we mess up 1v1s or FFAs.

The only thing I can think of is for the Army game mode when there's 3 or more Commanders, all Commanders must spawn on the same spawn point.

Anyone else have any ideas?

Power drain for energy weapons?

Then players could do what was done in Halo Wars. Just have fabricators build nothing but power plants.

In Halo Wars, one of the Covenant generals had an energy beam laser special ability that required power to operate. If that player pumped out nothing but energy plants and sent his general straight towards the enemy base, nothing could counter that. There was absolutely nothing that could do enough damage to the enemy general.

Yeah.....yeah.....

The competitive people won't be happy no matter the result.

As a frequent player of Halo Wars, I can confirm that this is a problem in that game. Although you can throw down a disruption bomb to save certain areas from its destruction (should you be a human, rather than a covenant).

Maybe... lower Commander health based on how many Commanders are on a team?

Make the Uber cannon one shot other commanders?

During Alpha the Uber Cannon could kill a Commander with 2 shots and Commander rushes were more common. And then the game would be all about getting off the first Uber cannon – so it'd be mostly luck based.

That won't change anything. The commander will still be far stronger then any force you can amass early. It also doesn't discourage one commander attacking another commander.

Id say static defences.

But people seem to be allergic to mobile artillery.

Perhaps there could be a defensive structure with a concussive effect that knocks back the target unit? That way, you could use it to buy time if you get rushed by multiple commanders, but it can't do much against a swarm.

What about having Commanders spawn only one per area? Then it would be more valuable to keep him back at your base and you wouldn't have the increased number of Commanders to rush in with at the beginning of the game.

Or, we need to find either a way to make Commanders more valuable so you definitely don't want to lose it.

Didn't the explosion from a Commander in TA destroy any other Commanders within the explosion radius? Then if you rushed one Commander with two, you could end up losing both, making it definitely not worth it.

Problem with that is it just facilitates even more effective comm bombing.

By far the easiest way to take down a comm rush is, as brian said, with more comms. If the explosion is gonna kill all the comms you used to counter the rush then it just makes comm rushing/bombing even more difficult to counter.

EDIT: first idea could work, but I'd rather not limit spawn freedom. Also on small planets the multiple comm rush would remain viable.

Defenses can easily be tweaked to make defending against commanders effective. Such as by including an anti-heavy defensive structure.

And the game will certainly require several types of anti-heavy unit that will be effective against commanders and other high-HP targets that are few in number. Commanders are also slow and will be vulnerable to skirmishers/mobile fighters.

Radical approaches like changing commander HP by number of commanders and such are not good solutions.

Then all you need to do is send in 1 commander to take out 5.

It seems that for army matches, limiting all players to 1 spawn point seems like the best solution.

That hardly seems like a complete solution. Firstly, it limits strategy to some degree (yes, I'd say choosing spawns in team games is strategy),I'd rather not see uber limiting spawn freedom at this stage.

Secondly, you're then faces with an expansion dilemna: if you send comms out to expand you're at risk of being comm rushed, if you don't you're at risk of having an opponent outproduce you should they expand with comms.

So... then what? :-/

I think commander detonations should be stronger. I can see you coming, counter-charge you, destroy all of your fabrication bots and then explode in your face but you'll actually win that fight because my detonation does so very little damage.

I dunno if it should be like TA, where a commander detonation was stronger than a nuke, but it could be a lot stronger than it is right now, which would make Comm vs Comm shootouts a lot riskier.

Seems a defensive structure would be ideal. I mentioned a structure that could knock back single targets, and Ledarsi mentioned an anti-heavy defensive structure (give it a long cooldown and high damage-per-shot, and it will scare commanders while remaining vulnerable to infantry). Both have the advantage of not requiring sweeping game-mechanics changes or upsetting balance in other areas.

I dunno if a defensive structure just for fighting off Commanders is really a viable solution.

One way or another, this will be a difficult thing to fix.