Discussion: Early Game Commander Rushes

I know there doesn't appear to be upgrades in this game, but what if the Commander's gun only activates after a factory is built? Whether it be an upgrade button or ordering some fabs to repair the comm for a little while to "enable" the gun or build it into the chassis or whatever.

I have an idea. how about a commander, which passively gets stronger , to a point as the game goes on, making it risky to use offensively early game, but strong enough to survive nukes, late game.
perhaps the strength of a commander can progress when someone gets the proper building up like if the opposing team gets nukes, the commanders of all the teams get instantly upgraded to be able to survive that.
this would take some balancing, but it could be done.

I have an idea.

Maybe the way to fix this without challenging or limiting the games game play is by making the most basic fabricators the counter to a commander.

Fabricators already have the ability to reclaim enemy targets and giving them a higher reclaiming rate when reclaiming a commander may fix this problem.

Fabricators are already weak and die easily to enemies but they can be mass produced easily. If they are able to reclaim a commander at a fast rate then players would just have to produce a lot of them to take down rushes. and this would not effect the rest of the game in a dramatic way.

This would lead to a risk/reward element to the game where a commander is an easy target towards enemy fabricators in large numbers while still maintaining the destructive power of the original commander.

I like the idea of decreasing its speed.

Although I think your "best ability / second best ability" hits the nail on the head. The Commander is much more valuable as an offensive unit than a builder – at least until Advanced units hit the field.

His economical production should probably be increased and build speed. That speeds up early game and makes the Comm more of an asset later on.

I also think his damage per shot should be increased and his rate of fire decreased.

Perhaps we're going about it the wrong way, maybe instead of changing the commander's abilities, or nerfing him, or buffing him, we should change the team gamemode so that there still is only one commander, rather than one for each player. One player would start with a commander, and the others with "lieutenants" (name susceptible to change).

Lieutenants would be similar to commanders, except smaller, less tanky, don't explode on death, give 75% of the metal and energy that the commander gives, but have a similar build efficiency. They would have a similar weapon to the commander, but without an Uber cannon. They could also be slightly slower.

The other way you could do it, is give the "lieutenants" better build efficiency than the commander, but make it so that the energy and metal they produce cancel out to give you 0 metal and 0 energy per lieutenant while building, all the while giving them limited combat abilities, while keeping them tanky. This would ensure that they could hold off a small rush on their own, couldn't rush themselves and you wouldn't want to lose them do to their efficiency. I'm sure there are better ways to balance an Idea like this, it's just something that popped into my head.

Commanders are too strong militarily at the start, much more so than TA or Supcom. TA comm was heavily outranged, Supcom comm had trouble making headway against even basic base defences.

In Supcom all ACUs could build the basic turret, which had pretty good DPS and outranged commanders pretty heavily. Commanders ability to dominate the battlefield was limited by the PD turrets arc of fire. PD turrets were in turn countered by basic artillery, which leads us into the general economic struggle, which is where we want to be. In PA it feels you have to get Pelters to make any headway against enemy commanders. This is in part because the laser towers don't feel very effective and in part because terrain is so wide open.

I also feel that repairing the commander is too fast and too cheap. It makes mistakes nearly meaningless as long as you scoot away, and you can constantly keep the commander in the fight so long as you don't get overwhelmed. *shrug*

Im still for kicking the player out that lost his comm
it worked in supcomteams (though stuff was not shared) it should work here like that aswell .... and dont come with " oh but if he's kicked he isnt in for the rest of the game" .... no sh*t sherlock? Do you know the word survival?

Sorry, but I need some clarification on this. Isn't the team that rushes with all their commanders going to have a HUGE disadvantage because they didn't use them to build up their base?

So what if the team getting rushed just avoids fighting these commanders and retreat where necessary? Wouldn't that still leave them with a better eco, because of the time it took the other team to walk their commanders over to their base, in which they already built eco and factories and stuff? I mean even if the commander rush destroys part of your team's base, wouldn't you still have better infrastructure because the time they spent walking over wasn't spent in building anything? So basically just avoid a fight where you get outnumbered, abandon a small part of your base in favor of getting the long term advantage and you'll be fine. Or am I missing something?

Edit: that has always worked for me up until now. Every time a teammate of me got commander rushed by multiple commanders, i decided to build up more infrastructure instead of helping them to get the long term advantage. And as far as i can remember, i always won those games later. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices for the greater good

well, the rushing comms will kill a good part of your infrastructure, then blow up your comm which means less generated resources aswell, and then go on on their killing rampage.
Theres not much that can hold of a comm with some repair power early game, much less a bunch of them.

As soon as you have a couple fabbers out the comm is expendable as builder, its quite easy to spend all metal without him.

To make the com gang-bang less effective:
* Adjust the Dgun to be useless against coms and less usefull against structures/defenses (happened in Forged Alliance, improved the game alot).
* Significantly nerf the repair speed of commanders. Possibly make it totally useless in favor of some slow, automatic self-healing.

Doesnt really fix the problem, but atleast there would be a significant risk if you use coms in enemy territory.

Further there could be some additional penalty for com-vs-com battles. Maybe a Death-EMP that stuns only commanders in range for 10 seconds,gicing the defending units some time to land free hits

Whatever happens I hope that individual players are never kicked out of the game when a commander dies. Kicking players would only push the problem away until we reach a point where players care more about their team winning than their involvement in the game.

No. They have a huge advantage. The Commander is more powerful as a combat unit than a construction unit after you get your first few fabricators out. And not only is it more effective as a combat unit until Advanced units get on the field, when paired with several Commanders it's a nigh unstoppable force. Especially when 3 commanders gang up on 2 commanders. Once the attacking Commanders take out an enemy Commander, they then take out an entire base and the defenders have no force that can stop them.

This is a game. We're supposed to have maximum enjoyability for players. Kicking them out means they can't play anymore. (yes, no s*** sherlock) Making players so they can't play is a bad thing imo. It lowers the enjoyability of the Army game mode and means whoever loses a Commander first, pretty much loses always.

It's a video game. Most players aren't ultra competitive. They just want to play around and have fun and can't do that if they get kicked from the game.

It beeing a game is not always a good answer ... in order for a game to be also chalanging as well as fair it has a set of rules ... yes enjoyabilitiy is what it is all about .. but is it enjoyable to lose to early teamcomrush when usualy what you want to do is flinging metal avalanches around? My enjoyment is in massive battles and thausands of explosions if i lose that way then its fine cause i hat my enjoyment out of it ..... you want to use your comm to blow up stuff? Fine too ... but only so long as the comm explodes ... and this is were it usualy gets annoying for every defender ... and people that always use commrush because there aint almost no consequenses kill the enjoyment of others weither they lose or win to it doesnt matter its similar to playing poker with donkeys they basicly play every crap because they dont give 2 sh*ts bout their stack ... they may lose because they go all in all the time with everything ... i may win does that mean i had fun or enjoyed the match .... hell no ....
you want to play for fun to enjoy yourself without giving sh*ts bout everything? Play against ai or with friend may be with changed rules .... but then please dont play ladder if you cant take it at least a bit serious ... even cheese has its consequenses so far commrush doesnt have to much negative consequenses to me which doesnt make it just cheese anymore but straight out unfair and unsportmanlike ... is commrush deathblow a viable strategy? Yes but it should be done with a propper reason and not be so easily be done because you are still in the game ... it also quite violates what the commander is about lorewise ...
does sound like a rant .. but that's how i feel to it to the point that i would have no interest in team games ever but alliances only
while i am not a competitve player myself and just play for fun and own enjoyment myself i play within the rules unless i want to sandbox and test stuff

I don't see why having a dead commander = a kicked player can't just be a game mode. Let the players choose when they host the game. Argument over, back on topic.

The thing is i personaly would want it to be a primarily thing for competitiv play as i would think it would ensure fairness
i do agree however that it should be changeable for fungames

If they start caring for their team winning then they will think about commrushing twice ...
it is a impactful decision after all quite literally ... you usualy do everything to your team to win this includes sacrifyses

Id like to ask someone to host teamgames with the gentleman rule of someone leaving the army control when his dedicated commander is destroyed for the sake of looking of how it plays out

They would not think twice about commrushing if it were a really powerful tactic. I think you see commrushing at taboo and thus a bad strategy in the first place. I am not saying whether commrushing is or is not too powerful, just stating my opinion on what should be done in one of the cases. This is only relevant in the types of commrushes which are both powerful and have a reasonable chance of the aggressors losing their commanders. So I will restate what I said with the hypothetical in place.

If commrushing is too powerful then causing players to be booted when their commander dies will not address the issue because we will reach a point where players care more about winning than being booted.

I am still confused on this topic. I have not seen any games where this is a thing. Yet, would a com rush leave a team behind on production for the game start, still be able to run from a commander with another (at least to the point of double ko), and in the end they cannot chase you completely down and your team still overall gets its first base up while your enemy just starts laying down lathe?

just played a 5 man FFA on a size 1 planet,

even more convinced than ever that commanders are too powerful militarily.

pretty much the only things that mattered were Pelters and Commanders.

i lost because Pelters have a tough time acquiring targets on a size 1 planet owing to extreme curvature xD

Well is that a problem with the commanders actually fighting or with the lathe's power to build things?

Also, size one planets are ripe for artillery play, especially catapults, but pelter's in particular usually end up firing like mobile artillery until they can direct fire.

On a size one moon, craters make the best placed for pelter's as the terrain allows them to low arc fire better.

But still, lasers if accounting to the terrain along with T2 artillery is king on the smaller planets if no one bot rushes.

Both.

In Starcraft 2, building placement could negate a lot of the early rushes, but since the planets in PA are perfectly round this might require a different way to allow players to anticipate an early rush and counter it.