I thought the new patch would balance combat fabs

I like the idea of long range healing artillery, too. Mines and turrets may be to OP or hard to balance ..
.. and it really sounds like a building cannon.
Why not mount the T2 combat fabber to a Holkins? With its slender statue it might just fit perfectly.

What did the combat fabbers change by the way? In my opinion just the speed of the games. So no boring first 5 minutes in the matches you can watch online but action from the first minute on.
Yes, I haven't seen many bomber harassments lately but they are still possible.
So combat fabbers didn't change the early game strategies but just made them faster.

The worst point about combat fabbers is that you don't have them as naval and air units!
If you start in the water far away from land, you are most likely going to lose.

So there are two options to adjust the game balance:
1. Nerf combat fabbers only to heal units
- No immediate need for air&naval combat fabbers. But I would like to have them for repairing t2 ships!
- Easier game start due to less units surprising one / more time to counter
- More chance for slower starting strategies (e.g. Turtle & Nuke)

2. Add air & naval combat fabbers
- It doesn't matter to nerf the combat fabber bots a bit, say to 30 metal/s. Then it will still be the most efficient build strategy.

For those complaining about that big game change, Darwin would have said:
"Adapt to the most efficient build strategy or get annihilated!"
And don't blame Uber for that, be thankful they do bigger changes. I've never seen a game evolving so fast and changes keep it interesting!

I agree we need naval combat fabbers, you can start on a complete naval world and your enemy start on a complete ground world with the exact same amount of metal and he can win because he have possibility to spam combat fabbers to get up nukes faster.

I don't have time to rebuild my entire PA build order from scratch.

That includes my strategy and thought process.

When using combat fabs, the entire GAME has to change. You don't just think, oh, I'll build one combat fab instead of 6 normal fabs. Your first 5 units suddenly become game changing. The fist five factories might also be the only ones you build the entire game. Expansion is based around how much metal you need to sustain three factories and a combat fab on a patrol route. The game is compressed and sped up, which pushes it almost to a breakneck pace like starcraft.

T2 is just not feasible with combat fabbers. I'm not saying it could be with regular fabbers, but it is most definitely NOT the way it is now.

Regardless of what change is made, combat fabbers need to be made less efficient than regular fabbers so that regular fabbers return to regular use.

The units in PA are all so expendable and have such low health that I've never really seen the need for field repairs. If combat fabbers didn't have any role in industry, I don't think they would see much use at all. I like the option to build a couple storage buildings and then be able to build something incredibly quickly once in a while.

I think that they should take more energy, but otherwise stay how they are; After all, Total Annihilation had the FARK, didn't it?

Maybe Metal Extractors are intended to be essential resource units. Maybe combat fabbers shouldn't be? Maybe what makes combat fabbers mandatory in it's current form deserves some scrutiny. Micro is one of the reasons, but a minor one, i'll elaborate.

The reason combat fabbers are so good (OP broken imba powerful fotm whatever heh) is that they are a fix to the slighlty off economy balance in the game. Through build after build now, through changes in T1 and T2 pacing, the metal and energy balance has been slightly tilted. Metal comes fast and cheap while energy is about three times as expensive so the dominant way to deal with was to let your commander build energy for large parts of the game (until you hit T2 eco) since it was the faster and more energy efficient builder.

The obvious problems with this is that the commander is a unit that is intended to be super good and strong at everything, we are OK with this. Having a T1 fabber outbuild the commander in every possible way (higher build rate and more energy efficient) is strange enough in itself, but add to that that it is a combat fabber that won't even be selected and dealt with the same way as all other fabricating units in the game is very strange.

I've stated this before but it's like you've added an extra secret tier in the game. The combat fabber is it's own little tier and a half on the way to T2 economy. And i don't mind extra tiers, do as you please with your game, what i'm arguing is that the current combat fabbers will still not be used as field medics. Everything about them is counter intuitive. They cost like a factory and anything can one shot them, i'll never send them in to the field because i don't have a unit that is that important to keep alive. I'd rather have means of efficient production without the extra layer that the combat fabber is to production.

What is see is not in any way near what i get. It's intendend as a field medic, a role i'd argue isn't needed, but it works as a rebalance of the entire economy of the game. Suddenly we can build a lot more and faster while building less energy plants. Because of a medic? No, please no.

Balance the game however you like. Make it slow or fast, make T1 or T2 strong, do whatever. (i'd prefer both t1 and t2 strong at a medium pace ) But do so by tweaking the numbers concerned (resource production and consumption) and not via some unit we are struggling to find a role for.

As a side note, I come from TA and they added the F.A.R.K. (Fast Assist and Repair Kbot) as one of the last units in the game. We never used that one for repairing anything either, it was only used at home building economy and assisting production.

I'm stating the obvious here and i don't mean to be rude but if you add units, like you added the combat fabber, look at what the game needs and not what would be cool. T1 artillery bots are a great addition to the game, they shoot over walls so now we have more options than bombers and pelters. But do we need a medic? What would be so valuable that we'd want to build medics to keep it alive? Only thing i can think of is my commander, and there's already twenty-five thousand reasons i probably can't afford repairing that one.

I've had more fun playing PA since i started using combat fab's to assist with building and assisting factory's than i did not using them, not using combat fab's in the current build slows down the game and makes the early game so boring in the first 5-10 min's i use to only play 1 game every time a new build came out, as for not sending combat fab's with armies:
A. combat fab's don't move when you give an area attack command
B. why heal a single unit when you can produce 2-3 units to take its place when it gets destroyed

P.S. if you have 2 combat fab's assisting per factory's it's much more efficient than having say 5-10 combat fab's assisting 1 factory

I think the actual problem is just that: The current combat fabber gameplay is totally unintuitive. They are called combat fabbers, you'd think you are supposed to use them in combat. They can't build things, so how is a new player supposed to guess that you actually need to use them for building everything to have any chance?

Besides, what's the actual _point_ of having them like this? What does it really add to the game? If you want faster, more energy efficient building, why not just improve normal fabbers, or reduce costs of everything?

(It doesn't help that the game is really bad at letting you know the actual numbers and efficiencies. You pretty much have to dig these things from the forum or some database somewhere. Hopefully this will change before 'release'.)

public int assist(entity entityObject)
{
if(entityObject instanceof Structure)
return this.buildRate;
else
return this.buildRate*5;
}

Or the equivalent to whatever code PA is written in. It allows fast building of structures and fast repairs but doesn't really help assist factories that well. This speeds up the beginning of the game, makes each combat fabricator even more valuable since they're harder to build now and also makes it more strategic based (should you build a fabricator or units to defend/raid).

That would be even more complex and unintuitive. You don't need combat fabbers to speed up beginning of the game; if you want that you can just as well lower cost of the buildings.

I don't mind that the combat fabbers speed up the building process more than ordinary fabs. However, the balancing of them needs to be improved no doubt. T1 combat fabs should be dedicated healers, and maybe the spam assist ability should only be for the t2 combat fabs which would become a F.A.R.K-like unit (TA Reference).

I dislike the fact that combat fabs are much better than all other fabs but I do like what the effect of having this increased efficiency has done to the game. I had a 9man FFA yesterday (which actually involved the OP) and I found that while I had enough energy metal was very scarce. This led to me having to constantly attack my neighbours and expand to try and take their metal. Reclaiming became a very viable strategy and was necessary for my economy to progress. I had to spend a large amount of resources defending my limited metal spots because they meant so much to my economy, a small raid from yellow on one of my larger metal spots lead to a complete crash in my economy.
I follow what others in this thread have been saying in that we need to make T1 energy better (if not increased production then reduced cost so we can build more of them for cheaper). This will help to recreate the feeling of my last game where metal was in short supply and I was attacking others and defending constantly to keep my economy afloat.

And that is the exact data I imagine they are collecting. Why make a balance change then revert it when the community whines about it? It needs time to be played and data to be gained.

For the past games Uber has put out balancing was exactly like this and this is why MNC and SMNC is a near perfect balanced game/s.

While I agree with your points, your solution seems to be the wrong one. If they were less efficient than regular fabs, why would you ever build them even for their intended role? No, the solution is to make it so that they can't assist in construction.

I've been advocating for this for months.

T1 PGen Cost: 450 -> 350
T1 PGen Output: 600 -> 675
T1 Mex Cost: 150 -> 225

Just do it.

that sounds pretty nice, although i would say just increase PGens to 700. Also, the mex output should be increased slightly, maybe to 8 or even 9 if the cost increases.

Thanks for the thoughtful post Meta. I just want to say, that from what limited usage I've had with the newest builds, I don't necessarily buy that combat fabbers are broken. I find this new usage as mobile build-assisters pretty interesting. How and when you use them really has a big impact on your build efficiency and they are an intresting kind of nescessary mechanic. Do they dominate gameplay? Yes, for sure. But I think it's still to early to say for sure if this is in a wholly bad or wholly good direction, all we can really say is some new gameplay has been found. And I appreciate uber's chilled back stance to this, taking time to let the meta mature a bit before reacting to popular opinion. I suspect combat fabs will need to be altered in some way, but I think we need to be careful not to discard the new gameplay they've revealed just because it dominates. It could become the backbone of an interesting economic meta and I think it's too early to say.

They're broken because

1. They're a unit that's used for fabrication but, if you do a box select, get selected with your combat units.
2. They're supposed to be a combat medic. Who would think that they're most useful as assist units?
3. They're useless at their intended role because they're 720 metal that gets destroyed by a single ant shot.
4. They essentially replace normal fabbers. Make them for the most part obsolete.

If you use them for their intended and implied role, they derp hardcore and you lose metal without an effect on your task force. If you use them for their most useful role and use a useful UI element, then they get sent to get blasted to bits by ants with your tank armies. You need to avoid using core UI features in order to use them. That's what's broken about them.

How about they just make repairs cost half as much? Combat fabs could then have standard build speed but longer range and more health?

I think that sums this thread up. I couldn't say it any better. Combat fabs need to only be used to repair units or maybe (i'm not sure what to think about this part)assist the construction of buildings. But NOT the construction of units

They serve a unique role and everyone has access to them so are they really OP?