Important balance issues

I feel having the ability to first shoot at targets that can shoot back (bombers if you are a ground aa unit) should not be op.

I think it would be. It basically makes it cost inefficient to use bombers against anyone who uses any sort of aa whatsoever. 150 vs 280. And then you could maybe even get rare annoying situations where person who uses bomber wins against person who uses pure fighters, because all the fighter missiles focus this one bomber instead of spreading out to do maximum damage on the fighters.

Would not be against testing it in a PTE though since i am just theorycrafting, and it is possible to be a good solution to air problem. Being a very simple change is a positive for this.

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I don't think the not being able expanding with fabbers thing is as big a problem as people seem to make it out. Maybe my definition of expansion pace is different from others, but i strongly feel that the person who expands more and holds more metal will definitely win. It might take time to fully epand all of it safely, but it's absolutely possible.

All the ladder maps have areas which are great for ninja air fabbers for the majority of skill levels. Many times I am hitting metal bottlenecks as much as energy bottlenecks. 2 fabbers on energy whole game is really the most i find myself needing, and the chokes let you build up that early energy to kickstart it all. It's a bit different from the more open maps we have been used to playing. If someone starts having heaps of success with some specific rush build though, i don't mind saying i was wrong on this. And by rush i mean totally neglecting metal or energy expansion.

Not fond of the idea of yolo take all the metal by 5 minutes without much risk. But then again, t1 fabber does indeed need to be more energy efficient if not simply because of the t2 problem. The fabber vs factory energy efficiency difference means it's not even worth investing one fabber onto t2 for the long term.

Anyway, nice write up zaphod. Good reasoning and solution proposals.

Thanks for feedback so far guys. Currently the only thing I feel I can add to the list is @towerbabbel 's note about the Holkins being underwhelming.

I also am quite hesitant to add more things right now because trying to change too many issues of balance at one time will likely cause more issues than it solves. It also doesn't allow you to really judge what effect the changes have had individually.

@mayhemster
I also tend to agree. This was on my list of personal opinions I omitted. I feel if we can get a better balance with t1 bombers/fighters and AA then making t2 air viable is the next step.

@cwarner7264 @cola_colin @cptconundrum @philoscience
Lack of t2 in games is certainly an issue but it is a very complex one (imo). It is definitely something to work on after these issues are iterated on. I also think we need to be playing ranked games on 600-800 radius planets to see if t2 comes out (Should we even see t2 on radius 400, <30minute 1v1s?).

@mered4
Vanguard - I agree, they need a proper role don't they? All I know is vanguards used to be good and made for a lot of excitement. Imo, just before vanguards got nerfed the meta seemed to be full-circling back to Vanguards aren't actually op anymore.
Naval - It is slow, and it seems like it would be nice to just have speed back up. But it's also what makes it unique with the slow strategy of taking so long to get anywhere and needing to think further ahead, needing to have the right composition because you can't quickly reinforce it. I feel we need to see what happens if narwhal AA gets buffed and suddenly naval maps actually revolve around naval instead of air units. At that point then I feel we ought to reconsider if slow naval really is working.

Relating to t1>t2units, grenadiers and catapults/pelters:
After these changes have settled in (particularly grenadiers), then it is very likely changes will be needed on turrets. This is something I think best to wait until these changes are made and see how the game is affected.

Notice how I said "should". If having reasonable target priorities makes something imba than something else is fundamentally wrong. I mean as far as I remember FA had working target priorities for air and it worked.

Well it depends what you mean by reasonable or should. For example, I think it's reasonable for everything to instead follow the same rule of dumbly shooting at whatever is closest. Something that is intuitive and easy for the player to understand.

If we followed your definition of reasonable, we should also make everything prioritise targets that arn't infernos, vanguards, commanders, spinners, or walls.

Yes. That's how it worked in FA basically.
And walls in PA do have the lowest of the low target priorities already btw. They are just:
a) often physically in the way
b) there is a bug that makes units keep shooting at whatever target they found. Even if new targets appear. So a unit that decided to kill a wall will kill that wall, even if enemy tanks arrive. In fact that bug may be why aa acts like it does vs bombers: fighters arrive first.
I really don't understand why we should throw away so many of the proven concepts from that game.

Well, i have a problem with infernos not tanking damage for example. Anyway, like i said, i'm not against seeing how it actually plays in PTE or some mod that someone bothers to make. Could be wrong with my theory craft.

Thinking further: A unit meant to "tank" damage for others should not rely on enemy units being stupid enough to shoot it. That's just broken game design. Instead the unit should have some feature to make other units shoot it. For example the inferno could be equipped with some form of gravity field that alters the flight path of projectiles to hit the inferno instead of the actual target within a certain range around that inferno.

I don't agree. That would be like saying WoW and every single RPG game on the planet is broken game design, which isn't true at all. The 'gravity field' idea effectively gives you the same result anyway even if the logic to get there is different.

I know people are hung up about the bombers, so I'm trying to tread carefully because there might be a problem since alot of people are talking about it. All i'll say is to date i have never built bombers nor used bombers in any real capacity. To me, the maths just doesn't support bomber use even in it's current state, except for specific timings for fabber snipes. If i am diligently scouting how many air factories they are going, all i need to do is match that number and produce fighters non-stop to get air control and prevent them from safely using bombers. Doing so costs me less metal, and i still end up with the advantage.

The reason clopse is one of the only players able to use bombers effectively currently is because he purposely power assists his 2nd air factory with commander to get unexpected air control that he can then snowball with.

Or just make it large enough that it blocks direct fire units.

They don't base their balance on bugs like this.
They have clearly defined rules and in Warcraft (both RTS and RPG) there actually are magic spells like "taunt" or similar abilities to get enemy units to attack a tank. Enemies have a targetting priority system and players have a whole set of mechanics to deal with it by using specialized skills. Basically my gravity field idea comes from there.

That is not true. It's vastly different if you have a bug that makes units shoot the first target they see until it is dead or if you have a unit that has a certain area of effect around it that effects enemy bullets. The second one can be balanced by changing the size of the effect. The first one results in weird situations where a dox keeps shooting a wall even though an engineer came in range.

I don't care about bombers, I care about units that have a targetting AI that doesn't completely kill the immersion of controlling a robot army from thousands of years into the future. I expect those robots to not keep shooting walls or hummingbirds while being attacked by other units in general.

And that is what t1 bombers should be for. If you want heavy brawlers that can fight armies you are looking for correctly balanced gunships.

clopse always has been all about bombers anyway for as long as I can think back

Ok well if we are talking about units getting stuck targeting other units, then you have no arguement from me about that.

Simply shooting whatever is closest isn't a bug however (what i mistakenly thought we were talking about)

I like the micro what can I say, only unit you can have fun with

Yeah that in itself is not a bug but i have been practising a move today, select all air attack spinner, select all fighter patrol spinner. bombers usually stay safe then. but that me prioritisng what i wanna kill i suppose

it is not, but it is a mechanic that's just bad. And as I said: No even fantasy RPGs and RTSs base their system not on that kind of system. They are far more complex than that.
Also PA HAS a priority system since more than a year anyway xD
People expect that of an RTS cause having aa units shoot fighters while a bomber or two kill everything looks stupid.

I don't think it's bad since it adds gameplay depth in terms of range control, unit positioning, and how you take engagements. If you are out of position and don't have your infernos in front, then they don't get targeted and tank for you. Or likewise with fighters, if you have bombers infront they will get targeted first ofcourse.

*Also for example if i rotate low hp units from the front to the back, 'smart robots' would try to focus these units and ignore the high hp units in front. But that tends to reduce gameplay depth instead.

It's a rule that you should be able to understand and manipulate to your advantage by positioning units correctly.

and yea, like you said i made a mistake with the walls before since they would be considered buildings and the prioritization of stuff seems to be units > buildings.

@clopse
Well, then maybe the easiest change would be decrease fighter hp and damage instead? Basically try to standardise damage per metal from the same aa missile against fighters and bombers.

Understanding that units shoot whatever is most dangerous for them isn't too hard either.
For air "shoot closest" target doesn't really work as well, as they bounce around way too fast.

I think walls were the reason why the target priorities were introduced in alpha. Before walls could be used as really really powerful damage tanks in armies. Basically spam walls randomly and place your army in it to have it win vs anything.

Speaking of walls, who thought it was a good idea to make tanks fire over walls at turrets? Now walls are all but useless except as a physical block that units must path around.

Units do hit walls, but it's less reliable. Not sure how the balance should work out for "walls as shields". But that's now really getting off topic from the off topic, maybe make a new thread about it

Do you have any sources for this? I searched for C&C (the old one) and found they had the same issues with walls. But couldn't find any detailed source on that topic.
There are some really interesting aspects to this, like
* When to retarget?
* Prefer low heath targets over high heath targets?
* Target on attacker?
* Target priority like nearness over threat?
And it isn't trivial to pick the right solution to all these questions, I even fear that for different encounters (within a single game), different solutions may apply.

Cheers,
criz.