Laser turrets are too cheap/T1 land armies have vanished

I don't see the problem with that.

Sorry, thats a straight-out lie. T1 turrets completely devastate any T1 ground force. If you had a "massive line" (which I assume 5+ turrets) I doubt it would even be able to take damage from a T2 ground force less than 300 units.

Not really because artillary is pretty cheap. Turrets are supposed to be strong, but not strong enough to the point of being unable to break with an army

you can easily get much higher than this too. The game just has too much resouces for the cost of everything still.

Are we playing the same game?
300 metal/second in T1 is FORTY-TWO EXTRACTORS.

By the time you have 42 extractors in T1, I am in T2, killing you with T2 units anyway, if not somewhere on another planet with an asteroid headed at you. (In fact, if you have 42 extractors, I *must* be on another planet, or dead, because otherwise you would not have been able to reach 42 extractors.)

Your argument is invalid.

Nope. Mind you I wasn't watching, and based on what I saw when I looked I think my line got flanked,

42. Now that's a nice answer.
300 is definitely a value where I usually have t2, but 200 is a very reasonable value to get with t1 in less than 8 min or so. If we have a super powerful sheller available in our t1 factories we can easily just skip teching (would be a waste of 5,5k metal, with shellers on t1 rushing them would be a better option) and do even more t1, 300 metal income out of t1 is quite realistic at least on planets of maybe 700 to 800+ radius after maybe 10 min or so.

We can play that out if you want.

200/second is still 29 metal extractors.

You have 29 metal extractors in 8 minutes? Are you actually playing against anyone or is this the AI set to 0 economy? I was talking about games where we actually play against people. You are grossly miscalculating how much metal you get before T2. You are not going to spam a T2 unit in T1 even if T1 factories can produce them. You simply will not have the metal.

Also, shellers are not "super powerful". They only have 125 hit points (same as a T1 tank) and they only fire once every 4 seconds and they massively overkill anything that's not a structure and their shots are so slow and high arcing that you can micro units out of the way, which, when facing 3-4 shellers in T1, would be exactly the thing to do.

Also, by the time you've built 10 Shellers, you could have built a T2 factory for the same cost and you'd be able to start T2 metal. If anything, the main problem with building Shellers in T1 is that they are so expensive, it might only rarely make sense to try.

The more you make me look into it, the more convinced I am that Shellers are the perfect unit to move down to T1. Their only real use would be to attack static defenses and even then it's pretty highly debatable as to if you should do that or just save that metal to reach T2 earlier so you can REALLY pump out Shellers.


Really what I see it boiling down to is that if you made every single unit into a T1 unit, we would still need to rush to T2 in order to afford them. Whoever started getting T2 MEX up first would still win. I can hold off your handful of Shellers with Dox until I reach T2, then counter your handful of Shellers with 4x as many T2 units from my T2 economy.

This, so much this. We need tools to easily/properly deal with turrets. This will separate the knowledgeable players from the newer players though. While a good player will just use the proper tools to get through a tower, a newer player will throw way more metal than needed to win.
I think that we have to ask our selves if that's what we want. I don't know.

What I think will help is an inferno buff and custom pathing for the unit.
Say you give your army of tanks and infernos a move or attack-move order on the other side of a long wall. Right now, the entire army will choose the shortest path and walk around the wall while the towers on the other side take potshots.
With inferno-exclusive pathing, they should default to going straight perpendicular to the wall and make a hole for the tanks, this could cause the tanks to recalculate the best path. I think this would introduce the smoothest and least-enraging game play. Maybe make the inferno move 10% faster than tanks too, or replace the inferno with an armored bot that will do the same thing.

With this implemented we will see less micro, even if we compare it to the FA equivalent.
If you wanted to move your army through a wall of a few PDs surrounded by walls, you would have to stop your army, move your artillery to the front and fire a few shots before moving forward.
Now you would only need to have the proper composition and issue the move order.

Hey maybe they can come up with a way to make T1 a really good raiding tool in the late game. Something like being able to load more T1 into transports, or making T1 more effective against buildings than T2, or on-par with with T2.

Can you expound on this? I don't really understand what you mean or how your argument is supported.

I happen to run a statics webpage called PA Stats. So I can actually proof my claims pretty damn easy:
http://www.pastats.com/pastats/chart?gameId=67204

I am indeed not that good and only have 24 mex on minute 8, but I am just not good enough.
Matiz had 31 mex and 7 shellers, no t2 mex yet.
At minute 9:21 Matiz still has no t2 mex, but 37 t1 mex. Soon after he makes his first t2 mex.
I still suck with my t1 mex, only having 28, but in turn I at least already have 2 t2 mex.

... I need to learn how to make more mex faster I guess, 24 at minute 8 really is bad :/

I don't have time to take full blown out stats on more games, but look at games of Matiz, Godde, Clopse, some others or myself and you will see that 40 t1 mex at minute 10 doesn't have to be that special.

http://pastats.com/pastats/chart?gameId=68245
36 t1 and 3 t2 mex at 8 mins against arguable the best player this patch.

Just ignore him, hes clearly playing a different game.

Wait, what? You guys are doing 1v1 on size 900 maps? This is just like those arguments I would get into with people in SupCom where they said rushing was stupid and metal was super easy to come by, only to find out they exclusively played 1v1s on 20x20 maps meant for 6+ people. I was doing 1v1s on 5x5 maps and having a totally different experience.

The bottom line issue is that the game right now has a T1 unit with 6000 hit points. It's called a "wall". T1 tanks and bots can't deal with it or anything put behind it with any sort of cost efficiency.

If you play 1v1 on a 6-player map you can avoid that issue because there is little reason for serious T1 combat. Your opponent is probably so far away that by the time your first real T1 vehicle attack could reach him, he's T2. But the issue still exists.


And, again, we can just make a nerfed version of the Sheller as a T1 vehicle and continue the same trend everyone is complaining about, which is that T2 is just a better T1, but I don't see the purpose. You just end up with units like the Inferno which can't really do their intended role because the T1 version ends up too weak to do it.


There could probably even be an argument made that rather than T2 being better than T1, it should be more like:
T1 = Light infantry, light tanks and artillery
T2 = Heavy tanks and specialty infantry

[ ] <-- the box
. <-- where our thinking probably needs to be

My fancy was tickled.

900 is a fun size for 1v1, but yeah it IS rather big.

However, looking at other games from Matiz:

http://pastats.com/pastats/chart?gameId=68137
size 653 => 24 t1 2t2 vs 32 t1

http://pastats.com/pastats/chart?gameId=67387
size 666 => 36 t1 vs 30 t1 1 t2

http://pastats.com/pastats/chart?gameId=67375
size 666 => 44 t1 vs 18 t1 (wtf matiz)

Now don't tell me ~650 is too big for 1v1

By comparison, I typically do 6-way FFAs on a size 900 map. I assume the 1v1 equivalent would be size 300 but there may be complex calculations involving pi and the surface area of a sphere.

Anyway, we are getting off of the point of this thread. Let's review:

In a map where T1 land armies are actually relevant because you are not on the opposite side of a giant sphere, walls and T1 turrets render T1 land armies mostly useless. T1 units cannot shoot over or significantly damage 6000 hit point walls. A Sheller could do it but you don't think Shellers should be in T1 because...? You seem to think that Shellers are efficient killers of Dox armies? Have you actually used Shellers or fought them with Dox? I personally find Shellers are not that useful except against walls, which they excel at dealing with.

Why does that make them T2, exactly?

Dox can kill Shellers with fewer losses than they'd take against Pounders. Especially if you micro them a bit to avoid the worst of the slow arcing shots.

So I still don't see where your argument is coming from. What is it about the Sheller that you think makes it T2?

For that matter, why should a Leveler be T2?

Does T2 necessarily mean "units which have higher damage output than T1"? Is that the only thing it can mean? Isn't that a leading complaint on these forums?

size 300 for 1v1?

... yeah well if you start in the middle of your opponents base things are different.
Shellers probably should around half the planet with size 300

You can simplify the math by ignoring PI as PI is always a constant.
So with simplified math you treat it like it were a cube with the formula: radius*radius*6 where is the number of sides on the cube. Actually skip 6 as well since that is also a constant.
300*300 = 90000
900*900 = 810000
810000 / 90000 = 9

A 900 size planet have 9 times as much surface area as a 300 radius planet.

The formula for area is pi*radius^².

A size 300 planet has an area of 282743.34.
A size 900 planet has an area of 2544690.05.
The latter is 9 times as big as the former though.

Well we play surface area which is 4*pi*r^2. So either way it's 9 as only the radius isn't constant,

A 300 radius planet is not that unreasonable for 1v1 games...