Obvious balance changes: Anchors vs avengers Anchors are too strong or avengers are too weak, take your pick. Astraeus needs to be cheaper Near useless in its current form. Don't allow normal fabbers to assist orbital It's not obvious that they can do that, really not obvious. Hummingbird vs peregrines Keep peregrines the better choice per metal of course, but not so much better that they can go full rambo. Turrets vs T1 Make T1 viable again Personal preference: Offensive naval drops I want to see some leviathan drops, from tiny tiny pelicans I know this is probably a technical issue. Reduce sxx cost to 15k To make orbital a viable strategy. With land assist the current cost is ok but still weaker than nuke against anyone competent. If land assist goes then 25k is way too much Punish those who don't consider orbital play enough to even get an umbrella up, encouraging at least orbital awareness Cheaper sxx means it can be used more as a general offense to soften players up (instead of just aiming for a comm snipe) Links orbital and normal wars a bit better, encouraging balanced play A little brother to the sxx (in function only, who cares if it's a laser or a water pistol), maybe 2000 metal to get something in between t1 tank and leveler in strength against land (balance to be determined) Properly link orbital and land layers. Dominance in one means you can start to encroach on the other. From land you can assault orbital with umbrellas and orbital launchers. From orbit you can have roaming sxx-junior squads
I'd also like to see the relative strength and cost ratios of T1 vs T2 in general to come down a bit, to keep T1 viable for longer.
THIS^But I would do some things a bot differently (see bold text in quote) Other things that would make orbital balance better: Fixing the bugs (canceling stuff too early makes it disappear, orbital fabbers can't assist or continue previous projects, Astraeus currently unloads from orbit before it lands, orbital fabbers sometimes get stuck after they are done and need to be unstuck in order for them to be able to move on to other projects, ...) Also T1 making orbital radar sat into LOS only spy sat and T2 orbital radar sat into actual radar only sat with near global coverage would be fine. This would mean both are useful, T2 for localising enemies and T1 for scouting. A way to generate metal from orbit (low efficiency T2 mining lasers or something) - this is why T2 orbital always happens only when you're out of ideas - no metal income. Other non-orbital improvements: T1 Pgen power increase to 1k. Mobile t2 flak (planned) Tactical missile defense or manual catapults (see other thread) 1st anti nuke free - this is to allow rapid response to nukes other than your own nuke. Nukes that target orbital (planned) and can intercept stuff between planets (so the enemy can't troll you by sending their commander on 15 minute solar system tours when they are doomed). When defenses are nerfed, nerf the vanguard it's the only single unit non-super weapon that can kill a comm alone on a 1v1 fight and with a pelican or astraeus it's single drawback is eliminated. Naval is still slow, they could do with another speed buff
The stronger thing should always cost more metal/DPS than the weaker thing with the same or a similar role. The amount of DPS for an equivalent amount of metal with a weaker item goes down as each weak thing gets destroyed, whereas a single strong item with less DPS/metal than the weaker thing will not lose any DPS until it gets destroyed. In other words, even when a stronger item is less metal efficient than a similar but weaker item, it will still beat the equivalent amount of them. Unless the item is tank destroyer or sniper bot, in which case a single volley and it's dead.
Longer as in always? Anything shorter than that and I am having a hard time getting behind the notion of T2 being a specialist tier - if special is to mean something other than especially good, that is. edit: @neutrino ogling straight upgrades notwithstanding.
Seems like some pretty nice concerns raised here. Nice post. The one problem I see with the cheaper orbital unit that shoots down would be that we would need an anti orbital veh or bot to counter it.
What I mean is, as long as cost is a balancing factor, it will always be more heavily weighted at the beginning of the game. Once you get to more late game and have a pile of resources, stronger, more specialized units (minus upgrades like levelers) will still have the same strengths, but the relative cost of producing them when your economy can strongly support it will favor most people producing mainly T2. A good eco balance may change that if late game resources are ratcheted down a bit, and you have to think more to determine what/where you can build, but that's not the case as I see it now. I mostly agree with that/your philosophy though, with a couple not OP direct upgrades thrown in (Levelers are still too strong IMO haha).
Perhaps, but then it would mirror the situation we have with land vs air, which I think would be dull. There's a lot of ways to balance it without needing mobile anti-orbital. My first impulse is to make sxx-junior slower than ground units, making it less of a threat to an attacking force. I have another idea which sounds alright at first blush. What if anchors were: Static as they were before Orbital fabbers build them They have to be tethered to a building (orbital fabbers build them like building mex) Only one per building If the building is destroyed so is the anchor (say the building powered the anchor) Again, this would be to tie orbital and normal layers together more.
You're forgetting the purpose of the anchor here: To tank a ton of damage during orbital invasions. It should be made DPS ineffective, but it should be mobile.
Lord, yes please. Everything that shifts focus to or ties the other layers to the land layer is plus in my book.
You're right, so I propose it should be split into two units: An anchor as I described tethered to a structure, with low health and high DPS An offensive bullet soak as we have now, but with lower DPS I don't know, but umbrella's can be defeated by dropping anchors then sxx. If the defender doesn't micro, the umbrellas can be destroyed before they target the sxx, or go straight for a comm snipe if you're feeling lucky.
Right, but if my counter is orbital units then I don't think there's anything you can do since I don't think orbital units block shots, and anchors don't kill anchors fast enough to stop them killing a satellite. You wouldn't use anchors to tank umbrellas, avengers are much more cost effective for that.
If your counter is anchors the answer is not to let them get in range (anchors travel at 10m/s, laser 25 m/s, incidentally avengers go 50m/s, which is another reason to use them in that avenger thread) of the sxx, which is a win for you/stalemate. You manage to chase me away, so I go mex hunting instead. I don't know about that, it's a statistics game. Assuming no defender micro and random target selection: Anchors mean less target switching but higher chance of the next target being sxx Avengers mean more target switching, but lower chance of the next target being sxx The optimum is likely to be a mix of the two, statistics are funny things.
I think it could be interesting to have a orbital unit that can only shoot when struck by enemy umbrellas.
how bout something like a scram jet or high atmosphere fighter than can go out into space aka the orbital layer. it would be cool to have level 2 aircraft that could move between the orbital and air layer and vice versa orbital fighters that could enter the atmosphere, it would make orbital bombardments a bit more interesting
Orbital, air and land should be linked. As it is now, all you need to defend a little moon is 100 kestrel or so on patrol. Unless you do a massive astreus drop with aa units, but that's countered easy enough too and too expensive. If they would make orbital-air gunship and fighter kind of units, that would be great, might also solve the t2 fighter problem. (making him only twice as good as t1 fighter, but with ability to go orbital, also, the gunships shouldn't be able to fire in orb layer) Another example is of using the sxx defencively, with the rate of fire and movability it has now, it's decently effective against hordes of t2 tanks/bots coming in, especially at chokepoints. Orb to land, but no land/air to orbital, forces you to go full orbital yourself in order to start dominating land again. Anti nuke satelites would be a nice thing too imo, just for the nukes on that same planet, either that or some sort of global missile shield. My t2 swarms have been nuked a couple of times, with no way to prevent that. It's just hard to make nukes work, since it's no exception to see 12 nukes flying towards your commander at a certain point in the game. Astreus is nice, but like mentioned elsewhere, there should be bigger orbital transport ships, build in spacedocks or by orbital fabbers, they should be (un)loaded by either delivery by astreus and paradrops, or by actually landing on the surface. Also, orbital needs to be fixed, if I send over 100 anchors, I do click only 1 point on the planet to send them too, what I don't want however is that they ALL go there, some sort of option to "land" in formation would be nice, you would cover a lot of ground. It's only little things, but they can make late game attacks and planet invading a lot easier. I don't mean to bitch about it being impossible to attack lategame. It are just measures to prevent stalemates. And seeing as the game is about interplanetary warfare, you should be able to do an invasion, not just spam orbital units and nuke him, untill you can build a teleporter and walk everything over.
I agree quite a bit with this round up. Now that the tournament is over, I'm expecting (and hoping for) a balance patch. I CANNOT wait.
