New Balance Mod

It has been a while since I played PA seriously. One of the main things that has put me off playing has been the balance. I am contemplating starting a balance mod. Ideally I would not like it to be one that just gets lost in the sea of balance mods. I will be very open to the communities opinions and will be ideally making a balance mod that brings the most out of the game.

The direction I want to take the balance :
- Speed the early game up a little bit.
- Focus the balance around large conflicts.
- Be a lot more team game focused.

I would love to see the PA to be a fun lan-basher type of game. Quick out the gate and something that is enjoyable for anyone to pick up and play. PA is a game that shines in the late game. It is also a game about massing massive armies. I want to really try and pull out these strengths of the game.

I do not want to drastically change the game. Most changes will be tweaking numbers here and there to make the game feel nicer.

I have already seen a few threads in regards to the community based balance. The way I see it if a balance mod like this takes off then there are two options. 1) Uber can implement this balance and the mod becomes the testbed 2) the community moves to a balance mod.

I don't think I am alone when I say that the community has to take over balance changes. If not now, then how long till we do.

I am more than willing to listen everyone and try and balance the game so that it is enjoyable for everyone not just a small minority. Please list any and all concerns you have regarding the current balance. Also let me know what parts of the game are the most fun and what you would like to see strengthened.

Pazoki!

Galactic Annihilation is the only balance mod out there and there's not enough community for it, let alone it and a balance mod. You'd be better off helping with new GA development than working on a new balance mod that's going to not be played.

Stuart you know that I do not like your ideas when it comes to balancing. You seem to have an inclining to slow the game down and I do not want to go in that direction. Now granted I don't know the direction you have taken GA but I have a feeling that we will have conflicting ideas.

You have also edited and added units. This is not what I want to do. I simply want to tweak values. Not change the fundamental roles of the units but just strengthen their strengths and fix their weaknesses. Working off of GA will be too much effort to accomplish what I want to complete.

GA plays faster than vanilla as long as you keep your economy stable. :/ Your com builds faster, you tech earlier, your units are faster, it's faster.

You can't focus the game around large battles and make it interesting if you only have two anti-ground per factory and fewer that are useful.

Stuart I have no intention of working off of GA. Thank you for the offer thou.

Sounds interesting, Whilst I'm not fussed about PA's current balance I'm still interested on keeping an eye on what you come up with. Let me know if you go through with the idea.

Yeah I am greatly assuming a team burning would have significant input into this. It would be nice if it could be something for all the clans to base themselves around for use of Clan Wars and the sort. Possibly enough interest could generate a revival of team burning in PA. I know Elite still has a slight interest in PA. I honestly can't get back into with the balance the way it is.

I'm not sure how many people in the community agree with you in order to get this off the ground. In any case I don't think that what you're speaking about is strictly a balance thing:

- Speed the early game up a little bit.
In practice what would you like to see change here? I would say that compared to some that early game is pretty fast already. Increasing the com's base metal and energy would probably change this.

- Focus the balance around large conflicts.
This is the main issue imo, trying to force "large" conflicts probably means an increase in HP and a change to defensive strategies. Which isn't a balance change it's a change in the way the game is played from start to finish and would make some units obsolete.

- Be a lot more team game focused.
Again, do you have any input on what changes you would like to see? PA is actually very good in team situations imo, resource sharing even in non shared armies and shared armies are a really good way to face off in teams.

I'm not saying that what you want is wrong, it may be an interesting change but I'm just not sure that this is a change that the community can get behind.

I think there are balance changes needed to make some more units viable.

Can you give some examples of gameplay situations which made you think something needed to change. For instance you thought early game was too slow because x happened or you think you should be able to reach y sooner.

I just get a feeling.
Even if the community can take over the balance adjustment,
there will still be many players who dislike the balance.
Many players want the game to be what they imagine,
but they may be still unfamiliar with the game.
Moreover, even the high ranked players have different opinion to the same thing.
The arguments of air spam, naval battle, Zeus, asteroid and Halley are still no final conclusion.

Thus, my question is who can have the right to adjust the balance?
Will the community makes the balance even worse and drives more players leave?

if i might throw some ideas in

buff commander health or put in some regen (doublenuke should still be sufficient enough for snipe so maybe to 17500?) ... or both
fix/tweak longrangeunits ... THAT would change a great deal in overall unittypeuse ..
tweak ares vs holkins
buff icarus health?
tweak typhoon attackrange?
tweak airspeed?
fix unitpushing

regarding your points
gamespeed
large conflicts
and teamplay ...
i honestly don´t see an overall issue to any of that ..
while it depends on the map i feel battles escalate to larger battles fairly quickly ..

teamplay? may need unit and resource sharing outside of fullshare teambattles .. or autoshare resources on overproduction .. but that would be it imo ..

Because the new thread appears on the top of the forums.
While replying an old thread only appears behind a long long thread.
And many readers don't like to read every page,
so no one can see it.

The other thread was more of an open ended discussion regarding the future of balancing in PA. This thread is more focused on one of the points of that thread that is what if we went ahead and did it ourselves.

Well anyone can balance. There are already mod that change the balance. To become the 'official' unofficial balancer would stem entirely from support from the community. It will only be a problem if that balance is forced upon the community. There really is no downside from someone trying. If a balance mod starts gaining traction then you will be presented with issues like fracturing the community and/or conflicting with Uber over balance. Lets see if a balance mod can gain enough traction before worrying about that.

Strictly speaking I do not need any support to attempt to rebalance the game. If it is good I am sure it will gain traction, if its **** then it can just sit in a shame bin in the modding section I'll be honest ideally I would like to rediscover that spark that made me love PA.

With my new found love of excl spreadsheets I am currently compiling all the data I can get my hands on. Any changes I will be looking to make are still too broad. That is why is said things like "Focus the balance around large conflicts" . It is still too early to know which levers to pull to get the feel I want. I have a lot of data to go through. The process I want to take will be more along the lines of starting with broad issues and narrowing it down to what are the causes of these issues.

I agree with you with that not all units are viable. It would be nice to split units into primary, secondary and situational. Rather than trying to make every unit a bread and butter unit.

One of my biggest grips is with anti-air. The balance between air and anti-air will one thing I will definitely working on improving. Don't bother asking what I am going to do yet cause still a long way off any good answer on that.

I want to raise the starting eco ever so slightly. That will be something that will probably be trial and error because I do understand the reasons why it was lowered in the first place. The eco overall I am fine with. I don't think I will mess around with it much. I did want to work over jigs. Remove the energy production from them. I feel as thou jigs having energy production invalidates Solar Arrays. Like everything it will need to be play tested.

I hope I don't get much hate for this but I also wanted to raise dox speed back up to 20. Hahah I just liked dox when they went that little bit faster. Dox balancing is touchy thou cause they can easily become insanely OP. Considered raising the tanks range. No real reason just something possibly will try. I will also be looking at changing vision radius as a possibility.

I still need to finish compiling all of the data and making sure it is correct before deciding how I want to play with the numbers. The ideas that have been posted already have given me good starting points thou. Just a fore note some of my ideas may lean towards the crazy side but at the end of the day I will be aiming to make sure the game is fun and fair.

You want to fix the eco by adjusting commander storage, not production. I don't want to see a commander that wastes eco or brakes even when building.

If you want large battles, you need to increase HP values across the board so that units don't instantly obliterate each other.

I do not like the idea of the commander producing less then he can spend. With storage I like the idea of building early storage. Again that is something that will be trail an error as theory might look good but in game it might not be that great. A lot of play testing will be required.

This game is about zerging. Raising the HP across the board will only slow down sim speed in the late game. I'll trying to find a good balance so that big scale battles happen without completely wrecking the sim speed.

Sim speed tanks because you play on multiplanet borefests, not because there are too many units firing too much.

You're going to be building early eco no matter what. Consolidating production in the commander makes it harder to raid. When the commander's early eco boost is in storage rather than in production, raiding becomes more effective and the early game is faster.

I'd also advise doubling commander consumption so that the early game goes a bit faster.

Raise the health of a single unit, even by just 1, will have a huge impact. You must consider this as a typical game will have armies of hundreds and even thousands of said unit. Walls on the other hand need a hp increase thou.

Once I math the commanders early eco I will give a better answer but till then I can't comment. Raise buildrate is something worth considering, thank you.

I don't know that there are any cases in the game where raising the health of a unit by a single point will have any impact. Maybe there are areas where something might take a single more dox volley? Tanks do 84 damage per shot, so generally an increase of one will result in the slightest bit less overkill.

What is accomplished by giving walls an HP increase? What is accomplished by making walls more useful? Why does this help the game?

If you can't explain why a change will help how the game plays, then the change shouldn't be made. I'm interested in the justification for increasing wall HP.

I personally like the idea of a balance tweaks mod that doesn't add units.

Sounds a bit like BA from spring (admittedly that does add a few units, but these were very careful additions added over years and the bulk of the unit set remains unchanged from TA).

As for the comments about wrong direction or not, I'd rather see some proposed numbers first I think only then can we realistically critique the direction. Also regarding 'who has the right' well this is a mod so it's fair game. The community manger to work with the BA devs to get to something which is imo very highly polished these days (from a balance view point), for that to happen here someone needs to try first imo mod should be named 'community balance tweaks' or something to get across this is essentially vanilla.

@stuart98 I personally like what you've been doing with GA. I think it's rather a big jump to get into from vanilla though... I think a more subtle approach that occasionally adds one extra unit now and then would be an easier way to keep the community on-board. Having said that, I guess zero-k proves the sweeping changes approach can work...

Pretty much what I am aiming for. The first iterations will more than likely not be perfect but that is just the case for most things. Once I have something substantial I'll be posting and then get as much feedback as possible. It pretty much will be the community balance so getting input from the community is important. I am going to open to feedback and try to give reasoning behind changes or reasons why I don't feel certain suggestions shouldn't be implemented.

Hey Pazoki, I have some modding scripts that let you generate a mod based on just changing parts of the base game unit numbers. It could help with rapid prototyping. I.e. you can tell it to patch all mobile units to have 1 more hp (with just two lines of json). Or you can make all units that are mobile and air, half the speed (that would be three lines of json).