New Balance Mod

#returnofthesniper

gil-e? .. is in ..

it depends on what kind of game players like to play .. i am personaly tired of how supcom did things with unitbalance and unittype distribution the same goes for TA in which many roles have been duplicated both between factorytypes and tiers ...

with a few tweaks and unitadditions (mostly for logistics) that would improve gameplayfluidity PA feels imo like the most flexible aproach in balance and unittypedistribution for these types of games

But it's broken all to hell.

so are hornets, grenadiers and bluehawks .. basicaly any longrangeunit that runs into the enemy ignoring maxrange

I have been rather busy with work so I have not been able to sink large amounts of hours into the maths of starting eco yet. I'm am just starting to work it all out to see how any changes I make will affect the overall game play.

Can I get any complaints/improvements for the starting eco? I am just one human so I can't possibly think of everything. Right now I am trying to make sure I do not create any exploits or abuses like the dox rushes of old. Any suggestions will just help make sure I cover all grounds.

one concern i have with the current balance(not entirely sure if its even a balance issue really) is that people keep on turtleing AT me, what i mean is, they get a ton of fabbers, generally bot for some reason, and try to turret creep everywhere.
now i dont know why people started doing this, they have virtually no mobility or opportunity to expand, making them easy, but annoying to deal with.

scanning through this thread I see some misconception about unit health leading to longer games. It doesn't. What ends up happening is armies have a tendency to grow a bit bigger before they wipe each other out. And not even by that much.

As it stands now, as two armies come together, the front lines start blasting at each other, they melt, and the new front lines repeat. With high health, a larger number of units come into range before things start melting.

In effect, when two armies are actually committed, it adds a few seconds to the battle.

If they are not committed however, and one runs, a much larger amount live to fight again, hence larger army sizes. This last until those larger armies clash, usually within minutes.

Has little real effect on sim speed or length of game. I did this in Anti-popcorn mod and it worked well in vanilla (haven't had the time to update with Titans yet)

would love to see the return of early game, 2x factory first anyone?

Personally I feel the early game power is to fragile and late game not fragile enough

make basic pgen stronger, make solar arrays paper and give all advanced power (including solar arrays) a death explosion.

veto on all of those :/

As far as early game eco I am doing math currently to work out exactly the pacing I want. Changing early eco has rippling effects so I am not going to do it willy nilly.

I hate death explosion for buildings so I will not be adding that to anything. I am working on how to feasibly remove it from jigs while also finding a good solution for jig stacking. Not entirely sure how to go about that so the jig death weapon will stay for now.

I am going to nerf jigs significantly. Reduce metal production a little, remove energy production and remove storage from it. I feel like having energy production on jigs makes solar arrays redundant. Also going to slightly buff solar arrays. This adds a bit more depth to gas giants. It also links it with ground as storage must be on ground therefore adding a link between orbital eco and ground eco. Jigs eco is insane already and can snowball out of control. I personally like orbital so I would like to see it become a bit more dynamic.

I am not planning to touch icarus cause those things are pretty useless and I don't really know how to salvage them. Using them for combat is unattractive and using them for energy is risky.

Yeah double factory openings were fun. I want to make it so that it feels like the average player is trying to chase that perfect efficentency while the top level players have room to be very flexible and can entertain themselves with lots of types of opening builds. Finding a good sweet spot is going to be tough thou and take time.

I had already worked a little with power in the early. Not sure how to work with power late game to make it more engaging but i'll think it over.

@slocke Just wanted to put a suggestion regarding jigs out there, maybe make them consume energy in order to produce metal? This would encourage players to get a good amount of energy going for jigs unlike normal mexs which don't require anything. The Jigs would still be useful but if you don't have that energy eco going either on planet or through solar arrays then you wouldn't be able to rely on them to carry you on their own. If you want to remove explosions then this may help as well since the energy limitation is there you wouldnt want to go massive massive jig spam due to the risk of you eco crashing due to lack of energy. (Not sure if I worded this well).

As for the solar aircraft make them fully capable of taking on units but without doing any aoe, if you want aoe you go use bombers (Maybe remove ability to attack both ground and air? or just give them really poor recharge time but reasonably high single target dps).

Maybe make them like a t1 version of the angel? I'm not sure exactly how you would do this but I think it would be interesting if you made it work.
Or you could buff their energy production so they are useful in the short term if you experience a sudden energy stall.

@nicb1 I do like this suggestion regarding jigs. I feel it might be too drastic of a change for the first iteration. Definitely consider it for further patches. I am wary of making too drastic changes in the first version as I want to keep it close to vanilla in the beginning and then go further and further away once the first changes have good reception and are solid. The first patch will be intended to be the first step in the right direction. I will bear your suggestion in mind cause it is a good one worth considering.

@ljfed @nicb1 Both good ideas for the icarus. I still don't think I will bother with it in the first version because it will be too much effort factoring those changes in with the bigger picture stuff. I'll remember those ideas thou for when I want to actually move forward with boosting that unit into becoming a viable unit. My idea of making that unit viable depends on it having invulnerable from anti-air when it is landed. That way it can be a mobile energy production field. I don't know realistically how many situations that would be actually used. Turning it into a semi air combat/utility fabber might be the better direction to take it in thou. Making it a heavier combat unit doesn't really appeal to me.

Right now I am focusing on the bread and butter of the game. So i'll work over starting eco, t2 eco and the primary t1 units. After those are heading in the right direction I think I will work on making t2 and naval. Mostly cause trying to do everything at once is sooo much work. Loving all the feedback thus far thou. Thanks.

Increase Icarus health to something like 350. Icarus becomes a viable anti ground aircraft with mediocre DPS but armour that gives it staying power.

Is it possible to enforce a larger no build zone around a jig, that way there is no death weapon and the quantity which can be placed on the gas giant is reduced.

Lets not forget we need the ability to nuke orbital