OMG Uber Cannon is so OP. Fix now!

I am out of ideas. This is broken imba. However the thread title is wrong. It should be "t1 transport fueled rushes are imba, fix them".

I got one win vs this. By spamming booms like a mad man. Like factory and only booms out of it till he attacks. It's not reasonable to do and still has a high risk of not winning even vs the rush.

Show me a counter to a 2:00 acu drop that has a full energy storage behind it and I'll believe otherwise. I can't think of anything that does cripple me in case my opponent is not doing the rush. And I cannot scout him by minute 2.

Good idea.

I think advanced transports fits with the design philosophy of "advanced is for specialized units." Air transports basically give all your mobile units a special flight ability. That's a really cool thing to have in the game, but it should be more of a special unit that is good for surprise attacks or uncommon situations. If it starts taking too long to get transports, nerf t2 air and make advanced factories cheaper.

Another thought: make transports vastly slower. I'm thinking Ant Pounder Titanium Insect speed.

Basically I think the point of transports should be to bypass terrain, particularly lava and water, instead of necessarily a speedy way to cross distances (which seems to negate the point of air fabricators).

The transport can be fast I think. But the dropping process should be much slower. So you can basically kill the transport, including anything in it, while it is dropping. The current "teleport to the ground" makes it very save to drop very close to enemy aa.

My solution to the Uber Cannon: From what I have heard, the cannon is supposed to be primarily for fending off early attacks rather than rushing the opponents yourself. So make it only able to do just that, by having it deal little or no damage to buildings. In what situation would you need to hit enemy buildings with your commander anyway? If this was the case, transporting your commander into the enemy base would accomplish nothing more than killing some of their units and lots of damage to your com, as any turrets in their base would deal extra damage while you can't destroy them, making the rush in their favor.

On another note, I really think the Uber Cannon should be able to target air units. With its enormous splash and damage, it may prevent those notorious bomber/gunship snipes. It seems kind of silly that when your com is alone it can wipe entire armies of advanced vehicles and bots but is almost defenseless against a few gunships, which encourages people to focus only on air units.

This is exactly what my post is about. It's also why I asked about trying the different strategies, different planets, etc. There are things you may not have even thought about or tried which is why I will not knee-jerk reaction change anything. This is the typical thing that happens with new, drastic balance changes. The first wave of 'OMG X is OP'... then someone learns to counter it and it's not as OP as they thought.

You are working under the premise that things like walls aren't needed, that a moon might be the only way to 1v1.
Please, try a desert planet, a water planet, build walls, try a bot rush, a tank rush. You need to check your premise again. Kinda funny since you have a quote about John Galt in your profile and the whole 'check your premises' thing is from Atlas Shrugged.

If you read my post I am not saying it's final or currently properly balanced. However, I am saying that I need way more data than you are providing me. There are a ton of moving parts and I need to see how it works on every planet and under every strategy. I simply can't rely on the opinions of two high level players in the first 24 hours of playing a drastic balance change to be my only source of balancing feedback. Especially when they have already convinced themselves of 'the one true way' to play.

So what you're saying is "put it all on YouTube"?

That does help.

What doesn't help is people making definite, public conclusions and they have yet to play the game. Not saying any of them are or are not in this thread. Just saying in happens.

I agree with you in general, but playing on another planet type isn't really a solution. That would effectively stop us from using certain planet types as our starting planet, which isn't entirely fun.

I'm fine with taking our time and trying out new strategies, but even if a solution is found there will be a big problem. Specifically, any time you create a hard counter for an early-game strategy you are limiting the options players have. If you know your opponent can send in a commander at 2 minutes, you must set up your starting build to either counter the attack or do it yourself. You don't know if your opponent is about to try it, so you will always have to be prepared to stop it. At that point, the game comes down to one of these;

• Commander drops on an unprepared base and wins
• Commander drops on a prepared base and loses
• Both players do a drop - Base trade
• One player defends and gets a slower start while the other builds like crazy and doesn't bother to defend against a commander drop
• Both players defend against the drop. You get a game with a really slow start.
• both players ignore the possibility of a drop and play a normal game.

Each player has only three options at the start, and only one possible outcome gives you a normal game. If players are choosing randomly, you have a probability of only 1 in 9 of getting a normal game (Two players, three possibilities. Each chooses one at random independent of the other).

There is some interesting game theory here, but actual gameplay just comes down to luck.

I've checked a few things that seem completely unreasonable to me. Some other of your suggestions are not within things I think are viable at all:

- Other planets: I have not yet played a desert planet. It might offer some cool things. But removing all other planet types from play is kinda of broken (Yes from a working defense on desert planets we might learn stuff that helps us fix this in general on other planets I know that, but I am trying to tell what I can do in the current game)

- Walls: too small, the commander can easily just walk around them. Making lines of them is taking away too much build power and time. We only have ~2:00 until doom arrives after all. Also you would need to spam walls without even having any knowledge of the attack before it happens, so you cripple yourself for "normal" games.

- Bot/tank rush: die to uber cannons. Even if not you can only have very few units at minute 2 anyway and you again would need a maphack or you risk to cripple yourself vs normal play.

My own ideas:

- Early t1 aa bots. Happen to be rather slow and are easily avoided using t1 air scouts and just dropping out of range.

- t1 bomb bots: have 10 hp, die to t1 air scouts. Only do 1k damage, which is not a lot. Making lots of them cripples for normal play. I got a victory vs the rush with a crazy boom bot spam though. But it was not stable (he failed to use air scouts to kill the booms and I ended up with like 500hp), I knew the rush was coming since it was planned for tests and it cripples me as well.

- No factory start: Instead of a factory I build storages. So something like mex pgen energystorage pgen mex pgen pgen energystorage pgen
The idea is to have the same kind of uber cannon power as he has and to not lose too much economy while doing so. In reality he can always get at least one of the storages and thus we have the same amount of energy to oc and just draw each other

... dunno what else to do

So I have played about 20 games. won 17 drew 2 and lost 1. We tried all kinds of units, biomes , map sizes and counters. Bear in mind these are hard hard counters that would put you behind in any normal game. (Normal meaning if you didnt build to defend against this threat).

We havnt tried air because we know it will work and which is also why this way is less likely to work on water planets as air labs at the minute are a lot cheaper to run.

Don't see much difference between desert and lava biomes at the minute. Little harder to build a safer base but the goal of killing the commander is still easily achievable.

I don't think you need to play this build to understand this is a little wrong. There is no bias whatsoever of me saying this. I love this game as much as the next person and want it to be as good as possible. This I believe is a step back and uncounterable in it's current state.

... dunno what else to do

You basically have to go for a fighter spam right away. There is still no guarantee that you can stop the attack and it sets you back so much that you will lose if the opponent does a normal build. It comes down to just getting lucky and picking the right build without knowing what the opponent does. That really seems like rock-paper-scissors build orders.

I think the reason they're fast is because the intended purpose is fleets of them ferrying stuff, and you need fast considering the risk of a fighter wave annihilating your entire army. That's why I think moving them to T2 without any other changes is the solution as it cuts out the core problem: transport rushes.

Where were you on page 3?!

I DEMAND FULL CREDIT!

so what is it you guys want? balance or fun only?
i would like possibly both ... the problem is you cant have neccesarily the first if you are not ready to sacrifice the later for the testphaseperiod we are in ....
i hate to say this but i mean you guys complain about transport comrushes or comrushes in general not being fun then how bout helping the devs with playing around on and with all sort of things to get as much input out of it as possible so we can make better
and eventualy quicker progress .... .... i would like too
but my darn gamerig broke a good while ago and sry if i come off as a d*ck

bit of theocrafting ... as you know ... me and broken comp
i also disagree with bringing the transport to advanced ....
in that case remove the t1 entirely and replace it with a more expencive multitransport version .... but even with that people would likely not be satisfied ... i mean come on guys we have friggin orbital at basic it cant be that we have planetary transportcapabilities early (even though currently for constructionunits only) and local only later ... this makes no sense ... at all .... it may help competitive play but it just feels totaly wrong in any other aspect of a logical tech tree as it will feel wrong to the casual player ... there must be another way ... if neccesary dont let the t1 transport allow the comm to be transported (which im rather against aswell) ...

The problem is that advanced is still thought of by a lot of people as being better than basic units. Advanced units don't need to be stronger, just specialized. If that gets balanced correctly then the advanced factories can even become a little cheaper.

I am not "complaining". I am stating what I tried, how it failed and why I think the current transport mechanics are not working out. I know we are in beta and all that and I accept that the game can not be perfect at the current time. I am merely trying to understand how it currently works out and what players can currently do to make it somehow work. However I failed at that for the most part. So either I missed something or there is no way to currently get around weird luck based early air play.

@Quitch: Most likely at work or maybe digging through the UI code of PA to fix PA Stats.

You guys are also missing the other side of this. Yes you may think it's OP in the way you're playing, but I also need data on how everything plays on different planets and different play styles.

Lets say, for the sake of argument, that this is an actual problem.
What if we make a fix that makes it so that certain aspects of transporters are completely unplayable on say a metal planet or a water planet. But we don't know it because you guys are so locked into your premise of playing the game one single way.

That playing other ways and gathering data is what I'm interested in. I need a holistic view of the entire game balance. I need to see every angle and then make a well educated, well researched change instead of doing a knee-jerk change that fixes one issue but causes 16 others.

Who stole my cheese?

I still think that, OPness aside, fast, cheap transports threaten the usefulness of air fabricators.

The advantage of air fabricators, up til now, has been that you can quickly fly them to where you want to build something. You paid more energy but you had a way to quickly project your build power.

With fast air transports, you can just move fabrication bots there and use them instead. So what's the use-case of air fabricators? Water construction, I guess?