Pounders, Levellers and vehicles in general.

Why not? Tanks already have slow turret traverse and slow turning speeds.
A bot can turn its torso almost instantly and is way more maneuverable.

A tank with a rapid fire high damage weapon seems a little silly.

I love high damage sniper units, I love rapid-fire Gatling gun units, and I love tank cannons.

I don't like rapid fire snipers.

Didn't say it had to be rapid fire. Just higher damage-per-shot and higher damage-per-second.

e.g.
100 damage per shot every 5 seconds > 10 damage per shot every second

Tanks could shoot slow, hit harder and meet my criteria.

Ok so thats more of a burst tank then a DPS tank.

If it net's out to better DPS, then so be it.

As for the leveller, I like the idea it has now where it has better range and HP but less damage and fire rate then the T1 tank. It could possibly use a better damage per shot, but I do like the idea of a slow pounding tank that slowly rolls out and blast explod'y shots, just like the advanced tanks from TA or even the old CNC tanks who fire orange orbs of death.

So I don't know what context to take Scathis' comment about balancing by halving and doubling, but I'm not sure if people realize that the (formerly) almighty Leveler has been nerfed by some unclear factor down to 25 dps from what was probably something like 500dps. That's a 2000% reduction... That's like taking a .50BMG and replacing it with a .45 cal, comparing muzzle energies.

You'd imagine that just reducing the Leveler's HP a bit and halving the DPS once ought to have been sufficient.

The Slammer T2 bot now has 150 dps. It can dish out damage six times faster than a Leveler. The 20 extra weapon range (note also the Slammer has slightly smaller vision radius as well, 85 compared to Leveler's 100) makes next to no difference because you'd need ten Levelers firing upon a Slammer for over a second before you can kill it, and by this time the Slammers have already made up the ground to get within range of your Levelers. The Levelers are now toast.

This is completely insane and makes Levelers utterly useless. I don't even understand why anyone would ever build a single vehicle factory in this patch. Yes, the discussion on Pounder/Ant vs Leveler and unit specialization is an interesting one, but my opinion is that there are far bigger balance issues than that one on the table now.

As far as I can tell the T1 bot factory's purpose in life after it is "superceded" by a T2 bot factory is to crank out Stinger AA bots. They are half a Missile Defense Tower each, but they get cranked out fast.


I guess they worked on bots for this patch and landed most of the new features on bots. But I'm just sort of puzzled by the unnecessary meganerf that just takes a whole lot of options off the table. All that being said, the Sheller is still a worthy unit to build out of the T2 Vehicle factory as it is a 300dps unit firing 1200 damage long range shells.


Source: http://nanodesu.info/padb

Maybe they want us to try the T2 bots a bit more?

I wasn't so concerned about Slammers.

First, I believe the stories about basic being bread and butter, and advanced being specialised. So I believe in the tales of armies consisting of very large numbers of T1 units with T2 units thrown in to achieve a specialised role.

Because of the range of Slammers, they perform fairly badly against an equal metal cost of Ants. (When Slammers cost 5 or so Ants).

I don't agree with the Leveller nerf, and think that it should have been the range that was reduced. Not range and dps.

I would have reduced just the dps, kept the burst, and made the leveller a tank-hunter.

Yes I've been re-discovering the effectiveness of ants. They are quite cost effective. Ants and Shellers get the job done proficiently. Sprinkling AA land units deters T1 bombing.

Bots are still preferred because of their speed though. Faster means they are slightly more capable of dodging defensive artillery and incoming fire. Mixing vehicles with bots in an army doesnt often work very well as they'll naturally separate from each other.

Wait WHAT?

It takes less than 20% for A to be unilaterally superior to B. Granted, figuring out how to find equivalence between two different things can be tricky enough.

It really should come as no surprise at this point that extreme overcompensation is standard development practice amongst game devs.

Just look at valve, they released an entire sequel dedicated completely to overcompensating for a minor balance point in the previous game.

Which game?