Some thoughts on balance

Modification:

Addition to the things we can all agree on:

The Commander's Regen is OP (he can run a whole factory by himself, and eight with sufficient metal).

Beyond that.

I actually said the same as you did, Clopse, when it was first brought to my attention. But, after playing a few rounds on an 800r Earth planet with it nerfed, I changed my mind. It isn't something you think about anymore - it's just *let me put a radar in my base.* Nerfing it also led to more interesting intelligence play. Since intel became a scarce resource, people started to use that to their advantage. It was interesting, to say the least.

Expanding is easy? Since when? You build ONE ENGINEER. ONE. Sometimes three. Building for expansions gets you killed because your enemy can have 100 dox on your doorstep at minute 3. Building up to expand your production never happens anymore - it's all just *protect engineer till doomsday.*

Dox are OP, because they fit into way too many roles throughout the game. Early-game? Use Dox or go pure tanks. Early-mid? Use Dox. Mid game, get T2? Use dox with Slammers behind. Mid-late, orbital Invasions? Use Dox and maybe booms. Late game? You COULD use dox. If you knew what you were doing.

I've been beaten in the orbital game by people using pure dox from the beginning to the end. I've beaten others using dox to invade. It's not Strong, it is DEFINITELY OP. There should be no doubt.

Mind you, tanks have a chance in a 1v1. But in larger games, going tanks will get you killed. Dox are just too versatile. Can we move on to something more constructive, like how to nerf them into usefulness?

This is better

There is a reason why the meta is still changing. People don't know what's the best yet. When I started back a few weeks ago, it was just pure dox spam. Now the meta ( in my opinion) is 2 bot factories/ Air / bot factory and then all vehicles. And this is map dependant, sometimes I will go all veh, but never all bot. So yeah in the right hands they can be real good, but if your not too good and play against veh and air player you will lose.

A simple fix is remove bot aa, bring back the aa bot and give it a speed increase to 15, then bots can still raid, weak against air and if they take air support with them they lose some speed.

Doesn't wanting to speed expansion and nerf commanders income contradict one another?

In TA you wouldn't build too many fabbers. Similar to PA when I think about it so I don't see an issue. You build less in 1v1 because you are supposed to be super efficient to try give yourself an early edge to snowball late game. Large expansions are a bad idea unless in a large planet with known spawns. Going a 5+ fabber start not knowing where the opponent is is wreckless no matter how cheap energy is or big the planet is.

As soon as the new PTE goes stable, I officially won't care anymore. All balance arguments will be able to be solved with easily populated modded servers. That is assuming of course there is still a population of randoms playing this game...

just an addition ...

I dislike the kinda. Energy is extremely too expensive imho
Also "Regen" is a missleading word. I first thought you meant the hp regeneration, which makes no sense

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Expanding is easy? Errr what?
Also saying energy is not a problem is heresy . If energy were not a problem reclaiming would be an important part of the game and people would try to take all mex they can get asap.
Or do you mean if energy is fixed expansion will be limited by metal? Cause that is fine actually. Metal is different to energy in how it is gathered in quite an important way

The meta is (currently) Two bot fac, one mex, one energy, 6 bot fac, then alternating between one energy and bot fac for the rest of the game. One engi is built from the first two factories to grab metal, and you build another to replace him if he is killed.

I know there are variations, but the majority of players from competent to king use dox almost exclusively in their builds, from FFAs to Team games. (my experience from playing randoms and stuff)


Also, we need a build-up phase to every game. Currently, there is no such phase. It's just attack attack attack. No establishment. No expansion. It's friggin' ridiculous, honestly. Especially 1v1s.

Expanding and attacking don't have to exclude each other imho. Sure your attack won't be as powerful, but that just means you need to be clever about where to attack.

Funny you should say that, I've been playing around with a few builds and have had success against similarly skilled opponents without building a single dox or by going dox, early air and then mixing the rest up with air/vehicles. There is more to the current balance than choosing between 1-3 fabbers and spamming dox!

On topic and ignoring 3/4 of this threads ridiculous bitchin, some balance changes I'd like to see:

1. Increase energy production of pgens
2. Nerf dox vision
3. Make naval a lot faster and fix some of the silly things like the scout boat having less vision than the rest
4. Buff Vanguards damage and health significantly but reduce their speed to less than a commander. Make them absolutely brutal at smashing through bases but not really able to snipe a commander unless you fail to pay attention.
5. Bring back levellers aoe
6. Nerf Slammers torpedos
7. Revamp T2 Air, its crap and boring right now.
8. Buff grenadiers

There are probably another 20 things I could think of but in general balance changes should end up with the whole unit roster actually serving a purpose.

Basic land:

A couple of suggestions for making dox a bit less ridiculous:
- the commonly stated removal of aa, we don't need a new aa bot people can just mix up numbers and have a few fighters that can support where needed to thin the dox spam.
- shorter weapon range
- fire only in direction of movement

This would create an excellent high speed, long vision range raider that would be shredded by defensive forces. It would have to get in close to do any damage doing so at the risk that any defensive forces not destroyed would be able to fire upon them unopposed during retreat. Tanks would have a better chance defending although a much larger group of dox would still be able to rush them. Infernos would become useful again if dox had to get in close and have to chose to either stand and take losses or turn and run while taking fire from other units.

-buff grenadiers range and splash radius (actual t1 artillery)

Long range units:

Increase artillery splash radius - artillery is big shells lobbed with rough accuracy to take out large blobs, currently doesn't really feel like it. Blobs of ~10 tanks can rush a pelter and win atm.
Tac missiles mostly ok, though t2 bomber should be able to fire in any direction losing 10 to 1 fighter without getting a shot off because they have to turn to fire makes them mostly useless.

Naval:

- Double health of pretty much everything
- 1.5-2x speed increase
- increase range of tac missile ship (why is it shorter range than the battleship?), increase damage
- scrap scout boat, don't really need a scout of every units type and naval players will almost always have air anyway

will add more later

what about nerf dox range, and buff grenadiers speed?

Hey would like to sell my idea of buffing the commander. Increase HP, Double ROF but keep DPS by halving damage. More details here: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/changes-or-the-commander.65625/

For changing the Dox:

I like dropping the Dox's AA, then nerfing the vision down to that of Tanks. It keeps Dox relevant, but makes them less effective than tanks, while also leaving bombers a place to completely mow them down without prejudice.

Grenadiers need a purpose. Right now they just suck, tbh.

I'd make them real anti turret units. So they would outrange turrets. Just like artillery is supposed to :S
Also I want a comeback of the stinger in what ever form. Just use the existing unit for something. Dead game files are sad.

I might try that out in the CUB on Sunday. Right now they are just a bot unit that is spammier than tanks, but does essentially the same thing.

Yeah you need to play more, or at least people that are not in the realm. Elodea (the king I'm assuming you are referencing) built air in kotp which as he said himself was the difference. So your mistaken there. That and the fact he hasn't played enough to know the mets recently. The thing is elodea has reached the PAG limit: It's where unit knowledge, building and decision making means more than the consistency of your army. Of course he will win most of his games spamming doc but when he come up against equal skilled players playing the meta he will have trouble.

I wouldn't be so confident saying that is the meta - it's actually a pretty bad build the one you described. It's needlessly risky since you'll fall over and die to anyone who goes just 1 air factory, and you'll die against 3 fabber build if you can't win in first few minutes which is possible if you ever played foerest. He is one of the best, if not the best at 3 fabber dox.

You are pretty wrong about 1 fabber dox spam. It should always transition into a 3 fabber build as soon as possible usually around 5th factory so that your commander is not building pgens at all. 1 fabber build is not for whole game yolo, it is for trying to get early game advantage or atleast push 3 fabber build opponent down to your macro level, then allowing you to macro behind it. You will also die pretty easily to defensive tank builds because of your lack of macro. If you want to yolo, you should be doing 8 bot factory rush instead.

Let me teach you the origin of 1 fabber build. Once upon a time it was 3 fabber dox vs air tanks and 3 fabber dox seemed to be getting more popular. So what happened was the popularization of 1 fabber dox which had the tradeoff of being more effective against the 3 fabber dox, but less against the tank build.

Also I think you and other people generally overly discount 3 fabber builds. They are very strong if you can defend because of the sheer macro you get over 1 fabber build (I think it is something like 25% stronger macro). Defending against 1 fabber build is not too hard with longer distance spawns even though dox speed should be reduced somewhat to make that easier.

I only predominantly do 1 fabber builds because i know people are probably not as good as me, which to clarify is not meaning to brag but just how i try to think about managing risk. If i think someone is as good or better than me like custard etc. I will take that into account instead. Anyway, i say that because it means it's likely the lesser skilled player will not be able to defend properly against 1 fabber build, which results in less risky win than otherwise. If i were instead to play against players who could solidly defend 1 fabber builds, then i would more likely go with 3 fabber build.

You see the same metagame development in high skill sc2. If you just asked any bronze leaguer, they would say maybe 'oh cannon rush op', but it really isn't because it's a skill issue. If you havn't played people like neptunio, burntcustard, clopse etc. you shouldn't so quickly say dox op.

Now, as for the spamming dox 'exclusively', lets talk about how that is wrong and why tank and air is also dangerous and used fairly often. If you think spamming dox exclusively is top strategy, then that is pretty nooby.

For tanks the 'meta' is map dependant, which you would easily see just from playing PTE ladder. Duellist system is pretty good for tanks and i'll usually do that there because it tends to be less risky somewhat. Alot of other people I saw did this too. The spawn distances are low, and more importantly the metal expansions are well clustered and generally inbetween your bases.

Air is also very important. I don't know how you didn't learn this over the past months where air has been quite strong. The person who just spams dox will just die pretty easily to person who spams dox and air- dox aa is not a big issue.

In regard to the issue of expansion, I'll agree with reasonable people that macro play is harder to defend than it should be, and t2 is harder to get than it should be. You need to stop being so hyperbole about 'no expansion' though, that's untrue and doesn't help the discussion. If two players 1 fabber build each other, then their units will cancel out and they will be able to both expand. If you don't defend properly, that is player error, not game error. What will usually happen is one player gets better macro advantage by being more greedy slightly earlier and wins that way, which is by definition expansion leading to win.

Basically, what i find is players will not defend properly and then blame it all on an expansion problem within the game. And because there is in fact a very real expansion problem in PA, it is not helpful to that cause to muddy it with experiences that resulted instead from player error. It isn't simply nerf dox, nerf commander energy, give more pgen energy, and expansion will be solved, because you didn't identify properly the underlying source of the problem.

I don't think the Dox' vision range is the issue. Bots don't offer a scouting unit so making the dox a raider/scout makes sense. The issue is creating differentiation between the grenadier, dox and tank.

With weaker/limited weapons the dox would be a good raider early on, transitioning to a supporting role by providing vision for grenadiers and tanks once attacks on main bases or hardened expansions begin.

The current aa could even be kept in that scenario so that they can still raid against air fabbers. At the moment it's only useful in large numbers due to it's inaccuracy against moving targets (bombers can often circle 6-8 dox with impunity, it's only with 20+ dox that their aa reliably kills things). If we can tweak the stats of the dox so that it's a true raider, the meta will change and large blobs will stop being the norm.

I don't think bringing back the stinger is necessary. A good balance (imo) should promote the use of multiple unit types not just pick a type and ignore the others. I imagine a few possible strategic options with the current unit types that could make balanced play.

Harassment - mostly bots, dox to take out most things, moving to grenadiers if fabbers are protected. Air to protect raiding units. Maybe lower bot fabber build speed so that the harasser risks his/her own eco for the chance to cripple his/heropponents.

Heavy offense - mostly vehicle, blobs of infernos, tanks and aa, with some grenadiers mixed in for artillery. Efficient vehicle fabbers and factories to support build up as transport time to new eco is slow, but a few vehicles around new eco spots is enough to defend them well.

Expansionist - mostly air, quickly move to cover all available resources, fighters and bombers powerful but costly to protect against raiders but not a good offensive force, vehicles used in established bases to defend. Will have better eco but air costs should be raised to reflect this.

Super heavy - naval option, slow build up but nigh unstoppable once critical mass reached very high dps for metal cost, high hp, long ranged.

Advanced build options can reflect this further -

Bots - fast, high damage to single targets (tac missiles). This is currently pretty much the case. Can't take on a similar sized vehicle force head to head, but can wreck an enemy base before being destroyed by the defensive forces.

Air - fast to expand still. T2 air units should be fast, powerful and more expensive than land. Speed up and maybe give gunship flak. air player will have small force compared to others, but this is offset by unit strength and limited number of defences that can attack it.

Vehicles - slow but devastating. In order to destroy HVTs you have to kill everything else between you and it. Artillery exists but does middling high splash damage, better suited to crowd control than building destruction.

Ships - pretty much what they do now, but the tac missile needs to be stronger and much longer ranged (it's a bit of a joke that it's shorter ranged than the battle ship and does less damage than a leveller). Also slightly faster and higher hp.

As elodea said the balance is not so broken that dox and dox alone are the only way to play. But there are relatively few metas to chose between and on certain maps there is a single clearly superior meta.

Dox don't need a scouting unit. There already is a land scouting unit. Dox are meant for killing unprotected metal. You scout with other units, then raid them.

The progression of the game shouldn't be decided by set metas - we should make a balance with units that don't force particular playstyles. It should leave your options open. Forcing people down 3-4 different lanes of play, like bots, vehicles, or air, or whatever, doesn't make sense in a game where you have hundreds of units doing tens of different jobs. The idea of a *bots only* or *vehicle only* strat needs to fall by the wayside. It doesn't make sense in the long run.

I feel like these balance discussion often miss the variables that affect the balance.

On a small 1v1 planet, sure the meta is fairly locked.
But this doesn't take into account the difference that planet/solar system size, FFA, team armies etc make.

It's most important in a FFA not to trigger multiple fronts by aggravating your neighbors too early.

In some cases, early orbital and capturing a moon is much more important.

My humble suggestion is that if the meta seems heavily weighed one way or another, try a different style of game or a different system.

Having said that, Dox are a fraction too cheap.
Just a fraction.