The size of an army is too correlated with destruction power.

This game has massive differences in the sizes between armies. In the beginning of the game, a couple of seconds can mean your army is double that of the enemy. This makes the 'balance' of the fighting very fragile. Most players get wiped out early. If two players survive, the other tends to be far more powerful and win fast. (assuming everyone starts on the same planet here)

I find this is mostly a problem early on. When you get to space there is so much going on that economy is not as important anymore.

I would be happy with a single change....

SHEILDSSSS

No, walls should get a temporary energy shield that deflects most damage for a couple of seconds. Lets say 95% of damage for 10 seconds. Walls will be renamed 'energy shield' because that sounds cool.
It has two effects:
*Walls are useful against both small and big armies. This is impossible to achieve using a pure health walls unless you have walls of different tiers, but who wants to use time to replace some stupid walls with better ones when you have so many and have already too much to do.
*Walls are better at slowing down enemy armies so that you can send your units to aid the static defences, since apparently static defences are not supposed to stop entire armies all by themselves.
*The enemy cant march through your base like there was nothing there like currently
*The time the shield is on is easily adjustable, which makes balancing easier.
*Makes energy even more important of a resource since walls become useless against big armies if the shield does not work (and the enemy will just march through)


Other changes would be nice as well such as:
-Tanks would slow down to shoot. Maybe not stop, but slow down. This would make bots more distinct too since they wouldnt stop.

Essentially what id want is that defencive battles were actually battles, and not just the enemy walking to your commander and destroying the entire base because your tanks were located 15 meters from the defence line.

This would mean that you can defend against any size of an army, as long as the army doesnt get through. Currently you can only really defend if the attacker has a smaller army or roughly the same size as your own.

What.

You.

See.

Is.

What.

You.

Get.

If you see a big army, you know you're going to get lots of hurt.

The problem you identified is the economy. The symptom is the runaway differences in army size.

Be a good doctor and stop treating the symptoms. Treat the problem. Change the economy.

He's kind of right. Even though his analysis of the problem and the solutions are completely flawed. A minor difference in the size of armies is perfectly reasonable, however the actual performance does not scale in a linear fashion.

The main issue is, that army power scales in square with the unit numbers for quite a while! Overall damage dealt while confronted with a constant source of counter damage is calculated by the Gauß sum over individual unit lifetime and damage dealt per unit which equals to quadratic strength with a constant factor.

Usually, army strength should only scale in square until friendly fire / range limitations enforce a natural border at which effective strength only scales linear in number since additional units will only prolong durability, but will be unable to increase damage output any further.

Unfortunately, with the current economy balance, you will never be able reach that point in time. Eventually you do, but at that point encounters only last a few seconds due to the extreme damage output.

Have a look at the Dox balance in the realm balance mod. They decreased range, damage and price (later one in relation to collision size!) enough, to ensure that you can easily reach the point where the damage output is actually limited by the weapons range due to units in the back line being unable to fire yet.


The quotient of weapon range by collision size is the most important key number when dealing with deathball effects!

Second key number is the delay between the first unit being in range of the defender and attacking units reaching damage peak. Latter one is reached when the front units are on direct touch with the target and the outmost line of units is barely in weapon range.

Infernos are actually pretty well balanced in these terms. They have a very short range and a relatively large collision size so the peak damage is already reached at 2-3 rows of units. They also have a rather large delay when confronting units with superior range.

Stock Ants are terrible. Their range is so much higher than collision size, so you can stack them in very large numbers before diminishing return effects kick in.

Stock Dox's are completely broken, maybe even more than Ants. Not only do they have a large range in comparison to weapon size, but ALSO a very short delay until peak performance is reached. With sufficient economy, Dox is completely unbalanced, even though it's basically locked away behind economical barriers currently.

can people just please quit trying to anvil in shields this way? it's getting tiresome.

what you describe is a problem. A problem has many solutions. By proposing just one solution, you're obfuscating the core of the problem. you change it from "death blobs are a problem" to "the lack of shields is a problem" which is just more crap to wade through for Uber before they can make a sensible comment.

Would be a lot easier if people would just use math to analyse the characteristics of the observed problems. Instead of just throwing "features" at it in the hope of somehow creating a "balance" by chance.

i'm sorry man but no, that's not even the same ballpark as what i'm talking about.

this is kind of a rule of engineering (engineer talking here) but also applies to other things. The basis is that when people ask for a solution, they're hiding (usually subconsciously) the actual problem. This is why we ask "why do you want that". Then, after several rounds of back-and-forth do you discover the actual problem, rather than what the person thought was the problem. like the recent shield thread, i didn't figure out the real crux of the problem until we were 10 pages in. (that the OP wanted richer tactics) and this happens quite a lot. People ask for solutions but they're frequently barely describing the problem.

In this case, the person asks for shields. But he (and most pro-shielders) don't want shields. The last thread i saw was really asking for a more diverse tactical and strategic gameplay (which is usually what Shields threads are about). This thread is asking for a solution to deathballs. it's not asking for shields. the OP just thinks it's a necessary solution when clearly, it's better to solve the problem than to cure the symptoms.

the biggest pitfall is jumping headfirst into this, not asking if it's really a problem to begin with and whether this is the problem at all. For one, a major combat balance patch has just been announced making this soon-to-be obsolete. furthermore, deathballs have kind of been around since Alpha and it's kind of part of the premise (huge armies). The next phase is whether the premise waters it down too much, which is really asking whether there's enough diversity. which brings us to tactics and their variety.

Then we can talk about whether we really have enough tactics. The problem is however that the community largely comes up with these tactics and they take time to form. which is why Uber usually lets things sink in a while (e.g. the combat fabber's OPness) to see if it's not just faulty tactics by us.

Uber has a massive combat balance coming real soon.

Let's wait for Uber to actually make an attempt at balancing combat.

This is why I want effective base defences, along with effective (But rather slow) siege.

Helps to have a home ground advantage.

Actually, huge armies and deathballs are not the same, on the contrary. If an army gets actually massive (in terms of space consumption), it's far less likely to show deathball behavior.

The deathball issue occurs as soon as the army isn't spread out far enough any more. And that actually got worse since Alpha since units cost more and pack more DPS (so less are built), but range was kept the same.

Great for saving resources on the server, not so good for the actual gameplay.

The Damage/second/m² is already quite good compared to other games. The unit formation feature lowers that number and it's a good thing. We must find the balance between too few and too much units shooting at the same time.

You should try out The Realm's balance mod.

It's pretty awesome and does a good job accomplishing that.

I'll defiantly have to give it a go some time.

This game isn't about teeny tiny unit ninja tactics...
There is no four-man infiltration and sabotage team... Just.... Ugh....

Yes, what @Geers said. This isn't starcraft where you can use a Ghost to take out an army by being smart with it. This is all about MASSIF' ARMIES OF DEATH. @Devak was also right, the strategies and tactics will get better with balance.

Patience young Padawan.

unit variety is my second opinion. If you had a wide variety of unit types, you have tools to better achieve "attrition", or favorable sacrifice.

The other thing is... it's a big army... it's supposed to do a lot of damage. Do you want large armies to deal only a little damage?

Never have I seen this typo be more cheerily ambiguous.

Oh no! a giant army is coming my way! if only i had something that had long range and killed many units at once *cough cough* Holkins *cough cough* Pelters*cough* Shellers *cough*.......

That's not how it works. You would have to stack so many of these, it would waste your energy resources and it results in the very same issue depicted by OP:
Strength of that Sheller army scales in square with the number of units so the battle is over in mere seconds.

Congratulations, you just killed one deathball with yet another deathball. Thousands of metal lost in a few seconds.

With fewer units (on both sides!), that would actually have resulted in a rather interesting encounter, but with the current balancing it's doomed to get faster paced the more units are involved.

hmm. not entirely sure what you're getting at. can you please rephrase that in the queen's english, instead of speaking in math? i don't speak math.