If this is really the meta i ask myself why nobody buys 1 dox to make a forestfire near the enemy base....
12 metal per tree with combat fabs. 1 combat fab working on a forest gets you roughly the same metal as just over 2 mex, taking into account movement time.
Yeah, this was a bad change in my opinion, a strong over-reaction to a niche problem. Combat fabbers had just started to find their way into the meta and will certainly be right back out of it now.
@zihuatanejo It's worth doing especially in early game, but it's not overpowered imo. The real benefit is that the payout is much quicker than building a fabricator and building 2 mex, and there is no heavy burden on power reclaiming. A combat fab takes an extra 3.33 seconds, 50 metal and ~2200 energy to build relative to a fabber, but once it gets to the forest is producing 2 mex worth straight away. It will pay for itself in ~18 seconds. Assuming a fabber can get to the metal spots quickly, it will take at least 30 seconds, 30000 energy and 300 metal to produce 2 mex. It will pay for itself in metal in ~43 seconds. 30000 energy can make ~14.8 dox, ~4.4 ants, ~2 bombers or ~3 hummingbirds, or energy plants to dig yourself out of the energy hole early.
A combat fabber pays for itself in 18 seconds, vs. 22 seconds for a MEX. It was the clear superior choice and it simply comes down to the number of them you produce which is something that would undoubtedly become set in stone. It felt like it severely restricted the opening on maps with reclaimables, but worse for me it forced you into a fiddly game of snipe the combat fabber, a now key unit which was far more vulnerable than a MEX. A trade off perhaps? It felt more to me like you were always going to be forced into taking that gamble. On the other hand, it's very early days and this might all prove to be hogwash. At the very least though the maps need to be tweaked. Maps like Duat clearly weren't made with this in mind when you have one tree on the other side of a crevasse which can cause a fabber to path all the way around the crevasse to reclaim it.
Admittedly i havn't tried it, so maybe i'm too quick about saying air spam is going to be the only viable thing although i'm still pretty sure it's most likely true. Vehicle spam might win you games too, but overall is probably not the best. If you have 2 cf vs 2 cf build order, the air spam guy will have advantage (how big advantage up to you to decide) because Mines kill land units, but not air units Bombers are not affected by walls, but land units are. We're talking you needing something like 1:1 spinner tank composition against an air spam because there will just be that many bombers by the time vehicles usually make it to your base. Not to mention you need to leave alot of spinners in your base too when you go out to attack. I don't feel like you would have more actual tanks at the end of the day. With that many spinners, it's even harder to attack through walls/turrets. And there is no unprotected expansion metal to attack because the guy is relying all on treeconomy inside his base. If it fails, you will be outmacroed because of air fabbers and air control. Air control makes it exponentially harder for the vehicle player as he expands over a larger and larger area. In normal 3 fabber based builds, that air control can be won back by spamming air factories with commander. With the cf build, the snowball is just so hard and so fast that you cannot come back into the air game --------- Also just interesting note: cf drain of 1500 energy will impact mine viability too. Not sure if i would use mines anymore hrm. It definitely puts a stop to the 1 fabber on cf steroids build though since the entire advantage was not having to build pgens with commander at all. Maybe overkill though
Not at all. It would ruin the whole meta-statements of the game. I really love how it alludes to Cold War, to environmental ruthless (that forest is blocking the path? Burn it down!), to nuclear fights, to economic greed and so on... This is also the reason why I´d like to have wreaked Tier II units and buildings! It would be a cool statement just again! BTW: The name issue of "Metal" always bugged me. It´s a simple mistake, it HAS to be something else! (preferable Mass, for obvious reasons) If you are going with metal trees cannot give you metal. If you are going with metal gas giants cannot give you metal. If you are going with metal MetalPlanets should be covered with MEX-Spots!
Yeah I def. agree something had to be done about tree-economy, but I think this was just too much. Unless they plan to further alter energy this change will surely be the end of combat fabbers in regular builds. Couldn't they just have halved the amount of metal one gets from trees? Or maybe gone with 500energy/s.
<sarcasm> Yeah I am sure a random map generator would certainly not create any balance problems. </sarcasm>
<sarcasm> Yeah all those awesome maps back in beta </sarcasm> ... oh wait let's restart I have 3 times the mex you have.
XD As always. Seriously though - Beta maps had a lot of problems, but we, the community, solved them ourselves in the process. It was a team effort.
That reminds me of speeches of political people. I never made maps at all. I always asked others to do it for me.
So now I played a game or two with treeconomy, I did this kind of build: commander: bot, air, air, mass vehicle factory first bot is an engineer that starts pgens, then do a combat fabber that reclaims, then 2 more fabbers and dox and stuff 1. air is fighters, 2. air makes a few bombers. Was fun to play. Like the economy actually feels like it works out. http://pastats.com/chart?gameId=285678 Can't see a problem with this tbh. Yes air probably is the best thing to use to get the early advantage into something, but you don't actually go air only right? If going air only is always the way to go just because of a little extra metal at the start then air needs to be nerfed. Probably to the level where you t1 bombers really can't snipe anything valuable and you need t2 air to do damage vs ground. Would give usage back to t2 air to ground attackers xD
Great post, these are useful numbers for @tvinita to think about. Rather than greatly increasing CF energy draw, why not adjust these numbers so the combat fabber+trees is equal to about 1 mex worth once at the forest. This doubles the payoff time and keeps this strategy as something you might do, but should limit it from being too dominant and increases the risk of doing it and getting sniped. edit: in the case the nerf was aimed at mines and not treeconomy, I am not sure why it was implemented in the first place
