Uber devs and balancing.

So having happily watched all of the test build videos, I can't help but being concerned about the devs knowledge of the units and ability to balance accordingly.

Dox spam, t1 bomber spam, t2 fighters and walls all being used when they shouldn't. If the people like scathis keep losing to swarms of dox he may be led to believe they are op, even though it's the opposite.

I'm not trying to have a go at the devs but I feel their office LAN party's are too small a test group of players to correctly balance the game.

presumably, that would not be too hard to rectify. either by just adding a "spectator" mode of participating, and having a look at "ladder"-matches, inviting top players to closed matches, or more systematically gathering data from all played matches.

or heck, just ask in here and look at replays.

I'd be curious to know how much they watch our casts.

Despite your concerns (that I also share), I'm rather excited about the upcoming changes. I think they're going to be a step in the right direction for game balance, diversity, and all that stuff.

I am not quite sure. I can understand this kind of concerns, but you also have to consider that the current dev builds is pretty different from what we play ourselves. Dunno.
But yeah a few "high skilled" devs would be cool.

Essentially, yes
I wholeheartedly agree with that point of view.


However, I am hoping to play the patch itself before I make an official point of view.

I think this because of two reasons

1) Respect for the devs, and the pure volume of information they are actually presenting to us.
2) Doxen in the video appear to have a greater sight radius than 85. It looks to be darn close to 100.

Uber are well aware that they are not the best players of the game and they will certainly use other tools to determine balance rather than simply relying on internal playtests.

Most of the team, as far as I'm aware, spend quite a bit of time watching player casts to get a broader sample of commentary, opinion and perspective.

I'm absolutely not worried about Uber being too inward-looking on this.

I agree that the better players usually have great knowledge of the game but this is also sided with speed. There is in no doubt many players with great knowledge and insight who may be overlooked because they can't click fast.

I like to think of myself as one of those players. I like to think I have a good theoretical understanding of the game, but when it comes down to it, Let's face it, I actually suck.

I think with such rapid balance passes for each of their test builds.. and with the goals scathis has in the beginning, having us test it would be more time consuming to plan then ever.

Not saying we are bad at balancing things. Its great that caster's like you zaphod and Brian play since they can look at it at anytime via youtube and notice somthing they didn't see internally.

When they hand us the final Speed balance pass. I'm sure it will be a balance milestone with many more to come.

Well judging by the videos at how well doxers are at crashing into PDs and t1 bombers are at.... well flying it looks like nothing has changed. If anything the introduction of cheap teleporters will further weaken the dox.

Scathis is not refining balance or finding the weak points like a top player would. He's trying a WHOLE NEW BALANCE. Maybe he's building lots of walls to try an come up with a new balance where its *worth* building lots of walls?

EDIT: Plus I notice in the most recent cast Meta mentioned that he was supposed to be able to go factory first. That sounds like one of the key ideas that came from the community and top players.

It's actually a concept that goes as far back as SupCom and Zero-K (and that's just if you want to confine it to this subgenre)

Not actually a fan. The accelerated start encourages pre-game strategies, since ' wasting ' time actually thinking about what factory to go is going to get you killed against someone with a preconceived strat and build order.

You have time during the selection of the starting point. In fact I do use that time to plan out the layout of my first few buildings.

Since, as a player, you have no idea where your enemy is and only a vague idea of what your 'home turf' is going to be I'd hardly call that enough time to weigh your choices and have enough information to commit to a strategy, especially if the idea of Bots=Infantry, Tanks=Armour holds true.

That's an important decision to make. It shouldn't be done as your first move unless you want a game that is basically a crapshoot.

Unless of course, the differentiation between Bots and Tanks is minimal and Uber are just paying lip service to the idea of differentiation, which could also be a possibility.

Not sure where I stand on this. On one hand yeah you get your factory up quicker in terms of game time. But the game will take longer to start as people will be checking the maps more before they click ready.

I like to think nanolathes way is in the final game. I hope the final build will give each factory type their benefits instead of the current where if you build anything other than bot factory you are more than likely a noob.

You also miss the social time and as nanolathe said you have more time to think about strategy. A lot easier to implement factory first in games with standard spawns but random just increases the scenarios you start preparing for once you see the planet.

I don't see the value of factory first.

Commander net income when fabricating may as well just be zero.

The reason why factory first is generally a good idea is that it is normally the first meaningful decision that a player makes. If we are not playing factory first, then we are instead playing economy first, which generally has a proscribed build order for maximum efficiency. We see it time and time again that 1 mex- 1 pgen - 3 mexs - factory - pgen field (or something similar) is the optimum build order. after this, things become a lot more situational, and games start to become more interesting. There may be a small amount of situational variability to this, but it is extremely low.

This promotes execution as the most rewarded skill, as the cumulative time advantage for such a build chain would be greater for a dexterous player than with a single build as the opening. This assumes that the player is given sufficient starting economy that they are able to support a factory and their commander both being able to build.

The concern that factory first promotes a lack of "thinking time" is not necessarily true, as going economy first doesn't give the player much thinking time either, as they have to be executing their build order to gain a maximum advantaged. I agree that the pacing of the game at the moment is off, but factory first neither fixes it, nor makes it worse. It is simply something on the side.

What really fixes the pacing is a precise tuning of the availability of resources and build rates. And I'm afraid we have a little way to go before it is sensible to do that.

I pretty much agree with you. Probably because I consider myself one of those players that would like to take part in the testing.

I'm actually not that good at considering whether something is too strong or too weak. I'm just good at using the most of what's given to me. I mean, in the balance thread, scathis didn't even know what proxy factories were. That made me a bit concerned tbh. Because that could mean that he doesn't really know how players like me, gunshin, clopse, colin, mattrmunson, godde, brian (just to name a few) actually play the game.

I mean just watching the devs build walls at every edge of their base, is getting me kinda like "uh... why would you do that? That's not how this game is supposed to be played."

You know?

That's why we're here, that's what beta is and that's why we have forums and vanguards and all. This is it.

Wanna show a balance issue to the devs? Dunno how much you host yourself but i'm sure most casters would love to do stuff with you, seeing how you are one of the top names. There you have a great way of demonstrating your concerns over balance as well as voicing them like you do here. Most changes that have come so far where obviously after feedback from the community. This time they just wanna give us some sort of working build we can break for them so they can fix it. Only difference this time seems to be they've let us preview the build a bit more than ususal before they release it.

So far i'm with cwarner, as far as i can see the devs are listening and they seem to realise their own shortcomings as competetive gamers.

Execution as a rewarded skill is only a problem if the UI doesn't support building up your Eco with the fewest number of clicks possible. If setting up your starting Eco is a matter of a few button presses that anyone can do then the player is freed to allow more important tasks to take his attention, such as gathering initial intel and devising a strategy based on that intel.

Rewarding execution is far from my mind here MadSci, I don't want this to be a micro-fest; but ' Factory First ' style gameplay is either a crapshoot if each factory has specific strengths and weaknesses, since your committing yourself to a set of units without any way to be informed about your opponent's situation... or if the factories all have access to the same types of units then it's pointless in even having distinct factories.