Uber devs and balancing.

The game isn't made specifically for pro players.I think you all would do well to remember that. It's intent is to be exciting for all skill levels. Therefore all strategies and components should be tested not just what " pro" players think. Also I find it hard to have PRO players on an unfinished product. Just because some people are good at exploiting the current level of cheese in this unbalanced unfinished product doesn't make them a pro. While they maybe professionals at other rts games that makes some of their insight useful. However to me there can be no pro players on something that's incomplete, they maybe good but pro is taking it a bit far atm imo. Everyone's insight must be weighed and measured not just " pro" players.....

And factory first I see crash city. Then you'll be sitting there anyways for five minutes waiting on eco to come up. So I really don't see where it actually matters. Yea you can get a scout to quick but you'll all be doing the same nothing.....

Then play that way.

That's exactly how I play.

If you're in any kind of position to snipe the commander, you might as well do so. The problem is the commander victory, not the units.

Crippling their economy is crippling their build power. There's no point hunting down all their fabbers if they have 50 factories
@nanolathe - what are you talking about?

The number of engineers you can support is directly related to how much power you have.

Which means that any land engineer you build costs 750 metal, plus the cost of the engineer (either 180 or 225)

Some people already do go for builders. This somewhat cripples the speed at which they fix the stuff you just broke, because they need to get a new engineer built and assigned to that task.

I go for resources first, builders if near the resources so they don't just put them right back up, and factories last.

I am also grateful for enemies who plow me and don't get my engineers so those can be assigned to immediately rebuild.

Another easy way to nerf commander repair is to increase the cost of the commander so that commander repair is more expensive and takes longer time.

And said new engineer costs less than a Dox. Hardly what I'd call a significant loss.

If you don't agree with me that's fine, but I'm not defending this position any more. It's too much hassle seeing as it's a personal viewpoint that seems to be anathematic to the majority.
I bid you farewell with an exasperated ' whatever '.

Depends on distance, and whether or not I wasted time queueing it. It is a matter of attention or travel time, if someone tactically wastes it then it is my fault not defending the engineer better but still a rather bothersome loss of my management time.

*shrug* I don't care any more.

That's the FA solution. I said it is impossible to do a repair in it, because in FA repairing the commander was about as expensive as building an experimental unit. Completely unpractical.

You don't have to make it as expensive as it is in FA.

Dont forget though fa comms had access to upgrades and veterancy to somewhat compensate
we wont have that in pa

Ofc not. FA went overboard with it, they really should have removed it completely.

There's a very famous example of a defensive line that didn't work

IT's called the maginot line. And the reason it didn't work is because the Germans went around it.

And that's the thing about no-mans land and defences.

The best example of defences in a game is Sins of a Solar Empire.

A human player will ignore your defences completely. If they have to, they will just jump away from your front lines and into your undefended core worlds.

The point of the defences is to give your fleet a staging ground, so that a smaller fleet can defeat a larger opponent, and potentially also defend important infrastructure (like factories) until your fleet can get there.


There is no point in doing what the devs do in the stream. e.g. Scathis builds a huge wall and heavy defences on one side of his base.
So Meta just sends his army around it, and eats into his undefended base.

e.g. Meta building a wall of mines. It's only luck that makes Brad walk over those mines. There is literally no reason to walk over a minefield if you don't have to, and he builds it in a massive open field.

The whole concept behind defences is that they are defending something. Watch how the AI builds defences - it builds defences in its base, then it builds beyond the defences and plops down new defences. It uses walls to defend key points.

End product - a whole load of defences inside its base.

Most people build defences around their base

In an FFA where everyone builds small bases and turtles hugely, guess what happens then?

Either you a) attack the undefended side of their base.

or b) make a breach in the defensive line, destroy everything inside their base, and then walk out the same way you came in, leaving them with a beautiful defensive line defending the ruins of their economy, and occasionally their dead commanders husk.

Static defenses should always slow the bleeding long enough for you to get your army there, not to completely replace mobile forces.

Long lines of walls -if they can be build for a cheap price in a reasonable amount of time- DO have a point in serious games.
They reduce the amount of possible attack vectors for the enemy. You don't have to worry about (or not as much) attacks from the sides where you have thick layers of walls. This makes a lot of things easier.

I use defences as a reaction to scouting information. If I see a huge army incoming, and I don't have enough to defeat it in time, I'll quickly throw down some defences. But that's usually the only time I do it.

And yeah, walls are only useful when built in bottlenecks created from terrain imo.
Maybe they will become more useful when terrain has a little more variation.

I always thought scattered around and a BIT thicker in more obvious attack directions was smarter.

Anyway, turrets do win wars sometimes, but it is as you said, usually posted up to an enemy with units coming out to support it. The turret is just the meat grinder.

Generally, everyone would rather build them 1-2 here and there, or build maybe 3-4 in a small loose row in order to keep the enemy out the obvious front door (especially when bases are touching).

I just try to make a point to put enough towers, possibly fabber repairmen, to cost an enemy a chunk of army for each 2-3 structures he gets.

This is why the scouting mechanics needs changing.

Saying I don't see the value of changing the mechanics to make "factory first" viable is not actually what I meant, sorry.

What I meant was, I don't see the value of changing the economy values to achieve this.

The commander can support any factory except naval with just one additional mex built, for naval he needs two.

Of course, you can then not support both your commander and the factory.

Then, consider upkeep costs of factories.

The bot factory is cheapest to operate, so you should always start with that. You can support it first, and it doesn't cost much eco to support. Plus, you get fabbers at the same speed that you get vehicle fabbers.

The naval factory is currently the worst factory to start with, purely because it requires a huge amount of metal income to support.

Air factory I think is a better factory to start with, because although the fabbers are horrifically expensive to run and very fragile, at least the factory doesn't cost much of your economy.

Currently the commander can build structures to the cost of 800 metal before he runs out of storage and stalls on metal, or approximately 600 metal worth of structures before he runs out of energy and stalls.

The problem is that to make factory first and commander still fabricating worth it you have to either

• Increase starting storage vastly
• Decrease the cost of the commanders fabricating, so that he provides more economy than he uses

The reason why I don't see the value in this is because if you do the first one, you still have to prioritise building that economy, and if you do the second one, the commanders fabrication would be kind of ridiculous.




I would much prefer that the game has different start conditions, and I would much prefer that the method of insertion into the game was an option that created different starts.

For example, in Rise of Nations, you can choose to start in 4 different ways

Nomad - just builders
City Center - City center only, no buildings, some builders and a scout.
Small Town: City center, economy buildings, some builders, a scout
Large town: City Center, economy buildings, defences, some builders and a scout.

I think accelerated start should just be a tick box in the lobby, and it should give you a "free, instant build" first basic factory along with 5 mex and 2 powergens.

The problem with that is that is you should still go for bot factory first, because you can afford the most fabricators with that starting eco, and you should still never go for naval factory first, because your expansion will still be slow.

I think Rise of Nations and Age of Empires solved it relatively well. You received 1 scout at the begining of game, it usually makes scouting early enough so that you can react to what you see and not play blindly. 1 free Airscout at the begining of game would decrease random factor therefore it would increase the skill required to play game.

Great post.

It makes me wonder if we shouldn't care that much about balancing units, and instead go back studying at the Military Academy