Dox Revolution Viva la dox revolution! Dox is love, Dox is life! Objectives of this mod Recognise dox as the true star of the show it always was Variety of play between bot, vehicle, and air. Less rock beats rock and everything else, more paper beats rock, rock beats scissors etc. Variety of units (both t1 and t2) used in army compositions Less volatility Emphasis on information control and fog of war - harder to radar Faster boats (about 30%) Do all this by changing as little as possible from vanilla Current status Completed first pass of bot, vehicle, air. Need to solidify the interactions between these before touching orbital, naval, and structure hp more. All constructive criticism is welcome Download https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5095264/redox.rar How to install: Unpack to your server_mods folder (AppData\Local\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation\server_mods). Mod identifier for mounting is com.dox.revolution if you want to add it manually Changelog Fully detailed changelog here Version 1.0 19/06/2014 Main changes - Dox now costs 50 metal and can shoot at air - Boombot costs 100 metal, slower. Repurposed as inferior pseudo-scout - Grenadier costs 90 metal - Tanks now do 80 dmg. Which means they are 4 shot by other tanks. Mix dox into your army to kill off the last remaining 10 hp quicker after the 3rd tank shot. - T2 factory increased to 7200 metal, but unit prices have been reduced to more sensibly match t1 unit metal to power efficiency. - Bumblebee replaced with weaker Kestrel gunship as t1 air unit. This is to give air more staying power and allow it to complement land forces easier. Subject to more balance tweaking, but I think this direction helps tie together the importance of dox, and give air players a more interesting playstyle. - Transports now at t1 and have a capacity of 6. You can load multiple units into one but you'll need to spam load hotkey. i.e. inferno has size 6, doz has size 1, ant has size 2. - CF can now assist at 30/2000 and will box select as a fabricator - t1 mex now produces 6 metal, t2 mex produces 8 metal. This is to encourage and reward map control, and slow down the early to mid game pace. - Turrets have lower dps, but higher health - All naval combat ships slightly faster - Nuke is now sensibly priced to compete with sxx - Teleporter now only requires 300 energy to run (600, or 1 pgen for both). More creative teleporter play pls. - Radar now much more expensive to build and maintain. -Other stuff you can find in the full changelog linked above
If that was his question, then the answer is no. Although I doubt stuart was asking something that silly? (unless he's just trolled me) You will still want 1 pgen, 2-3 mex. Don't see why not building any resources to start should be viable.
*Sigh* So the same repetitive 45 seconds every single game without variation? Come on, let factory first be viable!
I don't know if it is without variation. There's your 2, 3 or 4 mex starts, 1 or 2 energy starts, or something more funky involving storage.
Well i'm sorry then stuart, it doesn't look like this mod is radical enough . Having buffer time at the start of every game is a good thing I think. That 45 seconds is also there for people who want walking time to comm rush, or cut 1 mex for faster factory. Even if there was no variation, a period of quiet is good to allow players to get into the flow of the game, decide on a strategy etc. It is beneficial to the overall pace and feel of the game, and provides contrast with the action that follows in the mid game. Overall, i don't feel like there is enough compelling reason to simply add 3 mex and 1 pgen into the commander. It would be diverging from vanilla PA for not really much objective benefit.
Increasing com eco can work, but doubling commander storage is a better method of implementation as it also leaves eco first viable while making factory first possible.
This looks neat. I'm not sure about some of the more fundamental changes like the reduction of metal availability, but I will definitely try this mod this week.
well let me know what you think!! Updates have been sparse because i havn't been able to get numbers for games
This is actually quite useless outside of very early raiding and defense. Wait a sec, I think I found the point! I didn't think I'd like this, but it seems to work. I actually really don't like this. I'm not sure what you should do instead, but I kinda liked boom bots being useful. That said, without bumblebees, the sniping power of T1 bots may have required something be done about it. As much as I loved the divebombing style of the bumblebee, I think you are right about being able to complement land forces. Perhaps its for the best, but this can be really, truly annoying. I want my combat fabbers to aid my army, and this makes it much harder to keep them doing what I need them to do This feels really weird. I suppose I don't mind what you've done to T1 mex, though that does mess with my building intuition a bit since the base size vs building capacity has changed. However, T2 mex was decreased to 8 metal from 24. I guess I understand why you did it, but that change has a massive, massive impact. In some ways, I'd say this does more to change game balance than the sum total of everything else you are doing here, and thus probably doesn't support your purpose statement very well. Perhaps trying 18 (75%) or 21 (3x T1 mex, 87.5%) instead of 8 (33%) would make it a bit less central to the mod? I kinda understand why you did this though, and it might work out, it just feels weird with the whole minimal nature of the mod. Compete with SXX for what? Sure you used to be able to use them for commander sniping, but is that really a good idea? IMHO (given my experience level, very humble opinion) if you are going to mess with the nuke cost, you should also mess with the anti-nuke cost to allow players to fully defend a small, critical area without having to guess how much your opponent is committing to nuclear resources. You lie! Anyways... Could I advocate for a grenadier speed increase? This might be insane and bad for gameplay, but mixed bot unit compositions are a lot easier to pull off when at least one other unit can keep up with the dox. As it is, a grenadier/dox force moves as fast as an aventail force, which is downright terrible. I still need to play it more, but those are my initial reactions.
Hrm! alot of food for thought! Thanks for the great feedback! Glad to hear! The boombots were to allow bot first to scout your opponent in almost the same way that vehicles/air first can. Otherwise you need to design bots to be able to blind counter everything, because they can't scout for what exactly to counter if that makes sense. I shall have a re look at the damage though. They should have been able to harass undefended buildings/fabbers in small numbers especially with the greater vision. The idea was to let cf power assisting factory production be an interesting choice that the player can make. People always complained that the cf selected as a combat unit and not a fabricator, but maybe the cf eco assist should disappear so that it goes back inline with uber's vanilla implementation of no assist. Or maybe what needs to happen is just two different units... Probably the former for simplicity i guess? Good points. It definitely feels very strange and tbh i have no idea the limits of t2 mex, only that 24 is too much and was being justified by high t2 unit costs, causing this huge gap between t1 and t2. I havn't been able to playtest the t2 eco properly with people to really see the timings, so thanks for your feedback on this! Previously, it was a no brainer to go for sxx over nukes because of the metal costs (I think it still is, with nukes back to 86k in the current vanilla build). A full 1 nuke would cost ~100k and heaps more energy due to terrible energy efficiency, while an sxx would only cost ~35k from orbital launcher to sxx. I think anti nukes should still be ~5k as they are in vanilla, don't remember changing them. Will look into nuke/anti-nuke more. Is the changelog link not working for you? It should be publicly visible and all the information should be in the tabs at the bottom Good point about the dox/grenadier. Definitely warrants some more thinking.
Bots absolutely need a scout. However, the boom bot has two use cases in vanilla: 1. Quickly destroying fabbers/mex as part of early harass against expansion without any defense. 2. Sniping. You can snipe T2 energy, nukes, anti-nukes, commanders, teleporters, etc. This is even possible when some defense is present, you just need a bunch of them. Speed is *crucial* for this, since boom bots won't be able to withstand a single hit. Oddly enough, I don't believe damage is an issue for sniping (within reasonable limits), because when a boom bot swarm begins reaches its target, the rest of the swarm will be able to reach it, which given a large enough swarm, is an effectively infinite source of damage against a single target. Boom bots are inefficient combat units in vanilla (you would never use them as a combat force), and they won't ever be efficient combat units. The important quality of boom bots is that they do crazy DPS in a swarm. Well, those that live anyways. To live and to do DPS they need to be fast. In this mod, there aren't any uses for the boom bots later in the game, since they have #1 (which doesn't work when any defense is present) and scouting. This is normal for a scout, but the boom bot is such an interesting little bugger in vanilla. The reason I don't know what should be done in this case, is because making the boom bots scouts would give them more versatility than any other scout, and clearly better than the skitter. On the other hand, what other unit would you make a scout? The grenadier? I suppose you could bring back the former anti-air bot as a dedicated scout bot, but I don't know how hard that would be to mod. You don't lie! I need to learn to use google docs. Behold, tabs are a wonderful thing. Sorry about that ^^.
If you wanna flesh out the balance with some of us team burning guys feel free to swing by our ts anytime
