I also would like an anchor/hold position toggle button.
I sometimes will use a select all navy units hotkey to send in everything to attack and when that selects the sonar it is a problem. Selection priority wouldn't have anything to do with that, and I prefer the select all key rather than zooming out and selecting all units.

And I actually would love a toggle button that you can use hold position ANY unit, including land units.

Sometimes you want to send all your land units in for an attack, but would like to keep a small group in a specific location to defend against drops.

Are you trolling, or just incredibly stupid? Ras sacus are actually basically just as efficient as fabs when you factor in their bp and dps; everyone knows this. Both can pay for themselves in just over six minutes. From many months ago on the old forum:

Cuikui wrote:
As some have already done, looking only at direct mass costs, an SCU costs 6500 mass to produce 11 mass/second, which gives a payback time of 590sec (9min51s).
A MassFab costs 4000 mass to produce 16 mass/second, which gives a payback time of 250sec (4min10s).

Except that MassFabs also need a constant supply of power -1500 power/second, which is provided by power generators that also have a mass cost. A T3 power generator produces 2500 energy/second for a mass of 3240, the energy cost is about 1.3 mass/(energy/s). A MassFab therefore has an additional cost of 1.31500 = 1950 mass from generators that are exclusively dedicated to supplying its energy. This brings the payback time to 372 sec (6min12s). On the other hand, SCU produce 1020 energy/sec, which reduces the number of power generators to be built, this can be considered as a cost reduction of 1.31020 = 1326 mass. This reduces the payback time to 470sec (7min50sec).

Taking the energy into account, a SACU needs only 26% more time than a T3 MassFab to be profitable. If we add the mobility, the tankiness, the builtin turrent, the reduced space consumption and the engineering suite, you explain why it is better to spam SACU than MassFab.

As Strogo said, these calculations somewhat understate how useful fabs are because they do not factor in any adjacency bonuses.

But the buildpower of ras coms is certainly quite important as well, so it's important to quantify that. They provide 56 bp, which is equal to almost 2 t3 engineers, or slightly more than a hive upgraded to the second tier. So that is worth about 600 mass alone, meaning they will pay for themselves almost a minute faster, if you value the bp. Even if you are not using the bp constantly, it is still worth a significant fraction of that number.

Their gun does 300 dps, which is almost as much as two t1 pd. Especially given that sacus are mobile making that dps more useful than pd, we could value that at about 500 mass (the cost of two t1 pd), meaning they pay off another 45 seconds faster (if you value that capability). Obviously ras coms are very rarely used as combat units, but IF they save you from building extra tele def, then you would need to incorporate that value, even if you don't think it's worth quite that much.

Having at least a few sacus just to drop on big reclaim piles is also pretty useful because of their hp.

So if you factor those things in, they are actually pretty close to as cost effective as t3 mass fabs, less any adjacency bonuses, which can be pretty significant. But, I would say the adjacency bonuses are somewhat offset by the sacu mobility, hp, and compactness, so you can protect them all under one assisted shield (which, conveniently, the sacus can assist themselves).

Overall, I think ras coms are superior to fabs, but fabs are a little better if you don't have much use for sacu bp, and aren't too worried about them dying and having to invest a lot to protect them. And still, it depends on the game situation, so it's hard to say one is just better than the other. It can be a good idea to build some fabs for more efficient eco first, then transition to ras coms when their other characteristics become more valuable. Maybe you have plenty of bp and need more eco before you can even take advantage of the sacu bp.

Edit: the combat ability of sacus is very situation dependent, even for the tele def example I gave. If you have 30 stacked in one spot of your base (dealing 9k dps), perhaps the marginal (additional) benefit of more tele def is basically zero, because you kill an acu teleporting fast enough anyway. But if they are teleporting shielded sera sacus to you, and hitting your shields with arty at the same time, maybe the extra dps becomes important to keep your shields from taking too much damage and collapsing.

What percentage of matches does this happen in? Unless this is happening quite frequently, will it really make a big difference in the long run to anyone's rating? I mean think what happens if someone just magically added 500 points to your rating. You haven't gotten any better as a player, so it will pretty quickly just revert to your true rating when you lose most of your matches to players "at your rating."

@Valki said in Monkey Lord - roleless T4 that needs a Buff:

At certain ratings Monkeylord are far from bad, might it also be the most-built experimental all games combined?

FAF has a wide dispersion of usefulness in units, is the Monkeylord really an outlier in terms of usefulness?
In casts I seem to see it more often than Novax for example.

It is horrible to argue balance is flawed because "at certain ratings" players are too ignorant to know the best strategies. Obviously low rating players are doing things wrong, hence, their rating. e.g. "Yeah, 'at certain ratings' mass storages around t3 mexes are rare, so their adjacency bonus needs to be buffed." The problem has nothing to do with game balance, it is ignorance.

Because simspeed lag is one of the worst aspects of this game, anything we can do to ameliorate the problem is a great idea. I don't care how many cybran drone bots are visible. In fact, I would probably PREFER to see a laser beam similar to aeon because it makes it a lot easier to see exactly what the hives are assisting. Sometimes you don't notice they started assisting your smd or something else unimportant when that was your lowest priority.

I like the idea of a movement speed buff, and while we are at it could we consider increasing it's turret turn speed? The monkey is especially frustrating when it is attacking different useless targets on opposite sides of it, which require a very long time for the turret to turn. This is especially critical when you are just getting in range of what you really want to attack (e.g. acu) with a move command but it takes an extra 5 seconds to actually start attacking because it was focusing on some t1 tanks behind it.

@rezy-noob Ya that's accurate. t3 arty is much better than novax for killing bases. But novax can snipe isolated targets very efficiently, so it's excellent on any map with enough of those targets for it to pay off. t3 arty is also much more useful on the common 10km teamgame maps than setons because of the range.
So the answer is obviously that novax is really terrible on some maps and really good on some others (but mass novax is pretty much always bad). People saying anything other than that are missing the point.

Novax isn't too powerful on most maps, but it is actually very, very good on setons, and probably similar maps with spread out bases and lots of mexes. Just do the math:
Let's say you are the air player and have 13 mexes to defend. Only the core 4 mexes can possibly be defended with less than one shield per mex, even assuming 1 is sufficient for those 4 mexes giving a total of 10 so far, you'll still need a bunch of extra shields if you don't want your air grid to explode, plus your smd in the middle. So you'll still need probably at least 13 t2 shields (with maybe a couple t3 shields on the air grid because you need their longer range). If they are sera shields, that's 13x700 mass, equaling 9100 mass, PLUS you will need an extra t3 pgen for power to run those additional shields which drain 13x250=3k power. One t3 pgen, which won't even totally cover that power drain, is 3240 mass. That puts us at basically 12.5k mass spent (rounding up since we still haven't covered the full power drain) on countering the novax. BUT THIS IS JUST ONE PLAYER! There are 4 players that all have to do the same thing or the novax will just target them instead. Are you able to multiply by 4? Now the enemy team has had to spend about 50k mass (12.5k times 4...) because all the other slots have to build very similar numbers of shields, PLUS a bunch of apm queing up engies to build shields on every mex plus every important structure not otherwise covered by a shield (usually you don't have every pgen or hq right beside your mexes) to avoid significant damage from the novax. Some spots like the corner trio of mexes for beach you might get away with fewer shields, but you'll probably need a couple extra shields somewhere else that aren't on mexes so I think it basically evens out and this is a pretty fair estimate. Even if the other slots can get away with just 10 t2 shields (so we save 9x700=6300 mass) it's still going to be well over 40k total mass spent. But the novax STILL gives very nice scouting, PLUS it can STILL be used on any units not shielded, such as navy or t4s, or landed asfs, sams, etc. And it can help to soften up shields for a strat snipe of an smd too. And AFTER the enemy builds all those shields, you could still simply reclaim your novax, which takes a whole lot less apm for you to recover the mass than for the enemy to reclaim all their shields. Even further, you can just start to build the novax and not finish it, and possibly force out a whole bunch of shields in anticipation of it and not even invest much at all yourself.

UEF and Aeon shields are a bit cheaper for both mass and power, but give less range and don't affect the calculations too much. Generally, due to the small range you will need a couple extra shields to protect your buildings if you are aeon so you don't end up saving too much anyway. iirc the lowest tier cybran shield isn't strong enough so you need at least ed2 which makes the cost also similar. If you say about 600 mass times 10 shields for each of the other 3 players, that's 18k mass, plus 9k mass for the pgens to run the shields, so 27k, plus about 11k for the air player's t2 shields. So 38k total mass for a pretty conservative estimate.

Still, I haven't added in any cost of having to build t3 shields to protect the air grid. T3 shields cost a lot of mass. Maybe just 2-3 is sufficient depending on your air grid size, but that's another 5k or more mass you have to spend. So about 55k total mass will probably be spent by the team, and at least 40k. So, even if you use far more optimistic numbers by using other faction shields that are cheaper, it's still definitely going to be cost effective to build at least one novax. Building a second probably might not be worth it, unless you can surprise them and snipe an smd or something before they realize you made multiple and build additional shields. That shouldn't happen, but if there is one player managing multiple bases in the late game it would not be impossible.

edit: so does it need to be nerfed? Well I think it's quite weak on maps where you need far fewer shields, like canis, so it's hard to say overall.

I really love the idea of just adding bp into the factory by sacrificing engineers into it, though I could see us maybe wanting some upper limit on it. There would be pros and cons such as not possible to raid the bp with bombers or tanks, but also inability to repair the damaged factory. Allowing them to be stationed might go a little too far by giving tons of flexibility plus removing the risk of losing bp to bombers.

@archsimkat Of course you at some point need to learn how to play the game properly. A noob friendly mod is like learning to ride a bike with training wheels. At some point the training wheels obviously need to come off. The question is whether allowing (NOT forcing) games with training wheels to start can help some people not get too discouraged initially or actually learn the game a bit faster by not being overwhelmed by all of the different things there are to learn in the game right from the start, or if they simply develop bad habits that become entrenched. It certainly might be better to just learn decent build orders, but obviously, a lot of people don't bother. It's plausible that some people don't want to watch a build order youtube video, but will just play the noob mod, then eventually learn more and like the game more and stop using the mod because a lot less of their games were ruined in the first minute of the game.

Edit: I think generally in the game, not just in a noob eco mod, it would be good for an audio warning if you are stalling. "You must build additional [pylons] Power!"

I like Blodir's ideas on making the game less static in the mid-late game, especially making t3 units a bit faster.

I think RAS sacus are a bit overpowered, but if they provided say, half the resources they currently do they would be total garbage and would be sufficiently nerfed into oblivion. I don't mind them as a game mechanic, because they are pretty similar to fabs for income generation, and the build power is nice to help replace a few (hundred) t1 engies we would otherwise see . Maybe 7 mass and 750 power, and a build power nerf would make them quite balanced. Maybe we could go with a nice even 10 mass income, 1000 power generation, and increase the cost by about 50% (10k mass?). As it is they are a bit less efficient than fabs for eco (if you don't have a use for the bp), so that would be a huge nerf, and they would be swiftly replaced by t3 fab farms.

I also think reclaim is a bit OP. Part of the reason it is difficult to actually punish the "inefficient" ras sacu stockpiling is because there is the inherent defender's advantage, which is compounded by reclaim donations from any attack that doesn't completely win over the territory. Maybe 50% mass value for reclaim would be good, I dunno. I have always felt like reclaim makes the game more defensive and static than it should, plus it makes it a lot more work to learn an optimal build order on a new map because the amount of reclaim and distance away it is changes everything about your build. If anyone wants to make any comparisons to starcraft 2, this is one of the biggest IMO. You can do basically the same builds on every map of starcraft.

Also, I don't think it makes any difference whatsoever whether the reclaim proportions differ for different tiers of units, but I don't see why it shouldn't be the same either. In basically every single battle, the exact amount of reclaim is quite difficult to predict, because it is impacted by artillery shots landing on wrecks, overkill, etc.

@FtXCommando
Arguing we shouldn't fix one problem because it would make another problem worse is a bad reason to not try to fix both problems. If Cybran is currently garbage on t2, that is just another problem that needs to be solved. I can agree an extended t2 stage makes it even worse for cybran, but maybe the point is we should stop ignoring that problem too.

"all combat upgrades" need to be reviewed? How often do people get gun AFTER t3 mexes? Almost all acu upgrades besides tele and ras are well before t3 mexes, or after only a small number, and a small increase in mex cost would have a very small impact at that stage in the game.

"unit considerations do not change when you adjust mex values" I never said that. In fact, that's obviously the whole point! You will have a greater incentive to stay in the t2 stage. My point was that it doesn't make the game much more complex in deciding what KINDS of units to build in a situation, simply because that situation will last a bit longer. Earlier you claimed it was an "extremely important frame of reference" which was the point I was refuting.

"Is there never a choice between t2 mex vs more tanks" For the last time, THAT'S EXACTLY THE POINT (except t3 mex). This choice doesn't "disappear" for t3 mexes, but if it's practically a no brainer, it's more of an illusion of choice. Sure, the air slot on setons can choose to go t1 air rush too. That's a choice, right?! Obviously, a nerf to eco makes units more valuable. It almost sounds like you are agreeing with me! "This transition is reflective of your adjustment in mex output. You make teching less effective, you make units more effective. It's zero-sum." I would say going from "almost zero reason to build t2 units" to some reason is a net benefit for game quality by diversifying potential strategies.

"How many of these maps will now be garbage? Are you fine with just throwing out some random % of maps without checking to see what maps are now trash?" Well, it seems like the majority of teamgame maps currently played by the majority are likely to be made better by making these changes. Hence, people complaining about the issue...

"pretty much any guide out there on FA or FAF that will now be outdated" How many guides are based on optimal late game eco? How many people do you think will think "damn, I shouldn't have skipped t2 in this teamgame and just made t3 mex, LIKE THE GUIDE SAID!" Seriously...

FTX, you continually engage with an arrogant attitude and consistently refused to actually make an argument, rather offering attacks and unsupported denials of others valid arguments, until I pointed out you weren't actually making any relevant arguments. You can do away with the hyperbole. Of course making t3 mexes slightly more expensive will have side effects throughout some relevant parts of the game, but I see them being primarily in the t2 stage, and having the exact effect that we are looking for!

@Tagada said in Is mercy too strong in team games? What you think?:

While discussing if such mechanic is healthy for the gameplay is another topic the main issue right now is that because of the activation radius which is 25 (that's quite a lot, for comparison the vision of an ACU is 26) and the fact the projectiles that AA shoots needs to reach the mercy before it can transform itself into projectiles that cannot be stoped creates the situation where even if you have a lot of aa around you then if it's not between your ACU and the mercies you will still die.

It seems to be both unrealistic and problematic for gameplay that the mercy has basically nil hitpoints, but is still invincible during the most important phase of its attack, which should be the most dangerous phase. So what if we made it into a more realistic actual kamikaze plane? We could give them a more normal amount of hp (similar to what other bombers or fighters would have), a lot less maneuverability and slower speed, but targetable the entire duration of the attack. I am also imagining a very cool stuka-like sound effect for the attack path (about what the activation period would have been, or longer).
I concede this would be a significant change and probably requires quite a bit of testing to figure out the best balance of hp, damage, etc.

edit: to get an idea of the type of sound effect, this clip gets the point across.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W3KDB0yHYM

Also, perhaps you could make it so that the mercy can only begin its attack dive from a certain minimum distance away (30, 35 perhaps?), and the sound effect begins at that point and so it gives a little bit of advance warning of the impending attack.

I was generally in favor of the build time nerf for experimentals, but I agree with you that the ML is just too weak to be used now. Because it is such a glass cannon and therefore easy to prepare a counter for, it really does need to be a surprise, which is much more difficult when it takes that much longer to build. Otherwise it is extremely likely to end up as a mass donation. So I would approve a bp reduction, not necessarily back to what it used to be, but some reduction would be good.
Alternatively, an HP buff might work as well, but it would definitely change the nature of the unit and make it more of a generic t4, which I think would make it less interesting than the more niche role it used to occupy. So I also think reducing build time would be best.

@randomwheelchair I never said it was an "exploit," I said it was a bad game mechanic. If everything you can do through micro is "good" because it demonstrates "skill expression," then anything that saves any clicks ought to be eliminated. According to your logic we should eliminate infinite build queues, patrol orders, attack moving, hotkeys, shift-queueing orders, etc. But that would be incredibly stupid.

@turinturambar said in Make t3 navy more exciting!?!:

Where do you even get the idea from that current T3 navy stage sub meta is significantly shaped by groundfire?

@harzer99

Well I never said it was the biggest issue, just a problem. I'm sick of this misinterpretation that simply talking about an obvious problem implies it is the biggest problem.
It doesn't have to "significantly shape the meta" to be a broken game mechanic. We don't ban building factories underneath a transport dropping units because it often has a huge game deciding effect so often that it shapes the meta, it's because the game mechanic is broken.
Have you considered that maybe people are talking about it quite a lot because it is so many people find it problematic, regardless of how much of an overall impact it has on the game?

And: if people think groundfiring subs has such a tiny impact on the game anyway, then you should have no problem whatsoever with removing the mechanic from the game.

@arma473 T2 torp launchers are pretty useless, with almost no benefit compared to t1, just slightly longer range. The main problem is they are outranged by both cybran and aeon destroyers so they are completely useless against them. Buffing the t2 launcher range to 80 so it's equal to them might make them far more useful.

@archsimkat I would like to join the balance team. Ok?

Honestly that sounds just moronic. It's like saying you need to have a membership to shop at Costco, but memberships are free. What's the point of requiring the membership anyway?

@comradestryker Yeah I guess I don't care near as much about those things. Maybe it would be possible to have the best of both worlds, and have the wreck available as soon as the animation begins. Then you get all of the benefit of the dynamic animations, AND you can issue your commands without delay. I dunno, maybe that is impossible. If it's impossible I would just prefer immediate wrecks, because I'm never thinking "oh look at that pretty animation as the building is destroyed." I'm feeling frustrated about having to wait for it to finish because I'm playing a competitive real time strategy game...

Edit: even if there is a game limitation such that you cannot begin reclaiming until after the animation completes, perhaps it could still allow the order to be queued up? This is usually the main issue, not the 1-2 second delay in being able to construct the building...except when you are trying to build new shields in an arty war.

@uveso Well, it certainly looks like it would be much more complicated to change all of those things...but then the intelligent way to create an ESSENTIALLY unlimited unit cap would be changing the 1500 option to 15000...