@zbc Nuggets is tying to help spread your mod. If it’s ranked a lot more people will get to use it. That’s up to faf mods/admins from the sounds of it. Mod looks good!

Make it whenever more than a single mex is selected and I’d probably use it just to keep my once every thousand games mistake of ctrl-k all t2 mexes when I meant to only do one from happening.

That is absolutely the case of skill issue despite rating.

Source: me, a 1.9k-2k player who has permanent skill issues every time I try to play

3 acus dying corsairs in the same game is not a balance issue. Corsairs aren’t making more than a pass or two if you have flak and they’re easy to dodge. If you let yourself get to low hp on the front lines with no air coverage or flak + fail to dodge that’s not a balance issue that’s a skill issue. Hell I think there’s a stronger argument for slightly buffing corsairs so they consistently kill t2 mexes with two hits than there is for nerfing them. Don’t quote me on that last part I could be talking out my ass there.

@nuggets wait does that mean you can do the same thing again when you upgrade the t2 Mex by giving it while it’s upgrading to get a third Mex on the same spot and so on?

Would it make sense to make it impossible to reclaim a tml to get mass back from it? This way it stays as a skill check but is more risky to make because you actually lose the mass you invest no matter what? Just a random idea, and not sure it’s a good one. It definitely has some flaws.

Another idea that might be impossible, but is optical jamming something they could do? So not only is there radar jamming, but they could have holographic images of the sacu projected randomly around them. This would only be counter by Omni or by paying close attention. That might be too op/unfun to play against but it’s an idea I suppose.

Edit: Could be something like it both projects images of the SACU but also other units like titans, parashields, flak, etc. These projections also have a radar signature if there’s no Omni. So basically just massively buffed radar jamming.

Agreed. Jamming on works on things you make a lot of and you make later in the game. Jamming on units that commonly end up fighting in vision range doesn't do much, and jamming on things you don’t make a lot of is also pointless. This leaves frigs as one of the few units where jamming is kind of nice on in practice, forces scouting like stealth does for cybran navy. Still weaker than stealth, but it does something. Even then it’s only relevant later in the game when you’ve got destros and battleships fighting outside of vision range.

That said, this could be a bad idea but I’m throwing it out there anyway. What if UEF SACUs get jamming and shield dome at the same time same slot. So shield dome gives them jamming as well. Additionally, they get buffed jamming that throws more radar signatures than normal jamming and also has a longer range.

That way they have counter intel in beyond visual range fights and it’s not an utterly useless add on when there’s vision on them, which is most fights.

There needs to be some level of justification for it to make finding out if it's possible worthwhile, and we've already gotten confirmation that it'll be a pain to implement.

I'm struggling to find any benefit whatsoever to being able to do this. The only change I've ever made to an SACU after it's built is adding teleport/sacrifice/tml and those are entirely one off cases where I wouldn't want a prebuilt of those cluttering up the build menu anyway. Misclicking a tele boi would royally suck if you don't realize it asap.

If it was just a feature I could ignore, then I'd be fine with it. This is not the case; it has balance implications that both myself and Nomander have pointed out. Not only regarding costs, but one of the weakness of tele bois is that they're telegraphed far in advanced. If you see a Sera or Aeon SACU getting upgraded while scouting, you know they're making tele bois and can plan accordingly. I have won and lost games with that knowledge from scouting, and with how strong it can potentially be it should be telegraphed like it is currently.

It would also change the balance on things like tele gc if you can have pre built tele bois due to how the math behind sacrifice works. Tele gc is a niche that happens maybe once every 500 games, but imo it’s a fun niche in chill games. Pretty sure prebuilt tele bois would be a massive buff to tele gc which I don’t think we want.

@sainserow Gotcha, makes more sense. The stat nerf seems like a little much without also lowering the build cost and time.

Touches on the point that no one builds unupgraded SACUs as it is, so what's the point/role for them? Are they now supposed to truly never be built? I suppose I actually don't have much of an issue with that other than it makes them a potential noob trap. Even then I don't think noobs are building unupgraded SACUs anyway, so maybe not much of one.

Related, I'd also like to know the overall goal of the SACU rework and what role(s) the balance team is envisioning for them so we can have a better understanding of the reasoning behind the changes.

@sainserow said in SACU Rebalance:

Why lower basic SACU stats? Now a basic SACU cannot even kill 3-4 harbs

A basic SACU is also 2100 mass vs the ~850 or whatever a harb is. So mass for mass, a base SACU probably shouldn't be able to kill even 3 harbs. Especially considering the SACU is also a t3 engineer that gives mass and energy.

Story time! And yes, I do tie this back to the thread.

To the surprise of no one, I'm a huge nerd and also the kind of nerd who has been into building computers since I was a kid. Around the lovely age of 13 I built my first rig that was capable of playing games, but to back up a little, my family wasn't well off. I knew I wanted to do this for a long time, so for almost 2 years leading up to that I did whatever odd jobs I could do as a kid to save money. Mowing lawns, dog sitting, whatever, until I could afford the parts myself. My dad then took me to GameStop, and the first thing I saw was the Forged Alliance gold pack that had very recently come out. It had a giant robot on the cover and was a strategy game. Sounded perfect. It was the only game I could afford, and the only game I played for a while on PC. This was late 2007.

I have quite literally been playing FA for longer than some people here have been alive.

I'm not the only person here who has played this game a long, long time. Of course people like me are somewhat resistant to change. Change needs to be damn well justified, because I love the game exactly how it is, perceived warts and all. Some things are no brainers. Performance updates have been amazing, they have no downsides and really do help keep the game alive. Seriously, thank you @jip for all the work there. Overall balance changes have been solid, the balance we have now might just be the best balance the game has ever had.

Other things like advanced target priorities, spread move, spread build, etc are great additions because they do nothing but add to the base game in a positive way. They add strategic depth, which is perfect for a game like FAF.

I'm not going into more depth here since this has been covered to death, but area reclaim doesn't add to strategic depth, it takes away. It makes all forms of reclaim other than factory attack move redundant and pointless most of the time. Good players no longer have to think "hey is it worth spending my apm on manual reclaim right now or is attack move good enough". With area reclaim, the answer is almost always area reclaim or factory attack move. It also does nothing for lower rated players, because for them the answer to that question already virtually always is it's not worth it and they should attack move.

Much like the rename debacle, I do not think communication here has been well handled. On both sides. Valid criticisms of area reclaim have gone essentially ignored.

All that said, out of the things I mentioned in my original post area reclaim was at the bottom of what I cared about. If anything the associated nerf to rock reclaim speed is worse than area reclaim in my mind, but I could be wrong there as I have so far done little more than watch the replay from Tagada. I have, at least, done that though.

Back to my first paragraph. I want FAF to stay successful. I also want FA Forever to embody the Forever part. This means changes that actually impact how the game is played need to clear a very high bar before they're implement. In some cases that bar is trivial to clear. In other cases not so much.

The idea that people should move on from FAF because it's a 20 year old dead game and there's no merit there is a depressing clown take that spits in the face of tons of great open source projects, not just FAF. Even if I don't agree with everything devs/mods/whoever does, I'm glad they try to help the game and put their free time in. Call me naive or whatever the hell you want, but I do think most here have the best intentions for the game regardless of if I agree with their vision.

Communication is hard, and I think we've had some of the worst communication breakdowns I've seen in the past few months on FAF. Hopefully I've added a bit of explanation for the views of people who might be more conservative with applying changes.

Oh, one last thing. Exactly zero people who are current high level players will have any issues still being top players unless the entire game is fundamentally reworked, and even then many of them would become top players quickly if they put the time in. Top players aren't top players due to some magic tricks or meta abuse, they're top players because they have great fundamentals. The idea that top players are against this because they'd have to relearn something and might lose their rating is comically wrong and misplaced.

I am certainly not quitting over area reclaim? But in this scenario where it's somehow worse than manual reclaim my point for opposing it is simply that it makes things more complicated for no reason. Why have it if it's attack move with extra steps? It's just confusing. I'm also not sure how you could somehow make it worse than manual reclaim like @TheWheelieNoob is saying.

I have for a long time thought about actually contributing to different FAF code bases, but haven't taken up anyone's time with trying start since I'm not sure if I'll actually end up being consistent and didn't want to waste time. @Sheikah if you and @snoog do meet on discord, would you mind messaging me when that happens so I could at least be a fly on the wall assuming I can make my schedule work? Maybe I'll stop being lazy and actually try to make some contributions. My Java is unfortunately a decade out of date/practice though

So if it were somehow a bit worse than manual reclaim the same way factory reclaim, attack move and patrol technically are, this whole argument would stop? Why not do that?

Well at that point why even have area reclaim? It's confusing to have 5(?) different methods of reclaim with little to differentiate them. Attack move and patrol are the same except patrol doesn't stop when there's no reclaim left, but then what's the difference between area reclaim and attack move? Slightly more focused I guess? Then you also have to understand why factory attack move is different, and I'm pretty sure that difference only exists as a game engine bug funnily enough. It would be confusing for new people and ignored by more experienced players which is kind of the worst of both worlds.

@phong My general take is less that it levels the playing field between low and high rated players and more that it somewhat lowers the amount of skill expression available at high level play. And when I say high level, I mean higher level than me. There's zero chance that this magically makes me beat, say, Bully, let alone lets me beat Farms with any meaningful level of consistency. Also goes the other way, there's zero chance it would mean a random 1500 is going to start outplaying me. Consistently at least, flukes happen and I'm rather inconsistent.

Anyway, what this does mean is that in high level tournaments for example there's simply one less avenue for someone like Yudi to flex his apm vs Nexus or whoever you want. It lowers volatility in a way that I don't think I like, for example early aggression is made weaker because if it fails then perhaps you at least canceled a bunch of reclaim orders or something like that. You can argue that early aggression is too strong, and you might be right. I disagree with this as a fix though.

Right now you have to make a tradeoff with your attention, and it's a tradeoff that only truly exists at a very high level. There are decisions they have to make - Can I spare the apm/attention to manual reclaim? Is it going to result in me getting the mass too quickly so I actually can't spend it? Do I need the mass asap or can I just attack move vaguely in the right direction and move on?

I'm making too many mistakes in my play for those choices to really matter 99% of the time. I have never in my thousands of games played lost a game because I didn't manual reclaim enough and my opponent did it more than I did. It simply hasn't happened. I've probably lost because I didn't attack move reclaim enough, but that's different. In those cases I'd probably still attack move reclaim and not area reclaim anyway.

Really I think I will largely ignore area reclaim if it goes live. The scenarios I'll choose to use it are relatively niche and mostly involve getting a bit more mass from a hotly contested reclaim field with my acu when I'm lacking apm. I think anyway, I haven't yet played with it much. Otherwise I find clicking rocks kinda fun, sue me. The other issue is the huge nerf to rock reclaim that's apparently associated with the area reclaim and seems depressing to say the least. I can't ignore that one like I can area reclaim.

@phong said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

If we really cared about these top players drawing in the noobs, we'd all be doing more to censor their public tantrums

Actually, I agree and have said as much before, for instance my first paragraph here.

@zeldafanboy said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

The vast majority of the playerbase doesn’t even read the forums, so I think it’s silly for people to use negative sentiment on the forums as an accurate bellwether of the playerbase.

The majority of high rated players do visit the forums and most of this thread has been centered around the high level scene for better or worse.

@zeldafanboy said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

Moreover, treating the majority of the playerbase as largely indifferent to any changes so just cater to what the highest level players say isn’t a necessary corollary to this. Why not actually have polls on the client news page for potential changes?

Most of the discussed changes do exactly nothing for mid level and lower players. Apparently this is controversial, but area reclaim falls into that category as well. We could make sweeping stat changes to a whole bunch of units and if it wasn't announced I doubt random <1ks would even notice in game. I wouldn't have when I was sub 1200 or whatever. Unless balance is absurdly bad it's just not that noticeable until you hit a certain level of game knowledge.

@fremy_speeddraw said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15548
I don't even have to write anything

Damn. This was from 7 years ago, but change some of the names and examples and this could be written today. At least we have divisions now!

The difference now I guess is that ladder isn't dying but dead and tournaments are almost dead, but I can't comment much on this since i now have been inactive for years.

Yes, more or less.

Thanks @archsimkat you saved me the trouble of writing that.

@phong, two related things in response. The first being that rating is a bell curve and it doesn't make sense to add a huge number of people to one extreme end of the bell curve without padding the rest to maintain some reasonable average. Hence both my comment and presumably FTX's comments about there needing to be a lot more "average" players for there to suddenly be 1k top pros.

For the second, let's ignore what I just said and pretend it really just is 1000 new top players. This ties in heavily with what Arch said and what I was starting to type up before I saw Arch's post, but top pros bring in a lot of new people and do a ton for community engagement. What do a lot of pros, including top FAF people do? They stream. Streaming drives engagement and awareness for the game. Streaming gets new people interested in the game. 1000 new top pros means, what, 100 new active streamers potentially? That would be huge for FAF. It also means far more tournaments, and far more competition in those tournaments. Which means more official streams that draw in more people. Which in turn makes the viewership goes up, which in turn means more people get exposed to said streams that might not have been otherwise exposed to it. There's a reason most big games have a vibrant competitive scene, and why many times they'll start to decline as the competitive scene declines.

It also means more casts get made, and additionally casts consisting of actual high level play. Again, refer back to Arch's post regarding this since that's identical to how I feel. For me, watching Yudi in particular was huge motivation for me to get better.

Edit: I'm actually not sure if I'd be getting back into playing some FAF right now if not for Farm's stream honestly. Watching it makes me want to play, and also shows where there are some high rated games going on. Having more active and skilled streamers is huge for any game community.

As a side comment, I play a bit of Apex, and while I'm over a decade past my prime on FPS games and am complete trash, I'll watch highlights of pros or top streamers and get motivated to play as a result. I'm reasonably sure that both myself and my irl friends I play Apex with wouldn't be playing it if not for the competitive scene and the streams + highlights from it.