@arma473 said in SACU Rebalance:
My main point is that 1-2 assisted gateways is far better than having 4-10 unassisted gateways.
That's your idea for how to nerf RAS SACU. Your main point is that RAS SACU are too powerful due to their survivability (HP, mobility, size, buildpower, farms mentioned DPS).
Mass fab farms are only a better investment if you ignore their vulnerability. They're easy to kill with strat bombers, T3 arty, Novax, Telemazor, etc. Every time you expand the grid, you increase the vulnerability and you'd need to make more shields to protect it.
You make it sound like fabs are way too easy to kill so they're a bad investment compared to RAS SACU, but I don't see any good examples to back this up. In theory maps where fabs are made are huge:
- strats take too much time being spotted before they can drop on your fabs (with a competent air player). A cheap emergency t2 shield will also stop them if you have your bp is arranged well.
- T3 Arty and game enders are way too expensive to not be spotted and give you time to build shields then start your own game enders. You can also spread out fabs without a huge loss in efficiency relative to RAS SACU which makes them survive more against arty and be a worse target in general.
- Novax is cheap but it's still slow going across the map and can't do something like one shotting your t3 fabs. That gives you time to have mobile shields if you're a land player or just to build shields with engis. For t2 fabs the HP is a downside but they are more efficient eco.
- Tele is still unstoppable for large targets I have to agree. At least you can kill it with tmls + gunships but you're guaranteed to lose everything volatile near the teleport location. It's like 35k mass in tele+mazor+pgens/storages and you can't do anything to stop it from dealing damage without ridiculous investments in PD to instakill it. Except UEF/Sera TML tele which get blocked by TMD/T2 shields cheaply.
Even if you want to make a few mass fab farms, it doesn't take long before RAS boys become a better choice.
Maybe the meta just hasn't shifted to punish mass fabs enough, but at the moment their ~5:30 payback time compared to SACU's ~8:00 payback time makes fabs more lucrative than SACUs for quite a while into a game, despite the super late game vulnerabilities.
To understand the effects of that payback time, you can consider that the earliest you can get a structure built is when you put your entire (expendable) income into it and finish it before your next eco option pays itself back.
Let's say we want to build a Paragon with 130 engis needed for salvation spam (this is the fastest way to get multiple salvations out) with shields and teledef (310k mass):
- This means that with fabs you build at 820 income and finish in 6 min. Total time of fabs + para is 12 min.
- With RAS SACU you build at 511 income (very little, might as well go off only t3 mex + reclaim) and finish in 10 minutes (8 minute payback for SACU is only achieved if you somehow use all their energy instead of T3 pgens the entire time). Total time is 14:15.
The total time is not very important, the important part is at what income it is better to just start a full game ender build instead of making new eco, and you can see that if you are ever unable to keep building fabs it is better to simply start your Paragon than to make RAS SACU.
I used a complex calculator that includes the buildpower and energy costs for the entire eco build order then game ender build order, and includes generated mass every time the eco is built, so the payback times and build times are a bit longer than you would expect.
If you want to consider reclaim, then the SACU have an even lower income until you want to start your game ender (mass/paybackTime, and mass cost just got reduced), so it isn't helpful there. You can easily spare some random t3 pgens scattered around.
I think that this analysis conclusively determines that RAS SACU are terrible, and some mass fabs into T3 arty or game ender (you'd choose game ender because there are places where T3 Arty doesn't reach, which is a safe place for your extra fabs) is way better.
Addendum: The only efficient way to use RAS SACU is to send them out to reclaim as if they're normal SACU, where you can consider the RAS upgrade as independent of the SACU cost and paying back in 5:20, which is pretty much equal to T3 fabs, but that scenario is situational (underwater reclaim is the best use for SACU, and then frontline engineering is a decent one if T3 engis just die for some reason).
Coming back to your main point that RAS SACU are too versatile and durable, don't you think it's enough that they're getting large nerfs to HP (around -20%), BP (-28%, maybe further), and DPS (-66%) in the rework?
I also agree with Thomas that violating the rule that everything that builds can be assisted is going terribly against the game's fundamentals, and is certainly not worth the "small minus factor" from lore.
