View this replay and watch Stec:

https://replay.faforever.com/12950928

This shows why hives need a nerf. Stec goes hardcore eco and gets overflow from other players or mass pass and hits insane early eco timing. This is not possible with any other faction, the build speed is just not fair. Kennels won't do it as they don't have enough production power and can't move targets fast enough. Seraphim t3 engineer bonuses have been stripped. Aeon doesn't fare a chance, even following the same macro layout and using t2/t3/t1 engineers to build. Too many spastic things happen blocking build locations and not applying build power efficiently.

Hives just stack into a hard parabola too fast without any trade offs. Basically every player is getting Cybran tech gifted now as a result of this. Its terrible to see balance out of whack this badly.

I know my team overreacted to what was essentially a "decoy" nuke build instead of a proper rush, but the timings Stec hit are broken, even with mass throws. I'd like to see hives nerfed some to fix this. Put them down to 2 upgrades and bring them closer to in line with UEF kennels.

So again, every hero build I see uses hives, every super fast macro I see uses hives. Every impossible to deflect nuke rush uses hives. Every hero defense of areas that don't have sufficient defense uses hives. They are broken and need to be put down in effectiveness some to make the game playable on random.

I urge you to research reverse engineering. A first time develop of something cost a much large around because they are stabbing in the dark and making first time implementations of things. Also source codes can be "decompiled" ask any military or intelligence expert. Its not exactly rocket science here, we have a functional model working on peer to peer. It needs to be run server-side simulation to cut out all the extraneous layers of client to client preparation, streaming, and error correction. This last sentence surmizes everything that is going wrong with this title.

Do what's necessary to fix these problems and you will likely very rapidly move from #4 to #2 on the top RTS list on google.

Holding out the source code vs the larger body of the company is illegal. I'm not in that company and I wasn't around during lay offs, but I can smell a bit of a fish here and some sort of mediation would be preferable. If not just brute force the box open as much as possible and remake functionality (which is much easier to replicate than design as we already see the intended end product in action)

The spool up time would help with op shield assist too. Today lost a game where a mavor got built under t3 seraphrim shileds with some rediculous amount of hives assisting shields. We had 2 dukes, 6 satellites, and assorted battleship and cruiser fire all hitting together but the hives were too much. Every shield we broke, it instantly was able to brace another shield with sooo stupidly much build power. No other faction can pull that off unless your running around with 8+ engineer scu's or something.

Change something.

So after years of study, countless hours playing and supporting the FAF player base, I'm fed up.

The players from USA cannot play with people from Europe currently because of this game's fossil level P2p netcode. Nothing about the data rate of this game is preventing it from functioning correctly, its 100% over-strict p2p coding that could have easily been resolved by now.

Sitting through almost 3 hours now of streaming faf, and premiering a my map design, and I still did not get one single minute of lag free gameplay. The game needs servers to run a central clock and manage small packet losses so the thing doesn't just automatically run at 1/2 or less speed all the time. Figure out a scheme of donations or monetization to make this work, or I'm leaving like most of the American player base already has.

@ETFreeman What you are saying is how can I defeat my guncom opponent without upgrading my own com? Units only?

This is kind of a silly decision, but it is however possible. The real logic table for bread and butter play is gun com and prevent turtle, or turtle and prevent pushes from your opponent and beat them into t2 arty creep. If you are ruling out these two very very very standard options, you will need to simply outnumber them

The build you need calls for mass factory drop and t1 tank/ arty spam. You will also need to essentially feign defeat when he comes in with his gun com and let him move forward some, then having built up numbers from your large number of t1 factories, run him over with your units and just keep your com out of it, or mopping up some back units (its severely outranged).

T2 units die to quick to oc so just use numbers of t1 and a bit of surprise to catch him off guard. Again I emphasize the need to let him "win" some and lose only a few units while getting him charging recklessly forward, then go in for the kill.

No guarantee you'll polish off the com here, but you can beat that timing just by backing up just a bit and swarming.

Really though, use the main two options the most. They have higher success rates.

@deribus nowhere was I discussing mods. Also dual gap not that outlandish of a map. It has player roles just like setons does, just like tons of other starting positions suggest. I would like to see more maps like this rather than the "if its a not a bunch of 1v1's on lanes its not a real map" argument.

If players play passive and use com/turtle and minimum required defenses on canis for example, the same thing can happen. Overflow to some cybran eco junkie and the games maximum potential eco is totally offset by hive's fast transfer time and the ability for that player to spend that overflow seamlessly without engineer clumping, and slam rapidly through tasks without a single bit of transfer time. Please read my posts again and look past your blindness.

Well the pattern I see here is that lots of noobs or low level thinkers come in here and shit-post about this or that needing to be changed and everyone seems to get a default approach of trashing any post that comes through (because statistically that is a good guess without even reading the post).

Then when people actually raise good points the normal crowd does it's hatchet job and theres more counter-argument than there should be so it stalls or appears on a numerical post basis to be unpopular. Gonna take some special kinds of insight to work around that so hopefully you'll see what I'm talking about and act smartly.