I'd say it is quite important for the community to have good looking leaderboards, but they are quite lacking now imo. It's very basic/bland and doesn't give enough information at all. It's quite obvious when you compare it to something like the aoe2 leaderboards:

By far the most important one to add is the current rating. It is absolutely crucial to properly understand the players strenght. Most other categories are not as crucial but still very nice to have just to liven it up and give some interesting data.

The layout of the black row > grey row > black row is also a must imo. Especially if there is more information it improves readability a lot and it's so standard i'm surprised it isn't in the client. It should also be in the Coop rankings and custom games table tab. Just noticed it already exists in the live replays tab.

Currently you can see a players information by rightclicking > show user info, but left clicking does nothing. A bit weird to me but maybe i'm nitpicking.

Also speaking off the player graph:


You can see very vaguely see some indications on the faf graph but if you compare it to the aoe2 graph the constrast is lacking.

Also maybe an idea to mix the different rating graphs? Maybe it's personal preference but i feel like it looks a lot nicer. Most chess sites do it this way as well.

Also a little bug: You can drag away the information on the leaderboards without being able to get it back:

I know i was a bit blunt but i just think these would be some nice improvements.

Kisses from the big man

Sorry guys but this is a serious gaming community. If you want to have fun maybe try out the #memes channel on the faf discord. Thanks in advance

The problem

Most top players in faf use lots of hotkeys, as is the case with all rts games. However even though faf has tons of different possible hotkey binds you can use they end up being unusable for 1 simple reason: The lack of keys on your keyboard to assign hotkeys to. This is especially noticeable in faf because unlike other rts games there currently isn't (fully) a system in place to work around this issue.

Let me take Aoe2 (and sc2 to a lesser extent) as an example. Aoe2 has, just like faf, a lot of different hotkeys to work with. However In Aoe2 you have the ability to overload hotkeys which drastically improves the efficiency of using your keys to bind hotkeys to. You have a worker selected? Press D to make a stable. You have a stable selected? Press D to make a knight. You have a unit selected? Press D to make them go into defensive stance. Meanwhile on faf you assign D to dive your t1 subs and now the D-key is completely unusable for anything else.

Let me try to emphasize just how bad this is.

A UEF land fac has 20 possible units it can make. Just assigning hotkeys to those units already takes up every single letter key that's in a realistic range of your hand. You are somewhat spared by the current hotbuilding key binds that are currently available by being able to merge land/air/navy & build hotkeys together, but at this point you've only covered the basic hotkeys and already lost 20 keys. General unit commands like move, attack, patrol, stop, assist, reclaim, capture and repair need to be added too. Then you have tons of other often used hotkeys too like drop (from trans), OC, pause, repeat, launch tml, etc, etc. At this point i have only touched the more common hotkeys and haven't even begun assigning them for unit abilities, selection or other features.

The solution

As mentioned earlier there is already somewhat of a solution to this issue and that is the current hotkey combination list under hotbuilding. Although it isn't perfect, if it would be possible to add whatever combination of hotkeys to any button(s) you want it would already be a lot better than the current situation.

So what i'm envisioning is a mod with some sort of template that allows people that have no understanding of coding to easily adjust a few values to construct their own hotkey combination. For example You should be able to assign dive, drop, launch tml and enable/disable shields all to a single hotkey. What i think is most important is that there should be some sort of extensive instruction file in the mod for how to properly use it.

If anyone has a different idea or solution that's viable feel free to share it.

All in all the mod should allow of better competitive play since a better hotkey setup allows for more possibilities.

17/06 19:30 CET on https://www.twitch.tv/stellartactician

There will be a Q&A session about balance changes that are in beta (some adjustments will be made in the next few days).

This will be a mid patch Q&A which means no changes are finalized yet so if you have strong opinions about a change this would be the moment to voice them.

We hereby like to announce bullys disqualification from the tournament due to him having renamed and this will confuse the viewers too much.

I kinda agree with thomas on the point that the game is pretty linear/predictable and there's not a lot of variation that you can do strategy wise. Nowhere near the lvl of other rts games that is anyway. I do not however think that making factions tech stages and/or units more balanced towards each other is something that negatively impacts that. I'm not saying here that all units should become similar to eachother. I'm saying each unit should have their own unique strength that's good in atleast 1 scenario.

If we would go back to old balance then there would be tons of units that would literally never be made and could simply be removed from the game. Aeon t2 stage was so bad you would always rush t3 land. I'm not saying the old t3 land rush power spike for aeon was a bad thing, but the lack of t2 certainly was.

In an ideal world we would have both together, and it is kinda true to some aspect that some of the strongest units were made weaker to be more balanced. Maybe too much, idk, it's hard to tell, but i still do think that some of them were more than justified considering their dominance.

I'm not sure what your (thomas) idea is for an sacu change that would make is less linear to fit in the tech paths that exist in the game. It kinda feels like an empty shout that everyone agrees with. Let's make these units special and unique so they're great to play with! Sure, how?

Personally my ideal future vision of the game is that it gets unit upgrades, armor types and weapon types all balanced to make the game a lot more complex and interesting. I wouldn't even mind adding new units. You can make snipers have special penetration dmg against heavy armored units like percies while making them tickle titans, you can add an expensive upgrade to give spearheads a homing ability, etc. The problem however with this together with other suggestions that were proposed in this topic is if people even want this and from the general understanding i have the answer tends to be no. It's to leave the base game as it is aside from some minor balance changes. This aside from the fact that making such things will cost a tremendous amount of time and manpower which faf in general doesn't have a lot of.

One remark to the OP: I honestly don't know why you even wrote this. Balance team members, both past and current, tend to be evolved in tons of different areas in the community. They make youtube content, cast for FAFlive on twitch (that was co created by a balance team member), make maps, are in the matchmaker team, are faf moderators, host tourneys (some donate their own money), you can continue. Most are in the faf association as well.

Now why do you think these people tend to be on the balance team. Do you think this is because they care about faf and want to help it in some way? Nah no way right. They're just evil dictators that want to change the balance in their favor to win some more games.

At the end of the day everyone spends their free time to try and help improve the game. Now you can disagree with the changes made, but instead of screaming like this maybe it would be more usefull to start a proper discussion where you use proper arguments instead of going full conspiracy theory.

Honestly i dont understand why its so hard to understand. I play in this community to 1. Play the game and 2. Have fun with friends. If you remove a fun feature then ofc the overall experience is gonna leed to being less fun.

If anything, the fact that this apparently was such a big issue is only evidence that a lot of people like to use this feature. You have clans where people pick similar style names (snf), you have tournaments where players rename with their teammates (last rainbowcup where a team renamed to the 4 ninja turtles), you have random waves of renames of multiple groups of people which just creates fun moments for the community. I and some friends renamed to dave1 to dave9 like 5 years ago. We would all join a lobby only to hear responses like "aaah watch out here come the daves", and something like that would be the talk for an entire week because its a small community.

I personally have never heard anyone complain about this in my 8 years on faf. I even had a mod at some point join some joke renames as well.

You say that we're just here to see robots fight. Well youre wrong. Im here to see robots fight WHILE having a fun time with friends. The community at this point is way more important to me than any gameplay.

Waiting for the moment ftx can give his acu to me so it can be of some use after min 5

I think you misunderstood. You're supposed to delete all your maps before leaving

After 10 to 15 years of using the rating system i'd say it's way too late to change stuff like this tbh. Rating is way too ingrained into the faf culture and honestly it's kinda impossible to play without it.

Sighing up

I never knew that military ranks were based on a persons height

@miki1900 amen brother

irreal missiles are everywhere

Lets gooo grimplex and azot

TheWeakie (2300)
Ctrl-K (1817)
FtxCommando (1728)

Combined rating of 5845

Don't understand how you think telebilly is strong whatsoever. Especially with the latest tele nerf it takes like 1.5 min before you can fire the 2nd missile which is enough time for everyone to build some tmd. Killed 15k mass in a core base? It still cost you 20k mass + the insane e requirements to make the telebilly. At the end of the day making tele billy defense is also around 10x as cheap as telelazer def

If you want to stop others from doing it its not a ui mod but a sim mod

Noticed the same issue last weekend in some games

Okay a small 3 days later than planned but better late than never.

What i will write here is the vision that i have on where to take the sacu rebalance. Note that a lot is still up for debate and nothing is set in stone.

The global picture

So i assume everyone knows that aside from ras boys other sacu's are barely seen in the average teamgame. The reason is simple: they're just not good enough because of a multitude of issues. They cost too much mass or e, take too long to build or just have upgrades that aren't worth getting. Generally speaking sacu's are a giant untapped resource that's kind of just sitting in the game being ignored by almost everybody.

Therefore they're gonna get rebalanced so they will be worth making. The general idea is to create 3 main sacu presets for each faction. A rambo preset, a support preset (more info on this later) and an engineer preset (of course there are also other more faction specific niche presets). The rambo preset will basically work the same as the current presets do (but better balanced) while the support presets are an entirely new (mostly) preset that's meant to support big armies. The engineer preset kind of speaks for itself, but the main difference is that they will be more usefull at the front than they currently are.

The way i envision the impact of this is that in mid to lategame land armies you will see multiple sacu groups as part of the bigger army, instead of evergrowing numbers of t4's.

The details

To allow the 3 main sacu presets to exist we first need to look at the current sacu upgrades, their presets and the sacu's themselves. It is extremely important that wrong upgrades do not overlap with different presets as this might make some presets obsolete.

So first of all the base sacu's. They will be nerfed for 1 simple reason. Not because they are strong but because them existing as they do now interferes with the plan of having 3 main sacu presets. A few examples:

• The base bp of sacu's needs to be nerfed substantially to make engineer sacu's (especially at the front) ever worth it. There is currently zero use cases for an engineer sacu because rambo sacu's already have so much inherent bp on them that coupled with all the survivability upgrades they are simply that much better than engineer presets on the front. You can outbuild a single t3 gunship with a rambo sacu.
• The base hp of sacu's needs to be nerfed to give the planned support presets a possible counter: sniping them for their lower hp.
• It also makes no sense that the non rambo presets basically have the same dps as a percy when they're clearly not meant for fighting. I remember a specific game where i walked a gc into a group of 20 ras boys and i managed to kill 3 ras boys before their combined 6k dps (2.5x the gc dps) killed my gc in about 20 seconds. That kind of stuff should simply not be possible.

The base sacu will get some buffs in return although we haven't discussed the details yet. It's probably gonna be something like a cheaper mass cost and/or lower bt, but it is important to keep in mind that most likely base sacu's are always gonna be too bad to build because they try to do too much at once. The moment it is made a viable option for anything it will almost instantly become OP since it's viable to do that one thing plus has the additional benefits.

The way gateways are balanced will also be changed quite a lot. I want them to work in a similar style as factories: You have multiple of them with some adjacency. Gateways always had terrible adjacency because with it ras boys would become way too strong, so the plan is to buff the adjacency anyway to become similar to t3 land facs in efficiency, and nerf ras boys as much as it's necessary to not make them stronger.

More specific details

So the support presets are probably the most controversial but also the most exciting changes for me. 1 faction already has a set of 3 support upgrades that should work pretty well: UEF sacu's with a jamming, sensor and shield field upgrade (although obviously it needs to be rebalanced to be worth making). The other factions right now are lacking these upgrades though. We have come up with a few possible ideas but like i said at the start nothing is set in stone, so please mention it if you have a good idea. Maybe it will be used.

The current plan is for sera to get a regen field which has the same function as the current regen field on the normal acu. The plan for aeon is for them to get a chrono support acu (again similar function as the normal acu). Both of these kind of fit their faction theme since the main acu already has these upgrades. It's probably gonna be relatively hard to balance these upgrades properly since the effect can be very strong, but i believe that with enough testing it will be possible.

Cybran is by far the toughest one for me though and aside from a multitude of ideas we haven't exactly gotten many concrete ideas for them yet. A big issue is that both their sacu's and acu have a lot of niche upgrades that don't necessarily fit into a preset. Right now the only support upgrade that exists on the sacu is the sam upgrade, which is fine but nowhere near enough.

Here are a couple of ideas that we came up with/ got mentioned:

• Have a damage aura that damages enemy units (so the opposite of regen aura). You can combine it with cloak which is an almost unused upgrade to walk into enemy armies to damage them. It sounds cool but the main issue with this is that it isn't a support upgrade. That isn't necessarily the worst for cybran since they're kinda known as the aggressive faction, but it's also kinda easy to counter with spyplanes (although funnily enough you can have the sam upgrade on them as well to shoot them down)
• Have a damage aura that increases the damage of your own units that surround it. This feels kinda lame for me personally though.
• Have a speed aura since cybran is known to be the raid focussed faction. The issues with this however is that it's mostly useless in a straight fight (unlike the other support upgrades) and it won't work on a lot of maps where flanking is not really an option. It also is awkward that sacu's are very slow themselves and buffing the speed of units around you will make other units slowly leave it.

If you think you have a better idea we would be happy to see it.

All in all right now we are in the conceptual phase. We (think) we got the general idea down and will slowly start implementing these on fafbeta. Obviously a big overhaul like this needs quite a lot of testing and even then there will be no way we get it right the first time, but considering the current state of sacu's we have very little to lose imo.