3709 feedback thread

[Plasma_Wolf]

What exactly is the OC change? It just says it's a small fix to avoid too much power drain but doesn't give any details.

[keyser]

i'm quoting the commit message

Now min damage requires 5k e (*4993) instead of 5300+. Also if there is less than 5000 energy in storage when OC hits the target, then damage and e drain will be reduced to prevent e stall and radars blink.

[FtXCommando]

Out of curiosity why was the increase in cost on t3 gunship seen as necessary now? The cheese of gunship rushing was around since early 2017 but back then it was pretty much concluded by people that the entire reason the cheese works is that it relies on a fusion of people having poor air players that got exploited and them not having proper quantities of flak. Of course it was effective because even at high ratings you can count on 1 dude being garbage in 5v5+ games but that was a fault of poor players rather than game balance. Why is it different now?

An ASF was cheaper both in mass and in e with the old numbers and so it was impossible to ever have gunship rush be meta because, well, the counter was always going to be a hard counter. Even then, interceptors do a perfectly excellent job countering a broadsword and do not require any t3 air upgrade to counter the gunship.

Anyway, to really crush with the gunships you need to build up about 3 of them to beat any competent player’s flak/shields that they should have alongside their acu. This, alongside the travel time of the gunships, would require you to be like 2-3 minutes ahead of the enemy air player.

If you went with just 1 gunship and failed to do any noteworthy damage, you likely just gifted an air win to the enemy while also gifting him the mass to build 3/4 of a strat.

The typical abuse associated with the gunship rush (1 gunship just going to kill a rambo acu that is low hp at min 8) relied on a couple factors:
1) A dude being particularly greedy with his rambo ACU
2) An air player being greedy with his bo (the rush worked best on maps where an air player would also send his acu mid like canis/hilly/syrtis and so you could remove the need for step 1 and just kill the greedy air player)
3) You had snipe mode working to not only have land players focus down flak/shields but also to suicide into ACUs to deal heavy damage and allow gunships to finish people off

With the snipe mode changes, the third factor has basically been nulled and we’re back to the original factors that existed during 2017. I do not see how we’re now in a meta where the danger of this cheese is any different than it was in the past. It just seems like a kneejerk nerf to a reasonably dangerous response to rambo tactics. It just so happens that the 1800-1900s of 2019 haven’t learned to include flak in their mix 4head.

[keyser]

Ok so there was several explanation as of why this nerf was required.

first it prevent the rush of T3 gunship of being that easy to achieve. You can get them with only 2 T2 pgen. In combination with aggressive teammates in teamgames you can pull off easily 1-2 snipes on players that under the pressure only had a few flacks. The air player can pump enough asf to stop retaliation strat even if it won't make it him win back the air. Now the rush would lead into a nearly permanent lose of the air, but the crushing situation on the land part, would lead to a fast victory quite easily.

The second point is the comparison with the T2 gunship. As of now, T3 gunships were just upgrade of them. The T3 gunship were able to have a better hp/mass ratio than the T2 gunship, while having a decent dps/mass ratio in comparison. The increased beefiness is also a very important factor in gunship vs flak situation. This match up is one of the few where increasing the number of gunship serve no purpose at some point. On the contrary having higher hp unit with more survivability does impact this match up a lot in favor of the gunship. On a side note this is why the sera T2 gunship buff made it a very powerful unit. This change will lead into forcing the player to make a decision. Does he wants to have few T3 gunship with more survivability or lot of T2 gunship with increase dps ? We change from a no brainer decision, which was to spam the superior unit into having the player to adapt his unit mix composition in function of the situation. Furthermore this can lead to interesting combo, like few T3 gunships being built to clean flaks followed by a spam of T2 gunship to do the real dps. Each unit having his specialisation.

Hope this gives insight on the decision that have been taken.

here is the change for reference :

T3 gunship
mass cost : from 1260 to 1500
e cost : from 42000 to 65000

[Morax]

What if people just use the advanced target priorities modification and keep using snipe mode on the ACU?

[ZLO_RD]

What if people just use the advanced target priorities modification and keep using snipe mode on the ACU?

No that mod won't be banned and it should be noted that it's not possible to use ui mods to get ACU target priority back.

edit: from what i understand enabling and disabling snipemod on units that are not allowed to target acu will just do nothing at all. They will just have regular priorities.

[FtXCommando]

Still feel the effect is over exaggerated. Sure you can get, for example, a min 8 t3 gunship out on wonder which is basically as fast as you will ever be able to rush it without team assistance. However, it will take until min 9 for that gunship to travel from your base to enemy air base at which point flak in base from front player hqs, leftover ints, and a t2 shield from air player can be built to protect critical power. Or hell, you coulda gotten your t3 engie out and can spam a sam up. If the air player doesn’t die, then it is no longer an autowin but is instead a gamble on whether your land players are any good/enemy ones are shit.

Because now, let’s say you do manage to kill 1 side player with the 2-3 gunships you spam up. You absolutely are ridiculously far behind putting t3 pgen equivalent mass into the gunships. At that point, enemy air will not only have asf superiority, but he can make a strat or his own gunships and accomplish the same thing.

The risk was already super high on these strats and so few people rarely actually bothered to do the rush. Way more comfortable to do a strat rush which could always guarantee to kill like 3 t2 mexes in a teamgame.

The crux is that: building broadswords on 2 t2 pgens is an all in strat. You could do the same exact shit but build an asf/huge quantity of ints instead if you had the air player scouted and the all in would be an absolute disaster.

I’d say the gunship mix thing is just theoretical masturbation. No one is gonna do that. People don’t make corsairs if they can make strats because they are slow, can’t stealth, drop way later, have way less hp, tend to bunch up and die immediately to sams. Same will happen with normal gunships. You will see t2 gunships used in ladder for a longer period maybe but definitely not in teamgames.

[Farmsletje]

first it prevent the rush of T3 gunship of being that easy to achieve. You can get them with only 2 T2 pgen. In combination with aggressive teammates in teamgames you can pull off easily 1-2 snipes on players that under the pressure only had a few flacks. The air player can pump enough asf to stop retaliation strat even if it won't make it him win back the air. Now the rush would lead into a nearly permanent lose of the air, but the crushing situation on the land part, would lead to a fast victory quite easily.

That's not really true. In my past few 100 teamgames nobody ever went for this strategy simply because it isn't even good imo. What IS more common is sacrificing a lot of eco for quicker t3 air/t3 pgen into a strat rush

[ZLO_RD]

Restore snipe mode. People who are fast clickers can still alternate between moving units in small groups and targeting the ACU. All you have done is taken one of the most fun parts of the game (killing an enemy ACU when you have your units in the right place) and turned it into a chore.

This is not exactly right. as soon as you click on ACU, all your units that are in range will start turning their turrets.
but if ACU retreats, then you have to move your units again and when you do that you units will stop shooting ACU and start turining their turrets to shoot other units cause ACU is lower priority for them. so if you will click fast and do move and then stop and then move and then stop again you units will just turn their turrets around for most of the time instead of shooting.

now we will go back to the times when you can't just tell your units to shoot ACU and move at the same time
https://youtu.be/lpOzTyfzI1g?t=838

[Ithilis_Quo]

mongoose speed nerf is fine
Wagner nerf is crap, no reason for that, and frigate nearly non-existentional sonar (on units with intel icon) will have 0 impacts (tested)
Blaze buff, blaze deserve buff, but this is way how to not do it. There are some price rules, and moving it in humble buble way is all time problem. Instead of fixing moving bugs, that actualy require some elementary skill doing only this is super lame
Fire Beetle same... Shity units costing less will not be much more less shity. It is something but problem occur, honestly i not see fire beetle 5 mouths, not sure why..
Notha - same occur on other T2 bombers as well, change it only on one? Prepare to fix others on next patch
T3 Gunships - effectiveness is a problem, changing only mass and energy and no build time will not touch problem that it wanna solve. It delays Gunship by like 10sec, so it definitely brings change on rush!
Frigates - very dump decision, that change nothing, while this is multiple time tested and this kind of "solution" not work, I was not only one who experiment with it, and all reasults with buff underwater by nerf sonar lead to failure.. now whole faf community will prisoner from it. Prepare to redone in next 2 patches.
Sera sonar is fine
OC fix is bug so fine, but not call it balance patch


About sniper mod, what I suggest is fixing Percival that is too strong, by change main target priority to T1... Yes its stupid, and bring only frustration. but at least other units will not be that weak against Percivals so fixed! This is the way how dumbas some solution can be that touch friendly to use UI instead of game stats.
Another solution - radar too strong? Nerf it by removing zoom out! Easy! OC too strong? Nerf it by necessary manual click hold fire and then 5x attack click on the unit that wants overcharge and then put fire on again - micro is important and this will nerf oc. ML weak? change target priority of Other units to target it with smallest importances. Its extremely stupid change.. that stupid that i seriously hope that will not get inspired by suggestion section higher.