Sheeo wrote:
Have you never seen someone build a paragon and still lose? This happens--and rather often actually.
Have you never seen someone build a paragon and still lose? This happens--and rather often actually.
Sure, I've seen people lose with Paragons before, and that's fine. But that's almost always over the short term. How many people have you seen lose with a Paragon that they've had up and running for 10+ minutes? It shouldn't be a surprise that people sometimes have trouble getting a lot of use out of it right away - people in general are not used to playing with unlimited resources, and even then their play up until that point will not have been set up that way. (You're not going to build five hundred engineers before your paragon is ready - they'd just be sitting around!)
So opponents do have a window of opportunity for victory versus someone with a paragon. But given how incredibly powerful the it is over the long term it can still be considered to have power commensurate with its cost.
Sheeo wrote:
I have never, ever, heard of someone actually build 8 smds to counter the Sera ylona. Do you have a replay? And we're not considering the range of the smds here, are we?
Funny that you've never heard of it, it's been a long-know number. I have a replay that illustrates this from a recent game I played actually, I'll dig it up for you. (I won't have access to my SupCom computer for a few days though
) I'm not sure what you mean by "not considering the range of the SMDs" though, can you elaborate? I also have a much older game that is truly indicative of what I'm talking about. It was on betrayal ocean, and my opponent was largely restricted to his starting island, while my teammate and I had taken most of the rest of the map. I scouted the Yolona Oss he was building and started spamming SMD and it could not break through my defenses. Eventually he had four YOs, and still couldn't touch my base! It was only after he built a Mavor that he was able to finally finish us off by taking out the anti-nukes with the artillery.
That game was a very clear example of the limits of the Yolona Oss. He was able to, eventually, break through the SMD at my secondary bases, which allowed him to whittle down my economy in the long run. (Although that's primarily because I disdain SCUs with RAS. Against most players the peripheral bases would have been largely irrelevant.) Clearly the YO is a very powerful unit. But even after he had brought us back to an even footing economically by limiting me to my main base, he was completely unable to use Yolona Osses to defeat my base defenses. If we had made the changes that IceDreamer wants for the Mavor, he could easily have won the game with only one of those, 45 minutes to an hour earlier, because he would have been able to destroy all targets with almost 100% efficiency. That is clearly imbalanced.
Sheeo wrote:
You're saying that the Scathis isn't a game ender, and that the Monkey and Megalith cannot be used strategically? Not counting the Soulripper.
Yes, I am saying that.
In certain situations a Scathis can cetainly act as a game-ender. But its usefulness scales down as the map size goes up, to the point where on large maps it is primarily useful as a base defense. Compare that to a Mavor, Paragon, or Yolona Oss. No matter what map you're playing on you will be able to wield their full potential against any of your opponent's units that you choose, without putting the units at any sort of risk, and without your opponent being able to intercept the damage in any way.
Yes, you could build six or seven Soul Rippers for the price of one Mavor, but your opponent can see them coming a mile away, and you have to defeat whatever air force and air defenses your opponent has before you can move on to their economy proper. Fail to win those battles and you've just donated thousands of mass to your opponent. Same thing with MLs or Megas. These units are not strategic, because they do not remove the need for a conventional battle and the attendant drain on attention and risk of resources, nor do they bypass enemy forces to attack their target directly. A strategic weapon eliminates all of these requirements, allowing a player to win as long as their opponent cannot match them economically. Not all strategic weapons are game-enders (nukes, Novax, and T3 artillery, for example) but they do all share traits like I outlined above.
Cybrans have very powerful T4s, and when produced in large numbers it can be difficult for most opponents to counter them. But they still require the Cybran player to secure a path to attack the enemy, require them to put their resource investment at risk, and require them to win battles. When FA was first released Cybrans had a few strategic units, but I've seen a march of changes that removed most of them from the Cybran strategic arsenal. They already had the shortest-ranged T3 artillery, so they're more limited on medium-sized maps than other factions, although not too significantly. The change to the Scathis removed its strategic capabilities (although they were never that effective in the first place) but it was certainly justified, since not only did it make the Scathis more useful overall, but it was a reversion to its original design. The changes to nuclear missile submarines were far less justifiable, they're so short ranged now that the 'strategic' moniker is inappropriate - there's no way you can get in range of an enemy base if they have any sort of navy or ASW airforce. The only really strategic weapon Cybrans have now is nukes, and those are far from game-enders.
The more effective we make the other factions' game-enders, the less balanced the endgame will be for Cybrans. This is worth keeping in mind as we go forward.
Statistics: Posted by Mycen — 21 Apr 2014, 18:35
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