Forged Alliance Forever

Re: How to make cybran not the only faction that is played e

2020-02-08T02:50:21+02:00

Any one remember

SUPER CYBRAN

Statistics: Posted by Azraeel — 08 Feb 2020, 02:50

Re: How to make cybran not the only faction that is played e

2020-02-08T06:17:23+02:00

Good post, the overall message is spot on and pretty important: Cybran's very rarely at a huge disadvantage so everyone searches ladder with them, me included. I think they do have some gaps where they don't have any options or are the worst faction, but they're small - hover is occasionally really important (not often, maybe for some comebacks from losing navy, or some specific maps that are rarely in ladder like Dark Heart, Four Corners, maybe Finn's Revenge) or arguably countering an upgraded ACU (still doable tbh, please don't buff Cybran ACUs or PD). I would actually say UEF is pretty much as good most of the time (I search UEF+Cybran in the java client), although their drawbacks are worse - crap destroyers and Janus being useless for sniping eco in particular. It wasn't that long ago that people were complaining UEF was OP, the Mongoose/Parashield nerf just leaves them at "good" and they're still pretty common on ladder (used in over 50% of 1800+ ladder matches in February so far, including some UEF mirrors).

Not sure some of the example problems are that relevant for ladder (T3 gunships, T3 navy and T4) and there's one or two things that are wrong/debatable (T1 bombers are fairly useful including UEF, as ZLO said, and the Cybran bomber is rightly the worst), but that's nitpicking really, all Blodir's fixes sound basically fine to me. I guess this is a roundabout way of saying Aeon and Seraphim are crap for ladder and should be a priority, and I can't see how 3711 is going to make much of a dent in this as it's just a small buff to Aeon gunships and the Sera ACU Regen Field upgrades, countered by a small nerf to Swift Winds and nerfs to Aeon/Sera sniperbots.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Aeon and Sera are the worst factions for ladder, because at different times in the past they were the irritatingly good due to their T1 land, which was then nerfed pretty hard - T1 land decides more ladder matches than anything else so this is the biggest thing to fix for diversity in ladder searching. In Supcom Vanilla and I think FA GPGnet days (I barely played FA on GPG) the Aurora was way better at kiting - more range and speed, possibly more HP? Based on this, I'd suggest buffing speed and nerfing range so they still win even fights with micro and lose without, but also can potentially defend expansions on open 10k maps and more easily raid, which is where T1 Aeon currently sucks and is the biggest reason I don't use them.

The Zthuee was nerfed to be the only arty that costs as much as a tank and have a minimum range of 8, due to hoverspam being too hard to counter without massive APM investment. Other arties barely cost more than a LAB and have a minimum range of 5. This makes it much worse that the Thaam loses 1v1 to any other un-microed tank except an Aurora (see attachment, I made a replay because people seem to not know this). Re-buffing the Zthuee risks making hover maps more cancerous, so it's probably best and definitely easiest to buff the Thaam's HP/DPS so it can at least win a straight fight with the Mantis 1v1. Making Zthuee good on land in a non-cancer way for water maps would be better for faction diversity but is probably a lot harder.

Edit - I was looking at the the Cybran 1v1 guide I wrote 5 years ago on the FAF wiki, seeing as those tutorials are coming up in other threads, and it starts like this lmao

Cybran is the most common faction among the top 100 1v1 ladder players due to it being strong in most situations, particularly inside the first 30 minutes when the vast majority of high level 1v1s are decided. There are very few stages of the game where Cybran is uncounterably strong, but aside from certain amphibious maps you should be very competitive in nearly all situations. As a general rule, you have more options available to you as Cybran, due to having unique units, such as the Jester and the Fire Beetle, and units with special abilities, such as stealth and splitting tactical missiles.

Fire Beetles got nerfed out of the game and I'm sure stuff in there will be out of date but pretty funny how little things have changed overall.

Statistics: Posted by Sir Prize — 07 Feb 2020, 12:32

Re: How to make cybran not the only faction that is played e

2020-02-06T19:39:51+02:00

I agree with much of what Blodir has said and his reasoning behind the suggestions makes a lot of sense. I also agree with Farms that the aoen gunship change isn't quite as big as it might initially seem, though. But also regarding sera t2 gunships, weren't those buffed a long time ago to make them already "t2.5" to make up for not having t3 gunships? And I'm not so sure I'm 100% on board with the aeon tmd suggestions because it seemed like they were different with pros and cons, but I figure Blodir understands the game so well that if he says we should make that change then I''ll take his word for it. I very strongly agree with the idea that the longer range a unit has, the slower it should be. It is very hard to adjust for that fact by changing dps or hp, because kiting is extremely effective if a unit is both fast, and with long range.

Edit: Also I had posted a long time ago that it would be nice to be able to tell if a pd would shoot the ground from where you place it, because on many maps it is extremely difficult to tell exactly the terrain features without zooming in a whole lot, and even then it can be very difficult to tell because trees can even obscure it. In contrast to units which are mobile, you only know if you picked a garbage spot for your pd, making it a complete waste, after it is finished. You can't move it, and it's rarely feasible to zoom in and try to check the terrain very closely to pick what appears to be the best spot for a t2 pd. So this can be a huge annoyance for cybran and seraphim.

So if we could have sniper shots arc a bit, could we maybe have t2 pd shots arc about equally for all factions? I would even be fine with a nerf to cybran pd dps in exchange. Especially since for t2 pd it can mean the structure is essentially entirely useless, this is a much bigger deal than for shots from mobile units.

Statistics: Posted by Steel_Panther — 06 Feb 2020, 19:39

Re: How to make cybran not the only faction that is played e

2020-02-06T19:21:28+02:00

It's a problem with all hover units that aim using the chassis, and not a turret

Riptide has the same problem, while the sera t2 hover tank has pretty epic movement because its gun is in a turret

Statistics: Posted by TheKoopa — 06 Feb 2020, 19:21

Re: How to make cybran not the only faction that is played e

2020-02-06T00:59:02+02:00

I agree that the worst part about blazes is their movement. I still remember the first time I made them. I was excited to have "super auroras" that I could use to crush my opponent's t1 spam. How wrong I was. I felt like I was being punished for going to T2 land early in the game.

I was tinkering with a mod to improve Blaze movement. Their movement felt more natural/fluid with this, without breaking the game. They still don't move like auroras, but they are much more graceful. They still can't do what aurora can do (dodging side-to-side while firing at the enemy) so I don't think it makes them OP. It just makes them pleasant to work with.

Code:: UnitBlueprint { Merge = true, BlueprintId="xal0203", Physics = { MaxBrake = 15, --- was 4.3, aurora is 15 MaxSpeedReverse = 4.3, --- was 0, aurora is 2.9, same as forward speed MaxSteerForce = 20, --- was 20, aurora is 2.9 TurnRadius = 1.2, --- was 0, aurora is 1.2 TurnRate = 310, ---was 90, aurora is 310 }, }

Statistics: Posted by armacham01 — 06 Feb 2020, 00:59

Re: How to make cybran not the only faction that is played e

2020-02-06T00:37:48+02:00

Shame it's impossible to check since the EQ changelog got taken down kappa

Statistics: Posted by Farmsletje — 06 Feb 2020, 00:37

Re: How to make cybran not the only faction that is played e

2020-02-06T00:16:12+02:00

Blodir wrote:
Let's think of some solutions

- Aurora are insane weak on certain maps where you have to defend raids on multiple fronts
- Aurora cant raid
- Aurora vs bombers
- Aurora vs mongoose/hoplites

The main problem here is that Aurora are very unreliable compared to other basic units. They are very strong in some situations and extremely weak in others. So you are kinda on the tender mercies of the map pool. Not really sure what to do about this one tbh. Maybe increase hp so they no longer get one shot by bombers and hoplites, but reduce damage.

- Aeon has no way to kill t1 units efficiently in t2

Remove garbage pathing from blaze (give it a rotating turret like a normal unit etc.) if possible, if not, at least try to play with the numbers to get it to behave a little bit more like aurora. Pathing is really the only problem with this unit. I don't even care if you have to completely clone aurora to fix it. It's totally unusable in this state.

If blaze would be usable Aeon would have a reliable way to transition to t2 land. If there's absolutely no way to make the blaze behave, then remove it from the game. Luckily aeon can stay on t1 a little bit longer than the other factions because of aurora strength in high numbers (high range means more units are shooting at once).

The obsidian problem:
They are slow units with low range = useless. Just follow this rule: the more range something has, the slower it should move. Btw fucking up this design is the main problem with t2 vs t3 as well. This problem is especially big with the obsidians since it takes a long time to build up an useful number of them and when you do your opponent already has gone t3 and they become completely worthless since they are kited forever.

- Make obsidians cheaper (reduce dps hp etc to compensate for buffs ofc) so that the transition to t2 is smoother
- Make obsidians significantly faster than higher range t2 units (all of them)
- Reduce mongoose, hoplite speed (wtf they are fast units with high range)
- You probably also want to touch up the fast t3 units that can kite t2 forever (percies and bricks are fine, harby not so much. Also maybe othuum is too slow)

- Aeon has no fighterbomber so no real way to use air control if u get it (gunship are comparatively garbage since they get countered hard by ground to air unlike corsair)

You have a few options here:
- make t1 bombers useful (recommended anyway, but not sure how you'd do this)
- make mercies useful (I think EQ had this thing where mercies did some damage over time in an AoE, that sounds like an interesting idea. Could be used a bit like psionic storm in sc2)
- make aeon gunship op

High alpha damage on the gunship is not a bad idea, because this helps it avoid flak if a group can burst down targets quickly. Another thing that might help is increasing its speed so that it can avoid ground to air defenses more easily. This would also help give it an unique identity as a hybrid gunship/bomber.

- I absolutely love restorer but sadly they kinda suck so no decent t3 gunship also no strat aoe so t3 air is worthless against land

Give the restorer some AoE so it misses targets less.

- Frigates are bad

Yea buff the frigate im sure senton bois have something to say about this. Also I personally dont mind having to build a shard every now and then, but you have to make up for this by having a stronger frigate.

- Tmd is ultra garbage on some maps and god tier on others. Its super annoying to use

Wish we could just remove this unit. It completely disables mmls, missile ships, tmls, etc. but its horrible having to build one for every mex. One thing that could help at least slightly is lowering the build time so that you can build them as a response even with solo t2 engis.

- GC vs Mega

Reduce both mega range and cost slightly, this unit is totally ridiculous.

you just totally describe changes that are made in equilibrium

Statistics: Posted by Ithilis_Quo — 06 Feb 2020, 00:16

Re: How to make cybran not the only faction that is played e

2020-02-05T18:44:10+02:00

That would completely break them and make any sort of tml's completely unusable

Statistics: Posted by Farmsletje — 05 Feb 2020, 18:44

Re: How to make cybran not the only faction that is played e

2020-02-05T18:31:36+02:00

Aeon tmd just needs something like antis have where it only fires if the dude next to him isnt covering the missle. That would make aeon tmd insanely good and bring it in line with what its suppsoed to do i feel.

Statistics: Posted by Dro — 05 Feb 2020, 18:31

Re: How to make cybran not the only faction that is played e

2020-02-05T16:58:41+02:00

- If you make some semi early gunships flaks won't have shields with them and there won't be flak everywhere.
- They can 1 shot every single t1 unit including t1 maa
- In the numerous beta games i've played i've seen them kill up to 5 t1 units in 1 volley and that wasn't an exception.
- 4 of them can 1 shot a flak

Blodir wrote:
since Aeon doesn't have bombers their air is useless once flak is out.

The idea behind the t2 gunship was to make it some mixture between a bomber and a gunship because aeon doesn't have a t2 bomber. Unlike other gunships they now are better vs flak/aa because of their aoe and high alpha damage.

ThomasHiatt wrote:
Flak will still counter gunships, especially flak with shields. Attacking flak is absolutely not the purpose of gunships and trying to balance gunships to be good vs flak is absurd. I don't really care about the range but it must matter otherwise it would not have been changed.

Why does it have to be all black and white? aeon t2 gunships aren't good vs flak, but they are BETTER than other t2 gunships since other factions have fighterbombers that are way better vs flak than gunships. I don't see anything absurd about that.

The waste of dps argument by overkill is not always as bad as you might think and also pretty dependant on the situation. Vs units aurora's and t1 arties low gunships are better because of the overkill on the aeon gunships but it isn't always by a significant amount. Just tested 1 aeon & 1 uef t2 gunship vs 10 aurora (140 hp) & 10 fobo's (170 hp). Whilest the aeon gunships do 312 damage / volley and thus waste almost 50% of their damage they still managed to kill 9 units when the uef gunship killed 10 because other gunships often shoot an extra volley even though the target is already dead plus they take some time in retargetting on a new unit (and aeon gunship can do this in the weapon downtime anyway).

Meanwhile in real scenario's bigger armies that are often moving around tend to clump up a lot more so aeon gunships can often snack more units at once with their aoe. Also vs any t1 maa or non aurora t1 tank they are way more efficient since the overkill is very little.

Statistics: Posted by Farmsletje — 05 Feb 2020, 16:58

Re: How to make cybran not the only faction that is played e

2020-02-05T14:15:34+02:00

Sera

- No t1 naval anti air so instaraped by torps

Torps are kinda OP on naval maps even against cybran, because they can clean up any stray frigates, harassment units, etc.. This is doubly true for non-cybran factions. I think cybran frig AA is pretty much in a good place - as soon as you reach a significant naval force like 4-5 frigs you cant just kill that with 1 torp anymore. Find your faction diversity elsewhere and give sera and uef equally strong AA as cybran.

Perhaps you'll look into stuff like unit speed and manuverability, turret turn rate, rate of fire etc. for unit diversity instead. I like how aeon frigate is slightly different with higher range and lower RoF. Do that to the other frigates.

- t3 land is very strong in some situations and very weak in others

Sera t3 is ultra powerful on large plains with no height variation because of sniper bots and is weak in any situation where they can't utilise the sniperbot since othuums have hard time catching up to percies and bricks.
- If possible make sniper shots arc a little so they can avoid small height differences. On an unrelated note I also want to add here that it would be cool if sniper mode was a slightly more dramatic difference.
- Either buff Othuum speed or range (nerf other stats as needed)... It's a cool design that sniper bots force enemy to engage into your othuums that act as a slow and strong shield in front of them, but it's simply not reliable enough on the weirdness of faf maps.

- Yotha is useless to begin with and then u add the fact that cybran has Mega and u never want to go late game

- Same as for GC, mega needs to be nerfed range wise (but also need to reduce cost so that cyb has a change to get mega online before first gc/chicken)
- The problem with deathstorm is that you want to keep experimentals closer to your base so that you can reclaim them... Marching into the enemy base to donate reclime is the last thing you want to do. One cool solution to this would be to have the yotha launch the deathstorm forward to the direction it was facing when it died.

- no t3 gunship so air is pretty useless

Two ideas
- Make the t2 gunship more like a t2.5 gunship a bit like jester is t1.5... More expensive than t2 gunships but much more powerful
- Make the seraphim strat significantly cheaper (but weaker) than other strats
In this way gunship and strat could cover the role of the t3 gunship a little bit better (t2 gunship covers the part where an uef player would normally make a t3 gunship after first air win to kill a few mexes, strat covers the part where t3 gunships are used for defending small t3 armies and experimentals that venture too far from flak)

(Probably strat change not possible though since some teamgame players would get cancer from not one shotting t2 mex at once in gap anymore)

Statistics: Posted by Blodir — 05 Feb 2020, 14:15

Re: How to make cybran not the only faction that is played e

2020-02-05T13:31:30+02:00

I guess for Aeon TMD you might be able to do this:
- Reduce cost
- Reduce buildtime
- Increase range
- Increase time between blocks
- Introduce random delay before block so if you have many tmds they dont all fire at once
- Reduce the time the blocking effect lasts

Statistics: Posted by Blodir — 05 Feb 2020, 13:31

Re: How to make cybran not the only faction that is played e

2020-02-05T13:18:54+02:00

Let's think of some solutions

- Aurora are insane weak on certain maps where you have to defend raids on multiple fronts
- Aurora cant raid
- Aurora vs bombers
- Aurora vs mongoose/hoplites

The main problem here is that Aurora are very unreliable compared to other basic units. They are very strong in some situations and extremely weak in others. So you are kinda on the tender mercies of the map pool. Not really sure what to do about this one tbh. Maybe increase hp so they no longer get one shot by bombers and hoplites, but reduce damage.

- Aeon has no way to kill t1 units efficiently in t2

Remove garbage pathing from blaze (give it a rotating turret like a normal unit etc.) if possible, if not, at least try to play with the numbers to get it to behave a little bit more like aurora. Pathing is really the only problem with this unit. I don't even care if you have to completely clone aurora to fix it. It's totally unusable in this state.

If blaze would be usable Aeon would have a reliable way to transition to t2 land. If there's absolutely no way to make the blaze behave, then remove it from the game. Luckily aeon can stay on t1 a little bit longer than the other factions because of aurora strength in high numbers (high range means more units are shooting at once).

The obsidian problem:
They are slow units with low range = useless. Just follow this rule: the more range something has, the slower it should move. Btw fucking up this design is the main problem with t2 vs t3 as well. This problem is especially big with the obsidians since it takes a long time to build up an useful number of them and when you do your opponent already has gone t3 and they become completely worthless since they are kited forever.

- Make obsidians cheaper (reduce dps hp etc to compensate for buffs ofc) so that the transition to t2 is smoother
- Make obsidians significantly faster than higher range t2 units (all of them)
- Reduce mongoose, hoplite speed (wtf they are fast units with high range)
- You probably also want to touch up the fast t3 units that can kite t2 forever (percies and bricks are fine, harby not so much. Also maybe othuum is too slow)

- Aeon has no fighterbomber so no real way to use air control if u get it (gunship are comparatively garbage since they get countered hard by ground to air unlike corsair)

You have a few options here:
- make t1 bombers useful (recommended anyway, but not sure how you'd do this)
- make mercies useful (I think EQ had this thing where mercies did some damage over time in an AoE, that sounds like an interesting idea. Could be used a bit like psionic storm in sc2)
- make aeon gunship op

High alpha damage on the gunship is not a bad idea, because this helps it avoid flak if a group can burst down targets quickly. Another thing that might help is increasing its speed so that it can avoid ground to air defenses more easily. This would also help give it an unique identity as a hybrid gunship/bomber.

- I absolutely love restorer but sadly they kinda suck so no decent t3 gunship also no strat aoe so t3 air is worthless against land

Give the restorer some AoE so it misses targets less.

- Frigates are bad

Yea buff the frigate im sure senton bois have something to say about this. Also I personally dont mind having to build a shard every now and then, but you have to make up for this by having a stronger frigate.

- Tmd is ultra garbage on some maps and god tier on others. Its super annoying to use

Wish we could just remove this unit. It completely disables mmls, missile ships, tmls, etc. but its horrible having to build one for every mex. One thing that could help at least slightly is lowering the build time so that you can build them as a response even with solo t2 engis.

- GC vs Mega

Reduce both mega range and cost slightly, this unit is totally ridiculous.

Statistics: Posted by Blodir — 05 Feb 2020, 13:18

Re: How to make cybran not the only faction that is played e

2020-02-05T12:31:54+02:00

In most cases high alpha damage is worse than RoF. Maybe against mex or pgen you can one shot them with enough gunship or something and then it's good? It still isn't a corsair/notha replacement though since it's much easier to stop.

The point of gunships is that they provide reliable damage but are vulnerable to ground to air weapons, whereas bombers are less reliable and prefer to focus on stationary targets but are much less vulnerable. Ie. since Aeon doesn't have bombers their air is useless once flak is out.

Can you list things that addressed my points in the original post? I read through patchnotes markdown file on the 3710 branch on fa repo and I dont really see what you mean by the points being addressed.

Statistics: Posted by Blodir — 05 Feb 2020, 12:31

Re: How to make cybran not the only faction that is played e

2020-02-05T12:23:06+02:00

Does split attack not work?

Statistics: Posted by Little Miss Murder — 05 Feb 2020, 12:23