about shields, repair and sam vs t3 air

[Myxir]

in chat today, some people came up with many ideas, some are good, some are too extreme, but check them yourself


suggestions on shields

make shields not to recharge at all
yep, that means once the (let's say) 15k hp of your shield are broken, your shield won't recharge at all.

increase energy costs for recharging shields
when shields are down and recharging, you'll have to use alot more energy to recharge the shield (instead of 100 while beeing 'alive', about 300 when recharging), so spamming shields is still possible but having too many of them down might crash your energy income and you'll face your whole army having now shields on due to energy problems

combined/shared hp of overlaping shields
overlaping shields would have sort of combined hp, means if one gets damaged, they all get damaged, if one breaks, all overlaping shields will break. to which extend shield hp may sum up in this case needs to be tested ( 3 overlaping shields must not be 3x shield hp but alot less)

disable shield regen while beeing damaged
as the shield regenerates even while it's beeing attacked, breaking shields is hard if you don't have alot dps because it regenerates more hp if you need longer to crush it
that's why shield regen should be disabled until the shield is not attacked at all for about 5 seconds straight, then it starts regenerating hp

the shield generator will suffer when shields are attacked
at the moment, your shield can get attacked, crushed and recharged over and over and over and over again, there's nothing to do there
my suggestion here is, the whole shield hp is worth about ~20% of the shield generator hp, if the shield gets attacked, the generator will slowly lose hp and eventually break if it's attacked/recharged too often without beeing repaired



about repairing

we all know it, if your nice exp bot (or any other, just an example) is close to death, why not bringing it into your base, killing it, reclaiming the ~90% mass and building a new? that's the current situation, you pay about 10% mass and some energy to build a new bot which replaces the old one
the suggestion here is, why not make repairing easier and also more cost effective? having repair cost only about a third or half of he unit costs and also increasing the repair speed would make repairing a useful feature again



sams vs t3 air

as t1 air gets bashed by t1 aa like t2 by t2 aa, one might notice that t3 air is alot better in this case
to break the t3 air superiority without having asfs on your own, i suggest something like this:
t3 sam launchers will have 6800 hp ( about 2/3 from before ) but won't fire all on one single unit and have higher muzzle velocity

[Eukanuba]

In a sense FA is two different games: fast-paced games on 5 & 10k maps and eco/experimentals on 20k+ maps. It seems that these suggestions are made with the latter type in mind. Personally I think that 1v1 gives a truer representation of the game when you're looking at balance and so on, because teching and turtling is not really viable and so you have to use units at all levels of the game.

In some cases bad balance only becomes really apparent on big maps, such as 3599 Restorers and ASFs, but in more cases large team games can give a distorted view of the game's balance. Say for instance two players on one team focus on T3 air, but only one player on team two does. Team one will get air superiority and team two will be virtually unable to get it back and will probably lose. Is this because air is imbalanced? No, it is because team games allow the dynamics to be distorted in a way that 1v1 (or even 2v2) does not.

[Ghoti]

Eukanuba. That's like saying in 1v1, because one player might not try to get air domination, it might distort the perspective that air is imbalanced.

about repairing: I agree

everything else strikes me as iffy.

[Plasma_Wolf]

A question to Pilot (and possibly FunkOff). How is the shield mod going on? That'll easily solve all issues with shields.

[uberge3k]

It's currently in use, but still not enough of a nerf.

[FunkOff]

It's currently in use, but still not enough of a nerf.

Zep could always up the overlap penalty. 100% penalty, vice 20%, would eliminate the majority of the benefit from overlapping.

[pip]

It's currently in use, but still not enough of a nerf.

Zep could always up the overlap penalty. 100% penalty, vice 20%, would eliminate the majority of the benefit from overlapping.

Or maybe increase the default recharge rate of all shields by around 10 seconds, so that the penalty is also increased, but non overlapping shields also a bit less strong.

Even if you take the UEF shield boat, which has 32 seconds recharge (one of the higher recharge rate), since it has a speed of 7, it's very easy for the player to get it out of harm's way and bring it back just 30 seconds later to reprotect the fleet.

Most of the other shields recharge even faster (around 20 seconds, more or less). The only shield that has a quite high recharge rate is the Seraphim mobile t3 shield, with 45 seconds recharge (and with overlapping nerf, that must become really high). All other shields could have +10 seconds recharge as default value, and fire bases wouldn't be that hard to crack (t2 static shields have around 15 seconds recharge rate only).

[Softly]

I think it is a big enough nerf, whenever I've used multiple shields they've had the same health obviously but once they go down thats it, you need to build another shield army. They just don't come back up atm.

[Varaxis]

How do aircraft repair so cheaply on air refueling stations and in carriers? Is that code transferable to repairing land units?

[dstojkov]

Hi guys,


I didn't really understand your passion to nerf the shields .... actually if you guys don't know how to break a shield turtelling it's not a reason to push getting them nerfed.

No one complain on 3599 ... the air is kind of useless now. What are you aiming for ? delete the shield ? For what for actually ? Some people like turtelling .. it's a strategy after all it can work but the experience shows that it likely will not make you win the game.

If you absolutely like make suggestion on how to nerfed a game till death I think you didn't post on the right forum .. for that there is Blizzard forums.

Make ssuggestions on how to specialize a faction in that way that each are good in something and not that good in other one making de facto a auto balancing.

"Nerf/buff" strategy is the signature of a bad design no matter the point of view

Regards