balance advancement

[keyser]

I (or the other member of the balance team) might post from time to time the progress that have been done.

Here is a prototype of the scathis redesigned by turin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOq8VOFOimM

hate, share, comment.

[Turinturambar]

this version of the scathis is meant to devestate large areas and can wipe out whole bases in a few salvos. Opposed to a Mavor it is not able to break through assisted T3 shields. It usually doesn't even manage to fully deplete the T3 shields over a base in one salvo. Since it shoots all shots in one round it is easier to change targets in comparison with a mavor where retargeting after each 1-2 shots is needed if you want to destroy economy.

[Apofenas]

This may look and sound good, but you guys forgot to mention a couple critical things about such Scathis redesign.



https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/2686/files

As far as I can tell, thing which costs 220000 mass should be considered as a game ender, right? So how do you plan to have game ender which " It usually doesn't even manage to fully deplete the T3 shields over a base in one salvo"?

The video shows its poor accuracy at ~15km distance. Will it ever hit its target on 81x81 km map?

I used Gentleman's Reef (with around 30~35 km from top to bottom islands?)
1 salvo: 1/20 shots hit the target

Spoiler: show

3 salvos: 5/60 shots hit the target

Spoiler: show

4 salvos: 8/80 shots hit the target

Spoiler: show

Game ender needs to kill key targets and key targets are going to be heavily shielded. There, I placed some valuable targets for Scathis on an island for testing. 15 salvos, no shield assist. Nothing broke.

Spoiler: show

Yes, this is not a very realistic situation considering the amount of shielding and mass invested... yet Mavor+4pgens actually broke that shit.

Spoiler: show

I'm not quite sure if that is a good thing or not, but Scathis counts as mobile unit. It disapears from your map once you lose radar or vision on it. This would probably make it way too annoying for you to fight back since your arty would lose its target and switch to something else...

[Farmsletje]

The video shows its poor accuracy at ~15km distance. Will it ever hit its target on 81x81 km map?

It is well known that balance is made for 5/10/20 km maps and not for 40 or 80 km maps.

Game ender needs to kill key targets and key targets are going to be heavily shielded. There, I placed some valuable targets for Scathis on an island for testing. 15 salvos, no shield assist. Nothing broke.

Because all game enders have to do the exact same? No thanks. The scathis' task will be to easily and quickly kill entire bases, but NOT to kill key targets. If it could do both it would be completely busted.

Also fyi, damage numbers weren't properly looked at. This was probably just a quicc example

[Apofenas]

There is huge difference between "easily and quickly kill entire bases" and "damage every single shield in area and break nothing"

If you get your game ender at same time as your opponent, you probably want to kill it in a first place, right? There, got some seton test for you to show what I mean:

Spoiler: show

3 min after

Spoiler: show

this should show how Scathis damages the entire area - unshielded and badly covered things are dead, but nothing important died.
p.s. Mavor broke that no problem

If the opposing game ender is Paragon, Scathis would never break through shield assist and probably there would be a couple Salvations firing back after those 3 minutes. If that would be Mavor, Scathis wouldn't even live a single minute.

I mean, I like the whole concept, but it is all useless if you spend 220k mass to kill low-priority things under small or no shielding. Pretty much same 10x10 game ender exept it costs extra 200% mass now.

For current concept I'd suggest:
1)decrease firing randomness to 0.25-0.3
2)decrease damage to 1k
These 2 changes allow Scathis to concentrate more damage on smaller area and basicly annihilate heavily shielded bases because of huge 1000DPS, 14 AOE and shield overlap mechanic. This still has problems against strong shield assist.

3)decrease maxrange to 1400~1600(from 30 000).
Just so you know, Mavor has 4000 maxrange and that covers around 80km radius. 30 000 is around 1500 km(?). Range similiar to Salvation is more than enough.
As I already mentioned, Scathis is mobile unit and it would need constant vision or ground fire in order to shoot back. That is huge pain in the ass on big map. At least you'd have some small idea where Scathis could be.

4)cosmetic Change MuzzleSalvoSize to match the amount of barrels. Scathis has 6 barrels so it should be like 18 or 24 shots per salvo so each barrel shoots same amount of projectiles.

[Turinturambar]

this implementation of the scathis is able to break unassisted shieling, but only after 2-3 rounds of fire. it is exactly not designed to kill assisted shielding since we already got the mavor for that (which cant kill a para with hardassisted shields either btw). if you want to kill a gameender you should opt for a mavor (since gameenders mainly appear in teamgames it can be assumed that each side has the required tech in at least half of their games).
also a whole base isnt a low priority target and denying the enemy team most of their bases can win you the game too long as they dont have a para.


the newest version has a proper range (mavor range).

[Blodir]

It's super cool, but I kinda agree with apof. At game ender stage it would be useless.

[Turinturambar]

that depends a lot on the gamesituation. e.g. if youre on setons with both oceans lost im pretty sure a mavor would weaker than that scathis. whereas ofc you dont want to build this scathis, instead of a mavor, while the opposing team is rushing a para while on even eco.
since theory crafting doesnt make much sense in this case (sure I can build a base in sandbox and kill it but that doesnt say too much) i think its better to rebalance it after seing it used in a few games.

[____]

That is an insane amount of shielding in your last screenshot. With shield toggling and/or shield assist literally everyone could hold off a mavor indefinitely. Even with full pgen assist. Especially considering that guy has a para

This amount of shielding is pretty unrealistic, especially considering you built the para where the air grid usually is. You don't have that much space to spam shields usually. The only places where I could imagine this number of shields happening is on gap or 2gap since you have flat terrain and an insane amount of space. I find it highly unlikely that your situation will occur very often outside gap, and definitely not on setons.

Btw a salvation won't break that either - and in addition to that will be even worse for killing spread out pgens and such.

[Viba]

That reminded me of the EMP scathis in some gala balance version, it had longer range and lower damage but brutalized bases in a devastating fashion. Now I don't know how the values match up with this one but if this is anything similar, it deserves the game ender status and might even have to be nerfed

On paper the long range low dmg scathis didn't feel that significant, but in-game it was something else.