New to FAF

[FtXCommando]

Anything associated with FAF for the casual end user will be done through the client. It doesn’t change anything in your base FA so if you want to switch between steam and FAF you are always free to do so.

[DeltaBravoLima]

Is there a way for me to set up a 'skirmish' match that I can save? I did this in vanilla FA to experiment with different adjacency bonuses and make build templates. Saving was good so I didn't have to tech up every time.

[PhilipJFry]

you can play skirmish by starting the game via the exe located in C:\ProgramData\FAForever\bin

[DeltaBravoLima]

Does T3 arty have better fire rate than T2 arty lol? I tried for UEF...

[ZLO_RD]

Does T3 arty have better fire rate than T2 arty lol? I tried for UEF...

Need to specify if you are talking about mobile or stationary arty. Units tiers are sometimes arbitrary. T3 mobile arty is not very expensive, smaller range than t2 stationary, accuracy and damage vary from faction to faction.
You can check units statis in database, or just host a sandbox game with "cheats" enabled, press Alt+F2 and spawn units in and play with them, can use groundifre or play against AI.

[DeltaBravoLima]

Does T3 arty have better fire rate than T2 arty lol? I tried for UEF...

Need to specify

Stationary. I.e. klink hammer vs Duke.

[armacham01]

Some other changes worth mentioning:

ACU can't ride in a t1 transport. Only T2/T3 transports can carry the ACU. This change makes perfect sense, for reasons of game balance. Imagine how strong it would be if a t1 transport could move the ACU in the first 4 minutes of a ladder match. But also it would be an extreme gamble because of how easily t1 transports can be shot down. The change makes perfect sense, it's just not something that you would expect if you come over from vanilla FA and it's not immediately obvious why your ACU refuses to get into the transport.

Veterancy: it used to calculated by counting the exact number of kills. Now, it's based on the mass of the units killed, and you get proportional credit based on how much damage was done during the unit's life (you don't ONLY get credit for doing the killing blow). And you only get half-credit for killing non-combat structures like mexes.

While your economy is stalling, nukes and nuke defense barely load at all. This is nice because if your economy is stalling, you probably don't want to be paying for a nuke to load. If you really want the nuke to load, you'll find a way to stop stalling. E.g. you can pause some factories or engineers until you stop stalling. It is just something to be aware of. Again it's not something that would be obvious just from playing the game. I don't know whether this was part vanilla FA. I didn't remember it being part of vanilla FA when I came over to FAF.

Shield "overspill": this is worth mentioning because it's so not something you would notice. Let's say you have a t3 power generator that is being attacked by a gunther (t2 artillery). You make a single uef T3 shield to cover it, which has 15k hp. So the shield bubble can absorb 15k damage from the arty before it drops and the pgen can die to artillery. So far, it's simple. But let's say you want to be safer, so you make 3 more uef t3 shields to cover the pgen. The total combined HP of the shields is 60k. Which is 4x as much HP as just 1 shield. But you don't actually get 4x the protection, because of overspill. When the artillery hits overlapping shields, it damages all of them. It doesn't do full damage to all of them, but the total amount of damage done (measured in HP) is bigger than if it was shooting just one shield. I don't know the exact formula for it, but the point is that doubling the number of shields over some building doesn't actually double the protection you get.

These are not the most important things, but they're things you might find surprising if you remember vanilla FA.