by armacham01 » 31 Dec 2019, 02:41
Also, here are a few basic things that might help you:
Right-click on a T2 mex or T3 mex to automatically give orders to ring it with mass storages
Right-click on the "overcharge" button for auto-overcharge
You need to make energy storage in order to use overcharge. at least 5k power minimum and up to 15k for the biggest OCs.
There are many other changes to the interface and how units behave. E.g. t3 gunships won't chase after enemy spy planes now. Most of these things are so subtle that they're not even worth mentioning. You should just play the game and see how it is.
In original SupCom/FA, there was no reclaim in the water. Now, there is, which obviously is important. And you will find maps with underwater mexes. They work as you would expect.
There have been many balance changes, e.g. TMLs have more expensive missiles, that sort of thing. You can read the patch notes to get an idea of that (but of course, some of the untis have been changed multiple times, so if you're reading old patch notes some of the changes may have been changed again). I don't think it's worthwhile to list out every balance change. The basic idea is that units have been balanced and rebalanced many times in an attempt to make them all somewhat useful. We don't want to have any "crap" units that no one ever makes.
The biggest balance change is the "T3 rebalance." Basically, T2 units are no longer garbage. Combined with the "new" HQ system (it's not really new, it's been around for many years now) that makes it more expensive to get T3, you will see players actually get their tech level up to tech 2 and make tech 2 units, instead of switching from t1 spam straight to t3. Switching straight to t3 still happens but in most games, especially 1v1s, it is normal to spend a lot of time at tech 2.
A major balance change, at least for team games, is how much damage ACUs do when they explode. They do less damage to buildings now, so you can't just sacrifice one player's ACU to wipe out the enemy base. The magic number to kill an enemy ACU with your own ACU death is 2500 hp left on the enemy.
They fixed sharing, meaning that if "full share" is not turned on in a team game, units built by you will die right after your ACU dies. If you give them to a teammate before you die, they still self-destruct.
One of the balance changes is to unit movement. "Hover bombing" is less of a thing now.
Quantum Gateways now give you multiple options for pre-upgraded SACUs, which can be easier than trying to upgrade them. Also, you can upgrade multiple SACUs at once if you just select them. It's not like the bad old days when you had to click separately on every SACU in order to give it RAS. You can queue up ACU upgrades as part of a list of queued orders. So you can say, "go here, build 3 flaks, then get T3 engineering upgrade, then build a SAM and a T3 pgen" - as long as you are holding shift you can queue up all those orders.
A lot of units that used to do friendly fire damage, now don't do friendly fire damage. Mostly it was done to prevent abuses during team games, like using TML to snipe an allied ACU. But there are still many weapons that deal friendly fire damage.
Air staging is now a t1 building instead of t2. I don't know if it was always like this, but air staging is a very mass efficient way to repair your planes and of course you refuel them too.
T2 arty has a giant minimum range now.
Another aspect related to friendly fire is whether friendly units will collide with projectiles. For example, if your ASF flies under a friendly a strat bomber, the strat bomb wont trigger if it his your ASF. But it will still trigger if it hits an enemy ASF.
I'm told that adjacency bonuses are more important now than they were in vanilla FA. So you will see people make an "air grid" that is multiple air factories with a lot of pgen adjacency. The classic version is a t3 air grid that is a checkerboard pattern of t3 pgens and t3 factories, but you will also find t1 and t2 versions. Engineers assisting factories don't get adjacency bonuses. So if you assist air factory with engies it can cost a lot of power. not necessarily a bad idea (sometimes, it's absolutely the right decision) but it's something to keep in mind.
Many of the integrated mods like Zulan's hotbuild have keys you can bind. So definitely pull up the key binding menu and take a look at your options there. For example, I have 1 bound to "select nearest idle air scout" and 2 to "select all fighters" which makes it eaiser to move air around the map.
Hold "ctrl-shift" while you're playing to show where reclaim is. Anything bigger than 9 mass will show up on your screen.
I don't know if this was part of vanilla FA, but you can order transports to drop just 1 unit, or just specific units, and then fly on to some other place. So if you have 5 engineers loaded, you can order the transport to drop them in 5 different places.
There are a lot of resources built in to the client. We have tutorials now, the unit DB, replay vault (you can watch games while they are happening, or look up games from today or 5 years ago), mod vault, map vault. For example, if you want to get a decent build order for one of the ladder maps, you can search the replay vault for ladder games by high-rated players on that particular map. You could search for games where the map name contains "Desert Joust", the game mod name contains "ladder," and one of the players has a ladder rating of at least 2000 points. If you watch a few replays you can find someone who has a good build order and steal it for yourself. And it's not just the build order, it's also the way they play the map. Do they get quick t2 land? Do they make 4 air factories? Do they make 15 land factories even though they only have 12 t1 mexes? That can give you ideas to try to out. Then you could host some custom 1v1 games on that map, and play it 20 times in a row, which is a lot less overwhelming than trying to play on 20 different maps.
