Experimental Citadel MK2 - Broken?

[SmoothApproach]

Hi all, I noticed a weird difference between current Blackops Unleashed v6 downloaded from gpg forums that I play in single player skirmish or over hamachi and from blackops currently featured with FAF client. I noticed this in already a few games that I play with my friend on FAF, he always plays UEF and I play Cybrans. No matter what kind of air supremacy I manage to get I notice it all ends when he builds his Citadel MK2. Whatever gets near this experimental perishes, and I was ok with it, but was a bit concerned when it took 40 ASF with some heavy gunships on its own ( he just rolled it to the middle of the map alone -.-), and I noticed it had FULL veterancy after that, 5 stars and over 100k hp and a sick hp regen, with about 50 kills.

Because of that I hosted few custom sandbox games on faf and on my normal FA Blackops V6 mod in single player skirmish to test it by spaming some units. And I noticed why this unit was so broken. In FAF Cybran ASF have 1700 hp and cost 350 mass, and 40k energy while in original blackops v6 they have 2450 hp and cost 400 mass and 20k energy. I said ok they nerfed them for FAF, I can dig that whatever, I could adopt I thought. But then I noticed that Citadel has same HP in both versions and costs the same amount of mass and energy, but in FAF it needs only 5 kills to get a veterancy, and in Blackops v6 in needs a reasonable 20 kills for a first star. Each time it gets a star it increases its hp and regen, and in FAF this happens extremely fast once you send your entire air force on it and it takes them out like they were from paper and rolls out with 5 stars after 25 KILLS !!!!! It’s kind of frustrating when you can’t kill a single unit with nothing except yourT3 anti air turrets, and it crushes your entire air and does there whatever it wants and is too fast to catch it with ground t3 anti air, which also needs ages and huge numbers to kill it since it gets veterancy after killing 5 of them. Its really fun mod and I love FAF, but I am afraid I won’t be playing it over FAF with my friends until this balance gets in order a bit, I haven’t tested other factions units vs UEF, but as Cybran i need to completely give up from air when I play vs UEF. I also tried gunships and the results were the same, in blackops v6 its manageable and playable, in FAF its still practically unkillable. It would be playable if its veterancy gets same numbers as in blackops V6, although I also liked stronger ASF because they felt more like Air SUPERIORITY than those nerfed versions in FAF, but that’s a topic of another discussion

Edit: I checked and in FAF Citadel needs only 30xp for a single lvl, way less than any other experimental (only 5 tech 3 units), i cant see how much xp in Single player skirmish (blackops v6), guess its a feature of FAF ( i have GAZ_UI in both), but it takes 20 tech 3 units for first lvl (big diference)

Sry for a long post and mistakes if I made them.

[SmoothApproach]

Well since nobody is answering this thread yet, I've done some research as to try to determine a problem, first I thought that the problem was in _unit.bp file of Citadel so I looked, found and took both of them (unit name is BEA0402_unit), one from “unleashed.bo” from FAF and one from Blackops v6 from my original FA install mods directory and compared them, and found no difference, Veterancy lvls seemed to be the same in both files (only difference was in file paths, logically). I than even compared .lua (script) files, and also the same result.

When I started googling for FA veterancy I stumbled on a thread: http://www.faforever.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=1482&start=20.
It appears you guys from FAF have done tinkering with veterancy system that’s causing this problem with certain units.

2) Tuned down xp values : After a lot of testing, I believe the xp values for each tier should be more like :
1 xp / 3 xp / 6 xp / 50 xp, to prevent too fast boost at different levels.

That would explain how 5 kills on ASF get him one lvl (5*6xp=30 xp wich is listed as a veterancy lvl in BEA0402_unit.bp)

I believe that is the reason this unit gains lvls so fast now, also noticed it on T4 Cybran experimental dreadnought. I think mod developer should look into this numbers on all of experimentals, and increase veterancy lvls accordingly.

I could provide assistance for that but I am very novice at this, I use notepad++ to tinker with those units stats

PS: Is it possible to use blackops balance changes on units in featured blackops mod, I noticed ASF for example aren’t as nerfed there.

[ExavierMacbeth]

Yea the vet thing we arn't going to be able to do anything about since thats a global change the FAF team applied. Our balance values where written for v3599 (though we have checked 3603 Steam version for compatability). We haven't and currently have no plans to go through and make global balance changes to account for the various 36## versions the FAF team have created for the game. Not because we don't like them, heck i haven't even looked at most of them, but because none of us have really had the time in a while.

I was under the impression that the Balance mod was one of the checkbox options you get when you launched the Blackops Feature mod. If its not there then we might need to poke the FAF devs again to see why it wasn't added. I was under the where planning to make it so you can select Unleashed, ACUs, Balance, Naval Balance, & SpecWep in any combination you wanted when you launched Blackops as a feature mod. Been a while since I have looked though. Cause per the Blackops Balance Mod each ASF should have 2000 HP... and even then we only modified HP, Fuel, & Costs on the ASFs so any other changes that where made during the balance patch (if say damage was lowered) would still be in effect even if balance mod wasn't running.

[Saxxon]

Zombie thread, but I also had a similar problem with a mod that boosted the Czar and Awasah AA. A Czar was approaching my base, I sent 30+ ASF at it which would normal rape it by the second pass - it killed 3/4 of them on the first pass and healed up as it gained veterancy. Between the ASF and T3 anti-air it was down to 12k health - out of the roughly 70-80k it has after leveling up. Not sure which mod it was, we had a few running. The only one I saw that had anything remotely to do with this would have been the Atlantis mod that perhaps also tuned some other races experimentals as well (not sure if it did or not).