New Mod: ArtiMod

[armacham01]

ArtiMod is available to download from the vault. (Current version = 2, released today, April 9, 2019)

ArtiMod rebalances the cost and availability of buildings as follows:

T1 pd - 10% price reduction
T2 pd - available to all factions, 10% price reduction (20% for Cerberus)
T3 pd - available to all factions

T2 static arty - 40% price reduction
T3 heavy arty - 30% price reduction (40% for the Aeon Emissary because its DPS is so much lower than for other factions)

This makes it much more feasible to make T2 artillery and point defense for siege lines or creep. My hope is that this mod can shift the balance towards a more turtle style of gameplay that certain players like, while still preserving the broad range of options available in FAF.

The mod is intended more for Seton's/Wonder/Canis than for Astro/Rohan/Dual Gap (which are already pretty turtle-y). And also for custom 1v1s (where I don't think the mod would have a huge impact; even with a 40% price reduction on T2 arty it's not usually a great investment). My expectation is that this mod should not ruin the FAF experience on most maps, it would just shift it in a certain direction (that some players like and some players hate). My expectation is that a Canis game would still be a lot of fun, with air snipes and T4 and nukes.

What do you think?

[Franck83]

On seton's games, it could be useful to protect naval factories on the sea bed.

But like all sim mods, it makes the game unrated.

[DDDX]

I think that having your teammates donate you heaps of mass when you are starting to make turrets in the front line for the entire team accomplishes the same thing.
Giving everyone the same tech breaks balance of the factions - for example, Cybran have superior tml, give them t3 turrets and you have yourself a very strong front player.
T2 arties cost much for a reason - that reason being that it's very hard and costly to defend against them - several of them have more firepower and range than a Fatboy.

There are better ways of being turtle-y. For example, having your eco player make 2 t2 pgens very early on and giving them to the front player, so that you dont have to worry about energy and can focus more on shields+stealth+more mass left for turrets. Yet you rarely, if ever, see this happen in game.
Providing better intel to the front player, so that you spot that Monkey or that GC earlier and have time to react in time, or just to simlpy TARGET and hir the stealthed/unspotted enemy...


40%...is a lot. Specially for the t3 arty. And I am not sure about the Emissary - what do you base the info on? Because if it's the infocard - you need to know that the numbers there do not take DoT (damage over time) into account. And Aeon's t3 arty is the only one that does DoT damage - look in it's blueprint and you will see
"Do TPulses
2
Do TTime
2
"
Meaning that it does initial damage as stated, then over the next 2 seconds it applies that damage 2x more - meaning x3 total dmg output.

Ok...I guess the mod is better than the Defenses Expand x1.3x or x2, where dmg and range go up while costs go down... those are completely overpowered...

[armacham01]

Thanks. I sandboxed the Aeon T3 arty and it looks like it does double, not triple, the damage. Which is still a lot - Aeon T3 arty is some of the best in the game. So obviously I was wrong to discount it more. Also, the unit DB makes it look like Aeon arty has perfect accuracy. It has excellent accuracy, but it's not perfect.

One of my goals with this mod was to make sure that units still had the same balance in terms of range, damage, etc., that the only change was to cost, because I didn't want people playing this mod to have a worse understanding of units relate to each other. For example, "can 5 T2 artillery pieces stop a fatboy?" "Can 12 light artillery blow up a cerberus turret?" The answers to those questions should be the same with or without ArtiMod.

Mostly I just wanted to make a mod to see if I could. I don't play with ArtiMod and I doubt anyone else does either.