Point defense changes

[prodromos]

May be we should consider changing the role of point defenses( and shields too, but one thing at a time).
I would like to see point defense creep and early point defense positioning, rendered not viable. FA got that much better than vanilla for not allowing
base cocooning and encouraging map control. Still part of the old disease managed to survive till today. People can get away
with putting just some pds at places far from their bases and are proud they can have map control. I think map control should be viable only with troops. Building early pds without having controlled most of the map (and so earning a serious income by your skill and not by lazy positioning of some units), should cause major harm to your economy such as serious energy or mass expenditure.

I generally do not like lazy strategies and the above is not the only thing I do not consider right, but anyway. Some people will say that things as they stand today are fairly balanced, and I would not seriously disagree. But I do not like mechanics
that punish skill with more apms and let laziness stealing time to counter attacks with less apms. Why someone should be more agile and resourceful? Because someone else had the "fine" idea of conquering ground by doing almost nothing?

And to rant a little more and put a perspective from the other side. Why doing a drop of a unit to the opponent's base, that can pd-build, be effective or having more chances and less risks than dropping a hefty amount of troops with a number of transports? How much micro does it require to prepare transports and troops and safely drop them to the other side?
How much micro does it take to counter it?
Laughable amounts of micro. Yet preparing a unit or 2 that are a little hefty(see SCU) that can pd-build you to hell can prove more effective than sending 10 heavy t3 units to the opposite side and this to my way of thinking is not right even if it's balanced somehow.

[BenDover]

Aren't pds easily countered, like with a t1 arty? Besides I always thought of SupCom as more strategy focused game than a clickfest.

[prodromos]

No, they are not easily countered, but can be reasonably countered. And they do give you an unfair advantage in apms.
Supcom is not a clickfest, but pds right now cater to people with like 1-10apms who use the word "clickfest" as an excuse.
And no, strategy is not "securing" a front place safely and then hitting from the back with some "awesome"
weapon. And no I refuse to spend even 1 apm more to counter it.
And epic is not building big units or a lot of units, but being able countering all those seemingly awesome units with less
and smaller ones. Epic is doing great things when you have no chance. Many people misunderstand this word, as well as the word strategy. But tactics is what we are talking here, not strategy as a whole. I think the current situation undermines, a little, healthy tactics.

[prodromos]

.. and give even more advantage to people that are clickfest champions.

[Zoram]

Are we supposed to take that as a serious proposal or as a rant because you just got beat by PD creep again and decided your skills got beaten by lazyness ? :p

And for my own personal rant, what with the APM cult these days ? As the saying goes, "don't work hard, work smart". If you click faster and get defeated it doesn't necessarilly mean that you skills fell victim to lazyness (how does that make sense). if you died against almost nothing (pd creep), you're frenzy of fast clicks mustn't have been that efficient

Back to the topic, I disagree with most of your points.
Building a lot of T1 pd in early game costs a lot of resources, and do basically fucks up your production of offensive troops. And given that t1 arties destroys t1pd without taking a single hit, just building lots of t1 pds just won't work without units protecting them. I know, I had a tendency to build lots of defenses (because that kinda works against IA in skirmish, bad habbits ) early in the game, they get overrun and I'm dead.

Besides their weakness against arties, yes pds are very efficient, and that's kind of the point of defensive turrets :p Other rts have made the choice to have super weak defenses, I always liked the fact that supcom/FA includes real defensive gameplay into its mix.

Building early pds without having controlled most of the map (and so earning a serious income by your skill and not by lazy positioning of some units), should cause major harm to your economy such as serious energy or mass expenditure.

How do you get engies to build pds if you don't control the map ? Obviously you'd shoot them down before they're finished.
Besides that it does cause serious energy or mass expenditure to cover the whole map (unless there's only one chokepoint) with pds.

I actually use T2 PD creep a lot with upgraded ACU, and that's a high risk strategy, which works sometimes, but I got badly punished for it several times. (if the opponent reaches T2 a bit earlier than I expected and I f*** up my eco, I'm left with an ACU and t2 Pds, a few gunships and I'm dead).

And to rant a little more and put a perspective from the other side. Why doing a drop of a unit to the opponent's base, that can pd-build, be effective or having more chances and less risks than dropping a hefty amount of troops with a number of transports? How much micro does it require to prepare transports and troops and safely drop them to the other side?
How much micro does it take to counter it?

So defending is wrong, and attacking is also wrong ?
what's right then ?

I find it actually pretty hard to pull off an invasion by air. Doesn't matter that your transports are full of SCU if they get shot down in the air.

[BenDover]

And epic is not building big units or a lot of units, but being able countering all those seemingly awesome units with less and smaller ones.

And that is entirely possible in this case so what's your point? T1 pd as a standalone defense structure is almost useless if not supported by other units.

[uberge3k]

Static defense balance is something that I would like to make a QA pass on eventually. T1 is fairly well balanced at the moment, albeit with slight incongruities surrounding sera and cybran's differing artillery that need to be ensured are balanced in respect to the totality of their faction.

T2 PD is perhaps slightly too strong in some situations, primarily due to its direct counter, MMLs, being less readily available compared to T1 artillery. The reason for this is that T1 arty will generally compliment T1 tanks in T1 land army engagements, while MMLs provide relatively little anti-unit capabilities. This, combined with their higher cost, plus the opportunity cost of choosing to build MMLs over direct fire T2 units, means that T2 PD is relatively more difficult to counter than T1 PD. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, there are a lot of things about the T2 phase of the game that need to be looked at to ensure its overall health, and this is definitely one of the biggies.

Perhaps most important is that T3 PD is of very limited use at the moment. It is less cost efficient than T2, and therefore its only advantage is its additional range. Outside of survival maps, it usually doesn't have a niche that it can comfortably fill. There are a bunch of ways that this could be tackled, but many steps that need to be taken before that can be addressed.

[Zoram]

Static defense balance is something that I would like to make a QA pass on eventually. T1 is fairly well balanced at the moment, albeit with slight incongruities surrounding sera and cybran's differing artillery that need to be ensured are balanced in respect to the totality of their faction.

T2 PD is perhaps slightly too strong in some situations, primarily due to its direct counter, MMLs, being less readily available compared to T1 artillery. The reason for this is that T1 arty will generally compliment T1 tanks in T1 land army engagements, while MMLs provide relatively little anti-unit capabilities. This, combined with their higher cost, plus the opportunity cost of choosing to build MMLs over direct fire T2 units, means that T2 PD is relatively more difficult to counter than T1 PD. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, there are a lot of things about the T2 phase of the game that need to be looked at to ensure its overall health, and this is definitely one of the biggies.

Perhaps most important is that T3 PD is of very limited use at the moment. It is less cost efficient than T2, and therefore its only advantage is its additional range. Outside of survival maps, it usually doesn't have a niche that it can comfortably fill. There are a bunch of ways that this could be tackled, but many steps that need to be taken before that can be addressed.

that's funny, I'm way more "scared" by the idea of constantly changing unit roles and balances than by changing the UI (reclaim tools, eg). I'm happily conservative with unit balances.

I think t2 mobile missile launchers are very good counters to T2 Pds, and can be accompanied by T2 tanks (same as t1 arti and t1 tanks).

Edit: it's true that T2 PD is more readily available than t2 MML, but unless you build them with your ACU, it's not THAT easy to have them way before MML. And using the ACU for offensive T2 PD creep is a very risky strategy.
About T3, what do you mean, UEF is the only faction with direct fire T3 turrets right ?

[uberge3k]

I agree wholeheartedly. That is why any and all potential balance changes will be addressed one at a time, in the proper order, and with a level of testing that I daresay we have never seen before.

However, as balance is becoming a popular topic once more, I feel it is important to let people know that their thoughts and ideas are being heard and understood. In the majority of cases, including this one, what might at first sound like an outlandish idea is actually quite reasonable when viewed in the proper context. I think that it is of the utmost importance to foster and encourage this kind of discourse. Because we all care about the game so much, that emotion frequently spills over into people's posts. Looking past that and understanding *why* people are frustrated or happy with various parts of the game is how we can begin to address the underlying causes of issues rather than their symptoms.

It is interesting to me that the majority of the community actually has a similar idea of what they want. Take this thread for example: if you filter through the strong emotions and occasionally extreme examples, you'll see that everyone who posted in this thread more or less wants the same thing. We want a healthy balance between offensive units and defensive structures. We don't want 'cheap' strategies such as PD creep to reign supreme. We don't want to see overly dramatic changes to an already-working-pretty-dang-well part of the game. I think everyone in this thread would agree with those points.

[Zoram]

I like my PD creep :p
(half of the time though, it blows up in my face, mostly because I often do it out of despair (so fucked up that I send my ACU to the front to try and turn the game before it's too late, or because I'm too sleepy to properly play and can't support my ACU with any unit).

All in all, in my case anyhow ("noob" 400 player in ranked; 180 games plaid), I never found it was OP. Rarely works all by itself unless the opposing player has stalled his eco so badly that he can't do anything to defend.( happens at my level :p)