Remove/Rebalance "obsolete" units?

[TheGreenLizard]

Let's take the cybran tier 3 mass converter for example:

Although it occupies the space of 9 tier 2s and generates the equivalent of 12, BOTH its Cost and resource generation Efficiency is Much worse than its lower tier equivalent.

So, is there a reason for it to exist?

If I'm not mistaken, aren't there other units that are useless at all times? (not talking about units that become "pointless" because of the tier progress during the match.

Thank you for reading.

[Exotic_Retard]

*dark clouds appear*
*Ithilis appears amidst thunder and lightning and speaks in a booming voice*
It's Fixed in Equilibrium!
*house bursts on fire and people run away screaming in the background*


but yeah, its well known that they are almost completely useless. you can build them when you are running out of unit cap, and dont have ras sacus (you are seraphim bscly)

[Iszh]

t3 mass fab is crazy good only the built time and engi pathfinding desaster is preventing me often from building them. There is only 1 use but this use is great. If you plan your base from start of game and built your t1 facs that you can fit later t3 mass fabs inside 1 t3 mass fab is:

3000 mass built cost
4550 mass in t3 pgen -> uses 3500 energy -> 1.3mass per e of a t3 pgens -> 4550mass in t3 pgens
---------------------------------
7550 mass cost for:
=======================

12 income produced by itself
16 mass t3 land factory -> 4 mass saved each factory
---------------------------------
28 mass production
=======================


Just for comparing:

t3 mex with storages upgraded from t1:

(36mass +900mass + 4600mass cost+ (4x200) 800 mass cost)
6236 mass cost if upgraded
5400 mass cost if directly built t3 mex
27 mass production


To built those t3 mass fabs for t3 unit spam is like building more t3 mexes. There is only 1 problem why people cant use it, built power and pathfinding suck balls .... otherwise you could spam with such a base t3 like t1 units. A solution could be to reduce built time of those "t3 mass fab bombs" a lot.

[TheGreenLizard]

Thank you for your time, everyone..!

[Exotic_Retard]

izsh posted a great suggestion.

but lets take this one step further shall we?

so we replace that t3 fab in the middle with a t3 pgen next to 16 t2 fabs.
it takes up more space (6x6 effectively)

costs 4840 mass
provides 550 power/s
provides 16 mass/s
saves 4 mass/s (1.25% * 4 = 5% discount per fac; fac drains 20 => 19mass/s; next to 4 facs)

effective produce = 20mass/s
4840/20 = 242 seconds of payback time (also known as efficiency of investment; mass cost per mass rate)

compare this to t3 fab in iszh's post: 7550/28 = 269 seconds
t3mex (from being upgraded): 6236/27 = 230 seconds


so as we can see, iszh's stellar idea actually almost works, but t2 fabs are better anyway. bear in mind that i didn't round power use down, and instead discounted it, while iszh did. if i did that too i would get a nice 206 seconds which is actually better than upping a t3 mex apparently.

oh and dont forget that the t3 fab also has a higher energy cost to build (per mass generated), when compared to t2 fabs.

anyway hope this helps, and thank volatility for maintaining balance in this crazy world

[Iszh]

You forgot a few minor details. Both mass fabs are more or less duty in combination with a mass fab manager (which should in included in faf). Since you sometimes need in late game for different upgrades and or using reclaim for spamming exp or big stuff like t3 arti lots of e you need spare energy. Means you need to built some energy reserve income anyways which can be used by having mass fabs. So far so good. T2 mass fabs have disadvantages as well and i will try to explain why i think the change of t3 mass fabs if needed at all is a mini change.

T2 mass fabs advantages:
-cheap mass income for low cost
-good energy buffering

T2 mass fab disadvantages:
-terrible pathfinding mess lots of buildings needed 1 building t3 mass fab vs 28 buildings t2 mass fab
-low life with chain reaction ability not so nice even weak bomber can easily kill farms
-built time of 28 t2 mass fabs to rech income of a t3 mass fab is 14,000 built time a t3 mass fab needs 5,000 built time

T3 mass fabs advantages:
-one building in between factories cannot chain react explosions
-good hp so it will not be killed by single t1 or t2 units
-very good mass addon for late game base to spam t3 units

T3 mass fab disadvantages
-lots of space needed for factory mass fab farms
-you need the factories prebuilt in a correct way
-you need lots of e income prebuilt and not good e buffer if you dont have a huge e storage since you can only switch 3500-e on and off

Watching all those i would advise to do only 1 change to them and they are great. Since they have this very big ammount of e usage they cannot be used good to buffer you energy.

-> every t3 mass fab gives 10,500 energy storage

Thats 3 seconds of energy usage. That would justify their insane death explosion much more and improve handling.


EDIT: Here to give an example i used all my efforts and played this game for you to show the use of a t3 mass fab for you played in a real 1200+ game 4v4, the game was turned was interesting

4465805-Iszh.fafreplay

(430.74 KiB) Downloaded 76 times

[d-_-b]

T3 mass fabs give crazy adjacency.

for example a T3 mass fab next to 4 air factories making solaces will produce the equivalent of 42! mass per tick for 3500 energy, which including T3 pgens to power it, is more mass-efficient than upgrading to T2 Mex!, strats make 32 mass and are still more efficient than T2 mex, but only slightly. broadswords etc are also a great option for abusing adjacency.

while T2 fabs of course are overall more efficient, it's impossible to get so many adjacent to 4 factories simultaneously, as they are 1x1, limiting their potential... at this point you are limited by number of factories rather than number of fabricators, and T2 fabs don't make enough mass income to allow you to build enough of them to generate decent amounts of income by adjacency without also needing an enormous extractor eco to fund the rest.

but believe me, you can farm absolutely insane amounts of mass from T3 fabricators next to slave factories producing mass-heavy units. moreover, a single fabricator inbetween 4 t3 slave factories will not destroy the factories in it's death explosion, so it's at least not a complete disaster if it blows.

Even land factories producing percies at is only ever so slightly less efficient than upping a T3 mex.

you simply cannot get that much effective mass out of T2 fabs without enormous investment in buildtime and space.

and while you can't use the adjacency mass for other things, assuming you would be running the factories anyway, you CAN spend the income you didn't spend in the factory on other things.

interesting sidepoint: almost every method of generating mass income aside from T1 Mex, RAS SCU and T3 fab with no adjacency takes roughly between 3.5-4 minutes to pay for itself. RAS SCUs take 8m, T1 mex of course take 18s.

[keyser]

thing is that your mass "production" is highly dependent to your unit production..
if you have to get more asf to have air safe, you are going to have low "mass production" from these T3 mass fab.

[Iszh]

A big cloud of t3 units is always useful isnt it? About planes i thought that uef for example can spam janus air fabs additional to t3 asf farms. Janus has aa abilities and a good hp and ground abilities. Or as the other person told t3 bombers. The biggest issue is here again if you ever reach the stage that you could do something like this you times easier spam nukes, exp units, t3 stationary arti or super exp units. You will never spent you mass in a hill of factories just producing bombers.

For small use it could work like in my replay there i built 4 land factories for my t1 spam needs and later upgraded them to t3 just to spam t3 units. It was not much effort to place the t3 mass fab inside as a great mass addon. Same could be useful for air factories just make 4 of them and produce planes so you can use the adjacency.

Problems with t3 mass fab:
-adjacency bonus only enough with 4 t3 factories who whill spam t3 factories ever when you can get for this mass nukes and bigger stuff in late game?

Solutions (should stay some adjacency bonuses):

1.) maybe double(or simply increase) the adjacency. of course it would be far the best mass production unit, but how you can use it? only with t3 factories which is not easy and a t3 unit spam is still never seen because at this stage of the game you spam other stuff strategic weapons. If the adjacency is double you only need to connect 2 factories instead of 4 to it to make it useful. if you add 3 mass fabs arround a factory it will produce for free but maybe thats even ok who managed so far to create such a big volatile t3 mass fab farm .... not even then people would do it because t3 units in late game are mass feed and vet for exp units.

2.) add mass storage option to t3 mass fab. to be useful it needs to create at least 16 mass so 4 of them arround a mex should create 4x16=64 --> 64/18 = 356% adjacency for 4 mass fab arround mex it will produce in total 82 mass when mass fabs are switched on. normal mass storages have 50%. So with this funny idea they would be useful for adding arround a mex which you can do a lot since they cost so much e as mex booster.

both ideas are not op. 1st idea is improving them in general, 2nd idea is just improving their use/handling but not their production. No matterif something is changed or not i like them they are my good friends for building percivals

[Saxxon]

T3 Mass Fab used more in "vs AI" than in most PvP matches myself. AI doesn't deliberately target them over other stuff, whereas smart players know they blow up and will try to hit them to get the additional damage and eco hit.

The adjacency is great, and needed late game when all Mex are maxed out and occupied and it comes down to arty/experimental/nuke spam. I've made farms of T2 Fab/T3Pgen and T3 Fab/Pgen, either way something dies the whole thing blows.

One note on adjacency that maybe should be changed, T3 Mass Fab does not give adjacency for a nuke launcher, only PGens do. So I can get the energy cost from 4500 to ~1100 with 4 Pgens, but the mass demand is 40 mass even if I put 4 T3 Mass Fab beside it. The adjacency does work for nuke def.