T3 arties - noob heaven, need rebalance

[Gorton]

Yeah, I'd be more apt to take your word for it if people here also got their facts right. You can have high APM and great map awareness but if you tell me that 20k in shields defends your base from 1 T3 arty and that it takes 3 T3 arty to guaruntee that you break through well... At some point the rating isn't what's in question.

In a few words: Shifting the argument.
Skill is not just APM and map awareness.

Sigh... you were of course going to build the power anyway. Can we at least try to be honest here?

Yes, extra power, which you still have to build to power the T3 arty, place in the right position, takes time to build. You can reclaim other t3 power if you like afterward, I guess.
Important thing to note is that t3 power's expensive and if you overbuild it it's mass that can be spent elsewhere in the meantime. I don't overflow 123131 power in a game when I do not have to do so.

You're again using non-adjacency buffed T3 arty which you would NEVER EVER actually use in a real game as your comparison point. You biased your test so your comparisons do not make sense and your rating does nothing to change that. If you take that into account (which literally none of the people that went out and did testing did other than myself... because we're all so honest here) I imagine the arty would have broken through your shields and you'd find the 14k shielding barely able to hold agaist a single T3 arty. You'd then multiply that by 5 to shield yourself for a cost of 50k or more - I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume its 40k if you really worked on your shielding - and then you'd have to multiply that by the number of players playing for a total cost of 160k mass to shield 1 T3 arty.

I have attached a replay of a t3 arty surrounded by power gens being held of fairly indefinitely by ~18k uef shields, taking about 40 minutes to kill 3 of them. Imagine if it was aeon or seraphim.

Now someone else made the point that the Arty takes time to do its damage, and that is correct. People shield the important stuff, lose and rebuild some stuff, if they had good shields in place before the arty went up they might lose less, but at the end of the day it is a unit that forces 160k mass expenditure to really stop it from doing damage, and even once its stopped it presents a significant threat for the rest of the game and has a lot of utility.

As above, it is not that expensive.

See what I did there? I conceded a point for the other side, brought it into the discussion, because I'm interested in honest debate. I'm not trying to create a bullshit scenario that doesn't accurately portray the real impact of this unit.

This is Ad hominem.

Yeah, so what's the total cost of defending your base against one T3 arty in a team game. I feel like you just didn't address the actual point here, you kind of just slid by it while pointing out that shielding is cheaper for those that aren't playing Cybran. Give me a ballpark figure and tell me that its reasonable.

Depends on the map, what you need to shield and what you don't.
It also depends on whether it's an arty race (both sides have arty, remember?) or if one side just pushes and kills or pushes and fails.
That in itself depends on the map's features.

Assisting costs a ton of mass. Getting one ED4 shield to block a SINGLE T3 arty that is adjacent to T3 power requires FOUR Engineer SCUs and costs somewhere around 300 mass per second. Its one of the scenarios I tested. I tried to do it with three and found it couldn't be done. Cost wise I imagine you'd be better off just quickly rebuilding the ED4s as they're destroyed than assisting.

Also worth mentioning that assisting with two t2 engineers is not enough to keep up two ED4s.

I'm not surprised. They are the worst possible shields. It's a bit disingenuous to have a single shield fight an arty that is much more expensive, though, as I've already shown in a replay that they can hold pretty decently with some stagger.

Okay Gorton, I totally agree with you. T3 arty is not OP because you have to spend so much mass to build it that the other team should be able to just roll you. What was I thinking? Man, I'm surprised I didn't see it sooner.

Now just bring back the 85k mass scathis with the old build times and we'll call it a day. That can't possibly be OP either since it costs EVEN MORE mass than the T3 arty. Anyone that loses to that totally deserves the loss.

=P

You did not answer my question. Why is it that you did not die while making the arty?
Also something else to note is that while making an arty, you're using mass that could go into increasing your economy.


Edit: I would like to request something else of you.
Replays.
Games, on any map, where an otherwise evenly matched game was won with t3 arty.
If it's so op, it should not be hard.

[moses_the_red]

@moses_the_red I have attached a replay on T3 artillery vs shielded bases. I've used the artillery to attack the weakest point, where shield placement was crap. I have taken care in equalizing the cost of the base with the artillery and the defending base (and that both have the same mass income and Pgens to power it all), and made sure that with one enemy artillery, there is room for an Ythota to be built. On top of that, I added mobile shields and still didn't pass the cost of the artillery base. I have done this test twice.

I have also done a test with 2 T3 artillery, where I was in turn allowed to increase my base. I have built two more Ythotas, because that's within the cost. And I have done so while the artillery were firing at the base. Something important to notice is that the Ythotas are built AFTER the arties are completed. In proper equal mass situations, the Ythotas would be built while the arties are being built. After the Ythotas are done I have beefed up the weak spot so that no artillery shell would make it through. I did this at +3 or +4 speed and it took zero effort. I might have gone over the total cost of the artillery base by putting in the last shields, but that doesn't really matter, as under normal circumstances the Ythotas would be done way earlier and you'd have income again for other things.

Finally I did a small test of 100 Harbs vs 2 Cybran artilleries. I went away after giving the harbs the orders so they must have done some weird things, but some harbs did what I wanted and well... The claim that T3 arty is OP vs mobile armies is the most laughable and ridiculous claim, as you can see at the end of the replay. BTW 100 Harbs is 50% of the cost of 2 T3 artilleries, 6 Pgens and some shields.

I really hope that with this example, you'll be able to accept the fact that T3 artillery is fine as it is and that when you have something to say about balance next time, you'll provide a replay with the claims, so we can discuss the tested method first, rather than having to ask for proof on your claims for 10+ pages, with you arguing that you don't need to do that and that we need to test your ideas, or that you use your test to claim something that is the literal opposite of what the test actually shows.

Now, can we put this to rest?

First off, great job. I'm glad to see that someone is taking things seriously and making credible tests. Everyone else here did not allow for even a single t1 pgen's worth of adjacency, and you surrounded your arty with T3 pgens. I think that took balls. I concede that you have a valid test there.

The interpretation of your tests results however... there we do not agree.

You spent 74k mass shielding the defending base from one T3 arty. When you attacked the weakest point on it, you had to use mobile shields to supplant your base and it still broke through.

In order to keep things "balanced" you also shielded team arty with 10 heavy T3 shield generators at a total cost of 30k mass. I would argue that 30k in mass expenditures for shields when the other team has no bombardment weapon is... excessive. If some portion of that money were spent on say Ravagers or better yet gunships your scenario would have played out very differently.

Your scenario was a 1v1 scenario, but in your 1v1 scenario where the side that was not faced with a bombardment weapon had already spent 30k mass on shields (again, seems excessive) you still had a mass disparity of 44k mass to keep team Ythota from getting wiped out.

In a real game you wouldn't pick the weakest spot on that base, in a real game you'd pick the weakest spot on the weakest enemy base and likely wipe that player out. If the other team managed to shield like your Ythota base did, then they'd have spent 176k mass (yes, 176k) closing the gap between in shields that Team arty has and what they'd have to have to be properly shielded.

It goes without saying that 176k mass is... a LOT of fucking mass.

So while I don't think the 1v1 scenario where someone builds a base and Ythota and a ton of shields and someone else builds a T3 arty is super indicative of what happens in games, I do think your shielding strategy is accurate. 74k mass in shields to defend a base from 1 T3 arty surrounded by pgens. Perhaps someone else can do slightly better, but I think you did a good job and think your mass for shielding a base is credible.

So ~70k mass minimum to shield a barebones base with eco and two whole factories covered from a single T3 arty with adjacent pgens.

[Gorton]

In order to keep things "balanced" you also shielded team arty with 10 heavy T3 shield generators at a total cost of 30k mass. I would argue that 30k in mass expenditures for shields when the other team has no bombardment weapon is... excessive. If some portion of that money were spent on say Ravagers or better yet gunships your scenario would have played out very differently.

Bombers are a thing that exist. It's not wise to have no shields. Nice t3 arty- would be a shame if a couple of bombs blew up all the volatile pgens?

Your scenario was a 1v1 scenario, but in your 1v1 scenario where the side that was not faced with a bombardment weapon had already spent 30k mass on shields (again, seems excessive) you still had a mass disparity of 44k mass to keep team Ythota from getting wiped out.

In a real game you wouldn't pick the weakest spot on that base, in a real game you'd pick the weakest spot on the weakest enemy base and likely wipe that player out. If the other team managed to shield like your Ythota base did, then they'd have spent 176k mass (yes, 176k) closing the gap between in shields that Team arty has and what they'd have to have to be properly shielded.

In a real game that wasn't a 1v1 you would attack the enemy with units while he is making his arty.


Plasma, I think you could position the shields better )

[moses_the_red]

Bombers are a thing that exist. It's not wise to have no shields. Nice t3 arty- would be a shame if a couple of bombs blew up all the volatile pgens?

Oh I agree, I didn't say no shields, and certainly wouldn't advocate not shielding the arty itself. 30k in mass for it seems a bit much though.

In a real game that wasn't a 1v1 you would attack the enemy with units while he is making his arty.

As someone explained to me in the scathis thread, in a team game with high mass you can throw up an arty in like 2.5 minutes. The lost mass must be seen not as Ythota or no Ythota, but as a percentage based advantage for one side.

If you divide the arty's cost by the the amount of mass per tick you have (which is 300 on many maps) then you get the number of seconds worth of eco it takes to build a T3 arty. It works out to be 230 seconds. Spread out over 4 players it works out to be about a minute's (57.5 seconds) worth of mass.

That's it, you stopped producing for a minute.

If you've been building up for the last 4 minutes, with skirmishes but no serious committed attacks then you now have something like 1/5 less stuff than the other side does due to building the T3 arty. Its not some massive advantage. With defender's advantage, you can certainly hold depending on how things play out. A 1/5th mass advantage in an army isn't insignificant, but it sure as hell does sound a lot different than saying you have a 69k mass difference doesn't it?

That's why its possible to build T3 arty at times without guaranteeing a loss.

[Plasma_Wolf]

First off, great job. I'm glad to see that someone is taking things seriously and making credible tests. Everyone else here did not allow for even a single t1 pgen's worth of adjacency, and you surrounded your arty with T3 pgens. I think that took balls. I concede that you have a valid test there.

That is including you who doesn't allow for equal mass tests in the first place.

You spent 74k mass shielding the defending base from one T3 arty. When you attacked the weakest point on it, you had to use mobile shields to supplant your base and it still broke through.

I whipped up two relatively realistic bases in a matter of minutes, where you have not done that a single time. As I said in the earlier post, I made two equal mass bases. The arty broke through and did one capped T3 mex, with 7 mass fabs and a couple of shields worth of damage. The total damage is 14340 mass worth. Absolutely depressing for a T3 artillery.

In order to keep things "balanced" you also shielded team arty with 10 heavy T3 shield generators at a total cost of 30k mass. I would argue that 30k in mass expenditures for shields when the other team has no bombardment weapon is... excessive. If some portion of that money were spent on say Ravagers or better yet gunships your scenario would have played out very differently.

Really? You're criticizing me for not doing a full end-game base to test this, while your replay test of the T3 artillery is so crap it's not even worth discussing? I made this replay to show you how to do a decent test of the T3 arty's abilities and I took my time to explain where your thoughts about the T3 arty go wrong. Additionally if you can now mention "could've built this, could've built that", why the hell have you not been able to work this out yourself in your own games and your own tests?

Your scenario was a 1v1 scenario, but in your 1v1 scenario where the side that was not faced with a bombardment weapon had already spent 30k mass on shields (again, seems excessive) you still had a mass disparity of 44k mass to keep team Ythota from getting wiped out.

What 44k mass disparity? There's no disparity. Also, I mentioned this before: the shields are there in both bases to keep it realistic. I have given the artillery team an advantage by not sending the Ythota until several minutes after the arty started firing. I even built two Ythotas while being fired at by two artillery. This is all mass already available while the other team is building the arty. I simply delayed using it. So if you're talking about a mass disparity, look at the fact that Ythotas were built later than the artillery. BTW: these are two Ythotas while being fired at by two artillery, but the base was the same that got fired at by one artillery. That was a base with 1 Ythota to attack, and be equal in mass cost. With one more T3 artillery, you can build two more Ythotas and 9 strat bombers. That is, a base with two artillery can't beat a base which has 98400 mass in attack units. To go back to the point of 30k UEF shields in the artillery base, happily substract that and I still have 68400 mass for units to attack an absolutely defenseless base. This is a point you're ignoring completely.

In addition, well Gorton already mentioned bombers. I'll also mention gunships, T3 land just rolling in and even Fobo drops. All things that players build throughout the game, which makes the other team build shields. That's why they're there and honestly, 10 T3 shields to protect some mexes and a T3 arty is basically nothing.

In a real game you wouldn't pick the weakest spot on that base, in a real game you'd pick the weakest spot on the weakest enemy base and likely wipe that player out.

Too bad if the weakest player in the enemy team is too potato to build some shields. This is the same issue but to a larger scale. If it's three bases against three bases, there's not one Ythota against a rushed artillery. That Ythota would've been hippity-hopping on the field long before the artillery was even conceived.

If the other team managed to shield like your Ythota base did, then they'd have spent 176k mass (yes, 176k) closing the gap between in shields that Team arty has and what they'd have to have to be properly shielded.

Where the hell do you get this number from? I worked out an equal mass situation and you just pulled 176k mass out of your ass.

So while I don't think the 1v1 scenario where someone builds a base and Ythota and a ton of shields and someone else builds a T3 arty is super indicative of what happens in games, I do think your shielding strategy is accurate. 74k mass in shields to defend a base from 1 T3 arty surrounded by pgens. Perhaps someone else can do slightly better, but I think you did a good job and think your mass for shielding a base is credible.

So ~70k mass minimum to shield a barebones base with eco and two whole factories covered from a single T3 arty with adjacent pgens.

2 Artillery. Even 2 don't get through. You need to pay a little bit attention with your SCUs but then you'll stop 2 T3 artillery with ease. One artillery will not do anything. Ever. You need to stop thinking that the loss of 1 T3 mex and some surrounding stuff to artillery is catastrophic and that that makes a T3 arty OP.

One last time: I put up even mass bases. A nicely placed set of shields completely protects the base. The mass cost shows that by the time the opponent has the artillery done, you've got the Ythota done. The artillery fire shows that you can happily build stuff while under fire from artillery.

[Endranii]

Just wanted to say that t3 arty is 200 asf.

[moses_the_red]

That is including you who doesn't allow for equal mass tests in the first place.

I never bothered with equal mass tests because as I said in my reply to Gorton:

If you divide the arty's cost by the the amount of mass per tick you have (which is 300 on many maps) then you get the number of seconds worth of eco it takes to build a T3 arty. It works out to be 230 seconds. Spread out over 4 players it works out to be about a minute's (57.5 seconds) worth of mass.

That's it, you stopped producing for a minute.

If you've been building up for the last 4 minutes, with skirmishes but no serious committed attacks then you now have something like 1/5 less stuff than the other side does due to building the T3 arty. Its not some massive advantage. With defender's advantage, you can certainly hold depending on how things play out. A 1/5th mass advantage in an army isn't insignificant, but it sure as hell does sound a lot different than saying you have a 69k mass difference doesn't it?

This idea that buying a T3 arty is going to gimp you super hard is wrong, at least in team games.

I whipped up two relatively realistic bases in a matter of minutes, where you have not done that a single time. As I said in the earlier post, I made two equal mass bases. The arty broke through and did one capped T3 mex, with 7 mass fabs and a couple of shields worth of damage. The total damage is 14340 mass worth. Absolutely depressing for a T3 artillery.

C'mon man, if I had whipped up a base, do you think anyone here would have taken it seriously? I'm pointing to YOUR bases to claim that shielding a base from T3 arty is expensive, and people aren't accepting that, and you have the right rating and play the right maps.

Really? You're criticizing me for not doing a full end-game base to test this, while your replay test of the T3 artillery is so crap it's not even worth discussing? I made this replay to show you how to do a decent test of the T3 arty's abilities and I took my time to explain where your thoughts about the T3 arty go wrong. Additionally if you can now mention "could've built this, could've built that", why the hell have you not been able to work this out yourself in your own games and your own tests?

I believe I praised you for your test. Said it took balls.

What 44k mass disparity? There's no disparity. Also, I mentioned this before: the shields are there in both bases to keep it realistic. I have given the artillery team an advantage by not sending the Ythota until several minutes after the arty started firing. I even built two Ythotas while being fired at by two artillery. This is all mass already available while the other team is building the arty. I simply delayed using it. So if you're talking about a mass disparity, look at the fact that Ythotas were built later than the artillery. BTW: these are two Ythotas while being fired at by two artillery, but the base was the same that got fired at by one artillery. That was a base with 1 Ythota to attack, and be equal in mass cost. With one more T3 artillery, you can build two more Ythotas and 9 strat bombers. That is, a base with two artillery can't beat a base which has 98400 mass in attack units. To go back to the point of 30k UEF shields in the artillery base, happily substract that and I still have 68400 mass for units to attack an absolutely defenseless base. This is a point you're ignoring completely.

As I said earlier, in a team game it doesn't take that long to pay for a T3 arty. The enemy team can come pretty close to getting their money back IN THE TIME IT TAKES FOR YOUR YTHOTA TO CROSS THE MAP, its literally like one minute's worth of eco in a team setting if you're talking about a 4x4 where everyone has 300 mass income.

In addition, well Gorton already mentioned bombers. I'll also mention gunships, T3 land just rolling in and even Fobo drops. All things that players build throughout the game, which makes the other team build shields. That's why they're there and honestly, 10 T3 shields to protect some mexes and a T3 arty is basically nothing.

I didn't hammer on this all that hard, its not worth squabbling about as far as I'm concerned, but the point stands that the rei sa 44k mass disparity between the two teams in shield costs, and in a 4x4, that would be a 176k mass cost (44 x 4 = 176).

Too bad if the weakest player in the enemy team is too potato to build some shields. This is the same issue but to a larger scale. If it's three bases against three bases, there's not one Ythota against a rushed artillery. That Ythota would've been hippity-hopping on the field long before the artillery was even conceived.

And with defenders advantage and a much smaller mass disparity in a 4x4 than in a 1x1, the Ythota would likely not result in enough damage to punish the T3 arty's builders. Again, its 1 minutes worth of eco late game in a 4x4.

Also, you have to admit that's a lot of shields. =P

Where the hell do you get this number from? I worked out an equal mass situation and you just pulled 176k mass out of your ass.

Again, 44k mass x 4 players = 176k mass. I just took the difference in mass spent in shields between your two bases and applied it to a team situation where one entire team has to shield up to defend from the arty.

2 Artillery. Even 2 don't get through. You need to pay a little bit attention with your SCUs but then you'll stop 2 T3 artillery with ease. One artillery will not do anything. Ever. You need to stop thinking that the loss of 1 T3 mex and some surrounding stuff to artillery is catastrophic and that that makes a T3 arty OP.

One last time: I put up even mass bases. A nicely placed set of shields completely protects the base. The mass cost shows that by the time the opponent has the artillery done, you've got the Ythota done. The artillery fire shows that you can happily build stuff while under fire from artillery.

Again, Oh yeah, with SCU assist you can definitely stop T3 arty, but in my testing its 300 mass per second to keep one ED4 up with engineering SCUs and it take 4 SCUs to keep the shield up. I tried it with three and they just fail. I suppose its less if you use multiple shields, but if memory serves 2 T2 engies spending 40 mass per tick aren't enough to keep two ED4s up.

So if you and you're entire team are spending what you were spending (and you increased your shield count for that second arty to over 95k mass, I didn't bother to do an exact calc but it was around 100k) then I think the arty has more than paid for itself.

By the way, you didn't manually target the harbingers, had you done that you'd have gotten much better results.

[Endranii]

Hey I just got new idea? Why don't we just don't let players get this sick ammount of retarded resources by forcing them to actually playing the game instead of eco sim?
Like why do you have so much eco boi?

[Ze Dogfather]

I've NEVER been more afraid of the potential of the t3 arty until I came upon this thread... at least as far as (fanfic-)theory-crafting goes. I think there's been enough said from some knowledgeable players here on the subject. Sounds nice for a mod though.

[UnorthodoxBox]

So ~70k mass minimum to shield a barebones base with eco and two whole factories covered from a single T3 arty with adjacent pgens.

So I tested two things, one what you can do while the opponent is making a t3 arty, and two, how you can stop their first and even second arty WITH ADJACENCY with only 32,400 mass.

To make things even, both sides had only 10 non-capped t3 mex and 4 t3 pgens, and 10 identical sACUs: 9 aeon engineer prebuild, 1 uef engineer prebuild. This leads to a controlled environment; identical economy, identical build power. In the replay, you can see that 2 GCs were constructed (and one even reached the base) in the time it took to not even finish 1 t3 arty. This was done on a typical 10x10 to show usual travel times of EXPs. So already, you can kill 72k mass with 27.5k mass, and have a whole other GC to do damage with. You could even wait for the second one and attack at the same time.

The second test was two parts: 1 arty, and 2 artys. 1 arty (WITH ADJACENCY, ADDING 13k MASS TO TOTAL COST) can not even break through 5 UEF shields, the second weakest in the game. 15k mass STOPS 85k mass. It even covers most the base. More base coverage would at maximum cost 4 more shields, so 12k more mass, still 27k mass stops 84k mass. 2 artys require more clever shield arrangements, even t2 shields. 10 T3 and 4 T2 could stop two arty (WITH ADJACENCY) even with my haphazard shield placement. Again they are UEF shields, second weakest in the game. Imagine if they were Aeon, or Seraphim, or I actually placed the shields carefully instead of like an idiot. Yet still 2 arty is around 165k mass (this includes the 6 t3 pgens) and the shields only total at 32.4k mass.

32.4k vs 165k is so glaringly obvious, that it makes it look like maybe T3 arty needs a BUFF. You may argue that the shields only cover a tiny portion, but imagine 4 of those set ups covering a base. 4 x 32.4k is 129.6k. That will more than likely cover an entire base, AND costs nearly AN ENTIRE MEGALITH LESS IN MASS. Hopefully this is enough to show you why T3 arty is NOT OP, but could be argued to be even underpowered (something I do not believe).