T3 arties - noob heaven, need rebalance

[moses_the_red]

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).

Thank you for the post, I will watch the replay and get back to you. Always happy to see people posting tests.

[Plasma_Wolf]

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.

You're complaining about units that need to cross the map while assuming that when the artillery is completed, the artillery immediately kills stuff. It needs 20 seconds to even target, then three shots to kill a shield. On top of this you're assuming that the person who built the artillery will have his entire base protected against whatever is coming for him. Or in case of a 4vs4, that all players will have this right after the artillery is finished. It's more likely that all players defending against the arty will get enough shielding up as the shots come in, due to the artillery's RoF.

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).

The player who is going to build the arty also has to build shields to protect himself anyway, that amount to 30k mass. And the player who has to defend against the arty also has to build shields anyway, to protect himself against stuff before the arty comes along. Like bombers or a land push. That player sees the arty, and builds extra shields, to a total of 48k mass. The difference is 18k mass, not 44k.

What part about an equal-mass situation do you not understand? Feel free to think "oh the arty player doesn't need this so he can have the arty done earlier", but at least understand that if you're going this way, so am I. So your arty base has no 30k of shields? I'll have a bunch of bombers that will take out the arty well before it's finished. You're using all the mass of all the players? So will I and then I'll have a much larger land army than you to kill you with it. Needing 10 UEF T3 shields for defense while building artillery is absolutely worth considering.

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

No, it's not.

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.

Now that I figured out how you came up with 44k per player and told you how wrong it is, we can work with the new number. 18x4=72k. To be impenetrable against one artillery and hold quite well against 2 (only a bit of assistance needed)

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.

Then you're doing it wrong. Don't assist. Build a new shield next to the old. The new one will not collapse at the same time as the old one and by the time the new one does collapse the old one will be back up or you'll have a third one. After that, the shields take it in turns and you don't have to worry about it. This whole setup is even effective against two artillery, as I have shown by adding shields in the attacked spot. There I still stayed below the mass cost of the artillery base.

This setup starts to be in trouble at 3 artillery, and there it starts becoming a good thing to assist one shield with 16 hives, or 16 SCUs. Don't powerstall and you'll be ok for a while, but eventually you'll collapse. As you should because you let your opponent get 214k mass in artillery and didn't do a single thing about it.

By tHe WaY, you dIDN'T MaNUaLly TARgET ThE HARBingErs, had YoU doNe ThaT yOU'd hAVE gOTtEN muCh bEtter reSUlTS.

Now you're just trolling. This is about army vs arty and you already disproved your own theory by having only a fraction of bricks kill the arty that attacked, so you say (and didn't show). I have shown exactly the same thing with 100 harbingers vs 200 harbs worth of arty mass. The harbs were effective without micro and now you're going "Oh yOu SHOUld Have mICrOED them". Against what? The bees in the air?

[zeroAPM]

So the long and short of it is that T3 arty is only good if you're playing shit maps (thermo, gap, anything with chokepoints, etc) and you're better off building experimentals and T3 units.
Good to know.

[Blodir]

I think what you guys are not realizing about the t3 arty situation is that the reason it's so strong is not by its own merit, but by the fact that it is a really bad idea to attack in most lategame scenarios in teamgame maps. By most teamgame maps I'm not just talking about gap... but maps like Canis, Fields of the Great Phoenix, Pyramid etc.. However there are some maps where arty balance is totally fine too! For example it's much harder to get an arty on Wonder Open, because of shorter distance between the opposing front players. In any case most of the time when I do the mistake of playing teamgames my lategame strategy is just nuke into arty.

Why not just make direct fire units and kill your opponents before their arty finishes? Because attacking is just a mass donation. If you see an exp about to finish on the enemy team you have plenty of time to make a gc of your own while enemy is walking to your base... and often you don't even need an exp of your own - you can defend with just air unless they invested a lot of buildpower into t2/t3 facs pumping out flak. Even if you don't have air control SAMs usually scare away enemy air anyways. Even last ditch effort PDs can def usually. And that's not even the best part. The single most effective counter to direct land attacks is the fact that everyone on the defending team feels threatened and it's fairly straightforward for them to contribute to the defense. Even the random 1.4k (exotic) retard in your team knows how to defend vs a land attack !!!

Depending on the map there can be some advantages to investing more into map control than your opponents... you get more mex spots! Every supcom player knows that more mex is better! However in this case it's not quite so simple. The reason to this is that everyones base mexes are already t3 so a couple of t1 mexes really don't make much of a difference. Upgrading the far away t1 mex is simply very risky. First you have to invest into SAMs against air, then buildpower so that you can build defenses or exp in case there's a land attack (reinforce time from your main base is often way too long)... oops you got nuked (should have spread out your exapnsion more buddy). Having the map control is still a really big advantage (as long as you didn't invest much into getting it), but the risk is pretty high in most cases, especially since even your 1.8k teammate is kinda terrible.

Anyways let's say you did get those juicy extra mex out on the map because you invested into extra land units. What do we do now...? Well we already concluded that trying a straightforward land attack to their main base is an excellent way to throw the game so there really only is one choice... make epic t3 arty! So that's what the game distills down to. The team who starts their T3 arty earlier usually has the advantage, since they can start working on their opponents' shields earlier and thus don't need to waste as much mass on shields of their own. You can even play the meta by skipping nuke and antinuke entirely to get an early edge in the t3 arty war! There definitely is some interesting plays that can be made to contest the out of base mexes and stuff, but eventually we end up in the same place. T3 arty vs T3 arty, there is no way around it.

It's up to you whether you like this t3 arty meta or not. I think a game that reaches that stage deserves to end, because it gets mindnumbingly boring. It's very possible that without t3 arty we'd be seeing massfabs and paragons instead... would that be any better? You choose.

[Apofenas]

but maps like Canis, Fields of the Great Phoenix, Pyramid etc..

Maps where defence is so easy that you can cover 4, 5, 6 bases with single anti-nuke or you could simply throw 6 ACUs at GC to OC in one shot arent very different from gap in this type of conversation...

[Blodir]

but maps like Canis, Fields of the Great Phoenix, Pyramid etc..

Maps where defence is so easy that you can cover 4, 5, 6 bases with single anti-nuke or you could simply throw 6 ACUs at GC to OC in one shot arent very different from gap in this type of conversation...

So nearly every teamgame map that is ever hosted? I mean there's a couple of maps like OcTal or Island Zero where game is over in t1 stage... Do you want to argue about t4 balance on a map that never reaches t3?

You could make this map argument for anything. T3 OP (before patch)? Well you should've been playing Finn's Revenge! ACU TML OP? Why are you playing tml map like senton instead of astro lol noob.

Let's be reasonable though. There exists some maps that reach t4 stage and don't devolve into t3 arty war (usually). Some Wonder variations as mentioned previously, also Tabula Rasa, and I'm sure there's more. However the overwhelming majority of teamgame maps are t3 arty war maps, and I'm 100% sure that you, yes you apofenas, also play them a lot. Twin Rivers for example, probably played loads of that (1v1, 3v3, 6v6, you name it) and that's a t3 arty war map. Yeah even happens in 1v1. Fields of Isis and Vya-3 are also t3 arty war maps and you can't really avoid them with the way the map pool is set up (fortunately everyone dies before 15min because they don't know how to play the map). Badlands? BH vs me was scathis vs scathis if you count that... same for desert serenity, I had a scathis vs scathis vs zock on that. That kind of 1v1 games are not commonplace simply because players are too weak to get to later stages, so you might want to disregard them for now. But you absolutely can't disregard 90% of custom games happening on t3 arty war maps (still majority if u didn't include gap, astro etc.) and very often getting to t4 stage. What do you wanna balance the game around if not maps that people actually like playing?

By the way, I think having close starting locations for a team makes a lot of sense since it promotes teamplay. Often maps with spawns that are further apart feel like a bunch of parallel 1v1s. There's a reason people are playing the maps that they are.

Again, I'm not taking a stance on whether t3 arty *is* a problem (however I do think that t3 stage in general needs a lot of work)

[Gorton]

Relevant post

The thing is i'd call all of these terrible maps due to the aforementioned turtle heaven, but everyone's aware of my views towards maps in general so you can safely discount my opinion ^^

And yes, i'd agree with a dislike of turtle-strat late game. I don't like it either.

[IceDreamer]

Turtle existing as a strategy is fine, there just needs to be a strategy other than counter-turtle capable of beating it. Have not thought it through at all, but my first instinct would be to take a look at the T3 mobile siege units and see if they're an option for adjustment.

[FtXCommando]

You’re never going to create an adjustment to t3 mobile arty that makes it relevant to the real late game unless you plan on making them have a splash of 15 and a range of 280. Either that or nerf the late game tools to irrelevancy, but even that will still lead to games being decided by a single assault.

If you want mobile units to be used at nuke/arty/gameender phase, then you’re going to need to adjust reclaim values of t4 bots. Nothing else (at least nothing reasonable) will cause any significant change in meta.

Personally, I’m totally against changing the reclaim values, especially if it only changes a specific type of unit’s (t4) reclaim percentage while keeping the rest the same.

Also just feel like saying that I play nothing but teamgames and have zero issues with how gameplay shifts in the super late game. I don’t really get this idea that throwing enough t3/t4 at something should always be a solution to every situation (why bother having game enders if it is).

[Apofenas]

Spoiler: show

So nearly every teamgame map that is ever hosted? I mean there's a couple of maps like OcTal or Island Zero where game is over in t1 stage... Do you want to argue about t4 balance on a map that never reaches t3?

You could make this map argument for anything. T3 OP (before patch)? Well you should've been playing Finn's Revenge! ACU TML OP? Why are you playing tml map like senton instead of astro lol noob.

Let's be reasonable though. There exists some maps that reach t4 stage and don't devolve into t3 arty war (usually). Some Wonder variations as mentioned previously, also Tabula Rasa, and I'm sure there's more. However the overwhelming majority of teamgame maps are t3 arty war maps, and I'm 100% sure that you, yes you apofenas, also play them a lot. Twin Rivers for example, probably played loads of that (1v1, 3v3, 6v6, you name it) and that's a t3 arty war map. Yeah even happens in 1v1. Fields of Isis and Vya-3 are also t3 arty war maps and you can't really avoid them with the way the map pool is set up (fortunately everyone dies before 15min because they don't know how to play the map). Badlands? BH vs me was scathis vs scathis if you count that... same for desert serenity, I had a scathis vs scathis vs zock on that. That kind of 1v1 games are not commonplace simply because players are too weak to get to later stages, so you might want to disregard them for now. But you absolutely can't disregard 90% of custom games happening on t3 arty war maps (still majority if u didn't include gap, astro etc.) and very often getting to t4 stage. What do you wanna balance the game around if not maps that people actually like playing?

By the way, I think having close starting locations for a team makes a lot of sense since it promotes teamplay. Often maps with spawns that are further apart feel like a bunch of parallel 1v1s. There's a reason people are playing the maps that they are.

Again, I'm not taking a stance on whether t3 arty *is* a problem (however I do think that t3 stage in general needs a lot of work)

Not being Astro/Thermo/Gap doesn't just make map good in every way. Even Dual Gap or Gap of Rohan(if they werent shit) could be better than Pyramid/Canis at least because you need 2+ anti-nukes to fully defend your team from nuke. If you're going to balance game around that, you'll end up with absolute nightmare on map with more than 25km2 per player.

Close base proximity means that if your team mate dies you just take half of his mexes with no real effort which sometimes evolves into "just die already and i take your base" game. Full share is just a formality here: you take base instantly or 2 min later. Whenever on Wonder/Miracle/Tabula type of maps you are likely to contest that base with dead player's direct opponent.

You don't really get punished on thermo/astro/gap for your team's mistakes, on canis/pyramid/hilly you have it easier to recover from such mistakes allowing some "epic 2v4" comebacks; how much harder is it to recover from losing a player on let's say Selkie Isle?

Game balance could take that canis crap into consideration, but main focus must be 1v1. So go ahead, prove that T3 arty is OP in 1v1. I don't take non-EQ replays as proof.