moses_the_red wrote:
From my post: "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."
Your current argument is that for an entire team (4-5 people) to protect their entire bases against T3 arty, they will each need to build many shields, resulting in a total cost that is way higher than the individual Arty. And, as far as I'm concerned, this is true. Noone is really arguing you on this point. But to use this and say it's OP has a couple problems:
1: In the vast majority of games getting a t3 arty in the first place is impossible without dying to land. It could have 9 million dps for all the 3 incoming GCs care. The only time you can really get one without falling behind in production is when you get a massive reclaim field, in which case you could also make a ton of EXPs and win anyway.
2: the other team don't need to shield their (entire) bases until your arty is done. That's enough time to potentially double their eco, either through winning map control or just ecoing. Even when the arty does come up they don't immediately have to make a hundred thousand mass down either, they can keep pulling away in eco and only throw down a new shield when their current one drops below half health. You can start out with a couple of T3 and T2 shields, eco a bit more, then get more shields, and so on.
Furthermore, I disagree that the entire base needs to be shielded. It's not gonna be devastating if I lose a t3 mex or pgen because I didn't shield it, it's probably cheaper in the first place to just go rebuild it, and if he kills it again then great, I'm happy to keep his 72k installation occupied shooting at my 4k sacrifice. And if you want, 3/4 factions can put a mobile shield down on outlying stuff, and the other has extremely cheap t2 shields. These won't stop an arty, but they will double the time it takes to hit something on the edge of the map, essentially guarding against it completely since you can't afford to put that much time into killing just a single t3 mex with a 72k arty. Now don't get me wrong, even with all this it might still take more mass in shields than the cost of the arty, but by the time it's done, the non arty team wins the exchange because they can all easily afford the shields and retain their higher ecoes.
3: The situation you are envisioning is the ABSOLUTE BEST scenario for a person trying to build an arty. It completely ignores the fact that balance is primarily based around 1v1 (edit: based around 1v1 without trying to screw up teamgames), or that for 99% of teamgames on most maps, Arty will be impossible to get. You can look at Arty from a 1v1 perspective and argue it is vastly underpowered for it's cost and should be buffed, in fact that's what several people in the thread are saying.
keyser wrote:imo game should be design toward competitive scene. There is no competitivity scene in teamgame (apart to some extend setons). The only mod that is played at a competitive level is faf ladder. That's why i prefer to keep the balance toward this mod, while trying not f*** up completely the balance in teamgame.
And if we consider to balance the game around teamgame, i prefer to balance it around open 10x10/20x20 2v2/3v3 maps.
We are already suffering an issue having tons of people playing thermo/gap, if we make balance shitier on the "open 10x10/20x20 2v2/3v3 maps" then even less people will play this maps.
^which pretty much reflects the opinion of the balance team. Not every game is a 4v4 or a 5v5. You yourself mostly play 3v3s if I recall correctly.
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