EvanGalea wrote: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.
Evan, I'm responding to you because I think you're one of the more reasonable people on team "arty's fine". You at least acknowledge my arguments, and I don't have to go back and explain the same shit I was posting about 12 pages ago to you. Thank you for being a part of the conversation, its nice to have a sane person to debate with from time to time.
First, I'm going to kind of re-iterate all of the arguments I've been making, so that everything's on the table and so no one has to scroll back through pages to understand where I'm coming from.
1. Arty is extremely powerful, and can even counter T3 land well (similar to an assault experime ntal) if you choose to use it that way. The reason its not used that way isn't that its not capable, but that there are almost always more attractive targets.
2. Arty is cheap in comparison to the mass output of a t3 economy on high mass maps. On many maps each player will have a mass income of 300 or more mass per second. In a four player game on such a map (or a 1 player game with the same number of mexes if the mexes have been teched) T3 arty's 69k mass cost takes less than a minute's economic output to cover. To see this for yourself divide the cost of artillery by the mass income of 4 players. 69,000/(4 * 300) = 57.5. It is not so costly it can't be build on all map types.
3. To defend against arty costs a huge amount of mass in defensive shielding, a mass cost far higher than the cost of the arty on most maps. Plasma wolf created a test while he was arguing for team "arty's fine" where he created a base with 72k mass in shields to defend against one arty with T3 power adjacency boosts as an example. He did this on a 3 player map, so in a real game you'd have to multiply that by 3 getting 216k mass in shields to defend against a T3 arty.
4. T3 arty isn't that different from the old 85k scathis, yet everyone agrees that the scaths is OP for some odd reason while believing that T3 arty is just fine.
5. T3 arty is why its been so difficult to balance the Novax and Scathis. To make them worth building they have to be cost competitive with T3 arty, but T3 arty is so OP that if you do that people will see units these faction specific units as grossly OP.
6. T3 arty should probably occupy a middle ground between T2 arty and T4 game enders. It currently does not, its slid so far to the game ender side that people now consider it to be a game ender. This also means that in addition to eclipsing the Novax and Scathis, T3 arty also eclipses true game enders like the Mavor, yolanda oss or Paragon, reducing unit diversity in general.
7. T3 arty is an old unit, and is therefore familiar, but people should not make the mistake of assuming that anything old and familiar is as it should be. Arty is also balanced since all factions get one, but people need to recognize that it is possible for a unit to be balanced but also overpowered.
You are currently arguing against point #3. You're saying effectively that you don't care if arty forces a greater cost on the defender than the cost of the arty itself in shields, because you can just not pay the cost and start losing eco (mexes).
Lets go through your points in turn...
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.
This is incorrect, not only because of my "on paper" arithmetic in point 2 above, but also because Blodir has come in and said as much. On maps where teams or players get mass incomes of around 1000 total mass per tick, a T3 arty just isn't out of reach due to defenders advantage.
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.
The way eco is structured in this game, it gets much harder to increase after you've capped and teched all your extractors. You can't double your eco with a minute's worth of eco production after you've hit T3 mexes. That said, lets do the math to see how it would go if you tried.
Lets forget about power completely and just assume that you somehow have unlimited power and it costs nothing, and you're going to pour the 69k mass that the other team spent on an arty into eco. If you did this, and built T2 mass fabricators, you'd wind up with a mass income of 345, which sounds really good at first, until you remember you're in a game with 1200 mass in income per tick. Its about a 25% mass income increase.
If you were to factor in power costs, it would be significantly less. If you factored in shield costs to stop it from being blown up a second after that arty is turned on, it would be considerably less still. If you factor in the shields that you have to build to protect your normal eco from the arty which you already conceded costs more than the arty itself... it just gets worse and worse. Out ecoing a T3 artillery piece just isn't a valid strategy. It will destroy your eco far faster than you can increase it due to the cost of shielding your eco from it.
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.
Okay, you're not the only person that's said something like this. FTXCommando said something very similar, so lets go into this in detail.
Losing 3 T3 mexes and mass storage costs 16,200k mass to replace, and if the mexes are kept down for 5 minutes, you also lose 24,300 mass in income, or about 1/3 the cost of a T3 arty. That is 40k in total mass losses just for losing 3 T3 mexes.
How long do you think it takes for a T3 arty to kill 3 mexes? I haven't bothered spinning up a test game for this, but I'm guessing something less than 30 seconds if unshielded, and less than 1.5 minutes if insufficiently shielded meaning 2-3 shields. If that's all true then you're talking about losing 40k mass every 1.5 minutes. The arty pays for itself killing just 6 mexes and should do something like 120k mass damage every 5 minutes.
Hopefully this all puts to rest the notion that a T3 artillery piece is ignore-able.
The reason you and others intuitively see one T3 artillery piece as ignore-able is that every 5 minutes it can do ~ 120k damage to your team, but your team will still be producing 360k mass in that 5 minute interval and you'll still have the majority of your expensive infrastructure if you keep your coms and SMDs properly shielded. You can continue the game under artillery fire, but it will absolutely be having a massive impact.
And this period won't last forever because eventually that mass disparity will be turned into either a T4 force advantage for team arty or more likely, a second T3 arty.
And at that point you're going to see SMDs start dropping. Its very difficult to shield as much as you need to shield to keep your power up to run the shields that cover your SMD with two artillery firing on you. When Plasma wolf did it he had over 100k mass in shields for a single base.
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.
What I'm explaining here isn't really about team games. I talk about it in terms of team games because that's my personal experience, but this math works for 1v1s just as well if the mass on the map is high enough, if there are enough expansions.
Its not underpowered at all, on any map. It is overpowered on all maps except maybe the 40x40s and 80x80s depending on how densely the mass is placed on those maps. It is too expensive to be built on some maps, but that's not the same thing as being underpowered.
On any sufficiently mass dense map, T3 arty is grossly overpowered. It should be a powerful late game bombardment weapon, but it effectively functions as a game ender. It muscles the real game enders out of their role and makes balance impossible for other late game bombardment weapons. It really needs a combination of nerfs and cost reductions to enable it to be built on more maps in more situations, and to stop it from overshadowing other units that never get built at all because of how OP it is.
