Radical Balance Ideas

[moses_the_red]

3. Give Firebeetles cloak
Emphasis on just the cloak bit, not stealth, you should still be able to see them from radar.
Anyway you already nerfed their damage a ton so you gotta give them something right?
And don't give me this 'but muh stealth generator' shit no one actually does this except some uber try hard pros and why should we balance the game around like 7 guys?

I play with a friend that is just insanely good at dropping on people. If I play against him I'll warn people that he's going to drop on them and he'll still pull it off. He plays Sera but also UEF, and while Sera drops are better he can still pull it off well with UEF.

Cybran... cybran drops just seems broken.

It seems like Cybran should be great at drops. They're supposed to be the assault/snipe faction right? Being able to drop well would make a lot of sense given their role as the sneaky faction.

Stealth works with transports, and Cybran even gets what is essentially a dedicated drop unit the firebeetle. On paper they should be the game's most proficient drop faction.

And yet they're not. Cybran drops are super rare. Transport capacity is just too low. Dropping firebeetles doesn't work any better than dropping tanks or T1 arty.

The drop style that has worked best for me is to wait til I have T3 land and drop 3 bricks and a deceiver. If I tech rush land, and hit T3 before anyone else, that can work well. Fire-beetle drops just don't seem to work out. Maybe if you get them early enough and your opponent packed his T1 power you could use them to power snipe.

Its also admittedly possible that I'm just bad and haven't yet figured out how to properly utilize Cybran's advantages when it comes to drops. I readily admit that stealth drops seems like it should be really powerful.

[Crazy Cossack]

The engie mod radically changed the game. FAF is very different from original FA. So, yesterday's radical becomes today's conservative in that regard. Why should the game not evolve further? That which does not evolve dies. It's the law of evolution, the law of competition. But these are my last words on my topic. I see it is not popular.

[Turinturambar]

compared to any of your ideas though there were good reasons for engiemod

[Ze Dogfather]

I mean the balancing done in FAF is meant to evolve the competitive nature that the original FA had and to maintain the spirit of the original game. Everything that's been changed in the main balance has been minimal and in line with what FA is meant to be. Most of the suggestions mentioned are incredibly drastic that as Ftx said, is just suitable for a mod. T3 MAA is likely the most tame addition to the game, of a wild mirage of different things like a "sea transport" (there's already transports from the air factory that would do a far better job in general?). Most of the issues mentioned are things you can counter effectively if you use the tools you already have, as any faction.

[Apofenas]

Before T3 MAA like 90% of team games were 9 min strat rush. I still believe this nerf could be done even better using strat bomber speed nerf and Flak MuzzleVelotity buff. This is the only case of FAF integrating new unit and see how it is questionable desigion even after this many years?

You have to really justify integrating new unit and it has to solve problems that couldnt be solved otherwise and it has to work properly. That wasn't the case with T3MAA, specificly with Bouncer targetting that can't even hit stationary targets. Why integrate even more units with broken targetting when we already have 50 versions of broken jAnuses?

If we start adding units left and right, we might find ourselves playing Artas' mod who took ~3GB of mods, put that on 3599, tried to make EQ balance out of it and called THAT "Supreme commander 3".

Now let's head to some other points

(a) Hover should only be available from T2. Same with amphibious which is the case now anyway I think (except for engies and ACU of course).
(Therefore Aurora and Sera T1 arty would lose hover ability. This would necessitate further balance changes of course.)

Hover t1 is not a problem unless you play some shit map like Four corners, Wilderness or some Melted Duel. Even so it isn't a big problem with EQ t2 hover balance, but who cares right?

I'm not going to mention that someone would need to make new models for these units, because those were meant to rotate body while moving won't work without being hover. Thanks to Ithilis i had to learn it hard way with Nomad t3 hovertank.

Reduce Aurora range by a couple of points so it has just less range than T1 PD, BUT add enough health points to Aurora to buff it back to balance

Aeon T1 navy would need some buffing after this. I think people are saying even now that Aeon T1 navy needs a buff

Guess where it's already done?

EDIT

(f) Permit T1 fighters to strafe ground units. This would be a fairly light-effect weapon.

Watch Zero-K. It would be either useless, or 600 ASF will now obliterate everything above water.

[AdmiralZeech]

As always, the solution is CARPET BOMBING.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng_-jkaRGZA

I feel like the physics based bombing is constantly giving problems, ever since it was introduced. It's not even necessarily realistic since RL bombs come in high drag, low drag, and guided types.

SupCom at release had the bombs dropping straight down if the bomber passes over any target, and it was glorious.

I think it's time to ditch this faulty physics bombing in favour of a much more reliable and epic solution.

[IceDreamer]

I approve this thread. We need a good outlet for radical out of the box ideas, because frankly the game's design, though balanced brilliantly now, is getting dull. There is more than one way to balance a game, there are hundreds, and there are still some things that are "balanced" that I would argue are "bad". I would LOVE this to be a community where we can change things in minor ways not because they "need it for balance", but because it would make things more fun.

[AdmiralZeech]

I approve this thread. We need a good outlet for radical out of the box ideas, because frankly the game's design, though balanced brilliantly now, is getting dull. There is more than one way to balance a game, there are hundreds, and there are still some things that are "balanced" that I would argue are "bad". I would LOVE this to be a community where we can change things in minor ways not because they "need it for balance", but because it would make things more fun.

CARPET BOMBING

[Wesmania]

<snip>
It seems like Cybran should be great at drops. They're supposed to be the assault/snipe faction right? Being able to drop well would make a lot of sense given their role as the sneaky faction.

Stealth works with transports, and Cybran even gets what is essentially a dedicated drop unit the firebeetle. On paper they should be the game's most proficient drop faction.

And yet they're not. Cybran drops are super rare. Transport capacity is just too low. Dropping firebeetles doesn't work any better than dropping tanks or T1 arty.
<snip>

The reason for beetles getting nerfed twice was people getting worked up over using beetle transport drops to snipe ACUs (mercies have never been OP in that regard apparently ). I agree that it was an issue when beetles took just one slot, since being able to deal 14k damage with a stealth T1 drop was pretty OP (arguably countered by T2 flak). For some reason this nerf wasn't enough to someone and beetles were "reworked" into a 1.5k AOE damage dealer, with the same awful pathfinding and low HP. Right now they're useless for drops, useless for sniping buildings and useless against armies (because of pathfinding and low HP). I don't think anyone uses them any more.

So here's a radical balance idea, in 2 variants:
1. Restore original AOE and reduce damage to 2.5k or 2.75k. Keep 2 slot requirement. If paranoid, make it so that beetles can't explode in or right out the transport. With building HP nerfs, that makes beetles viable for T1 stealth drops to kill & steal mass of T2 mexes, and somewhat viable for larger T2 drop equivalents of other factions' arty drops.
2. Restore original AOE, keep reduced 1.5k damage, change mass cost to 200 or even 150. Decrease HP by 100 or so if necessary. Change slot requirement back to 1. If paranoid, same changes as in 1. Functionally equivalent to the first proposal, but it's possible to pack more beetles at the cost of more pathfinding issues.

[Apofenas]

I approve this thread. We need a good outlet for radical out of the box ideas, because frankly the game's design, though balanced brilliantly now, is getting dull. There is more than one way to balance a game, there are hundreds, and there are still some things that are "balanced" that I would argue are "bad". I would LOVE this to be a community where we can change things in minor ways not because they "need it for balance", but because it would make things more fun.

Meanwhile we get situation like we had with Resign_Smoker...

Fix whatever is in game first, like Valiant AA or Galaxy torps.

As for radical ideas, how about bring back old Titan with mml on its head. Great thanks to Resign_Smoker btw