How to make cybran not the only faction that is played ever

[PsychoBoB]

yes the spectre change is a very big nerf. :kappa:

Sry, you're right! I concentrated only on land units. Aoe of 2 is really a buff for the Specters.
But then there's still the problem, that Aeon has has to have T2 land and T2 air to compete.

[ThomasHiatt]

Well, it costs more and has less range without getting any increase in DPS, so it seems like a nerf to me. The way gunships are used is for raiding t1 mexes, sniping things, or killing leftover t1 land units. AOE doesn't help with the first two things and with only 2 AOE I don't think it is often going to hit multiple t1 units either. That is less than half of the AOE that the Cybran gunship has and the Cybran gunship has nearly equivalent HP and DPS and a longer range. I have only played a couple of games with the new gunships but I wasn't really happy paying more for a gunship that is not actually any better at what I want to use it for.

[keyser]

Well, it costs more and has less range without getting any increase in DPS, so it seems like a nerf to me. The way gunships are used is for raiding t1 mexes, sniping things, or killing leftover t1 land units. AOE doesn't help with the first two things and with only 2 AOE I don't think it is often going to hit multiple t1 units either. That is less than half of the AOE that the Cybran gunship has and the Cybran gunship has nearly equivalent HP and DPS and a longer range. I have only played a couple of games with the new gunships but I wasn't really happy paying more for a gunship that is not actually any better at what I want to use it for.

who cares about range on gunship ? You can just come snipe the flak in a seconde and then eat the rest of the army in no time. Also aoe is very important in order to have the full dps on unit, if you look at all non aoe gunship, you will see that they lose a big part of their dps by being dodge randomly by units. Overall it's definitely a buff, and a pretty big one.

[ThomasHiatt]

Flak will still counter gunships, especially flak with shields. Attacking flak is absolutely not the purpose of gunships and trying to balance gunships to be good vs flak is absurd. I don't really care about the range but it must matter otherwise it would not have been changed.

[TheKoopa]

Actually aurora are the cheapest t1 tank )

[UnorthodoxBox]

I don't really understand making specters cost more without increasing dps. Units can't dodge them in circles anymore but i feel like instead you could just increase muzzle velocity and thats it. Now a group of specters will just waste all their dps shooting all at the same unit as gunships usually do unless you manually target things. I guess if you attack move they will split, but for manually moving them, they will just waste dps.

[Little Miss Murder]

Does split attack not work?

[Blodir]

In most cases high alpha damage is worse than RoF. Maybe against mex or pgen you can one shot them with enough gunship or something and then it's good? It still isn't a corsair/notha replacement though since it's much easier to stop.

The point of gunships is that they provide reliable damage but are vulnerable to ground to air weapons, whereas bombers are less reliable and prefer to focus on stationary targets but are much less vulnerable. Ie. since Aeon doesn't have bombers their air is useless once flak is out.

Can you list things that addressed my points in the original post? I read through patchnotes markdown file on the 3710 branch on fa repo and I dont really see what you mean by the points being addressed.

[Blodir]

Let's think of some solutions

- Aurora are insane weak on certain maps where you have to defend raids on multiple fronts
- Aurora cant raid
- Aurora vs bombers
- Aurora vs mongoose/hoplites

The main problem here is that Aurora are very unreliable compared to other basic units. They are very strong in some situations and extremely weak in others. So you are kinda on the tender mercies of the map pool. Not really sure what to do about this one tbh. Maybe increase hp so they no longer get one shot by bombers and hoplites, but reduce damage.

- Aeon has no way to kill t1 units efficiently in t2

Remove garbage pathing from blaze (give it a rotating turret like a normal unit etc.) if possible, if not, at least try to play with the numbers to get it to behave a little bit more like aurora. Pathing is really the only problem with this unit. I don't even care if you have to completely clone aurora to fix it. It's totally unusable in this state.

If blaze would be usable Aeon would have a reliable way to transition to t2 land. If there's absolutely no way to make the blaze behave, then remove it from the game. Luckily aeon can stay on t1 a little bit longer than the other factions because of aurora strength in high numbers (high range means more units are shooting at once).

The obsidian problem:
They are slow units with low range = useless. Just follow this rule: the more range something has, the slower it should move. Btw fucking up this design is the main problem with t2 vs t3 as well. This problem is especially big with the obsidians since it takes a long time to build up an useful number of them and when you do your opponent already has gone t3 and they become completely worthless since they are kited forever.

- Make obsidians cheaper (reduce dps hp etc to compensate for buffs ofc) so that the transition to t2 is smoother
- Make obsidians significantly faster than higher range t2 units (all of them)
- Reduce mongoose, hoplite speed (wtf they are fast units with high range)
- You probably also want to touch up the fast t3 units that can kite t2 forever (percies and bricks are fine, harby not so much. Also maybe othuum is too slow)

- Aeon has no fighterbomber so no real way to use air control if u get it (gunship are comparatively garbage since they get countered hard by ground to air unlike corsair)

You have a few options here:
- make t1 bombers useful (recommended anyway, but not sure how you'd do this)
- make mercies useful (I think EQ had this thing where mercies did some damage over time in an AoE, that sounds like an interesting idea. Could be used a bit like psionic storm in sc2)
- make aeon gunship op

High alpha damage on the gunship is not a bad idea, because this helps it avoid flak if a group can burst down targets quickly. Another thing that might help is increasing its speed so that it can avoid ground to air defenses more easily. This would also help give it an unique identity as a hybrid gunship/bomber.

- I absolutely love restorer but sadly they kinda suck so no decent t3 gunship also no strat aoe so t3 air is worthless against land

Give the restorer some AoE so it misses targets less.

- Frigates are bad

Yea buff the frigate im sure senton bois have something to say about this. Also I personally dont mind having to build a shard every now and then, but you have to make up for this by having a stronger frigate.

- Tmd is ultra garbage on some maps and god tier on others. Its super annoying to use

Wish we could just remove this unit. It completely disables mmls, missile ships, tmls, etc. but its horrible having to build one for every mex. One thing that could help at least slightly is lowering the build time so that you can build them as a response even with solo t2 engis.

- GC vs Mega

Reduce both mega range and cost slightly, this unit is totally ridiculous.

[Blodir]

I guess for Aeon TMD you might be able to do this:
- Reduce cost
- Reduce buildtime
- Increase range
- Increase time between blocks
- Introduce random delay before block so if you have many tmds they dont all fire at once
- Reduce the time the blocking effect lasts