Navy Balance, Ground Fire, and Intel

[ThomasHiatt]

ThomasHiatt for balance team pls

Balance is fine the way it is and I have no interest in working on it.

Since the goal of FAF is to maintain Forged Alliance more or less the way it is without making radical changes there is nothing interesting to be done in terms of balancing. You are also bound by the existing engine and all of its flaws, which prevents you from fixing the biggest issues. All you can do is make some minor adjustments to a bunch of numbers. The data and tools needed to make these minor adjustments are also severely lacking. If you want any data about how units stack up vs one another you have to spend hours sandboxing it yourself. This should have been automated away years ago using some map script to automatically spawn units and move them into each other, or at the very least there should be a balance team database of past sandbox results so you don't have to do them over and over again. There is also a lack of relative unit stats. You can get a unit's absolute stats from the unit database and compare them to the absolute stats of another unit, but you have to do a lot of number crunching to compare them and get the valuable numbers out. What you want to know are things like time-to-kill, shots-to-kill, etc. Working on balance for this game is just a really boring number crunching exercise and the balance team does it in a stupid brute force way which kills any motivation and makes progress extremely slow. I was already on the balance team before and this is why I have no interest in returning.

[Spy_Emanciator]

This post isn't about t1 bombers, its about all surface units being able to hit submerged units. Its insane that t2 destroyers, t4 battleships and t4 battleships are WRECKING sub packs just by leading a bit or using spy flyover to temp locate and lose intel. The game blocks you from ground firing onto of subs for a reason, so just take off the vulnerability to reflect this intended game design of not giving the players that option. Its insane to both restrict direct intel ground fire, but then give them vulnerability. Subs kill subs, tops from ships with tops kill subs, top bombers kill subs. Thats it...

[Mach]

ThomasHiatt for balance team pls

The data and tools needed to make these minor adjustments are also severely lacking. If you want any data about how units stack up vs one another you have to spend hours sandboxing it yourself. This should have been automated away years ago using some map script to automatically spawn units and move them into each other, or at the very least there should be a balance team database of past sandbox results so you don't have to do them over and over again. There is also a lack of relative unit stats. You can get a unit's absolute stats from the unit database and compare them to the absolute stats of another unit, but you have to do a lot of number crunching to compare them and get the valuable numbers out. What you want to know are things like time-to-kill, shots-to-kill, etc. Working on balance for this game is just a really boring number crunching exercise and the balance team does it in a stupid brute force way which kills any motivation and makes progress extremely slow. I was already on the balance team before and this is why I have no interest in returning.

Just fyi here is a short explanation of how original supcom devs did it from you know who:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf5Du10WEv8&t=1m18s

[Derek]

After having read and re-read this thread, it seems clear that it would be sensible to do what Ithilis said in post #2:

so how to fix this -> copypast equilibrium code, that remove groundfire damage deeper as -1

https://github.com/Ithilis/Equilibrium/ ... 2d106e915e

After that tempest maybe will be good as sub as well...

I would add that it would make the Atlantis make more sense.

The atlantis isnt meant to be a brawling unit that can go toe-to-toe with battleships. It is a support unit.

Agreed, it shouldn't go toe-to-toe with surface ships. And, mass for mass, no sub should.

All subs should carry out the undersea battle without having to worry about their native fragility as a submersible get rekt as if they were going around surfaced. If it were just unrealistic that would be ok. But it is both unrealistic and makes for outright broken game dynamics. All subs are fragile by nature relative to surface ships. With AOE punching below the surface what we're doing here is gaming the system via ground-attack to break the balance between surface attack (bombers/b-ships) and the undersea war. Why have t2/3 torp bombers at all then?

The other problem is reliance on micro.

Your real problem is that you aren't microing your subs.

Generally, the greatest aspect of SupCom is to be able to focus more on the big-picture. The reason I fell in love with SupCom is because it was the first RTS. It exposed all the other "RTS" games for what they were: Real Time Tactics. Some micro is fine, but it should be reduced and avoided where possible so that the genius of what makes SupCom so great can shine. ---see next quote---

The point is it is bad gameplay to have to super carefully babysit certain units because of the interaction of the balance of the game, compounded by lag issues. Give me an explanation that says "this makes the game better because..." Given how t3 subs are already thought of as pretty bad units in many situations, I don't think making them even harder to use makes the game better.

Ultimately I have to agree with what Spy_Emanciator and others have said. Let's use that EQ code that has already been written.

Question for Ithilis and others playing EQ. What results have you noticed with stopping AOE from going undersea?

I would like to take a second to say that I appreciate what the balance team has done and I salivate with the release of each new patch.

Cheers and see you on the field,

EarthRover-

[FunkOff]

I agree with the damage reduction used in the equilibrium mod. It makes realistic sense as water is a good shield again attacks IRL.

[FunkOff]

I agree with the damage reduction used in the equilibrium mod. It makes realistic sense as water is a good shield again attacks IRL.