Nerf / Eliminate RAS option for SACUs

[Endranii]

Ras sacu is by no way as efficient as people think. There is just not enough competitive integrity for people to see how pointless ras bois are if you only use them for eco.
10 minute pay off is horrible.

At that point of the game Before your bois start paying off I'm already gonna be knocking on you with Mavor or something considering I got full t3 eco at the same time as you and used it to make ender instead of bois. Hell, 2-3 minutes after your ras lads start paying of I can get Paragon and then we will see who have more eco.

PS:I thought of full t3 eco getting you anything between 300-400 mass per second leaving you at 180k-240k mass produced before your first lad can pay off.

[CPTANT]

Ras sacu is by no way as efficient as people think. There is just not enough competitive integrity for people to see how pointless ras bois are if you only use them for eco.
10 minute pay off is horrible.

At that point of the game Before your bois start paying off I'm already gonna be knocking on you with Mavor or something considering I got full t3 eco at the same time as you and used it to make ender instead of bois. Hell, 2-3 minutes after your ras lads start paying of I can get Paragon and then we will see who have more eco.

PS:I thought of full t3 eco getting you anything between 300-400 mass per second leaving you at 180k-240k mass produced before your first lad can pay off.

Like already said in this thread, its 7:50 if you factor in the power.

Things also don't happen in a vacuum, lots of fighting can be going on that can make getting a game ender infeasible while ras bois continue to accumulate.

[ZeRen]

RAS SACU sucks, make Scatis useless and promote turtle static play, let me explain:

So typical eco whore map gameplay: T3 Mexes - SACU spam - T4 game ender, pretty boring

problem with Scatis is that it is designed to kill bases, who care about base when you have 30+ SACU and game ender with 30 shields? you lose power gen? no problem, SACU generates so much you need none! and this makes Scatis worst game ender

if there were no RAS SACU, players would have to build eco building and protect them, aggresive play like drops would be more rewarding and losing base would be painfull, so Scathis would be good now

[Farmsletje]

zeren still on his everlasting rampage of complaining about cybran being the weakest faction

[Captcha-Lover]

I agree that The ras option on sacus should be more expensive. Like 50% more expensive at least. Everybody knows that feeling when they roll Sera on setons and are actually forced to make units. Make combat boys, or build power boys and chickers. Jesus imagine how much more interesting late games would be if ras was only used in fringe scenarios. Or if yudi was the only player fast and efficient enough to be able to get away with ras sacus spam without getting rolled on navy, and if said scenario would actually be a once in a year game, not a once every game game.

I think that overall it has proven to be complete shit for the meta. Like I know that petric and farmer love their boys, but please get your asses out of your asses and nerf ras efficiency to a point where it doesn't make sense anymore, except you wanna meme and will actually get punished for it by any other reasonable mass expenditure.

[Steel_Panther]

As some have already done, looking only at direct mass costs, an SCU costs 6500 mass to produce 11 mass/second, which gives a payback time of 590sec (9min51s).
A MassFab costs 4000 mass to produce 16 mass/second, which gives a payback time of 250sec (4min10s).

Except that MassFabs also need a constant supply of power -1500 power/second, which is provided by power generators that also have a mass cost. A T3 power generator produces 2500 energy/second for a mass of 3240, the energy cost is about 1.3 mass/(energy/s). A MassFab therefore has an additional cost of 1.3*1500 = 1950 mass from generators that are exclusively dedicated to supplying its energy. This brings the payback time to 372 sec (6min12s). On the other hand, SCU produce 1020 energy/sec, which reduces the number of power generators to be built, this can be considered as a cost reduction of 1.3*1020 = 1326 mass. This reduces the payback time to 470sec (7min50sec).

Taking the energy into account, a SACU needs only 26% more time than a T3 MassFab to be profitable. If we add the mobility, the tankiness, the builtin turrent, the reduced space consumption and the engineering suite, you explain why it is better to spam SACU than MassFab.

As Strogo said, these calculations somewhat understate how useful fabs are because they do not factor in any adjacency bonuses.

But the buildpower of ras coms is certainly quite important as well, so it's important to quantify that. They provide 56 bp, which is equal to almost 2 t3 engineers, or slightly more than a hive upgraded to the second tier. So that is worth about 600 mass alone, meaning they will pay for themselves almost a minute faster, if you value the bp. Even if you are not using the bp constantly, it is still worth a significant fraction of that number.

Their gun does 300 dps, which is almost as much as two t1 pd. Especially given that sacus are mobile making that dps more useful than pd, we could value that at about 500 mass (the cost of two t1 pd), meaning they pay off another 45 seconds faster (if you value that capability). Obviously ras coms are very rarely used as combat units, but IF they save you from building extra tele def, then you would need to incorporate that value, even if you don't think it's worth quite that much.

Having at least a few sacus just to drop on big reclaim piles is also pretty useful because of their hp.

So if you factor those things in, they are actually pretty close to as cost effective as t3 mass fabs, less any adjacency bonuses, which can be pretty significant. But, I would say the adjacency bonuses are somewhat offset by the sacu mobility, hp, and compactness, so you can protect them all under one assisted shield (which, conveniently, the sacus can assist themselves).

Overall, I think ras coms are superior to fabs, but fabs are a little better if you don't have much use for sacu bp, and aren't too worried about them dying and having to invest a lot to protect them. And still, it depends on the game situation, so it's hard to say one is just better than the other. It can be a good idea to build some fabs for more efficient eco first, then transition to ras coms when their other characteristics become more valuable. Maybe you have plenty of bp and need more eco before you can even take advantage of the sacu bp.

Edit: the combat ability of sacus is very situation dependent, even for the tele def example I gave. If you have 30 stacked in one spot of your base (dealing 9k dps), perhaps the marginal (additional) benefit of more tele def is basically zero, because you kill an acu teleporting fast enough anyway. But if they are teleporting shielded sera sacus to you, and hitting your shields with arty at the same time, maybe the extra dps becomes important to keep your shields from taking too much damage and collapsing.

[CPTANT]

I still haven't heard a reason why RAS SACU's are a good thing for the game.

Remember they weren't ever in the original game as cost effective as they are now.

[ZeRen]

zeren still on his everlasting rampage of complaining about cybran being the weakest faction

my bad, I forgot that if you are not 2K player you have not right to have opinion

[Evildrew]

Maybe change the RAS on SACUs to only give +5 mass and no Energy and adjust the cost to reflect this. That would make the total cost of getting extra eco more expensive and increase the number of SACUs too in a players base. So with social distancing, it will be harder to fit all of them and the T3 Pgens under the same shield they are supporting especially once corona virus starts spreading and the quarantine camps get overwhelmed with patients.

[Captcha-Lover]

Could maybe someone of the balance team (Keyser, petric farms) make a statement regarding the future of the ras upgrade? I would recommend something like this:

1. Remove power gain from the upgrade to remove their ability to be walking pgens to add some more importance to protect late game power

2. Change their mass production to something very straight forward like: pay 6000 mass for 10 production per second so they repay after 10mins

Like that it would be a nice gimmick but not completely remove the need for map control because you still need to defend your power grid. Can we have a discussion about that? I think the current discussion has made totally clear that because of power gain, DPS and bp they are just too efficient currently.