Supreme Commander Talk

It’s been awhile seen Grokmoo pointed out that every game between top-ranked players seemed to be Aeon v Aeon. This has only gotten even more obvious over time, so the point that it is now probably safe to conclude that the Aeon Illuminate is, indeed, over-powered, and that a nerf is on the way.

Supporting evidence 1: Unconquerable’s forum thread explaining why all of the top players play Aeon almost exclusively. His main reasoning is that they have the best T1 tanks (no other faction’s has hover capability), the best T1 and T3 bombers, and the best T3 siege bots. Looking at the numbers and statistics, it’s really hard to argue against these simple claims. The Aeon really do have the best units in all of these essential roles.

Supporting evidence 2: PecosBill’s forum thread with an in-depth look at win-loss ratio by different factions. Not surprisingly, Aeon come out on top. Also, DeadLegion has a good comment in that thread that concludes that not only do the Aeon have the best T1 tanks, T1 and T3 bombers, and T3 siege bots, they also have the best T2 point defense, tactical missile defense, submarines, T1 interceptors, base shields, and artillery (by a long shot). In-depth reasoning and statistics are provided for all of these and it’s really hard to argue against.

Perhaps most telling is the comment by Doctor Dan, a GPG employee and community manager, in PecosBill’s thread:

We are constantly assessing the balance of the game, if we feel that things are out of alignment we will change it.

If that doesn’t point which way the wind is blowing, I don’t know what does. GPG put a lot of effort into making the three separate factions and I’m sure it has to be anguishing them that two-thirds of their creations are almost completely ignored in the high-end of competitive play.

Some players on the forums suggested making UEF and Cybran more powerful to compensate for the Aeon, but that is looking unlikely. UEF and Cybran are rather nicely balanced against each other, and GPG wouldn’t want to throw that out of whack. So the simplest way to fix the balance issue (and we know gaming companies always go for the simplest, aka cheapest, way) is just to nerf the Aeon. This won’t be too different from how the Cybrans were nerfed during beta. The Cybrans were too powerful and everyone was playing as them, largely because the mantis was so over-powered. The response was to increase the resource cost on the mantis and reduce its turret yaw speed. Look for something similar to happen to some of the Aeon units to bring everything back into balance again.

Update: Doctor Dan chimes in yet again. The writing is on the wall.

We are constantly examining balance issues, don’t be surprised if there are quite a few tweaks in the next patch.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 5:18 pm by Cyde Weys and is filed under News. Keywords: Tags: Aeon, Aeon Illuminate, Cybran, DeadLegion, Doctor Dan, Gas Powered Games, GPG, nerf, PecosBill, Supreme Commander, UEF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.