Patch balance notes released
Woohoo, tonight is an exciting night! The official patch balance notes have been released! Use this thread for extensive discussion and debate on the upcoming balance changes. Knowing you guys, you won’t be able to keep your opinions quiet. See the full balance notes below the fold.
MISC
* Map props have been altered to provide more balanced start positions
* Assist icon now properly shows when mousing over a Quantum Gateway
* Starting and Mass Extractor locations adjusted for all ranked maps
* Weapons that do splash damage no longer destroy other projectilesAIR
* Scorcher now deals its damage faster
* Tier 3 Spy Planes costs reduced by roughly half and now have limited range Omni
* Transports will no longer chase planes
* Gemini has been retuned after discovery of a bug with its missiles
* Tier 1 bombers now drop their bombs using a physics based model
* Zeus’s health increased
* Revenant’s damage increased
* Anti-air guns now prioritize bombers, gunships and transports over interceptors and scoutsGROUND
* Aurora: Acceleration increased slightly and top speed lowered
* Cybran ACU damage reduced Rate of fire increased Overall DPS has gone down
* Mech Marine can now correctly fire from a transport and health increased
* Omni Sensors no longer have sonar
* Flare: Damage increased
* Energy Storage economy reduced Death explosion radius increased
* Cybran TML defenses improved and now have a charge time before launch
* Aeon ACU Advanced Resource Allocation System cost reduced
* T3 land factories cost increased
* UEF ACU nuke now behaves like other nukes* Tier 1 Tanks
- Striker now moves faster and has been retuned* Tier 2 Tanks
- Retuned to perform better vs. Tier 1 units
- Now move faster
- Obsidian energy drain decreased* Tier 2 Artillery:
- Miasma: Damage reduced
- Klinkhammer: More accurate
- Gunther: More accurate, damage increased* Tier 2 Point Defenses
- Now lead their targets
- Oblivion and Triad no longer deal damage to friendly targets* Tier 3 Siege Assault Bots
- Ranged reduced
- Vision range reduced
- Acceleration reduced
- Harbinger and Titan cost increased
- Titan turret speed increased
- Loyalist cost decreased and DPS increasedSEA
* Strategic Missile Defenses can no longer be built on water
* Salem now moves similar to Aeon and UEF Destroyers Its speed on land has been increased
* UEF and Cybran Naval factories are now more easily hit by torpedoes
* T3 Submarines are now significantly cheaper to build, their TML damage has been reduced and their nuke cost increased* Amphibious units (Sea floor walking) now have water vision equal to their normal vision This allows them to see submarines
* Carriers (including the CZAR) can now build up through tier 3 air units
* Cybran carrier anti-air guns DPS decreased and accuracy increased
* T3 Sonar Buoy’s cost reduced, health changed and sonar range increased
* T1 and T2 Sonar Buoy’s health increased
* T3 Aeon Sonar Buoy anti-torpedo rate of fire decreased
* T1 Torpedo launchers now have sonar* Frigates:
- Completely retuned
- Health increased
- Cost decreased
- DPS increased
- Beacon range decreased and anti-torpedo system retuned* Submarines:
- Sylph cost increased and DPS decreased
- Sliver DPS decreased, cost decreased and health increased* Destroyers
- Cost retuned* Battleships
- Summit and Galaxy cost decreasedEXPERIMENTALS
* Galactic Colossus and Monkeylord now always respond to attacks from
Siege Assault Bots* Atlantis:
- Health reduced
- Torpedo system retuned* CZAR:
- Health increased
- Beam damage reduced
- Flak damage radius increased
- Crash damage reduced* Fatboy
- Cost decreased* Galactic Colossus
- Cost decreased
- Movement improved* Mavor:
- Accuracy decreased
- Turret speeds increased
- Cost reduced* Monkeylord
- Turret ranges increased* Scathis:
- Energy Drain per shot reduced
- Health increased
- Max radius* Soul Ripper:
- Ground damage doubled and splash damage added
- Air to air damage reduced
- Crash damage and radius increased
- Cost retuned* Tempest:
- Acceleration increased
- Turn rate increased
- Main cannon radius increased
- Cost decreased
May 10th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
I posted this ( http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=10344 ) on the GPGnet forums, an expansion of my earlier posts in the open thread. I won’t repost it here, to avoid spamming, but am interested in what ya’ll think. This patch sounds like it could be a major patch on the order of “The game was released months early, and now it’s more how we want it to be.” Considering the new features that they talked about and the balance changes, this looks to be pretty cool. And there might be new units!
Hey, I can hope.
The Hyper Viper
May 10th, 2007 at 11:39 pm
I read your post and there are some valid points brought up. My surprises come twofold from this patch. First there are many changes that come directly, as in the words of the community, from suggestion. These include:
[list]Omni range for spy planes
Removing Sonar from T3 Radar
Tier 2 PDs leading targets
Tier Three Balancing
Siege Bot Balancing[/list]
Though some of these may be general they still are improvement. I also think that having all carriers now being aloud to build planes will bring an interesting dynamic. I am most interested to see how the base defenses v siege bots battle will fair now, as there have been substantial changes in this issue.
I can’t wait to get the patch!
May 10th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
Having all carriers being able to build planes is a substantial change. This is really going to change how naval battles evolve. I’m guessing it’ll just become standard practice to set all carriers to repeat-build some pattern of torpedo bombers and interceptors.
May 10th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
Czars are carriers, too, remember.
And hm.. Cybran Cruisers can repair planes? Can other factions? Might be a really different change if Cruisers could build, say, scouts or ints….
The Hyper Viper
May 11th, 2007 at 2:10 am
Alright, this looks really good. :)
May 11th, 2007 at 4:07 am
hmmm doesn’t say whether uef tanks lead their target better now or not? this is the most important thing for uef possibly.. I was a little concerned, that since none of the people testing the patch (i.e the very top top players who are working with gpg) play uef, that uef would hence be neglected. But we shall see..
Haha, czar will be useless now you can’t just crash it on people’s bases.
looks like they are right on the ball with all the changes. my main worry is that it will be easier just to defend and similarly spam pds to attack build, now t2 pd are actually going to be accurate.
May 11th, 2007 at 4:09 am
I hope Aeon don’t suck now. I’m really used to how their units work together. I started the UEF campaign over since my computer only has sporadic internet access now that I’m at home and it felt strange using a different faction. On the first mission two bombers chased a land unit of some sort for about five minutes before finally managing to kill it. D:
I’m also hoping there are lots of optimizations to the engine. I’d really like to play at something more than complete crap settings without spending money that I don’t have.
May 11th, 2007 at 4:33 am
I agree wholeheartedly on both notes with T2A, but I’m not very worried. Looking at the balance changes, it doesn’t like Aeon has been killed much.
The only major doom thing is the T2 arty balancing. That’s really frustrating. I mean, the Miasma does decent damage for T2 arty, and its lame AoE seems like it balances it quite well.
What’s wrong with being able to build defenses that actually *do* something besides take resources?
May 11th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
The good thing about this patch is the changes seem to be relatively subtle. You don’t want to go too crazy making changes or you’ll only cause more problems than you solve. Uberhack fell into that trap with TA and ended up in a constant state of chaos as each new update just added further complications.
I like how they’ve offset making t3 stuff pricier/less effective by making t4 cheaper and more effective. By the sound of things you’ll spend an even amount of time at each level now rather than most of it at tech 1 and 3.
It’s good that they haven’t make t1 anti air too much more effective as well. If they made it more powerful nobody would use planes for offense, just for intel. Prioritising the targetting is a good compromise. I just hope the new bombers aren’t any less powerful than the old ones. Rushing someone with bombers is always extremely fun. You could only get away with that in TA in specialist situations.
May 11th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
I’m just thinking, if AA now prioritizes, how will air attacks be possible on peoples bases?
May 11th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Sear: Basically, it means you’ll need to start using T1 bombers as cover rather than T1 interceptors. It’s not a huge change.
May 11th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
I noticed it said that all T2 pd now lead targets, and also don’t do friendly fire damage. There is no mention of a reduction in the damage caused by the Oblivion, though. Is it just me or does this make the Oblivion even more overpowered?
I am glad to see that siege bots have been toned down a bit, although I noticed that the Cybran siege bot has actually been improved, which probably indicates that the 3 factions siege bots are now simply on more equal footing.
Overall, though, it is looking good. I am very excited to install this patch!
May 11th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
hm fair enough, and I did just think of a good thing :D, enemy have alot of ints at his base and has lots off ground AA, send in the air superiority fighters with a smarm of t1 bombers and take those ints out :D making it easier in ways :D
May 11th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
oo and another thing, does the Cybran air superiority fighter fix make them the best one now? due to the fact they won’t miss due to firing homing missiles and they will actually do damage, if so then I’m very happy :D sorry for the posting again straight away, the thought just popped into my head :P
May 11th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Molloy - You do realize that after the 2.0 series, the whole appeal of UH was uncontrolled chaos in changes, and constantly re-learning balance, only to have it upset again. At least, that’s what it was for me.
Grokmoo - I think loyalists may turn out to be overpowered now, with their TMD ability, if MMLs are more common along with the rest of T2. And AngryZealot and (I think) 215 have said that the Oblivion DPS went down to compensate for the tracking buff.
May 11th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
Great news.
Sear, Cybran T3 Fighters were already good especially with their stealth ability.
May 11th, 2007 at 7:21 pm
I’m glad that T4 is better now. Maybe some people will use them in ranked.
May 11th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
As far as I’m concerned, the balance changes were everything I wanted and more. Supreme Commander is really going to be a whole new game.
The only major fault I see in the changes is that RAS hasn’t been nerfed. It’s not too much of an issue, but it allows exponential growth without a real estate requirement (making it really easy to shield and protect).
If they fix the pathfinding with the engineers, it’ll be quicker (and already is cheaper) to just whore the t3 gens and fabs, so there’s probably not too much of a concern with ras.
May 11th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
Pathfinding improvements would be a massive leap forward. I’m hoping that’s a large element of what GPG were talking about when they said ‘various engine optimisations’. Pathingfinding in TA used to crap out after each player had a couple of hundred units but at least they weren’t as bloody sluggish as the SC ones are. You could make a change to where they were going and they wouldn’t all just sit there confused for 10 seconds.
Viperion: massive kneejerk balance changes were part of AA for TA Spring as well. Frankly I hated that crap. Every few months the game would change completely, everybody would play obsessively and work out what the new overpowered units were, then the game would be broken. Then it’d get patched and the cycle would start again. With OTA the way people played kept changing despite the unit stats not changing. People would work out how to develop different styles and approaches to overcome the perceived ‘imbalances’. If you keep changing the balance every few months it doesn’t settle properly and experts don’t take it upon themselves to develop their own techniques. You look at SC and alot of the better players said “Right, I’m not playing until the new patch” whereas if there wasn’t a new patch coming they’d just get on with it and develop new tactics.
If there’s one aspect of this game that concerns me a little bit it’s SCU’s. If t3 has been nerfed and t4 stuff isn’t THAT much better then I can see SCU’s taking over in a big way. The problem with SCU’s is that they’re very micro intensive and very economy based. The player who is the best at getting a really insane economy going that can harness the incredible build rate of the SCU’s will win out. That and the player who is a click machine who can keep upgrading their SCU’s while coordinating the battle. If you could set the Quantum Gateway to build pre-upgraded SCU’s that’d cut out tons of the tedious micro involved with it. You could queue up 5 resource upgrade ones, then 5 armour regen ones, then 5 dps ones. And ctrl+z an offensive SCU wouldn’t select the resource SCU’s.
May 11th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
I’m somewhat confused as to how the aurora made it through with such a relatively minor nerf. It was pretty common consensus that part of the reason for Aeon dominance was due to how much better the Aurora is than the other t1 tanks due to the long range. I’m not sure how increasing their acceleration and decreasing their top speed is going to remedy this. Hopefully naval battles will be a bit more balanced now, but auroras hovering off the coast is still going to prevent you from building a naval yard in the first place. Is there something I’m missing?
May 11th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
You have to look at the big picture, rabble - auroras didn’t get much of a nerf because then they’d suck terribly on land. The big issue was buffing frigates, buffing cybran subs, and nerfing the aeon subs. Now the other sides can have the kind of naval presence for cheap that will probably reduce the overpowered threat that the auroras were on naval maps.
Or, at least I hope that’s the case anyways.
May 12th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
@rabble
I beleive the frigate buff is the balancer in this case. Cheaper, harder, and nastier.
May 13th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
It still seems difficult to protect your first naval yard on a small water map like White Fire. IMO an Aeon player can get Auroras off your coast before your first Frigate gets built, which means you have no way to use that newly Aurora-killing frigate power to stop them, and you’ll have to go GG’s instead. But if you invested in a Naval fac that got ganked then you may be too far behind anyway.
May 13th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Yea having to tank your economy on a naval factory is really concerning. Frigates got a similar buff in my mod and are only able to hold off the aurora spam if you jump to naval extremely early. If the enemy mixes in subs, you end up having serious problems.
May 14th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
All changes look good except I missed one thing: SCU RAS nerf - I mean, that’s the worst micro in the game, right?
May 15th, 2007 at 8:15 am
Why can’t they let us build PD on water like you could in TA? We can build AA turrets on water so why not build PD too? it would be weak against ships and horribly vunerable to subs but would be perfect for holding off Auroras.
- Will