Comments on: Patch balance notes released

By: Will

Will — Tue, 15 May 2007 12:15:54 +0000

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

By: peter

peter — Mon, 14 May 2007 20:58:33 +0000

All changes look good except I missed one thing: SCU RAS nerf – I mean, that’s the worst micro in the game, right?

By: JRPereira

JRPereira — Sun, 13 May 2007 17:18:11 +0000

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.

By: amanasleep

amanasleep — Sun, 13 May 2007 16:16:40 +0000

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.

By: omsion

omsion — Sat, 12 May 2007 18:11:07 +0000

@rabble

I beleive the frigate buff is the balancer in this case. Cheaper, harder, and nastier.

By: JRPereira

JRPereira — Sat, 12 May 2007 01:11:47 +0000

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.

By: rabble

rabble — Sat, 12 May 2007 01:00:08 +0000

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?

By: Molloy

Molloy — Sat, 12 May 2007 00:51:07 +0000

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.

By: JRPereira

JRPereira — Sat, 12 May 2007 00:30:05 +0000

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.

By: scotchtape622

scotchtape622 — Fri, 11 May 2007 23:21:03 +0000

I’m glad that T4 is better now. Maybe some people will use them in ranked.