[old] Balanced Annihilation V6.84

[TheFatController]

Re: amphibious units.

Currently the spring engine reduces units speed under water so most amphib units are scripted to walk faster underwater to compensate.

It seems that in some cases amphib units can exit the water without their script detecting this and setting their speed to 'on land' so they move super fast out of water.

I've seen this happen but can't produce circumstances to recreate it 100% of the time, does anyone know how to do this reliably and can you PM me or post here.

Fix shouldn't be hard i'm just curious if the engine behaviour is broken or if the scripts have always been broken.

[Saktoth]

They've always been broken. Try them in shallow water- SPEED DEMONS.

This is why the engine was patched with depthmod. Try depthmod = 0 for full underwater speed. A higher number means slower (not sure what the default is, 0.2, 0.5?).

You'll have to remove all the speedup scripts.

Be warned that changing the depthmod will NOT cause a repath. The game will continue to use the old paths. This means that amph units will avoid going in the water because they think it will slow them down. This can be frustrating for amphs and means you have to spam orders to get them to stay in the water.

If you wish to cause a repath just change some other stat somewhere in the paths.

I suggest if you are going to repath, you also consider what other changes might be needed to pathing so people only have to repath once.

some stuff about Krogoths

Subs actually have a massive damage bonus vs Krogoths (who knew eh?). Krogoths are meant to be able to cross water, but be very vulnerable when doing so if the water is held by a ship player. IE, subs are meant to rape them. The reason they can go under Sharks Teeth is the same reason they can go under Tidal Generators (try it)- they are very short. All units are calculated as being about as tall as a peewee for the purposes of going underneath floating structures. Though you're right that sharks teeth are almost useless anyway.

[Pxtl]

Sadly, it seems like amphibs underwater-speed-boost is just plain broken. The engine simply doesn't support the pathfinding.

The simplest fixes utterly destroy balance. Removing the speed buff altogether and letting them have the OTA gameplay will make them useless, unless you buff them enough that they'll be better than kbots, and every other solution short of an engine upgrade would be an utter destabilization of BA gameplay. What the hell would you give them to compensate for being horribly sluggish underwater? Torpedo launchers? Then you're screwing over Core, since that means Arm has the pelican (unique) while Core's Gimp would be the same as other amphibs. Perhaps the amphib tanks could be made resistant to underwater weapons? Sonar-invisible?

I don't know. No easy answers. Need engine fix.

[Gota]

Oh yeah,that will unbalance ba...
Your saying that as if BA never changes...
How about the recent engine change that made laser turret range smaller?
They could outshoot their range before.now they cant...
That's a big balance change...
Did BA compensate for it to remain as it was before?
No..
Nobody even knows that the artillery units are better now cause the HLT cant hit them like it could earlier..
Ba has changed tremendously in the past few months..

[TheFatController]

I don't know. No easy answers. Need engine fix.

Sakoth gave the best solution, remove all the speedboosts use the depthmod tag and force a repath (many thanks Sakoth for letting me know on that bug btw).

[Pxtl]

Whoops - misunderstood the repath issue. I thought he meant that the depthmod field wasn't supported by pathfinder.

Nevermind. Once again, I fale at reeding.

[Evil4Zerggin]

A couple notes on depthMod:

First, AFAIK the repath issue has since been fixed:

moveInfoChecksum = moveInfoChecksum * 3 + *(unsigned int*) &md->depthMod;

Second, before depthmod existed, there were several versions of the COB hack to work around the then-hardcoded amph slowdown in water, first by Nemo IIRC and then by myself. Unfortunately it took quite a while for me to figure out exactly what the engine was doing; it's probable that BA took the script from a version before I had it correct.

[smoth]

>:|

[KaiserJ]

i've seen this a bunch of times... try making triton tanks in tabula, and driving them across the river in the middle... almost never fails AFAIK.

also, the "speed boost" only really seems to happen when driving on flats

[HectorMeyer]

I think this is a good opportunity to thank the developers of BA for their sensible approach regarding the changes they make. They are doing an excellent job. Let├óÔé¼Ôäós face the hard truth: BA is pretty much perfect right now.

It probably can be hard at times to maintain a steady hand, looking at all those "discussions" from the last months.

So, BA, keep it up and stay as you are :)

[MidKnight]

I think this is a good opportunity to thank HectorMeyer for posting in the old BA thread.
Hint: the new one's here!

Yay for correct posting!

[1v0ry_k1ng]

I think this is a good opportunity to thank the developers of BA for their sensible approach regarding the changes they make. They are doing an excellent job. Let├óÔé¼Ôäós face the hard truth: BA is pretty much perfect right now-

-except for fail kbots

[YokoZar]

I think this is a good opportunity to thank the developers of BA for their sensible approach regarding the changes they make. They are doing an excellent job. Let├óÔé¼Ôäós face the hard truth: BA is pretty much perfect right now-

-except for fail kbots

-and exploits, and bugs, and ships, and fffffff

[jellyman]

Just for those who think kbots, and particularly aks and peewees are fail, I have uploaded a couple demos of peewee and ak pwnage.

Key to peewee/ak pwnage is speed aggression, and looking for the weak points in defence. A fast build is required. 3 mex, 5 solar, one con if in back with limited expansion, or 2 cons if you need to expand. Don't waste early time on metal makers, llts, extra cons etc.

With the peewees, early game against flash the peewees were coming off second best, but only just however note the flash spammer had two coms so was able to spam the flash significantly faster early than a normal tank player would be, and had the advantage of more mexes as well. Normally when I have an early clash of peewee or ak vs flash I come of best through weight of numbers. Peewees/aks become fail against completed lines of static defence (an isolated llt is no problem against peewee/ak in numbers), or against levellers.

http://replays.adune.nl/?969
http://replays.adune.nl/?970

[hoijui]

ARMs torpedo bombers can be set to attack land units. they then drop the torpedo as if they were on wather (long before the target), and when the torpedo hits the ground, it sounds as if it explodes in water.
Thats what i saw in a game. equal or similar things may happen with the dept-charge tower and torpedo sea-planes.

I guess torpedo planes have to attack land units anyway, as it could be that the unit is on land when the torpedo leaves the plane, but is in water when it the torpedo arrives at the unit...
is the sound issue fixable? or is that to complex aswell?

[HectorMeyer]

IMO, the cheap/weak tradeoff of kbots is pretty well done. You can get up a large force quick and overwhelm your vehicle opponent.

I agree though that the construction kbot is very weak. It's the main reason I almost never go kbot. Maybe it's speed could be buffed to make it almost as fast as the construction vehicle?

[CarRepairer]

I think this is a good opportunity to thank the developers of BA for their sensible approach regarding the changes they make. They are doing an excellent job. Let├óÔé¼Ôäós face the hard truth: BA is pretty much perfect right now.

It probably can be hard at times to maintain a steady hand, looking at all those "discussions" from the last months.

So, BA, keep it up and stay as you are :)

IMO, the cheap/weak tradeoff of kbots is pretty well done. You can get up a large force quick and overwhelm your vehicle opponent.

I agree though that the construction kbot is very weak. It's the main reason I almost never go kbot. Maybe it's speed could be buffed to make it almost as fast as the construction vehicle?

That was fast.

[TheFatController]

Oh yes the kbot builder being weak completely refutes his previous good feedback.

If only it had jumpjets and a gravity cannon and emp and a widget that flashed up a giant animated console when you hovered over it noone would notice it's flaws

[jellyman]

Give the kbot builder a d-gun :D

[Idleking]

Give the kbot builder a d-gun :D

And range of an Annihilator!
Just kidding

But slightly increasing its speed could do the job imho..