Balanced Annihilation 7.42

[Wombat]

well, reducing viper bonus is another thing i dont understand D: it was always easy to counter it, just order con on repeat to make llt in range of viper

[smoth]

I don't see why not knorke. The commander is really the only uniques guy for each player(d-gun, super con, comm boom, possible game end condition)

[submarine]

Not having read the last two pages of comments, rants, etc. I just wanted to say "thank you" for your work and I greatly appreciate the changes :)

[Pxtl]

...

Holy crap that's a lot of *big* changes. So now how does the Core tacnuke compare to Arm EMP, range-wise?

And since the pop-up turrets are now regular turrets, will you be changing the animation script so they stay "up"?

I mean, I can understand the rationale for most of those... but dayamn.

And as for buffing L1 trans, the only way I'd want to see those upgraded away from their paper-form would be if they couldn't transport the comm *at all*. And that would ruin a lot of comm-based openers.

Just realized: you can now destroy a fighter-screen incredibly quickly by getting some anti-air power into combat range of it. That gives you a real incentive to keep some of your fighters landed at a safe location at the back of your base, or to use non-fighter AA.

[gonpost]

I have a few predictions/comments. I tried not to say if it was good or bad. My goal was to comment on how it will change gameplay.

The fighter update turns fighters into a purely defensive unit (or offensive if and only if they have no AA). Sending my screen to take out someone else's to break a porc will be much, much harder now. It will actually be more effective now to spam T1 scouts and send them in as cannon fodder while your bombers are in the back-middle, so that your bombers can make it to their destination. In FFA this'll place a lot more emphasis on ground combat.

However, gunships might see increased usage due to this update. Normally fighters are the reason that gunships aren't used (because fighters just completely pwn gunships), but if fighters are so much more fragile, they might not be such a huge problem.

Precision bombing means bombers will be much less useful for destroying units now. This also gives gunships more use than they have now.

Lowering bertha range will also make them more defensive than offensive, and more about area control. They're typically used as a porc breaker at the moment.

Infinite antinukes will make reactionary antinuke building much easier. That is, you won't have to worry about waiting for that first anti to build. That means nukes will have to be used more wisely, because you might only get 1 shot before enemy builds an anti. 50% cost to build also makes them a ton easier to build.

Removal of arm EMP bomber...the bomber control widget had made it so you could disable an entire front line with them and never lose a single one. I can see why this decision was made.

The new autoheal mechanic means that units will be fully healed after 2 minutes and 10 seconds of idling (I assume they can't be moving?).

That's all for now. We'll see how these changes play out.

[Johannes]

HLT nerf might not matter much as turrets get must their health from being constantly repaired.

Max HP/buildtime=repairspeed.

with MMs you lose the opening/close animation

If I understand correctly only turning on/off is controlled by a new system. The animation stays the same.[/quote]
As far as I tried they are always shown as on. And when you select the buildings they don't show the conversion going on either in the low left. Only way to see the rate is with the gadgets meter.

[Beherith]

Another minor bugfix- might as well get it out before its spread to all hosts.

[albator]

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- Reduced HLT HP 30% (~2400 -> ~1680)

I agree with johan about HLT, it was already less cost effective than beamer or lighter T1 turret and only mainly meant to stop slasher spam. Reducing HLT hp is actaully really bad cause now arm can still easily defend against rocko spam (still the most cost effective t1 def is beamer) whereas core is fucked with low HLT hp and no beamer.

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 Reduced samson/slasher HP 30% (~1100 -> ~720)

Slasher/samson cost reduction is fair, but it only impact DSD 8v8.... in all other game it is use as AA and wont change a lot

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ARM emp bomber

was a really god unit that could prevent t3 spam. It was one of the only unit that is not a click-and-hope-for-the-best unit. It there really not a way to fix the exploit pointed by gunpost ?


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Fighter HP reduction

is gonna make all game porcy. In ffa, you need to escort your bomber through AA by fighter so they dont die instantaneously to kill key stuctures, if you loose all of them that just going to tourn out into a t3 war.
- Another consequence is : since fighters get killed so easily, only one flak plus t2 gunship will become op tactik since fighters need lot of shoot to kill them and need to circle around.
- Fighters are already lost really easily since ground AA is better now. Poeple cannot micro anything all the time. ten sec of inatention and 200 fighters gone with 1 flak. That looks design for DSD.
- I know the point behind that is to reduce the number of fighter spam to prevent lag. But do you have to sacriface gameplay for that ?

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Antinuke no longer stockpile

: Would not have been much better to stockpile them to 5 or 6 on repeat. Cause now, if I remeber well, you can use the bug where only one anti is reponding to the threat to over spam nuke. Before you could only load 5 or 6 so other anti answer to nuke. Now pople will use that trick cause they know for sure you cannot respond to it.


Antinuke cost reduction was not necessary. It is already extremely difficult to spam nuke against anti and that does not matter so much in game, except if you are playing 8V8-DSD. Also if you want to stay consistent you have to adjust mobile anti and aicraft carrier, except if you want to prone eco fest and porc ofc.

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- T2 bombers are now precision bombers, dropping fewer bombers over a shorter distance (same single-target damage)

Now only arm can snipe commander with nuke bomber since t2 bomber dont do the work . Poeple know what to play in 1v1 large map game....
Also, now t1 bomber are most cost efficient to kill advanced fusion or whatever. You need to double the number to make as many damage on the stucture now.

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- Normalized idle autoheal. 1% hp/second after 30 seconds.

Mean krog is back to full hp after 2 minutes 10 sec. This is a totally new game. Cannot it be just a mod option ??





At the end I got the feeling BA gonna be even more porcy than before because of changes for air, berta and antinuke.For game like ffa, that will make it less fun to play since 5 second of inatention and you loose all fighters and you wont be able to break porc easily. Game gonna turn into a eco fest even worse than before.
Also it make buzzsaw ultimate weapon that will be overused now in most of team game.

If you ask me, it looks like it has been design for DSD too much wihtout taking other game types into account.


Edit: What about panter and croc E & bt increase ? Every one that play since a long time agree with it.

[Silentwings]

Nice changes :D I would have done much the same.

Although I don't understand why you reduced the missile speed of kargs. What does that change in practical terms?

[Nixa]

Just a note, the fileformat is in sdz.

For practical reasons this is fine, but some may have problems downloading with opera/IE from springrts.com as the file extention will rename to zip.

If you have this problem, either a file extention rename to sdz or download using firefox.

I believe the sdz format is used to make it available on rapid.

Unfortunitly this will probably affect new players until it is widespread on the torrent - if they have problems please give them a hand.

[TheFatController]

For the record as I was credited on this release, I'm not happy with every change here, specifically:

- Removed arm EMP bomber

I disagree with removing any units, if EMP bomber was OP it should have been refactored somehow.

- All fighter HP reduced to 50 (1-hit killed by all antiair)

I think AA should have got special damage boost vs fighter instead of this, this allows all the other random units that potshot air to be too effective against fighters and a 50hp unit is just odd and silly (why are these fighters so poorly constructed? my immersion!)

- Anti nukes no longer stockpile, effectively starting with unlimited missiles

They shouldn't be free to maintain imo, there's nothing to stop a base having 20 antinukes now and making it unbombable i'd have gone the other way and made nukes more expensive or increased the coverage.

- Removed 50% damage reduction from pitbull/viper when closed

Closed units have more armour, this is unintuitive.

- Teams now have base storage, commander storage now 0/0

Definite hate, storage should be tied to commanders to make them more tactically important.

- Normalized idle autoheal. 1% hp/second after 30 seconds.

Seems way too much for high hp units

- Commanders untransportable by enemy transports

Should be modoption, should apply to all enemy units not just commanders.


I am very happy with a lot of the 'behind the scenes' improvements and a lot of the scripting improvements and lag fixes.

[Gota]

Haha so much QQ over emp bomber...thats how it goes...one stuffs tons of units in to a game than u cant remove them cause you get QQ wave...

[triton]

[[PinK]8D]

hlt was crap before try to build it vs rockospam or well microed janus / levelers. only in dsd -30hp sounds good ... ba is not dsd.

emp bomber was awesome unit;( all units that need some micro for good performance are cool). same with comnap.....

-50% e cost antinuke is enougth buff for anti.... no need to remove stockpile imo....

fighters were pretty dead vs any aa before...

[mcgoo]

Ati Crash fix seems not to work here

win7 64bit, ati 11.5

[very_bad_soldier]

Thanks for the report. It seems the Ati fix hasnt made it into the archive of 7.42.

[Wombat]

<3 TFC

i think there is a reason why only 2 hosts updated ba :D

[Beherith]

I apologize for the crash bug, for now it can be fixed by disabling the Mex Snap widget.

[ginekolog]

I welcome all under the hood changes.

However, I feel all these balance changes will make games much more porcy.

Some air change was needed though as until now air was by far the best game finisher. Player with more fighters ussually won.

[Nixa]

Are you sure its the mex snap widget, it has over 200 individual downloads and i've never heard a complaint. Might want to look into that (also just tried it on ATI myself and had no problems...)