Next version of AA

[lurker]

And why are you attacking the LLT when you could be attacking the com. He can't use that repairspeed on himself.

He can turn around, walk away and let you have fun with his LLT?

Exactly! If you want to destroy an LLT that the com is guarding, you shoot him until he walks away, then blast the LLT into oblivion.

[KDR_11k]

Then his flashes eat your arty because you spent more metal than him

[ginekolog]

i wouldnt buff comm so much from start. Give him morph button that costs 5000m and gives comm 10k hp. So it gets lategame usage and doesnt screw balance totaly.

[kiki]

i wouldnt buff comm so much from start. Give him morph button that costs 5000m and gives comm 10k hp. So it gets lategame usage and doesnt screw balance totaly.

excellent idea

[Pxtl]

Much better than my overcomplex "upgrades" concept. A small problem: you have to give the decoys the morph button too.

There's a lot of fun to be had with morphed comm - give it a proper buildlist, and enough energymake that it's an important powersource in your infrastructure.

Still, even with all that, the comm is still useful as a kamikaze porkbreaker - which also makes it a liability within your base, since it's death by brawler-swarm or bertha-fire means it will blow your base to smithereens.

[Dwarden]

Tru Absolute Annihilation v3 ?

[Scikar]

I think part of the problem with the majority of Spring mods is that balancing starts far too early. There's a ton of units all with unique roles in this mod, and there is no way you're going to be able to make changes on the scale you've got planned and still have it perfectly balanced every release.

In my opinion, which in all honestly has little modding experience backing it, is that you should screw balance for now and get your big changes in without worrying about it.

I'm sick of all this endless theorycrafting that goes on regarding every single change in any OTA based mod. You can take any change from any AA changelog ever and someone will be able to draw up a hypothetical situation where it's an unbalanced change. Theorycrafting just does not work all that well once you run into anything more complex than connect 4. Chess has 5 unique units and the best way to test a theory in that is to play it out, so why do we test theories on AA balance with DPS and cost calculations in a forum post instead of playing it?

Get those big changes done (which I love by the way), get people to submit replays of their games to work with feedback, and let's see how the effect of a comm build speed and repair speed change really makes a difference instead of theoretically.

Note: This isn't to say theory is useless, just that in something as complex as this it needs to be backed up with proper gameplay instead of pages and pages of calculations that make far too many assumptions. This isn't Spreadsheet Annihilation.

EDIT: Having been away from a while and decided to read back a few pages in this forum, it appears that a similar discussion to this has cropped up more than a few times. I hope this doesn't derail the thread, but I felt compelled to offer my $0.02 as far as AA is concerned, given its history with balance discussions.

[kiki]

Good point. Also, when ua 2 comes out (with 2 factions) it will probably be totally unbalanced, especially since im doing factions 1 at a time. Aggreed.

[el_matarife]

You know Caydr, most of us would be happy if you just got AA 2.11 working in Spring .76 and you added most of the new flashy Lua stuff in BA/CA like the mex upgrader and graphical effects. There's a large group of people out there who really think that AA 2.11 was the best version ever, so if you started this new AA from there I guarantee you'd have a lot of players back immediately.

[Forboding Angel]

Actually CA's lua is fucked. I wouldn't touch any of it with a 10 foot pole atm.

[tombom]

Actually CA's lua is fucked. I wouldn't touch any of it with a 10 foot pole atm.

it works ok over here maybe the problem is at your end

[Caydr]

LUA isn't something I'd like to adopt too early. As FA mentioned, apparently now there's some compatibility issues with the code they so painstakingly wrote, right? And it'll probably happen a couple more times before the iron out all the bugs. So I have to think to myself, should I work on balance primarily or LUA and graphics primarily?

I would certainly like to implement LUA and improved graphics, but they are more time consuming than balance and unit changes - especially in the case of graphics, since there's so much trial and error. With balance changes it's mostly math and experience.

If having a commander in your base is a major liability, wouldn't it make just as much sense to say that having him on your front line, your only means of defense, is a similar liability? It seems like the main issue with commanders is that they are too dangerous in some situations and too much of a liability in others. Their power doesn't scale with the game.

While I can't accomplish what might be possible through LUA scripting, I do have things in place to hopefully make commanders scale a little better.

Why don't I leave commander repair speed lower for the first release if it's such a difficult issue, and then try it out later when there's less things to worry about? The main thing I wanted to accomplish was make his ability at the very beginning of the game much stronger, ie, allow you to get out of Absolute Annihilation: SimBase 2.5 as soon as possible and get on with actually playing the game.

Personally I still don't think it will be a major problem, only an adjustment.

[kiki]

Try to balance the balance and the lua. Lua makes the mod awesome and balance makes sleska happy, not that it matters.

[Pxtl]

If having a commander in your base is a major liability, wouldn't it make just as much sense to say that having him on your front line, your only means of defense, is a similar liability? It seems like the main issue with commanders is that they are too dangerous in some situations and too much of a liability in others. Their power doesn't scale with the game.

Exactly. In the early game, the comm is the most heavily armored thing you own, and an incredible source of repair-power. That means it's an LLT-factory and defense-system. This leads to comm-pushing - early on, it's hard to mass enough firepower to overwhelm a heavily-armoured unit like the comm and the nigh-invincible LLT it defends.

Later on, it's armour is far less significant. There is a laundry-list of late-game units (or just masses of L1 units) that can trivially skoosh the comm before the player would even notice he was gone. As such, the armour is less important, so the comm becomes your base's equivalent to the Death Star's exhaust ports. So at first, it's a huge asset. Then it's neutral - a big nanolathe source you use to assist your facs, since likely the enemy doesn't have any weapon that could penetrate into your base, but still too weak to push out on the front-lines. In late game, it becomes a liability - a target for brawler-swarms and berthas to focus on, when you could be using nanotowers for the same job.

[Caydr]

Seems to me the problem is much larger than nanospeeds then, it's an issue of commanders not being good units.

Never fear though, I've only talked about the things I've done to buff commanders at the beginning of the game, not at the end.

[BigSteve]

That means it's an LLT-factory and defense-system. This leads to comm-pushing - early on, it's hard to mass enough firepower to overwhelm a heavily-armoured unit like the comm and the nigh-invincible LLT it defends.

Clearly you still haven't discovered the power of the rocko, 4 of them to be exact.

I reckon this new version of aa sounds awesome, cant wait! :)

[Caydr]

New mod

Just to be clear, I do intend to continue work on AA for the forseeable future, but I'm working on other things primarily now. I will continue to implement engine features, but I'm not going to expend myself like I used to just so I can get AA in a position of dominance again. BA, CA, I don't want to see them fail, and I don't want to destroy smaller mods like AA used to.

Also - I'm sure this will come as a heart-stopping shock to everyone who's familiar with AA's previous release schedule - Nothing tomorrow AA-related. It's releasable currently but I just got another idea I really, really want to use.

[1v0ry_k1ng]

perfect name; AA forever. if its ever released the fans claim they will all return, but that would require it to be finished.
I love how everyone is happy to drop every bugfix and improvement that BA has added to go back and play a buggy and imbalanced mod from the past. if you REALLY want to play aa 2.11 iirc it probably still works with currently spring. blasts to the past generally arent all they are cracked up to be though, I know the xta v 0.66 enthusiasts were dissapointed when we tried the old version and found it was an imbalanced bag o lolz...

[Forboding Angel]

Actually CA's lua is fucked. I wouldn't touch any of it with a 10 foot pole atm.

it works ok over here maybe the problem is at your end

lol, most of it doesn't work.

Just because something isn't throwing a zillion errors over the console doesn't mean that it's not borked.

[el_matarife]

I've never seen someone Osborne effect a product before it is even released before, this should be fascinating. And you didn't just osborne effect AA, you made it seem like you're barely going to support it post release just like the last AA version. Caydr, please recruit a team to work with you on AA, it just can't last as a one man band.