Serious balance issue: goliaths

[munch]

My tuppence:

I think gols are imbalanced. The original poster has hit the nail on the head, it's their penetrating power. They just roll past your defenses - whether that's hlts/mrpcs or mobile forces like bulldogs or other gols. What I often do is send in a few lvl1 units to find out where the main defenses are and then attack with the gol(s) somewhere else.

The problem is that the cost of a unit is more or less proportional to the units HP. The effect on gameplay of high health though is non linear. Below a certain HP limit you can't even get past a lone HLT, regardless of how many units you attack with.

On the plus side, if you're using bulldogs, you could send two squads of two to attack from different angles. But it's not like you can't just do that with reapers (those other core heavy tanks that everybody forgets about).

The thing that bothers me about this is it dumbs down the gameplay. It used to be the case that if you got a half decent hard point that you needed to get past, you had to put together a decent combined attack to take it out - armour, artillery, MERLS etc. The ridicuously heavy armour you get in XTA allows you to bypass all that and just march into the enemy base. Often you can win a game just by being the first to build a gol.

I think we need to make armour cost dispraportionate, e.g. follow a square law or something (maybe not that severe).

Cheers

Munch

[NOiZE]

Well every body can pick a balancing mod they like, XTA, OTA, UH

it's all out there

so i would say stop complaining and pick a other mod..

[aGorm]

Whils't im not against the other mod's, dont you think it would be wise for teh base mod to be balanced as much as possible?

Personly... I admit i dont like how powerfull the golliath is, but then i play arm... however in the time it took my enemy to build one i had built 1 and a half penertrators, and if i had been a bit smarter would have hadt he energy to fire the thing and destroy teh goliath ( as it was, it got to my enery befor i got to it... but that was just bad luck and good play on the other side)

Maybe make them take just a fraction longer to build, but other than that i think there fine.

aGorm

[IMSabbel]

Er...
A penetrator destroying a goliath? Only if the driver of that goliath is doing a 2 week vacation in the meantime.

A penetrator does how much damage? 100/s? 150? Not much more at least, because even a hawk needs 3 seconds or so to be killed

a goliath in " base demolishing mode" can get HP due to experience faster then a penetrator can damage it. And even if it didnt, it wouldnt take 2 minutes ( 120 sec for 200damage/s) to find the penetrator (hint: there is a blue line...)

[aGorm]

you nuts? i had 1 penertartor take out 3 gollis befor (admitadly they wernt shooting it, more fool them). you just need teh power behind the dam things so they keep up there beam...

aGorm

[FizWizz]

It's apparent the XTA people don't want their Gols touched. Despite being Uber-armored and Uber-powered, they are Uber expensive too, and do have their weaknesses. Isn't the XTA Goliath just a Gol with 4x the power for 4x the price?

If Uber-Goliaths aren't your cup of tea though, I would strongly recommend UH for a balancing mod. I've also heard that Absolute Annihilation is of a high caliber too, but I can't say from experience.

[smartie]

An xta golliath costs a little under 7x the price of an OTA one. (4650 metal and 26560 energy compaired to 697 metal and 3906 energy) It has exactly 10x the hitpoints and the weapon is a short range bertha shell. Their cannon makes them perfect for fighting level 1 units because you can hit groups of guys with the splash damage from a single shot. A golliath can plow through a whole army of level 1 guys and hardly take a scratch.

[Lindir The Green]

I think the level 2 factory is more expensive than the OTA one, though.

Also, the goliaths in OTA were (almost) worthless, so the ones in xta should be more powerful.

[Torrasque]

And in the new version, they have 10% less hp, no?

[Min3mat]

10% less...i think that 20%-30% would make xta a LOT more fun or have a counter to them!!! maybe make the penetrator do bonus damage vs them (they are pretty crappy now anyway!)as its a BLOD => should be able to penetrate armour?

[jcnossen]

Yesterday I simply drove my goliaths into a heavily defended base, full of the enemy's goliaths. The goliaths ride through until they reach the fusions and shoot them, disabling all the enemy's energy weapons and goliaths...
My point is that defense is currently unbalanced with mobile units. Core defense can handle arm units, but the goliath and krogoth walk through both Arm and Core defenses. Now im not trying to stimulate porcing, but right now porcing isn't even possible against a core enemy and that's a little weird I think.

I think we need to make armour cost dispraportionate, e.g. follow a square law or something (maybe not that severe).

I totally agree with that.

And also, playing other mods is often not possible because there aren't enough people online... This makes it even more important XTA is balanced.

[Kuroneko]

Yesterday I simply drove my goliaths into a heavily defended base, full of the enemy's goliaths. The goliaths ride through until they reach the fusions and shoot them, disabling all the enemy's energy weapons and goliaths...
My point is that defense is currently unbalanced with mobile units. Core defense can handle arm units, but the goliath and krogoth walk through both Arm and Core defenses. Now im not trying to stimulate porcing, but right now porcing isn't even possible against a core enemy and that's a little weird I think.

Annihilators....lots and lots of annihilators.

[Lindir The Green]

If you want to prevent goliaths from walking through your base then you should use dts or fortification walls.

Or HLT walls

[Min3mat]

i thought that in xta they ran over DT? FW will stop them (Fortification Wall although a firewall promptly used could crash spring and solve the problem! :D)

[Kuroneko]

i thought that in xta they ran over DT? FW will stop them (Fortification Wall although a firewall promptly used could crash spring and solve the problem! :D)

d/c ftw!

[CrowJuice]

I belive 3 Annihilators can take down one goli.

[SwiftSpear]

I belive 3 Annihilators can take down one goli.

It's an issue of micromanagement. Annihilators outrange goliath by ALOT, if you simply put 3 annhilators against any number of goli you are wasting annihilators becaues they aren't going to do enough damange to successfully hold off the goli before the goli are in range. however, put up 2 annihilators and all of a sudden your bulldogs can take goliath on a 1 to 1 ratio within range of them.

You really want to screw over a goli rush just get 5 spiders in your rush force, buy the time your spiders are dead they will have frozen an unbeliveable ammount of goli.

In comparison, krogoth can walk through groups of bulldogs smashing them in thier path, outrange annihilators with thier missles, are unfreezable by spiders, and shrug off 30 nukes individually. Krogoth are a real problem in XTA.

[tanelorn]

I have a demo of a 2 vs 2 where one plater airdrops 5 kroggies behind the lines and you can guess what else. XTA has its issues.

[IMSabbel]

Yeah, i mean goliaths ok... but airdropping krogoths is... lets say _somewhat_ strange.

At least make those things fly slower with such a large mass on it.... (not to mention it looks like a eagly carrying an elefant)

[hrmph]

If your opponent can successfully airdrop krogoths, then there is something seriously wrong with your defenses. I mean, like two or three shots from a single defender will take out an atlas.