Balanced Annihilation V6.5

[Yatta]

Imo BA lacks a little on "special effect" units so Im really sad the commando disappeared , but the intruder dropping units on death is great news.

However I get unstable behavior with intruders (and others multi-units transports) :
When using a few transports and setting load zones, sometimes the transports wont load some units un that zone, you have to manually order to load every units.

When the intruder dies with multiple units onboard, some units sometimes reappear at their loading point, and sometime it just crashes.

BA or spring bug ?

I know the suggestions are legions, but while Im at it : I wish there was some kind of mobile units/turrets -other than crawling bombs- that are very dangerous to short range and makes the enemy goes "OH SHI- Its a trap !". Like a few hidden close to your "apparently undefended arty/ressources", or inside an intruder pursued by enemy units :D

[Evil4Zerggin]

Come to think of it, S44 has had problems with crashing when unloading multiple units in the past. Don't know if they've solved it, but you may want to ask if they know anything about it.

[Tribulexrenamed]

I know the suggestions are legions, but while Im at it : I wish there was some kind of mobile units/turrets -other than crawling bombs- that are very dangerous to short range and makes the enemy goes "OH SHI- Its a trap !". Like a few hidden close to your "apparently undefended arty/ressources", or inside an intruder pursued by enemy units :D

Core flamers, both the dragon tooth hat edition and the walking edition.

[REVENGE]

I know the suggestions are legions, but while Im at it : I wish there was some kind of mobile units/turrets -other than crawling bombs- that are very dangerous to short range and makes the enemy goes "OH SHI- Its a trap !". Like a few hidden close to your "apparently undefended arty/ressources", or inside an intruder pursued by enemy units :D

Core flamers, both the dragon tooth hat edition and the walking edition.

Both of which are made a lot less dangerous by the insidious lack of flameweapon aim ahead.

[gaxx]

Found a crash bug. I am not sure on the details of how it works because I didn't test every possibility.

I was testing the capabilities of the newly improved "Intruder" unit (which I love, just for the record). First, i built 15 crawling bombs and set them to repeat, put them in the intruder, told the bombs to self-d, and then placed the intruder into a mock base, then destroyed the intruder various ways (damage, d-gun, self-d). Each time it died, it successfully released all 15 of the bombs in-tact, and they immediately self-d'd.

While doing this, i noticed that the distribution of the bombs always had an eastward trend. The area around where i blew the intruder was destroyed, and an area about 5~7 factory lengths to the east was also destroyed.

Wonderful, right?
So i wondered to myself: are they distributing to the right, because that is always the case, or are they distributing to the right because I am on the west side of the map? So i decided to test on the east side of the map to see if they would distribute to the west this time.

So i loaded up another intruder (this time with 20 crawling bombs), and self-d'd it on the east side of the map, at which time the game froze. I do not know if this was because bombs were distributed off of the map, or because it couldn't handle the 20 bombs. I never tested 15 bombs (the number i had successfully tested up to that point) on the east side.

Sorry for the long-winded lead up, but i figured some of the details might help narrowing down the problem. If anyone gets more on this bug, i would love to hear about it :)

[REVENGE]

This is a (possibly well documented?) problem with transports: in the case that you attempt to unload units onto "invalid" terrain, the units will be sent back to their last valid location. For example, attempting to use the Intruder as a cherry-picker to lift units up cliffs and stuff is often hit and miss, since if you unload your unit onto invalid terrain, the unit will quickly appear at some random location for about a simframe or two, then get sent back to the place where they got loaded.

Like other people using the Intruder, have you checked to see if your crawling bombs got sent back to their original loading spots, or somewhere close?

And NOiZE, like I said, it's this crawling bomb loading and surviving shit that makes the Intruder more OP than before. Load and unloading units were already instant, so they were great for bomb pushing and comnapping. Now, the bombs won't even die when the Intruder dies, there is no more defense against Intruder whoring.

[Hacked]

he hates arm

[Yatta]

And NOiZE, like I said, it's this crawling bomb loading and surviving shit that makes the Intruder more OP than before. Load and unloading units were already instant, so they were great for bomb pushing and comnapping. Now, the bombs won't even die when the Intruder dies, there is no more defense against Intruder whoring.

The basic unloading capacity of multi-units loaders fails for assault imo.
Take lots of light units in an intruder or L2 air transport, and then order the transport to drop them to a zone. Either you drew the zone too small and it doesnt unload all, either you draw a zone big enough and it takes ages to unload the whole shipment.

This problem applied to the L2 air transport is ok because it shouldnt be too easy to drop units in the middle of the enemy base. However ...

This applied to the intruder which is supposed to be an assault transport makes it utterly useless (I dont remember seing one actually used in any game before except when I tried to test it myself).

The unload on death capacity just make this units actually usable ... except with the current bugs. Also dont forget that this capacity come to the price of losing the intruder :)

Btw the bug reported with the intruder (and crash) was present in BA 6.31 too. I started testing the intruder only 3 days ago, just in time before 6.4/6.41. If that is relevant, I was using .cheat / .nocost for the tests.

[Masure]

The best intruder death behaviour should be to unload all units damaged IMO (eg 50% damage).

If not, there would be no real gain unloading units properly.

[Yatta]

Except of course having the intruder still alive :D
Its cost isnt neglectable :)

You could also just drop all the units on the very same point.
It looks weird with superposed unit, but it might solve the drop bugs and also it gives a "auto death unload" counterpart : all units being superposed, they are in a very dangerous situation : all attacks on one of the units virtually applys to the whole group, and theres the risk of chain explosion too, until the units are properly dispersed.

[Pxtl]

Well, you could give the intruder a decent-sized death explosion and make sure the units get unloaded before it hits. Then the death-deploy would only be useful for heavily-armored units.

[Yatta]

Heavier the armor, lesser the unit loaded count. Building an intruder to carry 1 or 2 units and deliver them damaged ... whats the point ?
I think its ok just as it is (assuming it'll be debugged), and will give new opportunities to games.

[imbaczek]

transports have issues in 0.76b1, it's a tad better in 0.77, but still not perfect I'm afraid. please test for any bugs in svn spring builds.

[NOiZE]

Mex upgrader gadget still is broken for me in 6.41...

It works fine for me,

I tested with: 0.77-branch_spring_0.76b1+svn6359.exe

[REVENGE]

The best intruder death behaviour should be to unload all units damaged IMO (eg 50% damage).

If not, there would be no real gain unloading units properly.

+1

Yatta, are you kidding me? The Intruder becomes entirely expendable about 3 minutes after people tech. Really, none of the transports in BA (except the ships early game) are really worthy of being "saved" for another mission.

Btw, does everyone knows that crawling bombs are much more powerful when self destructed? Normal crawling bombs' self d explosion is the Skuttle's attack explosion, and the Skuttle's self-d explosion is that of a nuclear mine. Much more effective to self-d crawling bombs than to actually have them "attack" anything.

[hunterw]

so what happens when an intruder dies in an ocean and it has land units?

[NOiZE]

so what happens when an intruder dies in an ocean and it has land units?

It seems they get teleported back on land O_O


They should die though...


PS: the same happens in 0.77 ...

[Yatta]

The best intruder death behaviour should be to unload all units damaged IMO (eg 50% damage).

If not, there would be no real gain unloading units properly.

+1

Yatta, are you kidding me? The Intruder becomes entirely expendable about 3 minutes after people tech. Really, none of the transports in BA (except the ships early game) are really worthy of being "saved" for another mission.

Btw, does everyone knows that crawling bombs are much more powerful when self destructed? Normal crawling bombs' self d explosion is the Skuttle's attack explosion, and the Skuttle's self-d explosion is that of a nuclear mine. Much more effective to self-d crawling bombs than to actually have them "attack" anything.

Lets consider it somewhat more 'mathematically'.

The Intruder has twice the metal cost of the Reaper.
The Intruder has 80% the metal cost of the Goliath.
The Intruder can hold 7 Repears or 1 Goliath.

This confirms that the Intruder cost is NOT neglectible, thus making the loss of one considerable enough to chose not to self-destroy it to gain time in a non-emergency situation.

Imagine you want to use the Intruder to force a frontline, with the -50% HP rule.

Case 1 : Using Reapers
For the same metal cost, you have either 9 Reapers going on ground, or 7 in one Intruder. When the intruder gets killed, all Reapers have 50% health, so you can consider the Intruder delivered the equivalent to 3.5 reapers, for the total metal cost of 9 Reapers.
The fact is the reapers are now in fire range and can attack, however they are very grouped and very sensible to AoE, so this advantage can be somewhat neglected. The attack of 9 reapers without transports would be far more effective.
If you consider the defense line was strong enough to kill the 9 reapers before they get the defenses in their fire range, you can consider the Intruder wouldnt have reached the line anyways. (plus the reapers are faster than the intruder).

Case 2 : Using Goliaths
For the same metal cost, you either have 2 Goliaths, or 1 Goliath in an Intruder. [same blahblah...]. You either have two goliaths going by themselves, or 50% of a goliath close to the defense line (with all defenses already focused on it). Effective ?

So using an Intruder to 'intrude' a defense line -which I suppose is the role of an assault transport- is (imo) clearly ineffective with the -50% rule.

The purpose of the assault transport is to run trough defenses lines to help units reach a combat zone. If it delivers damaged units, it fails in its role, as the unit could have gone there by themselves and get the damage in the way.

Anyways, as stated before, Ive never seen an Intruder really used in
a game before. Give it a chance with this 'instant drop' feature and see if it gets actually used before being convinced its OP.

I just wish this unit could open new possibilities in games, just not be just another transport unit.

[gaxx]

If there is some way to script the intruder so that any units which would be deployed to invalid locations were destroyed instead, you could take care of the balance problem and crash problem in 1 shot.
Self-d the intruder and get your units out quick, but risk losing some in the process, or let them out normally at no risk.

On a slightly different topic: Commando
Commando was my favorite unit in BA before, but it was just too risky to use due to its huge EMP death. Walking one up your front line, or even flying one up on a trans risked having a huge hole frozen in the line if the commando exploded. Air dropping was out of the question, as the EMP blast from 1 trans caught all of the others as well.
Simply bringing the old commando back would make it overpowered due to the applications of the new intruder, but I would love to see the commando back with a smaller or no EMP blast.

[imbaczek]

If there is some way to script the intruder so that any units which would be deployed to invalid locations were destroyed instead, you could take care of the balance problem and crash problem in 1 shot.

This is an engine problem; it'll probably be addressed before new release, since it's easier to fix than a desync