9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Classic game design, maintained to please you...

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Ares
Balanced Annihilation Developer
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9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by Ares »

Firstly I would like to thank Flow for the lovely new UI which he has provided BA. Also thanks to Decay who made small but interesting changes like the EMP spider, and then reverted it based upon what the players wanted.

However, since Forboding Angel has taken the role of balance maintainer he has taken it as an opportunity to move BA away from its classic game design and into his own personal vision across all characteristics in less than a week:

Image

Gameplay mechanics - Repairing costs, fighters firing at ground, build ranges, wrecks blocking movement, binds, projectiles hitting allys, – all changed.
Aesthetic changes – TA’s classic nano lathe removed, death sounds changes, death explosions different.
Balance changes – all costs rounded, all turn speeds and accelerations, many AA units changed, energy generation changes, build range change, wind generators don’t chain, missile and projectile speed changes

The reaction from the community is disappointment, this release having strayed so far from the forum’s tagline “Classic game design, maintained to please you”.

Forboding Angel you have pushed changes through irresponsibly and without any consideration for members of this community and the response of server owners has been to remain at BA version 9.46 until balance changes you made are reverted.

Looking ahead, unless you are willing to change your approach, players like Gluon, Cartouche should be in charge of guiding future balance decisions. Flow I hope you would be willing to accommodate this.
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PicassoCT
Journeywar Developer & Mapper
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Re: 9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by PicassoCT »

Lol. This is amusing. Very amusing.

To stay alive, if for no other purpose, then to see history undo the works of great man and make little ironic art from the live of the surviving.

Forb, remember when the engine was breaking evo, and you reverted on the engine and made a big post about it.
This is your moment, now you are the engine Dev,
and the ba-community is the forb. I wonder what kharma will do with me, for those aeons of bitching..
its gonna be ironic and iconic, well worth to die in classic prose and pose for.

Image

BA is open source, so everybody is equal when it comes to starting faith wars.
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Floris
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Re: 9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by Floris »

First of all, Forb is no BA dev. I never stated this. He did share me some insight in BA history (he was a player way before I even was). He has his own SpringRTS game aswell and has experience that goes beyond just maintaining or forking a game. Yes he had his influence on the latest changes, but I directed all of this in concensus to at least try some of the more tricky changes.

Also it doesnt help that people like Senna are misinforming our playerbase with all kinds of assumptions and chatter.

The recent BA releases were kind of beta releases... in need for some finetuning. Needed to see if everything works and how much of an impact the new changes have, while fully aware they caused imbalances. I tried to make this clear whenever I could. But this often is futile cause all the change overwhelmed the chatter and I was still busy fixing encountered issues on the fly.

- Forb helped out with implementing new particle effects system and then (assisted) with many other things too.
- Unit acceleration and turnrate buff is needed for better pathing, but also makes vehicles a bit too powerfull atm (9.52 has nerfed vehiclespeed a bit)
- BA already has old nanoparticles back, guess you haven't tried 9.52 yet. (this fixes forformance issues)
- Because aesthetics missiles will start slower, and accelerate. (i was restyling particle effects anyway)
- missile based AA needed a behavioral change/buff too
- The buildspeed buffs results in faster paced starts (also since 9.52: repairing units is less quick.. buildspeed*0.6)
- I must say that I dont desire or had planned to be the BA balancing dev, but I did want to make some structural changes first, before anybody else would take Decay's place.
- Lots of people can balance by adjusting unit config files, but BA had years and years of maintainers who only did just this and hardly anything else. We wanted to deal with some oddities and legacy stuff first before a new dev can be installed.

I don't mind that the overkill host with 9.46 is the fallback, but new ba versions occasionally need some big game testing.
Last edited by Floris on 27 Nov 2016, 03:11, edited 1 time in total.
CommanderSpice
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Re: 9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by CommanderSpice »

But you did break our BA.
Lots of people can balance by adjusting unit config files, but BA had years and years of maintainers who only did just this and hardly anything else.
Wasn't that the point of it?
I think there is another mod (Progressive Annihilation?) for trying out stuff.

BA was never about trying new and fancy stuff. It was about continuous improvement based on player feedback.
And a lot of people liked it because of that.

I think it would make more sense to put the drastic gameplay and balance changes in a staging mod so everyone could try it out and have a laugh see what actually makes sense and what is utter crap.

Smashing the game to pieces from one release to another is not a good way forward. And its a way on which many players won't follow.

I'd be very happy to see the BA restored to its former glorious state.

Please make BA great again.
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Forboding Angel
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Re: 9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by Forboding Angel »

Wow, lot to process there.

I have not taken on the role of balance maintainer. I have, however, pointed out areas where certain units simply don't make sense (the madsam and packo were good examples) and helped fix them (in this case the scripts were garbage).

Classic game design? First of all, if anything, I would move it more towards an OTA design. OTA was a shitload of fun, and BA implements some spring specific things that take some of that fun away. However in the broad sense, understand that if anything, I'm more of an OTA purist.

Repairing costs, that was a change that Floris agreed to in order to make nanoshielding actually cost something (15% energy), instead of the case simply being WHEE I HAVE TONS OF BUILDERS +iwin <- google it.

Fighters firing at ground? I have done nothing with air. Talk to floris.

Build ranges... Christ, in order to build something, cons were having to hug whatever they were building. The problem is that super short build ranges results in a LOT of unnecessary con unit packing/unpacking and shifting movement as well as the probability that cons would get stuck on a building. On the flipside, too long of build range and all of a sudden nanoshielding is a very real issue. The new minimum range (200) solves both issues.

Wrecks blocking movement, Actually what you aren't understanding is that it only applies to map/wrecks that are 2x2 and below. Anything larger still blocks. The issue is that wrecks blocking movement is neat and cute until you have massive wreckfields that completely make t1 useless. t2 can just roll over the t1 wrecks (t1 units by and large are 2x2). But that's not the real reason for it, the real reason is that historically BA units move like shit. A lot of the time they would be accelerating or braking, never simply cruising at their max speed. As a result, not only does it make pathing gawdawful, it also make controlling units in areas like that awful as well. This essentially mitigated the issue altogether while still maintaining that larger wrecks would still block movement. It also helps people who play BA on a potato get far better performance.

Binds, BA's "binds" were simply a widget setting binds in uikeys. You can still use uikeys, nothing is stopping you, but an addition was added by commonplayer that allows for there to be dynamic hotkeys for building units and structures, and display those hotkeys directly on the buildpic. About that same time it was thought... HEY wouldn't it be neat if we could show costs too (which are toggleable btw, Talk to Floris)? The binds do not interfere in any way with your uikeys.txt

Friendly fire, this is a necessity, tbh. What you don't know is that in 9.46 battles are far more of a crapshoot than you could ever have imagined. Many units never get hit at all, other units have projectiles fly right through them. Sometimes you will think that the projectile hit due to aoe damage from the projectile hitting the ground, but that aoe isn't the full damage that should have been done to the unit that should have been hit. This is due to tiny hitboxes being added to each and every unit as a method to make some units work when stacked. In theory, neato. In practice, it's awful. Here is an example of the flash tank hitbox vs a proper hitsphere:

Image

Image

As a more practical example. This is why when you dgun things in 9.46, sometimes it simply doesn't hit, even though visually it seemed to impact the unit(s). There is even a thread on this forum complaining about it.

Furthermore, the gadget that intends to mitigate some of the issues makes them even worse, by taking these collision volumes and reducing them by about 20% (guesstimation). In order to fix collision volumes properly, friendly fire needs to be disabled. Put simply:

If units block each other's shots = collision volumes will be awful
If units don't block each other's shots = collision volumes will function the way they should

Unfortunately, realistically, the choice is binary.

Death sounds changes, This was done because BA used 3 explosion sounds for the deaths of all the units in the game, save for commanders and 1 or 2 buildings (nuke silo, etc). The death sounds gadget was written by flozi and it allows you to assign categories of explosions to various units. At the moment, all the units in BA currently have a library of about 20 explosion sounds for when a unit dies. The Commanders have about 5 different nuke explosion sounds that are used when they die. This ensures that the battlefield sounds far more dynamic than hearing the same explosion for every unit that dies.

Death explosions different, what you mean is that they are actually using spring's particle system (CEG). This is part of a larger point so I will address this further down the line. Suffice it to say that CEGs look better and use far less particles. For example, in 9.46 4 goliath tanks firing continuously, use about 5000 particles. This is insanity. Even worse, it will bring lesser graphics cards to their knees. BA has for years used the default engine explosions which overuse particles in the most wasteful of ways. There are times in a large battle in BA 9.46 over 20k particles will be in use. This is unacceptable, it is lazy, and it is shoddy. A huge battle should spike at around 6 maybe 7k, and normal battles should use around 1k, and those are the extremes. Ideally, far less than that should be in use at any given time.

All costs rounded, I had nothing to do with this. That was Floris wanting to make things pretty and it was a pain in the ass for him to do it all, so you're welcome.

All turn speeds and accelerations, Desperately needed. As I stated before, units in BA very rarely ever hit their maximum speed, they were always accelerating or braking, as a result, it has a huge impact on pathing. Proper turn speeds allow the units to respond properly to a player's input as opposed to waiting for a unit to eventually obey your order. That said, for a full 180 reversal of movement, the difference between 9.46 and latest BA is about 2 milliseconds.

Many AA units changed, I only fixed the scripts for the packo and madsam, Talk to Floris.

Energy generation changes, Huh? Talk to Floris, I know nothing about this. Talk to Floris?

Wind generators don’t chain, take a moment to think about how fucking stupid of a mechanic this is. Wind generators? You know why they were made to chain? Because the BA maintainer at the time didn't want people playing on greenfields, so in order to discourage it, windgens were made to chain. Pretty fucking stupid right? Regardless, I didn't have anything to do with it. Talk to Floris.

Missile and projectile speed changes, Talk to Floris.

Ok so I typed all of that up, now I am going to show you something. You know all of those changes you were talking about? They are pretty much all put behind modoptions (that were initially disabled by default until Floris told me to make them the default).

https://github.com/Balanced-Annihilatio ... s_post.lua

The vast majority of what I have done is in Post.

if (modOptions.betterunitmovement ~= "disabled") then --Modoption
if (modOptions.firethroughfriendly ~= "disabled") then --Modoption
modOptions.fixedhitspheres ~= "disabled") then --Modoption
if Spring.GetModOptions().smallfeaturenoblock ~= "disabled" then --Modoption

As you can see, most of what I do that would effect gameplay in any tangible way is behind a modoption. That means it can be toggled, by you, the mod itself, or the host.


----------------

What I've done in BA internals so far (that I can remember, it's a ton of cleanup so I'll probably forget some stuff):

Help BA move from SVN to GIT (thank fucking god).

BA was using resources.tdf. To any of the other real (I.E. Non *A) gamedevs here, you know what a cancer resources.tdf is. Anyway, implemented proper resources.lua and fixed the resulting buggy chaos from bad maintenance.

Implemented my generic CEG sets and implemented them in BA's units as well as the sprites. This was a massive chore that took about 3 entire days to accomplish. In the process I also cleaned up the death explosions clutter in BA. All of this was preliminary with the understanding that Floris was then going to go through and properly implement explosions and effects the way he wanted them to be. This resulted in a massive drop in particle waste, which now allows players computers not to be overwhelmed when a lot of action is happening.

Implemented deathsounds. While going through death explosions, I was startled to find that only about 3 explosion sounds were used for every single unit in BA. Implementing deathsounds required adding customparams to all of the unitdefs which was a monumental chore, but now Floris can have categories of sounds for when units die. For example he could have one sound set for kbots, another for vehicles, watery sounding ones for subs and ships, etc. All done very easily and within minutes as opposed to months.

Implemented CEG effects for unit pieces that fly off when a unit dies (this is why it looks so pretty when shit blows apart now (that and Floris implemented a really nice effect for it)).

Updated LUPS, BA's lups was ancient. I updated it and at the same tiem we also implemented lups nanos. Floris got a little carried away with particle usage on them, however ;p But nanas have since been switched back to the default engine one due to the fact that at any given time BA has hundreds of builders, all of which end up overwhelming things. This is a serious issues and exposes the huge flaws in BA's buildpower makeup.

Standarization of buildtime and workertimes, In BA 9.46, buildtime was a meaningless statistic. In latest BA I made it mean something by reducing buildtime to the seconds something would take to build with 1 workertime. So essentially I put it on a 1:1 ratio. Then, I went about standardizing workertimes which were all over the place. I only touched actual builders, not minelayers and stuff like that.

t1 and t2 factories get 3 buildpower (same as commander)
t3 factories (gantries) get 6

I should point out that the only factories that really benefited in a meaningful way from this is t1 factories. I noticed that in order to properly produce t1 units, it was necessary to have at the least 1 nanoturret (preferably 2) for your t1 factory. In OTA, t1 factories produced t1 units at a satisfactory rate, and so after upping t1 factories and testing quite a bit, it was made default.

t1 constructors get 1.5 (nanoturrets have 2)
t2 constructors get 3

Ofc this impacts aircons, because now aircons don't completely suck anymore. Instead of making aircons crap at building again, the solution was to simply reduce their max speed. This means that in base they can be really great, but you can't just use them to go populate the map in 2 minutes kekekeke.

Remastered sounds, BA has been using 8bit mono sounds for years. Unchanged from OTA. I remastered them in 16bit mono (preferred format for spring). Maintained the same volume while adding depth (smile EQ for the most part).

Remastered unittextures, Has anyone notice that the units in latest BA look way more clean and nice? You're welcome.

Updated BA's aging lua handlers, added utilities, etc. Gamedevs who why this crap is important. From a pure player aspect, the impact is nil.

Implemented Music, you're welcome. You can now even easily have your own local soundtrack for BA. Huge thanks to Floris for adding volume sliders and sexy track names and controls to the music widget <3.

Implemented loading music, used a placeholder song which ended up becoming the defacto I guess lol.

-----------------------

Now to address some of the utter bullshit that has been spread by Senna and various others.
Forb is trying to ruin BA so ppl will play evo.
Bruh, really? First of all, I don't really want BA players playing Evo. The evo community is nice to each other and we have fun. You guys are cancer. Stay in BA where you belong (Like a good side bitch, stay in your lane). If you do come over, be nice or get banned. I have zero tolerance for harassment of newbies. But overall, no. I don't want you.
omg decay is gone and is replaced by forb
I have my own game to work on. Floris needed help and in a very macro sense, I helped him. Anything that I did that effected balance went through his approval .I said I've been working on it (on a macro scale), I don't think I've ever claimed to be officially part of it.
Mr Gundam
Seriously... How do you mistake me for Smoth? Bruh. Smoth actually has talent.
We can't dl BA from springfiles anymroe BAW
I can see how if you are stuck in spring 7 years ago this might be an issue. It really isn't and Rapid is a far better method of distribution. That fact isn't up for debate. I even made a frontend for it (Windows) for those of you who have broken fingers:
PR-Downloader Menu - https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing (Someone who knows python better than me should convert this *hint hint*)

There is more, but those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head.

-----------------------

My main goal in touching BA has been to bring BA into this decade. BA has been a poorly maintained pile of junk for many, many years. Mostly touched by people who only knew how to change numbers in a unitdef. These people have rarely understood nuance and more often than not do not realize that there are more ways to balance something rather than the kneejerk reaction. Beherith tried valiantly to polish BA, and in a lot of ways helped matters a lot, but the fact of the matter is that behe hasn't touched BA in quite a long time, so all of the great work that he started just got dumped by the wayside. BA effectively has a history of holding the engine back. This makes myself and other gamedevs justifiably angry, especially due to the fact that BA is generally looked upon as a cancerous growth attached to Spring. Now, internally, BA is as modern as the rest of the games (more or less anyway), with the exception of 3do and BOS/COB. So that is a pretty huge deal. Please understand that I mean no disrespect or offense to previous BA maintainers.

In my changes to BA, my focus has been to make it more fun to play in a macro sense. I'm not talking about macro vs micro, I'm talking about macro in a player sense. Fun to play for vets, fun to play for newbies. 9.46 has the very frustrating mechanics of units that do not obey orders in a timely fashion, units that path badly around obstacles (like wreckfields), projectiles that don't actually hit their target when they appear to do so, and the lack of capability to do minute micro with individual or groups of units. The latest BA fixes all this although Floris disabled hitspheres fix and firing through friendly which needs to be reversed for a lot of reasons, but he's in charge so what he says goes, however they are modoptions so you can enable them at your leisure.

These changes help the overall gameplay. Are there smaller more subtle impacts? Sure there are, for example reapers and bulldogs are fantastic MBTs as they were meant to be (maybe a little more fantastic than they should be?). Understand that changing a unit's turnrate does not make the turret turn faster, as a result, you still have to deal with the fact that the barrels on most BA units turns slowly. And if the units is turning opposite of the barrel, aiming may still take a while. You can see this pretty plainly when using a group of raiders or stumpies. But what it does promote is unit formations and concaves.

But these impacts are minor, and any impacts can be fine tuned for more precise balance. But an even larger point is that the modoptions that I have implemented, when enabled, promote unit synergy. When you have no useless backline units (I.E. units sitting in the back of your army, can't fire because friendly units in front, and when the units in front die and the units behind can fire, the units that are behind end up having their projectiles hit the wreckage in front of them sometimes), that means that your army can work together as a whole unit, which means that putting better thought into your army makeup will result in more favorable engagements.

I suggest tuning out people that simply whine about any change, and trying to understand how changes promote better overall gameplay. Nothing is ever final, and everything can always be tweaked. Becoming a drama queen doesn't help anyone.
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Silentwings
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Re: 9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by Silentwings »

Floris wrote:BA had years and years of maintainers who only did just this and hardly anything else
This isn't entirely fair imo - and to the extent it is fair I think it is what the playerbases of ye very olde times (meaning, before TFC) wanted. But I am glad to see you taking an interest in BAs visuals - which were largely neglected by Behe & I in favour of BAR.
Forboding Angel wrote:I suggest tuning out people that simply whine about any change, and trying to understand how changes promote better overall gameplay.
I think it is unlikely that anyone who is not a regular player will be able to make changes that are liked by BAs playerbase because
(a) It depends on fashion as much as fact, and there are mostly no right answers - not a bad thing, but it means that people making changes should be part of the playerbase and be widely visible as such. Without that players will (often correctly imo) respond with "WTF", and feedback will be misunderstood; e.g. these ones are not the drama queens, nor the self-interested.
(b) It's difficult to get what you wish for, even when you do want sensible things - easy to think "oh if I do X then Y will follow from it" and then reality is more complicated.
Forboding Angel wrote:these impacts are minor.
No, they aren't.

I've no wish to go through each change individually and discuss which I think are hopeless rubbish and which seemed sensible - and I don't think I play enough to do it anyway atm - but imo devs should like their playerbases, on average.
Forboding Angel wrote:I don't really want BA players playing Evo. The evo community is nice to each other and we have fun. You guys are cancer. Stay in BA where you belong (Like a good side bitch, stay in your lane).
Forboding Angel wrote:BA is generally looked upon as a cancerous growth attached to Spring.
I am frankly not surprised that several changes initiated by someone who takes this view of BA are getting a strongly negative response from its players.
Forboding Angel wrote:BA has been a poorly maintained pile of junk for many, many years. Mostly touched by people who only knew how to change numbers in a unitdef.
I'm afraid I do feel compelled to defend many good people who helped in the past, and point out that imho this claim takes the title of the most ridiculously arrogant self-interested bollocks I've ever read in this forum. And believe me, that was a hard record to beat.
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Forboding Angel
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Re: 9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by Forboding Angel »

No, they aren't.
We have different viewpoints on what is minor. But you would have to be far more specific.
I've no wish to go through each change individually and discuss which I think are hopeless bollocks and which seemed sensible, but imo devs should like their playerbases, on average.
I hold no ill will vs the BA playerbase, but even the playerbase itself refers to itself as toxic.
I am frankly not surprised that several changes initiated by someone who takes this view of BA are getting a strongly negative response from its players.
Cute transition, but that's crap and you know it. You are also comparing apples to oranges. You know that I am referring to the fact that in many cases we have had to keep broken behavior in the engine due to it causing issues with *A and *A maintainers not knowing how to work around it. *A has a long and storied history of holding the engine back. That is what I am referring to, not the gameplay of BA. Once again you knew exactly what I meant and are simply being disingenuous.

The gameplay of BA has some pretty serious issues. Just because you get used to bad behavior doesn't mean that it shouldn't be fixed. Additionally, the fix doesn't always mean that it will result in completely different behavior.

I've played AA for years religiously, played BA off and on over time, played BOTA pretty religiously for quite some time and have played OTA (diff engine obviously) for the majority of my life. Even made a little *A project myself at one time. I've helped work with EE. I've been working on Evo for many many years. I'm pretty familiar with the engine, and I'm also still quite familiar with *A and in particular, BA.
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Forboding Angel
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Re: 9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by Forboding Angel »

Silentwings wrote:
Forboding Angel wrote:BA has been a poorly maintained pile of junk for many, many years. Mostly touched by people who only knew how to change numbers in a unitdef.
I'm afraid I do feel compelled to defend many good people who helped in the past, and point out that imho this claim takes the title of the most ridiculously arrogant self-interested bollocks I've ever read in this forum. And believe me, that was a hard record to beat.
Doesn't make it untrue. Until beherith decided to try to make it into something real, generally the only people that touched it were mostly number jockeys.
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Silentwings
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Re: 9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by Silentwings »

Until beherith decided to try to make it into something real, generally the only people that touched it were mostly number jockeys.
This is different to the first claim, but I repeat imho "arrogant self-interested bollocks", and (more importantly) everything else in viewtopic.php?f=44&t=35793#p580137.
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Forboding Angel
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Re: 9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by Forboding Angel »

The problem is, the reality of the state of disrepair in which BA has found itself contradicts your statement.

As an example, it took Behe slaving away to finally get BA out of mostly FBI and TDF. That should make you say "Dafuq???"

Edit: Let me remind you that there was a reason that the majority of what I did was locked behind default disabled modoptions. It was to allow people to try them at their own pace. However, floris told me to make them default, so I kept them behind modoptions, but just enabled by default.
CommanderSpice
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Re: 9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by CommanderSpice »

Floris wrote: - I must say that I dont desire or had planned to be the BA balancing dev, but I did want to make some structural changes first, before anybody else would take Decay's place.
Forboding Angel wrote: I have not taken on the role of balance maintainer. I have, however, pointed out areas where certain units simply don't make sense (the madsam and packo were good examples) and helped fix them (in this case the scripts were garbage).
Funny how the balance gets totally fscked up, but no one is responsible.
Are there any more dudes which don't wanted to touch the balance or are not officially assigned to that job but are pushing balance changes like mad?

This "structural changes" and "fixes" are the actual problem.
You both say they are all reasonable and necessary.
I say they aren't.

For example the rounded buildcosts. They affect balance, do they? Are they necessary?
I guess they were done after the display of the costs on the buildicons, to make it look "nicer".
Do I have to comment on the "reasonable"?

And even if they were reasonable and necessary, they are too much at once to judge the effect of one specific change and fix side effects effectively.

Why not make another mod if you want a vastly different game?
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Forboding Angel
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Re: 9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by Forboding Angel »

In what way has balance been effected? Actual tangibles... How has balance been effected? How has it changed gameplay.

With everything I have observed and in playing the game myself, people generally play the game the same as they always have with similar results.

The one exception was in a lavahighground match with doo and the other fx guy, doo was trying to nanoshield his warriors vs my thuds. I simply targeted the workers and he lost the battle resoundingly shortly thereafter (then I proceeded to suicide my thuds into Adolf's minefield. RIP the dream.).

Another oddity was before the construction plane speed was reduced, someone on bandit plains was making a neat little llt line with aircons (he still lost, but the effort was valiant). << Con plane speed was reduced because this exhibited an actual potential problem. Reducing the speed mitigated the issue while still retaining the con plane as being useful.

Provide specifics of where balance has been effected and why you think that it poses a problem.
CommanderSpice
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Re: 9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by CommanderSpice »

Forboding Angel wrote: Provide specifics of where balance has been effected and why you think that it poses a problem.
You seem to imply that balance and gameplay is untouched. Do I really have to do this?

https://github.com/Balanced-Annihilatio ... 6730eebfa2
1. Changing metal end energy costs affects the balance.
2. Random changes (like, for example, rounding) are a problem.

And that is just one commit. I don't want to go every other commit which nonchalantly touches gameplay and balance,
because that would be a waste of my time.

Also I do not care who of you two did exactly what.

You not being able to acknowledge this basic connections is a problem on another level.

With "problem" I do not want to say it won't be a game you can play.
It's just not our beloved BA any more.
Ares
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Re: 9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by Ares »

Forboding Angel wrote:You guys are cancer. Stay in BA where you belong (Like a good side bitch, stay in your lane).
I think this says it all. Forbs should not be involved in BA. He is ruining our game and doesn't care if we disagree.

No server operators want to host your new version, revert all balance changes to 9.46.
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Forboding Angel
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Re: 9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by Forboding Angel »

CommanderSpice wrote: 1. Changing metal end energy costs affects the balance.
2. Random changes (like, for example, rounding) are a problem.
I asked for something tangible. Energy costs going up or down by a tiny amount as in 10 or 50, has very little appreciable effect on balance when you're dealing with costs in the thousands.

It results in a change that is a fraction of a second of impact. Across the entire game you might have an impact of 5 or 10 seconds.

That is not tangible (in the broader context).
I think this says it all. Forbs should not be involved in BA. He is ruining our game and doesn't care if we disagree.
The fact that I put changes behind modoptions that are disabled by default proves you wrong.

The fact that I've spent tons of time working to fix BA's infrastructure when it poses no clear benefit to myself proves that you are wrong.

Ares, spice, You are right about one thing. I do not care one tiny bit what you or senna think. I care what people who love the game and play it with an open mind think. For example, the FX guys provided great feedback without being aholes. Be like them.
CommanderSpice
Posts: 29
Joined: 29 Jun 2011, 13:14

Re: 9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by CommanderSpice »

Ok, we tried.

Any closing comments, Floris?
dansan
Server Owner & Developer
Posts: 1203
Joined: 29 May 2010, 23:40

Re: 9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by dansan »

Wow - what a depressing thread!

If you just say "it was better before" than you sound like my grandpa. That _something_ was better before is always right, but lacking to explain what and WHY something is worse now DOES NOT HELP ANYONE.
BTW: when is "before"? BA has changed a lot over the years. The changes of this release are not bigger than the changes from last year (combined). Were those changes good or bad - can you even tell in retrospective? Can you even distinguish which strategies were changed because of stats and which ones because the player base simply fancies it?

Instead of jemmering about changes, two things must happen:

1. THANKS A LOT to Floris and Forbs for their immense effort to not only keep BA working but to update its code base. Source code must be updated - sometimes a lot - or it will simply *rot*. That's something a BA player does not want. Bringing structural updates to an old code base is tedious and difficult work and even with the best effort will have side effects. But the win is, that BA will live longer, be faster and - very important - it will be easier for future maintainers to work on it!! We all want that.

2. Restore good balance. Undesired balance changes do not necessarily have to be reverted, but can be balanced with others, etc etc. Balance is not a state but a continuous process. I am (like most players) not proficient in how this is done. OUR JOB as players is not to bicker around - because that doesn't help. To make it better, we have to give examples of what effect on overall balance or strategy or tactic a change had and how we'd like it to be. Important: don't write _how_ it should be _done_ - that a maintainer knows better - write _what_ you want achieved and let the maintainers do the implementation.

It is good, that BAs "heart" (its source code) got a major update. Now let's help get the kinks out of it for the next releases.
dansan
Server Owner & Developer
Posts: 1203
Joined: 29 May 2010, 23:40

Re: 9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by dansan »

On a different page: I feel that it's a little problematic that mainters/devs and players discuss this in the same thread. The things nixtux and forbs have to say to each other are on such a different level than what ares has to say, that it makes the thread rather confusing and discontinues.

Split nixtux's points to viewtopic.php?f=44&t=35800 at his request. (Silentwings)
Senna
Posts: 315
Joined: 17 Mar 2009, 00:20

Re: 9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by Senna »

btw guys stop that fight each other, we have a small community actually.

Floris u should think what you want to do with BA, for my knowledge, BA has be made by community from many years.

I think u should keep work on widgets, but let community make the changes they want.
Senna
Posts: 315
Joined: 17 Mar 2009, 00:20

Re: 9.51 Forboding Angel revert to 9.46

Post by Senna »

This will only end closing BA or any mod using old OTA cavedog models. This fight is not good guys. we will end with no mods anymore.
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