CA X BA discussion

[Vadi]

I concur you on the players choosing BA over CA.

If you make as many, or more, CA autohosts, you'll a) see the number of newbies joining those games drastically go up, b) eventually see more usual players coming over.

This will require however that all people who support CA only play on those autohosts for a bit - so that the movement doesn't choke early on.

Give it a try if you want

[Otherside]

vadi CA has enuff hosts/autohosts

problem is that the community is rather close minded if they crash once in a CA game for watever reason they will say the mod sucks and stop playing

if they get beaten trying to do a BA tactic in CA they get pwned and dont understand how CA works they say they cba to learn or zomg noob mod and dont play

another problem is that every1 seems to climb into one game instead of filling multiple CA games

u get one autohost with 16 players and 10 specs and 3 empty autohosts

i find huge games pointless personally and think it would look better if multiple hosts were filled with 8 or so players

[Licho]

BA is popular because its popular :)
Most people don't care about other mods if their current one works. They don't want to update, learn and try something else.

And also as you said its harder to get CA game, so why bothering?
Most BA players never even tried CA.

It's very hard to switch "dominant" mod.

[Saktoth]

Tech 2 seens to be working fine for me, and properly balanced.

There are quite a few units at t2 you wont see used at all, or rarely. Others are just flat out worse than others of a similar type and with the same abilities (BA's Zipper for example, though thats been buffed a little).

The only reason t2 works is that its delayed late into the game. At t1, you start with the same resources and the same potentials for expansion- it needs tight, precise balancing. At t2, the players have already staked out territory, the economic differences are already quite apparent and thus some unit being slightly better than some other is less apparent- its usually more important that you have a stronger economy than the enemy (which, by t2, someone will) and just spam some relatively effective unit, and use it effectively.

Its also harder to test for the effectiveness of a unit when all these other factors are in play- which means its harder to find out which ones are really exploitable. T2 also has huge overheads requiring it to be more cost-effecient or its not worth the ivestment (just get mohos and spam t1, like people used to) and is lumped in with other economic factors (you get mohos at the same time as new units- so which won you the game?) etc etc.

Take for example moving resbots from t2 to t1. Even though they were nerfed (hp esp) when they were moved, people used them a lot more- because at t2 they have a massive mohoeconomy and reclaim sweeps and just cant be bothered. There is just less nuance at t2, despite the huge range of new tactical options you get at t2. So, making sure stuff is balanced is less important.

For this same reason, t3 is the least balanced thing in the whole game, and it doesnt really matter that much because t3 is a joke (both meanings).

Finally, id like to say BA is the best RTS i had ever played when i got into spring, and the reason i kept playing spring. CA is based on BA for a reason (rather than being a totally new mod) and we owe a lot to Noize, Day, Caydr and the OTA team for making a really well crafted game.

[Vadi]

vadi CA has enuff hosts/autohosts

Will you please quit repeating that? Why, why, why are you saying there are enough when there are like 5, and 2 of them free, when there are 3x more BA ones?

That's OK, you completely missed my point, and I don't feel you'll get it either. It has to do with marketing & the way humans think.



Edit: "u get one autohost with 16 players and 10 specs and 3 empty autohosts

i find huge games pointless personally and think it would look better if multiple hosts were filled with 8 or so players"

You're getting it... now things a bit more. How can you spread that number out?

[Machiosabre]

I might not be the best person to go by, but a row of empty autohosts just pisses me off.

[Vadi]

This will require however that all people who support CA only play on those autohosts for a bit - so that the movement doesn't choke early on.

(love the quotes button!)

PS. Both autohosts are taken atm. If I wanted to start a game with players around my level, I couldn't (I can't host). There is a lack of them.

And getting someone to play with you on ca is as easy as pming "Hey. Want to play a game?". That's it. Spread out over a bunch of autohosts, and get newbies/medium-ranked people to play with you. Continue that for a bit, and they'll roll.

[Otherside]

i keep saying this cos 90 percent of the time there is an empty CA autohost if there was a need for springie it would be there empty autohosts generally look bad

[LordMatt]

It's very hard to switch "dominant" mod.

BA did it in a few weeks with no more lobby spam than CA players do (and no lobby topic).

[Vadi]

They probably had... more than 2-3 (one of which is always on 1v1) autohosts on.

[LordMatt]

I don't think there were many BA autohosts until BA became established.

[Vadi]

Awesome!

Now if only BA didn't require OTA content...

[Licho]

I dont think springie was made before BA switch :)

[Licho]

It's very hard to switch "dominant" mod.

BA did it in a few weeks with no more lobby spam than CA players do (and no lobby topic).

While AA was broken and abandoned and BA was AA + fix

How many times have you tried CA in past 2 months LordMatt?
And in past 4 months?

[LordMatt]

0, and 0.

Awesome!

Now if only BA didn't require OTA content...

CA does too currently, if I'm not mistaken.

[Vadi]

Of course!

However they're working hard on replacing those models (they say it, and they mean it). This will greatly help spring, because a) it'll be much easier to advertise spring, b) much easier to distribute it. In the proper open-source fashion, it would be included as a download on many websites, linux repositories, and so on.

It'll also help new players get started faster, and lose less of them (believe me, not everybody goes and asks for help. If it doesn't work, they got lots of other games to play)

However you just confirmed that you're a die-hard BA fan. Okey, your point was understood, go have fun

[BlueTemplar]

FYI I played today in a 8vs8 CA game (and with some specs IIRC)...

[det]

It's very hard to switch "dominant" mod.

BA did it in a few weeks with no more lobby spam than CA players do (and no lobby topic).

The CA spam is nothing compared to the spam during BA's rise to dominance. Every time I hosted AA, I was PM spammed by WarC.

[KDR_11k]

Also AA was broken when BA arose, wasn't hard to sell people on what was basically a bugfix of the dominant mod.

[Hobo Joe]

One of the main reasons I like BA is becuase it's most like OTA. The main reason I downloaded Spring in the first place was because I've always been a huge fan of TA. As far as I'm concerned, it's the best RTS ever made(And it doesn't look like that's about to change, I haven't seen a good looking RTS in a long while), so naturally I leaned towards the mods that were most like OTA, eventually landing me with BA.

I've tried CA a couple times, and I really didn't like it. For me, it changes the game, WAY to much. It totally reconstructs the build hierarchy in a way that I feel is pretty bad. The commander can build an adv. Kbot lab, but it doesn't have a proper adv. construction kbot. To do that, you have to get the special 'economy' worker. I can imagine ways that that could be executed in a good way, but as it is now, I feel like it's just a gimmick, a badly-thought-out placeholder.
Then, there's upgradeable metal extractors. The first, and biggest problem I found with this is that you can't help it. It will go at a set speed no matter what you do. Stuck in a metal crunch, or anticipating one? Well sorry, you're just gonna have to wait while your metal upgrades itself over the course of 2 minutes. Speaking of which, that's silly. It can upgrade itself in ~2 minutes, but that's as fast - if not faster - than a construction unit could. What's that mean? Does is have a awesome internal nano-tower? Why can't we use that to our advantage? Why doesn't it then have the ability to build/help? Doesn't make a bit of sense.

And while I support remodeling(After all, the TA models are more than a bit dated) I didn't like the liberty that they took in the remodeling(Again, that's probably my OTA bias). I'd like it if they kept the look more, and just upped the poly count for better detail(Like Mr. D's remodels. They may have been in there, but I didn't see them). The peewee was the biggest one. It stuck out like a sore thumb. First of all, it was proportioned just like a human. I always liked how the Peewee was a little stubby guy. It made you feel that, while he was weak, he could move fast and still take a couple hits before he was down. The remodel looks too much like a twig, and the legs make it looks like it could spring across the map in no time flat. Also, it looked to much like the Zipper. In fact, it looked like a beefed up Zipper. Like it could move just as fast(or faster), but had more firepower, and could take more hits.

/end rant

The biggest thing that I DID like was the sprites/effects. They definitely looked much better than the BA ones.