Heavy Troop Transports

[Koln]

QUOTE (NightRychune @ Mar 3 2010, 07:08 AM) Playing against sup you're on a clock: Win the game before they galv all of your bases off the map and you can't mount an effective offense because you need to walk 2-3 sectors to try and kill anything,

This.

The way i see the balancing (which i'm sure most people won't agree) is that exp NEEDS to kill the enemy in early game. While figs have a good miner o ability (gat2 df2 can kill almost any drone without even bothering to kill nans if you get enough people) and sfs are almost offensive only craft (defending in sfs is harder than anything else until you have hunt3) they can't D their miners as effectively as exp (mini2 ints kill small craft faster than gat2 figs). If you fail to kill their econ in the early stages of the game, they'll pwn you with their superior tech (the name "supremacy" says it all). Yes, it's a hard thing to do, but it's something you must do. It's the same as tac, with the difference that you can bomb tac far easier than sup while they have enh tech. The "problem" is what Brood said in his self-quote: figs are small and people can't aim.

Sup has the best endgame because it's a techpath about end game, and i think it should remain like that. If you go exp the game shouldn't last more than 40 minutes, and for that HTTs need a perk and nor sup neither tac need a nerf (right now).

[Solamnus]

I think the problem with HTTs is people generally underestimate them as an end game strategy and we lack HTT pilots too. HTTs are pretty effective with sig2 acc2 GAs, it is easier than int bombing i think because most of the time bbr needs to get close to the base, fire 1 rack of ABs get next to base, wait just next to base reloading and finish the base unless the pilot has very good kb, HTTs are faster in this way they just go to the green door and make you own the base instead of blowing it to do dust.

People just dont think it is useful in general but I think HTT's are fine as they are now.

[Drizzo]

I second McW. I would rather see sup changes reverted, pp's removed, sb's and sfs recieve a global nerf to their speed, accel, and missile damage (like 10%).

It's not like every single faction does not already have a counter to Tac located in the garrison, which everyone starts with. Maybe make CMs a tad cheaper and independent of the tech base requirement if you feel that tac will become RAMPANTLY OVERPOWERED WTF I DONT HAVE MY SUPER EYE PROBE OMFG OMFG I CANT LEAVE MY INT AND USE A SCOUT TO SPOT @#(!

[mcwarren4]

QUOTE (NightRychune @ Mar 3 2010, 01:08 AM) Sup is the outlier right now. ...

...Playing against sup you're on a clock:...

If you want to bring Sup back into line, kill TP2, kill XRMs, kill FBs, or kill Galvs. Back in the day, TP2 was more unsuccessful than it is now and not a "free win" button because of the random chance to fail whenever someone ripped in. Brilliant code change fixed that, and contributed just as much to the end game dominance of sup as did the advent of XRM and FBs.

This is exactly my point though. Sup IS the outlier. The solution shouldn't be make Exp more powerful, thus forcing you to later on make Tac more powerful to bring it in line with the other two. Just nerf the win button on Sup and you won't need to perk the other two.

I contend you are on a clock against any tech path. Its just that your style of command must vary according to which tech you go. If you are Exp and you aren't killing or at least slowing enemy miners you deserve to lose. If you are tac or sup against Exp and you don't kill miners you deserve to have the adv con pushed into your sectors.

You don't need to kill galvs or tp2. When is the last time you saw a team actually use a traditional tp2 drop with regular or heavy bombers? Its the figbees (and XRM prior to that) that make sup unbalanced. This is also why I think pulse probes unbalance things. Pulse probes is what created the figbee/XRM problem in the first place.

edit - in short, if you remove pulse probes you remove the need for figbees and you also make base capping more doable. As it stands now if you are against exp you can negate the risk of stealthy htt's for $15,000 and a U rock.

[Jimen]

IMO, endgame tech is supposed to be really freaking good, that's how you end games, and it's not like you didn't pay a crapload of cash for it. In that respect, tp2 figbees are great, sbs and super heavy class are pretty good, and htts are meh; I haven't ever heard anyone really disagree with that.

The reason people complain about sup's endgame compared to the others, and part of the big reason it's so good compared to the others, I think really comes down to the number of people you've really gotta commit to it, and how much work has to be put into it. With sbs, you're gonna need 3-4 pilots sneaking around each base for a fair amount of time while they set up and wait for a chance, and with SY, every capship takes 3-6 people. Exp ties up about 3-4 people if you're gonna try a stealth-cap or your entire team if you're going for a forcecap. And in all of those cases except SY, everyone participating has to know what they're doing or else one idiot can screw the whole run.

With sup, though, you only need one scout to set up on each base (while the rest of your team is free to do whatever), and then once the scout is ready, everyone just has to dock up and grab their figbee and (assuming the tp2 scout wasn't an idiot) just have to press the R button and suddenly your entire team's bombing their base. It's expensive, sure, and a bit risky if it fails, but it gives endgame versatility that exp and tac can only dream of. Those late-game sup comebacks where the sup team's been whittled down to one sector but turtles forever while they tp2 the other team off the map and win? That, more than anything else, shows the power of sup's endgame - I wouldn't necessarily say that's overpowered for endgame tech, but I'll sure as @#(! say you can't do that kind of thing with HTTs; con pushes, maybe, but you'd have to work one hell of a lot harder for it and you'd be throwing a lot more cash down the @#(!ter for every failed attempt.

[NightRychune]

I don't think removing pulse probes is a good solution, and that'd cause more problems than it would solve. It'd make tac, which is already in a pretty good place right now, even more powerful. Pulse probes have a pretty minimal impact on properly executed TP2 drops right now simply because the sig of adv/hvy scouts is so low and they move fast, it's generally very difficult to track even one in your sector down unless you commit 3-5 people to flying around pulsing out the entire sector, and even then it's not a guarantee.

Pulse probes had nothing to do with the XRM or FB 'problem,' those were created and implemented because Sup had no endgame against an exp team with heavy ints that was turtling, and games would just drag on and on and on. The problem is that Sup has gotten to a point where it's THE best way to win and carry through a game, from the mid stages all the way to the end in terms of offense and defense in every way. It kills miners faster, it has better mobility, it can expand faster and cheaper than Expansion can, and can exert superior map control and better forward presence than Expansion can.

The reason Sup wasn't this bad before is that you got all of the above - inexpensive expanding, map control, etc etc but fighters sucked @#(!, and you had the opportunity to tear through them with mini2 ints because they had less fuel, bigger hitboxes, worse gunmounts (in the cases of giga and IC) and weren't nearly as good at engaging in combat as they are now. Figs have been buffed so much, and ints have been nerfed, and it's at the point now where figs are on par with ints in terms of killing ANYTHING, whether it's DMing or miners, cons, whatever. This is especially apparent when it comes to the smaller hitbox figs like Bios and Dreg. You just don't have any reason to fear going head to head with an int in a fig like you used to.

[mcwarren4]

QUOTE (NightRychune @ Mar 3 2010, 10:39 AM) Pulse probes had nothing to do with the XRM or FB 'problem,' those were created and implemented because Sup had no endgame against an exp team with heavy ints that was turtling, and games would just drag on and on and on. The problem is that Sup has gotten to a point where it's THE best way to win and carry through a game, from the mid stages all the way to the end in terms of offense and defense in every way. It kills miners faster, it has better mobility, it can expand faster and cheaper than Expansion can, and can exert superior map control and better forward presence than Expansion can.

We are in agreement that pulse probes had nothing to do with FB or XRM. Check that one off.

We are in disagreement about the exp team turtling problem. Or maybe we aren't. If a team is turtling you have to either A) wait for them to finally make a move and hit them while they are projecting force elsewhere or you are probably mining mostly freely and will have battleships in short order anyway. Even mini3 hvy ints aren't going to take down several battleships. If SY is off you can still mine for a 2nd tech, preferrably adv exp and do combination tp2 drops and large con pushes. Eventually something is going to give in the defense.

I think we agree on more than we disagree in terms of identifying the problem. I just don't want to see us continuing to move in the more uber direction. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the purpose of the community core. If the goal is to make games shorter and more decisive then your thinking is more correct than mine. If it is solely to balance things while keeping the game similar to Allegiance as we know it then I think my line of thinking is more correct. If the goal is shorter and more decisive games then I'm off base with my suggestions here.

[mcwarren4]

For the record, I think Drizzo's thoughts were in the right direction in terms of nerfing tac if you were to get rid of pulse probes.

[Psychosis]

is it still possible to pull the stats for what factions were used in a game?

or how about we just pull up the list of squadgames, and look at how many times sup was used over the past couple CC releases

[NightRychune]

I'm not really sure what CC's design philosophy ever was, specifically, beyond taking core design out of the hands of a small clique and putting it into the community's at large. I'd say it's fairly obvious that that's not even really taken advantage of, though, considering the nearly month old poll Brood has up about Shipyard has 67 votes in it, out of 508 current actives on the leaderboard (178 of which are below rank 5).

If we want a "purer" version of Allegiance, like the old MS cores, we should be scaling things down. Remove FBs, remove XRMs, remove Hvy scouts. Revert shipyard, remove Corvettes, remove Longtoms and Battleships and all of the expensive, upscaled bull@#(! that goes along with it. It'd be pretty easy to revert the game back to a state where it comes down to effective deployment of your team and enh and adv tech, and less about turtling until you buy cheese tech upon which you're almost guaranteed victory. Personally, I'd much prefer a slowed down game where having adv tech actually means something, where the "middile" stage of the game where teams are fighting over expanding and operating with mid-level tech lasts longer than 10 minutes before you move into the first of the end-game phases. As far as pugs go, though, that gets terribly boring because people aren't very good, and I like keeping myself entertained by executing and figuring out new tactics and new ways things can be used.

Besides, because data like faction win/loss and tech path win/loss aren't tracked, trying to balance anything in the core right now is based on perceptions and anecdotal evidence which is biased because people have their own favorite tech paths, ships, weapons, whatever that they enjoy using and don't want to see nerfed into oblivion. I'm no different.