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Expansion does have a viable endgame. Its called base pushing.

With the addition of unrammable large constructors, it became even more viable.

guitarism wrote:QUOTE (guitarism @ Mar 2 2010, 09:42 PM) nerfing pulse probes means your taking away from exp's ability to go after tp2 scouts and SF's.

_SRM_Nuke wrote:QUOTE (_SRM_Nuke @ Mar 2 2010, 10:21 PM) Exactly. If you nerf pulse probes you are just going to make it even easier to tp2. I really don't think there is a single sane person in this community who thinks we need to make it easier to tp2 with fig bbrs.

Everyone loves to throw out ideas but nobody ever thinks about the second order effects of them. Sure, I would love htts to be used more but nerfing pps will just exacerbate other problems.

We are seeing about 6 years worth of core development history in these two posts and the point of my contention with this direction. Why did we get pulse probes in the first place? It wasn't because of tp2 figbees, I can assure you of that. When pulse probes were 'invented' there were no figbees. They were developed as a counter against tac. Sup was actually reasonably balanced back then as it had no win button, but a skillful tp2 drop was doable. But, as a result of pulse probes it made using tp2 in the traditional sense pretty much impossible. As a result, in comes XRM hvy bbrs (not the current nerfed version, but ridiculous missles that could take a tech base down without getting within 3000m of it. So we fixed that by making exp more powerful, creating workable figbees, adding cruise boost, and nerfing XRM to the point its not used anymore (not that I'm sad about seeing XRM go).

Do you see the progression of ideas here? Each one builds on the last, creating a new problem while fixing an old one. All the while all (maybe not tac, I'm not sure of that one) of the tech paths are stronger than they were 5 years ago... not in relative terms, but in absolute terms.

Nerf or get rid of pulse probes. Get rid of figbees. People can htt. Tac becomes a viable option. You want a counter against tac? Its called camping alephs, starbase, heavy scouts, and sup sensor upgrades. Ever notice how tac is rarely used against bios? Its not because of the off chance they'll go exp and be guaranteed to get pulse probes. Its because you can pretty much assume that 10 mins into the game they'll have adv scouts, and 20 mins into the game they'll have hvy scouts roaming around and SB'ing is pretty much done.

Has anyone noticed that TF HTT have like uber hull?

QUOTE As a refresher, numbers for Med assault shields, as of DN 00.04.60:

Med Assault 1: 800 HP, recharge of 20, free to start with.
Med Assault 2: 1,200 HP, recharge of 25, requires Med shield 2 (2,500) and Med aslt 2 research (5,000)
Med assault 3: 1,680 HP, recharge of 30, requires Starbase (10,000), Med shield 3 (2,500) and Med aslt 3 research (5,000)[/quote]

Can you edit the first post to include a refresher on regular med shield (hitpoints and recharge)?

mcw, we saw how well that worked out with Spunky and fofo's core. It was pretty well balanced but it was boring as $#@!, I mean galvable IC tps???

4 AC turrets.

Weedman wrote:QUOTE (Weedman @ Mar 3 2010, 01:59 AM) if you're seen trying to setup, you're usually done before you even made an attempt, forcecap is one of my favorite allegiance moments, but again, you need basically your whole team, and even though I despise supremacy, dumb3 will ruin most force caps with enough warm bodies who can hit the fire missile button. considering a 20v20 or there abouts

If you balance gamesettings for 20 vs 20 games, what's gonna happen in 10 vs 10 games? HTTs will be overpowered.

If HTT is to weak in large games, why no not bring back the idea of a large game edition of CC, which is optimized for games with more than 15-20 players per side?

There were already several suggestions how to make one, so sup uberness in large games would be a bit nerfed.

PuG commanders frequently don't even choose an appropriate map size to a given number of players. You expect 50 people to exit the game and enter a new one because there's now 50 instead of 25? Big game CC is a nice idea for zone games or something, but I really don't think it's a solution for PuGs.

mcwarren4 wrote:QUOTE (mcwarren4 @ Mar 2 2010, 07:28 PM) Night, I don't disagree that exp needs a viable endgame when compared to the other techs. You rarely see successful HTT'ing anymore. With that being said I'll say the following:

What is this... a freakin' arms race? For years its been perk this, perk that, perk perk perk. Can we not fix things by nerfing? I would like to see things fixed by reducing the strength of tech paths more often rather than perking everything else

edit - a good place to start would be nerfing pulse probes or something to that effect

Sup is the outlier right now. Tac is in a pretty good place overall in terms of the development of its mid and late game offensive and defensive options. Sup, on the other hand, can very easily drop early bomb runs or con pushes done by mini2 ints with gat2/df2, late game they can take absolute map control by expanding with inexpensive TPs and galving every faction but IC back to a few sectors unless they invest in tech bases early, which will severely delay adv tech and isn't usually a good idea when you KNOW if the other team is going sup they're going to rush straight to galvs, galv all the small bases, and then sit, turtle, and mine until they have TP2 and FBs, upon which they'll then go try and win.

Those games are incredibly boring to sit through. 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, and the sup team can rip around adv figs at will and defend everything, or get TP2 and FBs first, or be IC and try and brute force con pushes or bomb runs or HTTs or whatever else that will fail more often than not, and while you're dumping your entire team into these runs, you end up with heroes from the sup team killing all of your miners because you can't spare anyone to defend them, or your balls out offensive runs probably aren't going to work. Sup can switch far too easily from heavy offense to heavy defense, especially with the intelligent deployment of carriers, and even midgame it's very difficult to get any traction against them unless your team is absolutely amazing, is constantly on the ball with every miner rush or con push, and somehow your miners don't die to random df2/gat2 figs that are flying around while your entire team is on O.

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.

Malicious Wraith wrote:QUOTE (Malicious Wraith @ Mar 2 2010, 08:54 PM) Expansion does have a viable endgame. Its called base pushing.

With the addition of unrammable large constructors, it became even more viable.

Unless you're IC, you have to push large cons against Sup. If you're pushing them into the enemy tech base sector, you have to use a Shipyard or Garrison, which cost $20k a pop, and can be pretty easily probed, camped for, and killed with gat3/df3 adv figs. Even after you plant your con in the sector, there's no guarantee your team will even be capable of keeping said adv figs off of your bombers or HTTs or whatever, considering how utterly easy it is to spike them down.

juckto wrote:QUOTE (juckto @ Mar 2 2010, 10:17 PM) Can you edit the first post to include a refresher on regular med shield (hitpoints and recharge)?

Done.

Broodwich wrote:QUOTE (Broodwich @ Nov 9 2009, 08:57 PM) So besides what i said here, i feel a need to bring up a few things others have voiced, or basically how to balance sup.

Currently sup has the best endgame, and i think this is fine. However, its resistance to bombing, even at the enh stages is rather high. Int bombing with basic ints against enh figs is something that isnt done anymore because it so rarely succeeds. Figs are small and people suck at aiming like always, and with commanders finally understanding what to buy for figs (ss2, mp, dumbs) ints on a bombrun are way less effective. Not to mention breaking a camp is much harder.

Basically in DN figs were still the do all, end all best ship in the game, but you had to pay a lot more than exp to get them to level playing ground. Now ints and figs are almost even already, without having to be pimped out.


IMO i believe the best first step to bringing back a more balanced matchup is reverting the fig scale reduction implemented in the early stages of CC. Other options are: removing hvy booster, removing fbs ability to mount a booster (along with a scale reduction to normal size), doubling sup tech prices to match other techpath prices, moving ss3 back to starbase. Some are more drastic than others, but these are all reversing changes made to sup that have been made over the years.

In addition to what vir said a large adv con push costs almost as much as a second adv techbase already with a much lower chance of success of a) planting and b) planting close enough to do anything and c) being able to do something with that base that you pushed to their base. When you say "push a large con and forcecap it" you realize it costs 22.5k for htts, 20k for the con and another 7.5 or 12k (depending if you already bought enh cons) for a large base that they can pay 10k to replace. So 50+k for something that has a very low chance of success vs just buying a sup and for the same cost getting galvs and almost all the way to fbs while pimping out your ints