Oh, yeah, sorry. I made a couple of posts last night that appear to have disappeared from the forums. I kept wondering if I suddenly got placed on mod preview or something lol. I did respond to your post but the aether ate it apparently, so I'll respond again:
Papsmear wrote:QUOTE (Papsmear @ Jan 6 2017, 07:49 AM) Since it is easily reversible how about trying to lower Bios research time from 12 to 10 minutes? (I think it's 12 minutes??????)
Currently 10 minutes (5x normal time).
QUOTE See how it goes and if it doesn't work change it back or leave it but lower payday.
There are quite a few options available.[/quote]
I don't really want to take the sort of "let's just throw balance changes at the wall and see what sticks" approach I feel like you're advocating here. I'd rather be more precise and careful with how I balance the game.
QUOTE I want to see Bios played more and not get slaughtered early game.
They are a great faction that hardly ever gets used anymore.[/quote]
I want to see Bios played more and not result in the single most boring games in Allegiance history. They're a pretty terrible faction and they don't get used because games involving them aren't fun.
I know it's weird to think of changing this by starting with a nerf, but sometimes before a thing can be fixed it has to be broken a little more, you know? Like if a stud in a wall is broken, you can't just tie it up with a bandage, you have to pull out the insulation to get to the stud which you have to pull out and replace. (Look, I dunno construction
). The goal isn't to make Bios worse than it already is, the goal is to make Bios a more viable faction than it is, but one that's both fun to play and fun to play against.
Right now, just as an FYI, I'm leaning towards the following:
1) Pulling lt sfs/lt ints
2) Increasing fuel capacity and top speed of bios figs
3) Increasing cargo of basic, adv, and hvy scouts so that basic/adv carry 2 prox/probe and hvy 3
4) Increasing cost of bios techbases to 25k
In my mind what it'll do is this: Bios will have enough money to where after mining one sector (besides their home) to completion they can buy their techbase. This gives teams a window of about 8-9ish minutes to disrupt the Bios economy. After that, you'll basically be priced into bombing Bios. This will be challenging because they're going to have a LOT of probes and access to a LOT of prox, but generally speaking you have 10 minutes (until mini2/ints come up) to get through. Meanwhile they'll be pressuring your miners with long-range scout-and-fig missions and hitting your techbase-adjacent bases with stealth bomb runs from their hvy cloak bbrs.
It'll basically be more of the same but much less "whoops now we have to contend with mini2 6 minutes into the game." Basically the only faction that can reliably do something like that is Dregh, and isn't it weird to think that Dregh and Bios are the two earliest mini2 users?