"Born to live in the sand " or Dune balance

[Inara]

This topic devoted to Dune2k openra's mod. Some players told me, that i must write some words about it. Today dune2k isn't interesting for majority of players, nobody speaks about this mod. But some players still play it. I play this mod so often now, that i can tell you that more and more players join dune now. It is becoming some more popular than in old versions. FFA-games still are rare, but you can stable play 1vs1. But that all is offtopic, let's begin! :D
***My english is very bad. Sorry for this fact***

PART1.
Let's begin with main properties of game interface and game mechanics:
1. I was surprised with production speedup from multiple factories. This new feature made game more dinamical, but, doubtless, decrease balance of some game's elements. (I will mention this problem later)
2. The editing of worms made they less agressive and now they can't eat infantry, what isn't realistic. So you can't protect harvesters, since you haven't trikes. In this situation you must retreat with harvesters, that has negative influence on your economy. (It's about 2 or more harvesters)

3. I like, that developers added some new animations. Thank You for this!
4. You can't see the crates in the fog of war in latest release. That's very good.
5. New spice blooms looks very pretty, spectacular and realistic.
6. New types of explosions made siege harder, aspecially, explosions of the concreete walls. The big stone blocks damaging all your forces very hard, so you army must repair before continue the attack.

About infantry (not elite):
1. I liked that engineers are able to capture building immediately.
2. It was sadly surprise, that medics has been deleted. It's impossible to heal infantry now, aspecially freemen and other elite infantry. Please add medic again :'(
3. Thumper... he's strange subject. He can attract the worms... but in very small radius. Maybe he must to attract nearest sandworm on the map?

About all elite infantry:
I think that latest release is ... experiment to increasing game dinamics, because now elite infantry must be balanced ASAP.
1. About freemen:
That's interesting idea to summon 2 fremens from palace per every 1.5 min. But now their production is too slow and they aren't snipers. But other side they more effectively against buildings.
You can use them just as demolishers.
Now the time for funny mathematics. Two freemen per 1.5 min means, that it's 4 fremen per 3 min. But sardaukars are producing in barracks and have default(with one production point) time of production - 4 sec. It means 45 sardaukars per 3 mins(!!!). That's not all: you can inrcrease time of production to 2 sec(!!!). Now you'll have 90 sardaukars per 3 minute.
Dobtless, there is too big difference between freemen and sardaukars. Freemen can’t resist effectively against sardukars. In the books of Dune they were the same in fight. But now i don't understand why they are exist. Will be better if freemen have sniper ability again and their production speed increase. For example 5-7 per 1.5 min.
2.About saboteurs:
Saboteurs now single-use unit. In addition, his production is now only one per 1.5 min. It is too long. This unit is not effective after last update at all.
2.About sradaukars:
All fine. This unit is good-balanced :)
End of the PART1.
~CombatBot.Inara

[klaas]

After playing a few games, 3 things struck me:

1) I can't see who the owner of a unit is. Is it possible to make this more clear somehow?

2) Infantery is slow. It is hard to defend your base with them against trikes, because, well, they are just so mindnumbingly slow.

3) Trikes are too strong. I don't think it is possible to survive a trike rush, if you don't have trikes yourself.

[Inara]

After playing a few games, 3 things struck me:
2) Infantery is slow. It is hard to defend your base with them against trikes, because, well, they are just so mindnumbingly slow.
3) Trikes are too strong. I don't think it is possible to survive a trike rush, if you don't have trikes yourself.

2. Infantry musn't be fast. Trikes are fast mobile vehicles developed to fast scouting and fast attack. You must defend all enties to your base with infantry to stop trike rush.

3. You needs mobile vehicles to defend your base against trikes. But you can use missle quads. They are bit stronger than trikes, but bit slower.

[anjew]

Trikes my be strong but they also the most effective at taking out the missile tanks, which btw does 50% health to a tank in one shot. That may be intended but missile tanks take hardly any damage from tanks so they incredibly strong

[Marn]

Actually it takes around 10 shots to kill a Missile Tank with the Trike.
The fire rate of those buggers is so fast that even Combat Tanks take longer, around 50% health remains while the Trike is long done.
Part of the problem is because they do 135 damage per shot to Wood armor type.
Speaking of overpowered, after taking rate of fire in to consideration I realized that Trikes do about 2.5 damage to buildings while Combat Tanks do (Ordos=3 Atreides 2.7 Harkonnen=2.45)
So here we can see that the Trike even in some cases outperforms a Harkonnen Combat Tank when in comes to damage output to buildings.
The math behind it is simple, (Raw Damage) * 0.(insert effectiveness of armor type here) / (rate of fire) = damage output
Trikes right now fill a very wide gap, they are not only fast (3 times faster than basic inf) and good at taking out infantry (about 5 shots) but also great at taking out Missile Tanks, Ordos Deviators, and most importantly buildings thanks to their rate of fire.
Honestly Trikes are pretty glassy, takes about 3 basic inf to take one down which all together cost 150 (50 each) while Trikes are 300 each (excluding Ordos non stealth Raider which are 350)
On paper it would seem that spamming basic infantry is a viable strategy until you realize that Trikes out-range your basic inf and can easily kite them with 3 to 1 speed advantage.
So the best early game thing you could do purely for defense it spam Troopers or put a costly investment in to your own Trike squad =p

#NerfTrikes

[JOo]

@Marn : that sounds like you did put some serious thought into this ...

what would you suggest to balance this ? what difference do you suggest for trikes and raiders ?

another thing , what do you think about people skipping the concrete so they can be faster then their opponent ? do you have any suggestion there ? (im asking here for a something to make "skipping concrete" unatractive)

[Inara]

I don't think, that trikes are op :eek: . Maybe all, who thinks not so, play dune more than 1 game and know, what they're talking about.

[klaas]

I've played multiple games, and trikes are op. I've also played vs someone called inara.bot, and he starts by building....... Trikes. I wonder why.

[Marn]

I don't think, that trikes are op . Maybe all, who thinks not so, play dune more than 1 game and know, what they're talking about.

I think the main problem are not the Trikes, but the fact they there isn't much that can counter a blob of them during early game.

@Marn : that sounds like you did put some serious thought into this ...

what would you suggest to balance this ? what difference do you suggest for trikes and raiders ?

I would suggest knocking down their effectiveness vs buildings from 25 to 24, that would put both Raiders and Trikes at a minor disadvantage against buildings compared to Tanks at least when it comes to damage.
I would also suggest matching all infantry LMG firing range to Trikes from 2c512 to 3c0
Basic infantry right now play a very minor role and hopefully that would make them better counters to early rushes.
From all the games that I witnessed almost nobody goes for early barracks and for good reasons.

another thing , what do you think about people skipping the concrete so they can be faster then their opponent ? do you have any suggestion there ? (im asking here for a something to make "skipping concrete" unatractive)

It's a risky but well worthwhile play-style, since it takes about 332$ to fully repair a refinery from half health and over 5min of real-time on normal speed.
I think the reason why this is a meta (and used to be in original Dune2k as well) is because only 2 buildings (Wind Trap and Barracks) need a 2x2 slabs excluding turrets and silos, rest of the buildings need a 3x3 slabs for full coverage.
For that you need a ConYard upgrade which is worth a 1000$ making it extremely wasteful during early games, and by the time we get to mid/late game your base is already built up.
Slabs should be a tactical choice rather than necessary redundancy, and right now unless you play on a big map it's no slabs or die.
I feel at the current state investing in to 3x3 slabs punishes players too much, and 2x2 slabs aren't enough to fully cover most buildings. Nobody wants to waste time putting two 2x2 slabs for a single building, so most players just skip it.
There could be 2 solutions to this.
#1(easiest) make 3x3 slabs available right from the start, that way players will sacrifice only slight build time off their main queue.
#2 create a defense tab and move slabs there but with significantly increased price (around 200$ instead of 50$ for 3x3, no upgrade required) to compensate for the fact that your main queue is no longer taken by them.
At the end there is nothing wrong with slabs.
If you choose to be fast and skip slabs you expose your base to early rushes, and if you want to go for slabs you shouldn't have to be bogged down by upgrade cost and time it takes to get a 3x3.
At this point I was talking about encouraging, but if you want to discourage players from skipping there has to be a massive draw back. Unfortunately that might slant the favor towards one play-style, slabs or die.
We need a happy middle ground, but as it stands right now 50% building damage isn't enough to motivate players to loose valuable time and money to go for slabs.

[Inara]

I've played multiple games, and trikes are op. I've also played vs someone called inara.bot, and he starts by building....... Trikes. I wonder why.

I often play trike-rush or just build trikes. But if you want to see that trikes aren't op, i can play some games without trikes at all and send you replays :D

another thing , what do you think about people skipping the concrete so they can be faster then their opponent ? do you have any suggestion there ? (im asking here for a something to make "skipping concrete" unatractive)

About concrete slabs:
I often play without using concrete (I use it only for windtrap), because some build-orders requre this style. For example, fast economical build-order:
1.Windtrap
2. Barracks
3. Refinery
4. Refinery
5. Refinery (now you must cell one refinery, but you have another harvester)
6. Windtrap
7. Light factory
8. Windtrap
9. Heavy factory
...
You must execute this list to LF as fast as you can, because it's risky if your enemy execute trike-rush. You have only 15-20 sec to prepare yourself for attack of enemy. If you build concrete with 0 ping and fantastic APM, you pay 220$ ((1+4+2+4)*20) for plats for other buildings (without ConYard uprd) and spend 33 (3*11) seconds. Using plats is disadvantageously in this situation, because you spend all your aditional time to slabs. But using plats in FFA more usefull, I always build plats in more than 1vs1 games, where i have no team.

[Inara]

PART2.
About light vehicles:
1. Was good idea to change missile quad`s firing system. As it was before � their rockets were guided, and that�s make impossible to avoid them for slow units. It previous version was easy to counter trike rush. For example 4 quads (400$ each) could counter 8-10 trikes ($300 per one). So this improvement was good for buffing balance.
2. A lot of people thinks, that trikes in this release is OP. I don't agree with they, but, I think, that if majority of players thinks so, then it's motivation to research this problem.

About Carryalls:
1. Now you can evacuate your tanks from the battlefields to repair pads with carryalls. It's cool.
2. And another funny detail: you can shot down carryalls with missle tanks. But it's impossible to save your carryalls, because you can't control they. IMB. I guess, that will be better if you can see map with carryalls, control and repair they and see their lifestatus.

About very heavy vehicles (Devastators and harvesters): As i see, have been added a autorepair to theese units. Very good.
About Sonics: Sonic tank's speed was decreased and now impossible to use them for hit-and-run. Their power also decreased against buildings and vehicles. Also looks like splash damage have been added and they became more healthy. Don't think, that theese changes are so good as wanted.
About Deviators: Their chance to capture enemy vehicle decreased, but you still can use they (for example aginst devastators without support). Maybe their chance must be a bit more or maybe not...
The end of part 2
~CombatBot.Inara

[Canavusbis]

Quad should be worse than trikes when doing all-out rushes if the balance has been set to the originals.

[Inara]

PART 3
Some words about outpost and turrets: in this release theese buildings can't detect cloaked units. It's sadly. And i guess, that outpost must reveal shroud in larger radius.

That's enought I wrote all , what i think about latest release. As the post impression i want to say, that dune is very interesting game. Very big thanks to developers for they heavy work.

[noobmapmaker]

SoScared did a long cast on Dune this monday, could be interesting, see his last episode: https://www.twitch.tv/soscared/v/55799921