End of 2018 RA balance changes

[netnazgul]

@Smitty hijackers' speed should be reduced now (at the moment they are same speed as Medium Tanks on the road), say to 75-80 at least down from 85, and maybe its cost increased to $600 from $500. One other interesting solution may be to introduce the same cap delay as engineer, for 1 second instead of insta-capture.

At the same time engineers definitely require a counter-buff to their expendability, at least cap time reduced to 5 seconds. Maybe considering reducing their cost too, but that is risky.

[ZxGanon]

Engineer:
He doesnt really needs that many chages to be viable but rather his surroundings.
I would reduce the capture time of engineers to at least 5 seconds.
Increasing the MoneyUponCapture value of oilderricks from 100$ to 250$ (maybe more that might cause highly unstable games).

Thief:
Reducing his movement speed from 85 to 71.
Maybe also increasing the cost from 500$ to 650$ or changing his capturing stun behaviour to take 2 second after freezing a unit to enter it like engineers external capturing.

But I´m pretty sure reducing the movement speed will already do the trick since even if HiJackers get dropped by APC´s Miners will finally be able to run away in time.

Also people have to get start getting used to HiJackers and develop counterplay strategies. Afterall this is an RTS and people gotta figure out how to react to this new style.

Also what FiveAces mentioned was to streamline the stealth mechanic since apparently 5 different traits of stealth exist with different interactions (for instances HiJackers being revealed by infantry while others dont which is very unintuitive for RTS).

[Smitty]

Also people have to get start getting used to HiJackers and develop counterplay strategies. Afterall this is an RTS and people gotta figure out how to react to this new style.

Yep. I want to see a few weeks of playtesting before we say things have to change. This is the first time hijackers have been viable after all.
Is the engi cap time in SP 5 seconds?

[Orb]

Had a discussion on Discord with Barf about what to do with the engineer. You can find it in #play-testing.

We think a good place to start would be reducing the engineer cost to 400. Cap time reduction isn't desirable as it is already feasible to sneak engineers into a Barf base (RAGL Champion). Refunds increase might be needed, but it might be possible to achieve good balance without it. The problem with refunds is they make engineer snipes even more punishing, and the usual snowball problems.

Maps with 6 or more objectives probably won't be viable anymore (and too difficult to balance around), so we kept the discussion to 4 or less. At a 400 cost engineer you can capture 2 oils and produce a modest guard of 4-5 rifles on a wf-1st. Or produce 1 engineer on the safe oil and try to deny cap with 8-9 rifles.

We also agreed other neutral structures will need a buff, and probably something creative. My personal idea is a new buff from owning a hospital, which grants a 10% bounty on your own units killed. You can think of it like the hospital saving lives (value). We could also remove the heal potentially. The heal is a bit wonky since it's much more beneficial for Soviets than Allies (maps with "safe" hospital captures favor Soviets).

As far as the hijacker discussion goes, I think anything that increases the hijacking time would be bad. Why would the hijacker wait a full second before stealing the vehicle? It doesn't make sense to me, and it certainly won't make sense to new players. If it's OP I think a speed reduction would be best (maybe same speed as harvester?)

I agree the Hijacker shouldn't have a special cloak.

[netnazgul]

Cap time reduction isn't desirable as it is already feasible to sneak engineers into a Barf base (RAGL Champion).

What if we reduce the cap time [to 5 sec], but also introduce a "building is being captured" sound warning?

Btw, as the discussion goes, I'd suggest slightly increasing dog's health as it's now having drastically reduced DPS due to chewing animation. Allowing it to withstand another rifle shot?

[Orb]

I don't think so, as dogs can now run with an attack command. Running dogs dodge rifle shots (no damage).

While testing this I ran into a bug. I was trying to get my dog to do a running attack after eating someone. If you give the attack command while he's eating it's just a walk command (I guess because it's a queue'd command?). Anyway, my dog got stuck, much like the old behavior but permanent until I gave it a new command. I've attached the replay file.

[Sleipnir]

We also agreed other neutral structures will need a buff, and probably something creative. My personal idea is a new buff from owning a hospital, which grants a 10% bounty on your own units killed. You can think of it like the hospital saving lives (value). We could also remove the heal potentially. The heal is a bit wonky since it's much more beneficial for Soviets than Allies (maps with "safe" hospital captures favor Soviets).

A more intuitive option could be to make them give a small health buff / damage reduction for infantry.

[SirCake]

Its just slightly more beneficial to the soviet because they don't get the cheap tier zero remote area of effect healing tank nightmare that Allies get.

[lawANDorder]

My personal idea is a new buff from owning a hospital, which grants a 10% bounty on your own units killed.

We just made bounties an opt-in so it would be a weird step imo.

streamline the stealth mechanic since apparently 5 different traits of stealth exist

Please let's not change things that work fine just for streamlining. It seems logical that only dogs and other spies can detect disguised spies IMO. Same goes for cloaked vehicles which use sophisticated hardware to actually become invisible and thus require special detectors. The different traits have probably technical reasons.

We obviously can not give infantry detection vs disguised spies. So the streamlined alternative would be to require the same detectors for thieves as for spies, and that seems like a bad idea considering that
- spies are usually only a threat near your base and detection is much easier to set up there
- while spies can be detected by the player, thieves can not
- thieves are dangerous in the open too, where you usually have no detection.

> Maybe also increasing the cost from 500$ to 650$ or changing his capturing stun behaviour to take 2 second after freezing a unit to enter it like engineers external capturing.

I think the equal value fits good for these special units and should be streamlined. I don't really understand the reasoning for the other point and to me it would feel like a huge regression now that the buggy behaviour has finally beeen fixed!

It's good that testers have already found a lot of issues that can be fixed for the release and IMO the focus should be on the "does it work as expected part" for now instead of trying to refine the details of changes that are not really tested yet.

[Smitty]

It appears we've got some consensus on 1) Tone down the hijacker and 2) Engi could use some extra oomph after the capture rework.

Since we've at least got another playtest cycle to work with I'm leaning towards reducing the hijacker speed to 71 (same as Tanya and heavy tank) and reducing the engineer capture time to 5 seconds. We can then see how these units perform in the second playtest and determine if they need further changes as some have requested.

[netnazgul]

What about other balance test maps that we could play on playtest? Regarding Artillery.

[netnazgul]

Ok, some feedback regarding the new game state as well as the overall stuff:
- Mammonth tanks are much more potent now, to the point that they might be quite hard to stop by Allies even; we thought that reducing their rockets weapon range at least by 1 cell is to be done
- consider buffing Migs by doubling their damage but halving their ammo, so they will pack more punch per salvo and actually be able to one-shot stuff around
- bumping minelayers' health a bit? Given the rise of the tank meta, mines might be one of the counters to that
- 5-seconds capture time simply doesn't work for engineers - you just don't have enough time to do anything against it if you don't see it prematurely, a pack of engineers can capture a whole base in a single sweep; either we need to reduce engie price instead or just drop the idea of an expendable engineer for 1v1s
- soviets seem to get a lot of nice things this release, so we need some counter from allies. For example, allies T3 is now even more lackluster.

[netnazgul]

Another pack of suggestions for allies:
- Mobile Gap Generator generating fog instead of shroud, thus not explicitly revealing itself on the map when explored map is enabled; maybe considering adding yet another cell of enemy units vision reduction, at least for far-seeing units;
- a slight buff to MRJ can also be a thing;
- maybe thinking of giving chrono tanks to all allied factions, but I don't see what to give to Germany in its place

[lawANDorder]

Another pack of suggestions for allies:
- Mobile Gap Generator generating fog instead of shroud, thus not explicitly revealing itself on the map when explored map is enabled; maybe considering adding yet another cell of enemy units vision reduction, at least for far-seeing units;

FYI, this terrible heresy is also discussed in #15364.

[netnazgul]

It's not heresy rather than another attempt to fix MGG (usual GG as well btw) behaviour in place to account for Fog of War, because it is a bit silly to have Explored Map option and Fog of war in the game, but Gap generators still exhibiting shroud instead, making it obvious for opponents that there is Gap generator.

This is a development of GG/MGG in the spirit of what it is - a device to mess with opponent's vision.