Well, in the same post I also offered some suggestions to mitigate Missile Spamming - thereby trying to reduce the effectiveness of Plymouth late game.
My arguement is that without Missiles Plymouth will lose to Eden due to Eden's weapons superiority.
ESG < Acid Cloud when it comes to Tigers. Put 1 ESG Tiger and 1 Acid cloud tiger up against each other and see which one comes up on top.
Sure ESG can pull back and let Eden come to then, but when it comes to offensive play or when making a defensive stand at 1 location Acid Cloud will win out because ESG cannot pull back.
My testing with varying numbers of Tigers has the Acid Tigers surviving with 10~20% HP left (got the same results both with and without upgrades). But this is without moving at all, the worst case scenario for ESG. Factor in how there was so much "wasted" ESG damage in most of these tests, the fact that it affects a 45% larger area than Acid Cloud, and doesn't do friendly damage, and ESG is quite easily better in the general case. In the best case, where ESG is able to attack just ahead of the enemy army and the units in front take maximum damage from driving over all the mines rather than it bring spread over other units, ESG is far and away better than Acid Cloud. You act like you need half the map to retreat over before ESG becomes better, but you only really need maybe 5-10 or so tiles, if that. It's also worth mentioning mines on the ground do stack multiple times on a tile, but I'm not sure what the limit is other than it's at least enough to one-shot a Tiger.
As far as missiles go, there's a reason we're only talking about nerfing them rather than removing them from the game.
Well, with the current situation, Plymouth's weapons are still poorer than Eden's. Thors Hammer is stronger than RPG and Acid Cloud is stronger than ESG.
Comparing RPG to Thor's Hammer is comparing a common ore-only mid-game weapon to an end-game rare ore-requiring weapon. And Plymouth's weapons being worse than Eden's - really? Aside from Thor's Hammer, that's absolutely not true.
Laser is much worse than Microwave, mostly because Heat Dissipation Systems comes much earlier for Microwave, but even with all upgrades Microwave Lynx beat Laser Lynx. At the very least, Heat Dissipation Systems needs to be available at the same time for Eden as it is for Plymouth. Laser Panther/Tiger vs. Microwave Panther/Tiger has the Laser winning, but that's not an engagement you'll ever see, and those chassis are irrelevant anyway when the main concern with those weapons is the early game. Lasers probably need a damage buff to make them on par with Microwave unless we try giving Eden a weaker version of EMP earlier or something.
Eden's equivalent to RPG, Rail Gun, is handily worse - it can't shoot over walls, and (with upgrades) fires 20% slower while only doing 3% more damage. Rail Gun should get a range buff to compensate for not shooting over walls, and either a raw damage or rate of fire buff (I'm leaning towards the latter) so it has the same average DPS as RPG.
Eden has no answer to Stickyfoam.
I already talked about Acid Cloud vs. ESG, I disagree that Acid is necessarily better.
The state of EvP is basically, the Eden player just has to hold on for dear life with a consistently inferior army until Thor's units are finally out, and then pray he doesn't get missile spammed to death.
I also have years of high-level play. That has landed me on the conclusion that it is favorable to be able to commit more vehicles to a battle than your enemy can. Securing your base with walls and GPs makes sense as it free up vehicles. At least for Eden it does. The same strategy doesn't work for Plymouth.
The problem with Guard Posts is they do quite a bit of damage to things next to them when they die, one-shotting Lynx. This means you can't use them to defend alongside your army, because they'll end up doing more damage to yourself than the enemy. It might buy some time and soften up the enemy a little bit, but that's about it. Nerfing Thor's range would make GPs more workable for Plymouth in EvP, but I'm also thinking the GP explosion damage should be removed.
As far as walls go, Laser/Microwave is actually the best weapon against those, but they might need late-game range upgrades to not just get killed by every GP around.
It's not meant to be directly beneficial to either colony, it just an idea to make Rail Gun have it's own niche, rather than not being utilized at all.
But you also want to buff RPG range, so Rail Gun would still just be literally a worse RPG.
No, it is not nullified that easily, because 1) Plymouth no longer has the possibility to outdistance GP's & 2) Lasers now gain the ability to outdistance Micro's, forcing Plymouth on the defensive initially (Before getting Sticky's). Also with the added range it will become more pushing and pulling between Sticky and Lasers since both can shoot eachother. I also suggested removing Sticky Foams damage to structures (Or structures and Vehicles both)
If you read I also suggested decreasing cost of Lasers that would add strength of nubers compared to Micro's better damage.
I've almost always seen Plymouth wait for some Stickyfoam before they push out, since it's not exactly long after Microwave tech. As far as "pushing and pulling", uh, that involves movement, the thing that Stickyfoam is specifically made to shut down.
Decreasing Laser cost wouldn't be very helpful because it still ties up your production just as much, and extra Vehicle Factories aren't cheap in the early game.
Neither Sticky (If removing Vehicle damage, then none in Sticky's case) nor ESG will deal huge amounts of damage. Sticky will stop vehicles in their tracks. ESG's will only hurt if you drive on the mines. Sit still and damage wont be that great.
Couple both of these missiles with my suggestions toward increased cost and increased Launch/Impact time and I think it could be an interesting option.
The key here is to balance these toward cost so that it adds diversity rather than being overpowering.
Of course Missiles damaging Structures is a bad idea. If you read my whole post coherently instead of picking out parts it might more sense.
I saw that and it's still way too OP. EMP Missiles are the last thing that needs a buff, especially to that degree.
If you wanted to buff up Plymouth late game, encourage the player to build Supernovas. This seems to me, Plymouth's counter to the Thors Hammer Tiger; a fast unit with a massive explosive payload that can decimate several tigers in one blast.
Good luck with that, Starflares/Supernovas are clearly not skirmishers. They're exclusively used to snipe key structures, which I actually have seen a lot of.
As for the EMP Missile, lore-wise (campaign), Plymouth at that time had very little resources and thus the purpose of it was to disabled the Eden Spaceport to get the RLV so that they could finish up their starship faster. It wasn't meant to be a weapon that could be spammed easily. Factions in the campaign also only ever had one Spaceport and huge resource constraints. Thus, if we wanted to make things balanced, I'd say restrict both players to a single Spaceport. That way EMP Missiles become a strategic one-off weapon for dealing a strategic blow, while the majority of your tanks do the brunt of the work, rather than a spammable "cheesy" tactic.
I'm not a fan of arbitrary limits like that.
For the ESG, is it possible to keep laid mines active until destroyed? I recall that ESG mines eventually disappear, and a way to make ESG a little more powerful, would be to keep the mines active until something ran over them. Thus, the Plymouth player could funnel enemies by keeping several active minefields and force them to either go down the path they wanted or take huge damage crossing the minefields. That is one way of buffing the ESG without modifying its damage or other abilities.
That would be way, way, way too OP. You would only need a single ESG to defend.
For the RPG, the only situation where I'd agree to give RPG splash damage is if RPG had a minimum range. Thus, it could have splash damage, but not be able to hit targets within range of 1-2. So, any short-range unit, ie Laser, could decimate an RPG by getting within its minimum range but still be in trouble if grouped up with multiple units at a distance.
That wouldn't work. Damaged units move slower, and short-ranged units would be taking damage before the RPG receives any, so the RPG would be able to move away from the other unit faster than it could keep up. Plus the RPG could just fire on a tile next to the attacker if it had splash.
A way to buff Railgun without affecting it's damage is to allow a projectile to fully travel its range hitting all targets in its path. So if there is 3 lynxes in a row, the railgun hits all 3 if they are all within range.
That would make it better than Thor's. Too OP, especially for a mid-game common-only weapon.
- EMP usage by Eden?
Not sure how you get the idea Eden doesn't use EMP. EMP becomes a core part of any army as soon as it becomes available.
- DIRT usage at all?
In some of my survivor missions I made DIRTs give a slight amount of structure auto-repair, mostly to make scratch damage from electrical storms less of a pain to deal with.
- Light Tower usage at all?
They need to give "enemy unit sighted" alerts like Scouts do.
- Scout usage at all?
I've used them on maps like Pie Chart to alert me to Starflares or whatever being sent in through the back.
- Do players create extra bases or stick to a single base the entire match?
It's always worth it to grab a second common ore mine, even if your first one is a 3 bar and the second is a 1 bar. Setting up a whole new self-contained base is a pretty huge investment, but on some big Land Rush maps you might get screwed out of nearby rare and don't have much of a choice.
That does bring to mind another really big balancing consideration, the maps themselves, specifically ore placement. La Corrida's ore is pretty balanced just because you're guaranteed so much of it (maybe too much), but Pie Chart is a total crapshoot that becomes a coin flip after the early game based on how RNG treated you as far as ore on the outer edges of the map goes. Randomized resources really shouldn't be a thing in competitive play.
