Jumpfac Discussion

So far as I know, Jumpfac has not been played a great deal recently, and when it has been played it isn't meeting with a great deal of success. (Most of my knowledge is about 1v1.)

A couple of factors which might be causing this are:


Moderator
The Moderator is at best a finicky unit. Its damage is not particularly great, it is largely ineffective against units outside of the 100-300 metal range (due to overkill against smaller units or its slow being ineffective against larger ones) and it's easy to lose a lot of them while their weapon is recharging unless you're microing them very closely.

The Moderator also does not have a great deal of synergy with the Placeholder. While the Placeholder can keep some units from getting too close to the Moderator, the Moderator itself doesn't have the damage output to capitalise on the Placeholder all that well.

Moderator is also the factory's only light-weight counter to Venom, but doesn't have the movement capacity to actually keep up with Venom on a map where you'd expect Jump vs Spider to be played.

At the end of the day, while the Moderator does more-or-less fulfill its design goal of countering Zeus, it is not very fun to play with due to its near-crippling weaknesses.


Sumo
Sumo used to be super-good when it had heat ray, and pretty good when it had disruptor beams. Now it has the Newton beams, and it's not entirely clear (at least to me) why a unit like the Sumo would have them. It's now a gimmick unit which doesn't really do anything to defences, and outside of niche applications of its attract/repulse (see: bombers) it's a bit meh. It also requires incredible amounts of micro to use effectively.

I feel like the combination of Sumo's 13.5k hp and its jump to stop it being swarmed is so strong that, if it keeps those two aspects, it almost has to have a non-weapon to keep it balanced. If it had less health maybe its weapons could be more effective?


Porc
Jump's answers to porc aren't very good. Its artillery (Firewalker) may be useful for pushing into porc lines (kills repairing cons and supporting raiders, etc.) but isn't able to do the heavy lifting, the Jack has to put itself well and truly in harm's way to accomplish anything, and the Sumo isn't very effective as an assault.

This is a problem which can be dealt with by a facswitch, but it doesn't seem entirely reasonable that Jump's answers are so much worse than those of other factories.


Matchups
Jumpjet doesn't feel like it has particularly good matchups against factories it would commonly be matched against, either. If the terrain is such that Venoms can escape Moderators (not very difficult) then Jump seems to be in very difficult straits there. I don't know much about the Shield matchup but I've been told it's also bad for Jump. Jump vs. Cloak is playable, though I think you have to do a lot of work with Pyro before the Zeuses come out.

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Do you agree or disagree with any of the above? I haven't been especially active recently so it's possible I'm misrepresenting the current meta, and I don't play enough jump to be certain about a lot of the above. I'm not even sure that it's a problem that Jumpfac isn't played very often.

(It does have some applications in 2v2 at least, early combos with another fac's skirmisher and Placeholder can be amazingly strong.)

I'd say two things about Moderators:

- They are a unit which you make because you have to, not because you want to. That's not necessarily a bad thing about the unit (a similar thing could be said for Warrior, and for Antiair in general), but they are inherently a response to a threat, not a threat in as of themselves. They're really quite bad as an aggressive unit.

- Moderators are not a fun unit. They're slow, they're clunky, they don't do a whole lot of damage, and they place a huge burden on you to keep them safe since they can't look after themselves. The same could be said for artillery, but (for example) an Impaler gives you the reward that you're knocking down your opponent's buildings. The payoff for Moderator is that you don't straight-up die to the thing your factory has no other counters to, and that's far less satisfying.

It is indeed possible that Jump is balanced, just too hard to play because of the APM requirement.

Well, you and I fundamentally disagree, then.

Any other opinions?

Clusterfuck inc.

Issues I see in JJ:
- raiders don't scale
- raider role is subdivided to compound this
- There is no unit that is spammable in the mid-game.
- JJ requires more apm/attention than most people possess.
- JJ require a style that does not have much in common with other fac. You are required to specialise in it in order to be good, but JJ is only viable on limited maps
- Sumo is still too weak to pull late game.
- Moderators are role confused and weak.
- Puppies are a defensive unit, but require being on your opponent's side of the map to make effective use of grey goo (you don't want to be processing your own reclaim inefficiently like that).
- Skuttles break games. They are so unreliable but their risk/reward is enormous. I dunno... they piss me off XD

Puppies and pyros:
Puppies are great on defense, and for reactively snatching opponent's reclaim fields. They do not scale well in numbers however due to not benefiting from Lanchester's law.

Pyros also scale poorly due to friendlyfire -> while they’re good in early game, they quickly lose their bite. To make this worse, pyros are a terrible defensive unit.

So on top of neither unit being good at scaling, puppies can’t be easily put into an offensive role, and pyros can’t easily be put in a defensive one. This makes the longevity of raider viability particularly poor for JJ. Ordinarily a raider force is as liquid, seamlessly moving to fill whatever strategic objective you have -> you can build them and know that even if they land in troubled times, you can keep them in reserve and they will become useful either in exploiting weakness or reacting to mitigate your own.

Moderator is bad:

It counters assaults and riots that are dumb enough to walk into them, and it's flex AA, but that's not enough.

- It's got the health of a pre-nerf rocko, for over three times the cost.
- It costs more than most of the units it counters.
- It has enormous role confusion.
- Burst slow is good, but burst damage with a slow is bad. Are you trying to kill something quickly or draw out the fight?
- It's precise, but then is supposed to combo with place holder, which enables less precise weapons. Rocko or rogue would be far better at this roll.
- It counters assaults with burst damage and slow?! High health counters slow, and high health counters burst.
- It's general strength is low, but also its speed is low. It needs to meet the units its supposed to counter in order to be effective, but then has zero chance of maneuvering itself into a useful position to do so.
- It struggles to find a place in a game, and then when it does it's made redundant almost immediately. You need something to counter zeus, but a single sharp-shooter will guarantee you never make cost on this sort of engagement again.
- They are inferior to other skirmishers in a straight up fight due to range and poor hp.

Now I have seen moderators make cost, but it's rare, and usually due to the opponent conceding a major mistake. They're not good enough to do their job reliably, let alone contribute to the gaping chasm JJ has for spammable units.

Firewalker
I disagree with your thoughts on firewalker. I think it's exceptional (outside of its retarded ai that seems to make it want to walk into range of stingers?). It's slow but inevitable.

Sumo
I like sumo as it is with the graviton beams, but I'd like to see it even cheaper. It's a support unit, yet you can't afford both it and your force. It has no useful role at this cost. Make it 1300 and see what happens.

No spammable units
It’s the only fac that has zero good spammable units. This might be by design, but it’s an enormously difficult factory to learn as a result. All of its units are highly conditional, and many aren’t even reliable within their roles.

Skuttles
Fuck these guys. Amirite?

Try them with placeholder.

Apparently a few moderators and a placeholder is enough to kill a Goliath.

That speaks more to the strength of placeholder than to that of moderator.

SnuggleBass , i agree with your analysis. mostly.

just one thing. if you dare to touch skuttle, i skuttle you.

What are peoples' thoughts on the Jack? I find it's trying too hard to wear too many hats, somewhere between heavy raider and Ravager-ish fast-assault, and that means it has to be frustratingly expensive for what you get.

Aquanim - yes, Firewalker is weak against shields. Imho, that's the problem with the firewalker: it's basically meant to kill skirm-balls or do artillery work against unshielded static targets.... but it costs so much and is so slow that I rarely pull it out. I mean, what deathballs do you see that you'd want to hit with a firewalker? A shieldball? Ineffective. An early skirm ball? Costs too much to ever see that action. Unshielded porc? If it's light porc, you'd just assault it with jacks, and if it's heavy porc there's a shield.

I mean it devastates spider-deathballs, but those are often smart enough to go around since they're faster and have better terrain abilities.

That and its bone-headedly frustrating movement just makes me hate it. Too situational and too clumsy.

Sumo need back Heatray or Gaybeam Slowbeam.
Or lower the Cost.