1v1 Fac-RPS tweak suggestion for testing

I have also posted the below in #balance.

Shieldbot | Cloakbot | Spider loop (with a mention of tanks): This loop seems easy to tweak.

Cloak suffers vs Shield because:

• Bandit is 1:1 superior to glaive (Tested, confirmed)
• Ronin has a difficult time fighting shieldball due to friendly fire, felon range and shield regeneration
• Phantom can no longer 1-shot felons - EDIT: It now 3 shots them, because both the shield and the unit HP are higher than phantom damage.
• Ronin cannot compete with rogue. Rogue also seems to be good on terrain specifics where it can kill reduced movement speed (hills) glaives accurately and efficiently.
• Snitch is superior to imp

Shield suffers vs Spider because:

• Venom is in the anti-bandit niche statistically, also fast and ranged enough to handle rogues, thugs, outlaws. All but felon.
• Recluse's weakness of inaccuracy doesn't matter against shieldballs.

Spider suffers vs Cloak because:

• Glaive is a cheap anti-flea unit with enough speed and the right pricepoint to be able to overwhelm most spider units with good micro.
• Ronin/Reaver does a surprisingly good job against venom/redback
• Phantom is a solid and reliable counter to Recluse

Other notes: Reaver/ronin are the reason cloak has a very easy time against tanks and amphbots. Changes in this area may smooth out other RPS situations.

"Trapped queue" refers to situations where you are forced to build specific units to handle an opening play / enemy composition, but that queue is doomed to fail later.

Proposals to help address this loop:

Bringing glaive back up to par with bandit reduces the need for cloak to fall into a trapped queue and evens up the early game. May also help vs Rogue. To protect spider from this change, redback needs to be brought back into relevance against cloakbots. Reaver currently beats redback with a little HP left over (which it can then regenerate fully), and redback kills glaive in 4 shots inefficiently. If redback were tweaked to 3-shot glaives via damage up, attack speed down slightly but with an overall DPS tune-up that put it on par with reaver (despite being 20 metal more costly) this might help to compensate.

Recluse is weak vs cloakbots and strong vs shieldbots, because of innacuracy. I propose that it's accuracy be increased to help it vs cloakbots, whilst reducing it's DPS to compensate Shieldbots. Recluse can be an oppressive, abusable force in a lot of situations, so it being on the weaker raw damage scale vs large targets isn't a problem.

Increase the price point of rogue further. It has more than half of the DPS of an emissary, and just under half the range. However, it's range is #1 in standoff cost unit compositions prior to artillery, therefor for all intents and purposes, guarded rogues are a mini mobile sub-emissary. They can and should cost appropriately.

Either weaken the shield regeneration or capacity of thug slightly.

Since reaver/venom/bandit's loop hasn't been solved here for shield vs spider, I suggest venom builds up it's emp a little more slowly in a value range that just slightly improves bandit's odds.

A relevant side note: blitz needs to either be slightly cheaper or slightly tankier (When compared to ravager (250m), blitz(300m) has a mere 9 more speed but 36 less dps and roughly 2/3 the hp:cost ratio, leaning heavily on the stun.), which will help as a switch against bandit/rogue and fighting reavers which dominate tanks. Equally, emissary is failing to exist alongside lance and firewalker - and whilst it could and should be in the sweet spot to fight low-cost high density units in rogue's bracket, it is falling short. Something that boosts it's damage output to the tune of this bracket, even at increased cost, would be helpful here.

Super side note: Imp/snitch is an entirely different discussion but essentially hinges on the strength of shieldballs, particularly in teamgames. With the existence of aspis, numerous options begin to fail, such as licho and pre-strider artillery, often leaving cloaked snitch and EMP missiles as the only remaining options in a meta that doesn't often reward fast-enough assaults. If snitch (and imp, perhaps limpet) are to receive nerfs that many think that they should, the density of shieldballs needs to be normalized first.

An alternate approach in line with @Mudosaka's concern would be to slightly nerf bandit and duck (hp), but this creates kodachi superiority (particularly vs shields)

Honestly, I think glaive is fine against bandits. It's able to effectively use its speed advantage to catch bandits out of position and raid where bandits arent. I think the main issue in cloak vs shield is how weak ronin is against shield balls.

I really like the buffs for spider though. I think redback needs a buff. I think it would be cool if redbacks were slightly faster, and had more range so they could more effectively kite reavers.

The recluse change is something id really have to see because Recluse oftentimes feels like it does damage way too slowly, so nerfing its DPS might suck. Higher accuracy might offset that though, so IDK, I'd love to test that.

IDK about another rogue nerf, it honestly seems fine to me. Shield plops aren't nearly as popular as before, and fighting rogue doesn't feel that oppressive. Not sure though, cuz I haven't fought many shields recently.

I fear that a venom nerf would make spider early game much weaker to glaive since glaives already tend to beat venoms (especially with a buffed glaive)

blitz and emi buffs would be really nice

I would love to test out these tweaks :D . Do you have any unit tweaks prepared?

I like how the OP is laid out. I'll write some initial thoughts then get into more cohesive thoughts later.

quote: Cloak suffers vs Shield because:

I am not quite sure what Bandit being 1:1 superior to Glaive means. If it means that Bandit wins in a straight-up fight of equal cost, then that seems unsurprising. Bandit is slower so it has to have an edge somewhere. This seems fine as CLoaky has a more versatile riot in Reaver. In general, I think there should be ways of playing that generate fights that Glaive wants to take, and other ways that generate fights Bandit wants to take.

Bandit is particularly good on defense due to its range advantage, but can be destroyed if outflanked. Glaive wants to run past defenders and use its DPS to kill things before help arrives. Glaive with a bit of Lotus is great against Bandit because Bandit wants to dive to Lotus and kite the Glaive, but cannot do both at once. There were two attempted comm kills in B1436566 2 on Fairyland 1.31 that show off the difference. The Glaive attempt was successful because it could run past the Bandits and kill the comm before help arrived. The Bandit attempt failed because Bandits could not use their range advantage against the defending Glaives.

I'm open to Bandit vs. Glaive being too favoured for Bandit, but I want to know what more people think, and possibly to have more replays. Nerfing Bandit very slightly isn't that hard (maybe -5 hp?) but I'd want a bit more of a consensus.

Ronin friendly fire sounds like it should be fixed.

I am happy with Phantom not 1-shotting Felon. The matchup felt pretty sad for Shield once things escalated when Felon had 1500 health. Felon being bigger than Thug seems good.

I am not sure why Rogue is still good after it has almost been nerfed back to when it was bad. Perhaps it needs less turn rate to undo some of the effects of superfluid. One idea I like the sound of is to bring Picket back as a somewhat efficient counter to Rogue (and maybe even Recluse). This could just involve pushing Picket health and Rogue damage to the point that Rogue no longer 1-shots it. A cheap turret aimed at skirmishers should generate more stability in matchups than trying to fiddle Rogue, Ronin and Recluse into a spot where each factory has and a good ranged answer to each.

I'm not sure about Snitch and Imp, but a bit more cost for Snitch sounds ok. Cloaked bombs are always a bit controversial, but I feel like we'd lose something exciting if they were owled.

quote: Shield suffers vs Spider because:

I'm a bit of a broken record, but has anyone tried Racketeer? Also does spreading work against Venom? I'd be happy to do something like drop Venom real damage slightly to give raiders a bit more of a chance.

quote: Spider suffers vs Cloak because:

Making Redback kill Glaive efficiently sounds good. A Phantom nerf (slowed while reloading?) for other reasons sounds reasonable.

quote: Other notes: Reaver/ronin are the reason cloak has a very easy time against tanks and amphbots. Changes in this area may smooth out other RPS situations.

This combo has tended to be quite efficient unless it happens to be countered. I'd want more views on this though.

quote: Proposals to help address this loop:

• I want to gather more input on Glaive vs. Bandit.
• Redback killing Glaive efficiently sounds solid.
• Redback has 25 range on Reaver, is it not close to killing Reaver already? I don't think there is much danger in giving Redback a bit more HP (or something) to beat a Reaver (if extra damage to beat Glaive isn't enough).
• I don't like the sound of messing with Recluse inaccuracy since this is the units thing. I'd investigate a Picket buff to give all factories a general tool to defend against skirmisher buildup. Trying to make Rogue equal to Ronin and equal to Recluse sounds very tricky and I'm not sold on it being desirable either.
• I'm not adverse to making Rogue a bit more expensive, since we can't seem to figure out why it was bad before and good now.
• I would rather not touch Thug if we're also nerfing Rogue (and maybe even Bandit). I like the Thug game plan thematically for shieldbots, and other units keep popping up to derail it.
• Venom would have to lose either 15% or 31% (I can't test right now) of its EMP damage to impact how it fights Bandit. This is an interesting idea, but feels a bit extreme.
• I want more input (and possibly games) before buffing Blitz or Emissary. Both are pretty dangerous buffs. Blitz would benefit from a bit more health or a little less reload time (both are a bit anti-quant though). The nicest Emissary buff may be improved unpacking/packing speed.

Also I'd like to add something on Firewalker since rANDY brought it up in #balance. Perhaps Firewalker could have less direct damage. This would reduce its impact against shields, potentially making area shields a good counter, and give units extra time to move away. Firewalker used to fire two medium sized balls which were changed to a shotgun specifically so that area shields did not hardcounter it. Maybe it could have reduced burn damage too.

I have a question. If multiple firewalkers fire into the same area, so that the fire overlaps, do the burning effects stack? Cause if they don't it would be interesting to reduce burn damage but allow for a little stacking or something.

Yo RiposteR. Couple of things I'd want to throw back your way here.

quote: In addition, glaives heal, which is particularly useful against venoms which have low dps but high stun value.

Rarely is a captured glaive a glaive that gets away and heals, and if so, it's likely to be so few of them in numbers that heal is unlikely to be a deciding factor in the game. Venom's major weakness is reaver, with ronin also being surprisingly good at contributing (chunky hitbox of venom).

quote: I've lost a number of times to dregs on Fairyland because I just cant find a way to kill the shields. Ive tried phantom + sling + likho, but they are just so tough to bring down. I guess just build shield factory and build rogue? Reducing shield regen on thug (the main culprit) might make it more risky for shields to just walk forward and backward on repeat.

This sounds like you see the issue from the same point of view I do. If the shieldbot player can establish a solid eco through good early bandit pressure, it's entirely possible for the shieldball to be too mature to stop by the time it gets on radar. Or at the very least, it's a tradeoff between being able to cope with bandit raids or the ball. Switching to shieldbots to counter shieldbots is a common move and reinforces just how powerful they are.

quote: Imp + Snitch should be nerfed...ive noticed in particular imp has a surprising ability to chase units even after it is spotted.

Whilst I agree on one level, I get what GoogleFrog is saying about losing something exciting. But they're just so polarizing too. Nobody likes being on the receiving end of the snitch that kills 8 scorchers against a factory that already inherently counters rovers. It's brutality. But everyone loves getting that cloaked snitch against 2 lances or a big shieldball in team games. I'm really glad I started playing them because it has opened my eyes to just how necessary they can sometimes be, and why. So I'm standing by "if we bring bombs into check, we need to bring the reasons bombs are required in line too (lack of diverse shield penetration options)".

quote: Amph close to not viable 1 v 1 at this point.

Care to expand on that one? I need a bit of convincing on this. Hovers definitely feel uncommon and out of meta atm. As helpful as claymore has become, this bug where he can't launch across the edge of the water properly features too commonly on the maps where you'd want to be hover.

quote: Emissary can feel really strong in the right situations (for anyone who had the displeasure of playing vs Godde on red comet just before he stopped can atest to), so I'd be cautious with buffs to them, however I do have some ideas in mind to try if Godde returns. I know there are a few players a couple months ago commenting Blitz op (Riposter/therxxy maybe? Can't remember too well) as they were dominating some games on Doldrums. I'd maybe leave them as they are for now.

If we were to:

• Nerf reaver
• Nerf FW
• Keep rogue in check

Then I'm willing to let go of tank adjustments. I think these changes would make tanks more viable. Without a skirmisher they almost need to rely on blitz entirely in some situations, and if riots are too strong, that isn't feasible enough.

I haven't been able to comment on everything so here are a few notes.

quote: The racketeer's missile travel time and broken OKP mean that targets still get a chance to shoot between disarms.

Ticket?

On Rogue vs. Picket, Picket was really quite good against skirms before its cost was nerfed from 80 to 100. The drastic cost nerf was implemented to kick the game out of Picket wars. So I think a slightly better Picket vs. Rogue matchup could do a lot. I would also like to try reducing Rogue turn rate, as that is possibly a subtle-yet-important factor in how it advances then runs from Glaive and Ronin.

quote: Did you get a chance to check the replays I linked GF?

I had a look at the first one and got the chance to watch the other two just now. Firewalker is very nerfable since its last nerf was in 2017 when it lost 1/3 of its speed. The unit was essentially created in May 2015 with a 300 metal cost buff and the rework of its gun into a fireball spray (previously it shot two mini-Infernos). So we're working with pretty raw, unrefined, numbers. However, the fact that nothing has been tried means I am more likely to try speculative Quant's Rule nerfs first. I think I would like to see it deal less upfront damage to make it worse defensively against speedy units that try to kill it. A little less range could also be an effective option. I would like assaults to be able to shrug off its damage, but we don't seem to quite be there when there are more than a few FW.

I think I would also like to nerf Phantom. Mostly for team games, but I've also seen people complain about it in 1v1. I am thinking of making it slower while reloading to give people more chance to run them down, without messing with its attrition or burst potential.

Some balance-adjacent quality of life thoughts:

Crawling bomb radar dot minigame doesn't seem entirely ZK. Would it be ok to reel in their Absolute Brutality factor down a bit by reducing the blast radius, but in turn make them radar stealthed, so the landmine usecase isn't dependent on radar and attentions-per-minute variables? Cloaking them is completely busted and I'm not sure how its addressable, but this would be a start.

Recluse rockets tend to spread quite a ways beyond its maximum range. Adding the new Fire Towards Enemies toggle seems quite logical, and would give the unit a small, unique leg-up.

The only caveat to that I'd envision is that if you have it on by-default, you're going to absolutely trash your/team's shit on the way to the frontline.