StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Posted: **2007-05-22 12:30am**

It's a few weeks overdue, and I haven't had a chance to play any games under it yet, but everything I've heard says it's a pretty big patch with a lot of changes. Here's one list I found:

Patch Notes
MISC
* Map props have been altered to provide more balanced start positions
* Assist icon now properly shows when mousing over a Quantum Gateway
* Starting and Mass Extractor locations adjusted for all ranked maps
* Weapons that do splash damage no longer destroy other projectiles

AIR
* Scorcher now deals its damage faster
* Tier 3 Spy Planes costs reduced by roughly half and now have limited
range Omni
* Transports will no longer chase planes
* Gemini has been retuned after discovery of a bug with its missiles
* Tier 1 bombers now drop their bombs using a physics based model
* Zeus's health increased
* Revenant's damage increased
* Anti-air guns now prioritize bombers, gunships and transports over
interceptors and scouts

GROUND
* Aurora: Acceleration increased slightly and top speed lowered
* Cybran ACU damage reduced Rate of fire increased Overall DPS has gone
down
* Mech Marine can now correctly fire from a transport and health
increased
* Omni Sensors no longer have sonar
* Flare: Damage increased
* Energy Storage economy reduced Death explosion radius increased
* Cybran TML defenses improved and now have a charge time before launch
* Aeon ACU Advanced Resource Allocation System cost reduced
* T3 land factories cost increased
* UEF ACU nuke now behaves like other nukes

* Tier 1 Tanks
- Striker now moves faster and has been retuned

* Tier 2 Tanks
- Retuned to perform better vs. Tier 1 units
- Now move faster
- Obsidian energy drain decreased

* Tier 2 Artillery:
- Miasma: Damage reduced
- Klinkhammer: More accurate
- Gunther: More accurate, damage increased

* Tier 2 Point Defenses
- Now lead their targets
- Oblivion and Triad no longer deal damage to friendly targets

* Tier 3 Siege Assault Bots
- Ranged reduced
- Vision range reduced
- Acceleration reduced
- Harbinger and Titan cost increased
- Titan turret speed increased
- Loyalist cost decreased and DPS increased

SEA
* Strategic Missile Defenses can no longer be built on water
* Salem now moves similar to Aeon and UEF Destroyers Its speed on land
has been increased
* UEF and Cybran Naval factories are now more easily hit by torpedoes
* T3 Submarines are now significantly cheaper to build, their TML damage
has been reduced and their nuke cost increased
* Amphibious units (Sea floor walking) now have water vision equal to
their normal vision This allows them to see submarines
* Carriers (including the CZAR) can now build up through tier 3 air
units
* Cybran carrier anti-air guns DPS decreased and accuracy increased
* T3 Sonar Buoy's cost reduced, health changed and sonar range increased
* T1 and T2 Sonar Buoy's health increased
* T3 Aeon Sonar Buoy anti-torpedo rate of fire decreased
* T1 Torpedo launchers now have sonar

* Frigates:
- Completely retuned
- Health increased
- Cost decreased
- DPS increased
- Beacon range decreased and anti-torpedo system retuned

* Submarines:
- Sylph cost increased and DPS decreased
- Sliver DPS decreased, cost decreased and health increased

* Destroyers
- Cost retuned

* Battleships
- Summit and Galaxy cost decreased

EXPERIMENTALS
* Galactic Colossus and Monkeylord now always respond to attacks from
Siege Assault Bots

* Atlantis:
- Health reduced
- Torpedo system retuned

* CZAR:
- Health increased
- Beam damage reduced
- Flak damage radius increased
- Crash damage reduced

* Fatboy
- Cost decreased

* Galactic Colossus
- Cost decreased
- Movement improved

* Mavor:
- Accuracy decreased
- Turret speeds increased
- Cost reduced

* Monkeylord
- Turret ranges increased

* Scathis:
- Energy Drain per shot reduced
- Health increased
- Max radius

* Soul Ripper:
- Ground damage doubled and splash damage added
- Air to air damage reduced
- Crash damage and radius increased
- Cost retuned

* Tempest:
- Acceleration increased
- Turn rate increased
- Main cannon radius increased
- Cost decreased

Interesting notes:

The Tech 3 bots have been significantly nerfed, supposedly to curb the "tech up and spam T3 assault bots" tendency.

Some of the units have "cost retuned"... popular speculation I've seen is that "retuned = increased"

Posted: **2007-05-22 12:38am**

Does it run any better on single core procs? Right now it's a complete slideshow on anything bigger than tiny maps on my A64 3000+.

Posted: **2007-05-22 12:40am**

* Mavor:
- Accuracy decreased
- Turret speeds increased
- Cost reduced

Well... how much is it decreased by? How inaccurate? Is it still an insta-win?

* Fatboy
- Cost decreased

Rejoice!

* Tier 2 Point Defenses
- Now lead their targets
- Oblivion and Triad no longer deal damage to friendly targets

Yes! Finally! Now maybe my Triads will hit something!

* UEF ACU nuke now behaves like other nukes

This sounds ominous... I'm kinda worried here.

Posted: **2007-05-22 12:49am**

Hawkwings wrote:* UEF ACU nuke now behaves like other nukes

This sounds ominous... I'm kinda worried here.

I disagree with reducing fatboy's cost, but this is good. I think this just means you can intercept it, instead of it being an uninterceptable nuclear cruise missile.

Posted: **2007-05-22 01:15am**

* Weapons that do splash damage no longer destroy other projectiles

Never saw a problem here. Interesting though.

Salem now moves similar to Aeon and UEF Destroyers Its speed on land
has been increased

Maybe it'll be worth something on land now. Maybe. What I'd like to really see is a better pathfinding AI for this, so that it'll stay on the ocean as much as possible where it's faster. As it stands I have to carefully plot routes for them so that they actually get to their destinations this century.

* Tier 1 bombers now drop their bombs using a physics based model

So, they'll perform like they did in TA now?

* CZAR:
- Health increased
- Beam damage reduced
- Flak damage radius increased
- Crash damage reduced

Health: good
Beam: Meh, instant death is a good incentive to build air defenses
Flak: Again, meh, it doesn't really matter.
Crash: That'll cut down on suicide CZARs I suppose. Assuming anyone builds the worthless PoSs in the first place.

Posted: **2007-05-22 01:38am**

Covenant wrote:
Hawkwings wrote:* UEF ACU nuke now behaves like other nukes

This sounds ominous... I'm kinda worried here.
I disagree with reducing fatboy's cost, but this is good. I think this just means you can intercept it, instead of it being an uninterceptable nuclear cruise missile.

It's not uninterceptable, it's just not a strat missile. It's a tac missile, wich means tac defense shoots it down. Of course, few people put tac defense in their own base...

Posted: **2007-05-22 01:54am**

thank Valen they made the carriers into factories. Now they aren't utterly useless. The Atlantis is now super awesome, since you can submerge to build more planes between launches.

Posted: **2007-05-22 08:36am**

Hawkwings wrote: * UEF ACU nuke now behaves like other nukes

This sounds ominous... I'm kinda worried here.

It now has a flight profile like an ICBM rather than a curise missile. This means anti-tactical missile defenses are almost worthless and you need stratigic defenses.

Posted: **2007-05-22 09:11am**

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:Does it run any better on single core procs? Right now it's a complete slideshow on anything bigger than tiny maps on my A64 3000+.

That's what I like to know as well. For some reason, the beta performed better at my comp then the final version and was the reason I never played it much

Posted: **2007-05-22 08:15pm**

Xon wrote:
Hawkwings wrote: * UEF ACU nuke now behaves like other nukes

This sounds ominous... I'm kinda worried here.
It now has a flight profile like an ICBM rather than a curise missile. This means anti-tactical missile defenses are almost worthless and you need stratigic defenses.

This seems so weird. I've never built the ACU nuke in a real game, but it always struck me as the sort of nuke you'd lob at an incoming swarm of ground units, not at an enemy base. But with a strategic-missile arc, it'd be really hard to hit any enemy unit formations.

Posted: **2007-05-23 08:01pm**

Well, if I ever built one, I would have used my ACU to ninja the enemy base, which typically doesn't have tac defense.

Do strat defenses now shoot down the UEF ACU nuke?

Posted: **2007-05-23 08:04pm**

The tac/strat/AA division is kind of stupid anyway. Having huge gatling guns that only shoot at one particular flight profile just looks retarded when there's a single bomber levelling your base and it does nothing.

Posted: **2007-05-24 07:56pm**

Stark wrote:The tac/strat/AA division is kind of stupid anyway. Having huge gatling guns that only shoot at one particular flight profile just looks retarded when there's a single bomber levelling your base and it does nothing.

Yeah, that's pretty anathema to the old TA ideology of "anything can track and shoot at anything". Granted, this caused problems in TA when a laser tower might sometimes try shooting at a bomber rather than the ground troops marching up to it, but the latest patch introduced priority targeting for AA (bombers and gunships before fighters and scouts) so I can't see it being that difficult doing the same for the tac missile defense.

My guess would be, from my limited impressions at least, that the tactical missile defense is supposed to an extremely reliable anti-missile system, and that for it to get tied up shooting at aircraft could undesirably reduce anti-missile performance. Alternatively, it could be that in order for it to be as reliable as it is at intercepting inbound missiles, it has to be so accurate that it would never miss the slower airplanes... which could very easily become a problem once people figure this out and start laying down anti-missile platforms rather than AA. You could counter this by making the anti-missile platform guns do little damage (and have the missiles take little damage to destroy) but then it might take rather a long time to destroy an aircraft target.

Which leads me to wonder if perhaps the priority targeting introduced in the patch doesn't force an AA unit to break off its firing program and retarget a new higher-priority target which just came into range, but rather simply dictates which unit to choose to engage and then that unit stays engaged until its destroyed or it goes out of range.

Hmm.

Posted: **2007-05-25 12:49am**

What I would LOVE for AA is coordinated firing. Say, I select a group of T3 SAMs, group them together, then give a command saying "Split your fire so that missiles are being launched at ALL targets in range", and "Ignore scouts and interceptors". That way, when the bombers come in, the SAMs isolate the bombers from the chaff, and lay into all of them at the same time.

And the other option for the group could be "Focus on the most important target until it dies or goes out of range". That would cause all the AA in the group to fire on the experimental/gunships/t3 bombers one at a time until they're no longer in range.

And do the same thing for ground point defense too, that would be great.

Posted: **2007-05-25 01:09am**

I think the t1/t2 AA suck so bad (and are guns, so should only be short-range point-defence anyway) that replacing them with the tac defence would barely change the game. Give the tac defence a priority toggle (even something simple like missiles/bombers/all planes) and let it shoot at whatever the hell it wants.

Then again, I want heathen things like counterbattery sensors too, so nobody listen to me.

Posted: **2007-05-25 01:34am**

Remember sensor towers in Warzone 2100? You could assign a battery of howitzers to the sensor tower, and then leave it alone for the rest of the game. Then later, as your big push to the enemy base is weakening, a sudden howitzer barrage kills the tank formation in front of you, and half their base!

Or, you see a big radar splotch telling you that enemies are incoming. You quickly gather up your units and send them in, but by the time you scroll over there, the artillery shells are already tearing apart their attack.

Ahh, memories.

So yeah, I want something like that.

Apparently the reason that laser towers and whatnot don't fire on air units is because of the massive HP disparity between air and land units. A T1 tank has about as much hp as a T3 bomber.

Posted: **2007-05-25 01:40am**

Yeah, that trend also results in the absurd ID4 ship with FIVE THOUSAND WHOLE HITPOINTS, a laughable value for such an expensive unit.

I really miss being able to assign units to sensors and command vehicles. Often in games like Supcom the biggest thread (or only threat) it people ruling you by outranging and you not noticing for long enough for them to blow up your shit. With counterbattery sensors heaps of anti-t3 arty micro goes away, and the air-command sensors could do the same thing for air units (squadron attacking? automatically launch the interceptors to shoot them down, then order new planes from factories to restock!).

This is really the problem behind the stratified AA - it requires so much pre-planning and on-the-spot micro when it SHOULD be relatively painless.

Posted: **2007-05-25 02:22am**

Can anyone recommend any good mods? I found one mod that really helped with one of the most annoying aspects of the game: the interminable length of time required to build a functioning base. It gives the supreme commander instant upgrades, so you can just jack him up to T3, add a resource allocation unit to him, and build T3 mass extractors and other goodies right off the bat. It even adds steroids to the resource allocation unit so the power and mass boost is huge, and it gives him a big construction speed boost, so he's equivalent to several fully upgraded support commanders working together. Of course, all of this also makes him super valuable, so you're more likely to try and defend him.

Unfortunately, it seems that most mods are broken by the latest patch, but this one still works. And I suppose I should point out that most of the reason I use this mod is so that my son can play and get all of the cool experimental units quickly, because he's not really interested in playing a damned "gather and upgrade" cycle for half an hour before his base is worth anything.

Posted: **2007-05-25 02:27am**

It doesn't help that the early game units are so worthless and the early defences so strong. A few t1 turrets and a t2 turret can hold off dozens of lowend ground units. Spending fifteen minutes getting to the 'good' part isn't very awesome.

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