Actually I have just been looking at this and currentlyThe problem I have with the idea of staggering the ROF upgrades is that boost you get with the last upgrade. The ROF will increase from 50 with no upgrade to 63 with one upgrade to 83 with two upgrades and to 125 with three upgrades. You see from no upgrade to the first upgrade you get 20% more shots but from the second to the third upgrades you get 50% more shots. This means you will have a lot of problems not to become an overpowered MRP when you apply the third ROF upgrade. So give me some values you want to use and I can give you a hint of what will happen with the weapon with the upcoming upgrades in comparison with the Lancer and the Medium/Heavy Cannon.
The default stats for the mini rocket pod are
Damage 20
Rate of fire 50
After 1 damage / rate of fire upgrade
Damage 26
Rate of fire 62
After 2 damage / rate of fire upgrades
Damage 32
Rate of fire 83
After 3 damage / rate of fire upgrades
Damage 38
Rate of fire 125
So the first thing I'd do is reduce all 3 damage upgrades from 6 to 4 then I'd increase the base damage and the base rate of fire
From
Damage 20, Rate of fire 50
to
Damage 26, Rate of fire 95
After the first damage and rate of fire upgrade that would you take you to
Damage 30
Rate of fire 107
Of course this is where things would get a little tricky because the second rate of fire upgrade increases the rate of fire by 21 and the third rate of fire upgrade increases rate of fire by 42
Which would give you
Damage 34
Rate of fire 170
Clearly that is a bit much, so what I'd do is decrease rate of fire upgrade 2 and 3
Rate of fire upgrade 2 would be reduced from 21 to 12
Rate of fire upgrade 3 would be reduced from 42 to 12
Which is still going to result in a rate of fire of 131 which leave us with a difference of 6
Which would give us
Damage 34
Rate of fire 131
And that should give us roughly the same damage we would have with
Damage 38
Rate of fire 125
Well maybe a little more but I wouldn’t think it would be more than about 200 or 300 damage per minute, so I think that should probably be ok
I was talking about alpha campaign only, we know that by the time the lancer and the heavy cannon have all the possible upgrades that can have on alpha campaign they are going to be stronger than the mini rocket pod, when I said that it would be matching damage with the medium cannon, I was thinking in terms of light medium and heavy weapons and therefore trying to match the damage of weapons up to there intended role now personally I'd consider the mini rocket pod to be a medium weapon, more powerful that machineguns for example but not as powerful as a lancer or heavy cannon now obviously its difficult to decide on exact damage values till we get that far we'd have to see what the damage the mini rocket pod and the medium cannon where actually doing come the end of alpha campaign and then we could decide if any adjustments are needed.That means that the MRP would be obsolete from Alpha 11 on. Do you really want that? The MRP gets three more damage upgrades at Beta 1 and even with the stronger armour of the Collective units, I think this would give us the chance to make the MRP a viable choice until the middle of the Beta campaign.
That’s something of a specious argument isn’t it, by that argument I could say that you are going to have to increase the cost of all weapons because insane is meant to be harder.I disagree in all of these points. I used tracked Lancers and tracked MRPs in my tests and they were all but not useless. And the Medium Cannon on halftracks is a viable choice. You should think about that we are testing insane difficulty. And all things should be more difficult in insane difficulty. If you decrease the price of the Medíum Cannons things would become too easy and even easier in the less tough levels. Insane difficulty shall force the player to think about his usual strategy and especially to force him to adapt it to the tougher competition. With making the Medium Cannon lighter, less expensive and faster on tracks there would be no more competition and nearly even a newbie could play insane difficulty from the very beginning on. Insane difficulty is made for experienced players and experienced players should be able to deal with this competition. If they are not able to deal with it, they are not experienced enough at that moment.
Clearly we are not doing that therefore all weapons should fall upon the pre-established cost curve, and since the medium cannon does not do this currently then it needs the cost adjusting accordingly, the long and the short of it is that the medium cannon is a weaker weapon then the lancer it is a much simpler weapon that the lancer as well and therefore should be less expensive than the lancer, and since the aim of the changes to the lancer and cannons is to equalise the heavy cannon and the lancer then the cost should be the same for the heavy cannon and the lancer and the cost of the medium cannon should be in between the light cannon and the heavy cannon.
I guess this is one of those things that we will have to agree to disagree about
When I said this I was talking about me, I almost never use tracks because they are to slow to be practically useful, there are only really any good on defensive missions, or missions where you are dealing with particularly heavy resistance, but in the case of dealing with heavy resistance the best course of action generally is to just bring heavier fire power.Do you have any proof for this? Did you ask other players? In his fast walkthrough, NoQ used tracked units and I did it also when I played the campaign. From Alpha 06 on until Beta 11 I always used tracked units. In our rebalancing, it was the first time that I used halftracks in a level later than Alpha 06. And that with the Medium Cannon.
I mean yeah tracks might give you more durability but who needs that durability if you can kill your opponent so fast that they don’t get a chance in inflict a lot of damage, and in that case the durability you would gain from tracks goes completely to waste.
Ultimately what this comes down to is one very simple question why mess about with slow tracked vehicles when I can do the same job 10 times faster using half tracked lancers.
I have just double checked this and the first scav base on alpha 6 only has 1 artefact unless someone has changed this is a later version of master and that containsIn Alpha 06 you get at the moment two artefacts in the Scavenger factory not one as you supposed: the Medium Cannon and the MRP (see the attached code). With your suggested research path, we would have to take four artifacts into the factory: Medium Cannon, MRP, Lancer, and Bunker Buster. But if you two want to do so, I'm fine with that.
Medium cannon
Medium cannon hard point
Mini rocket pod
Mini Rocket Guard Tower
HE Mini Rockets
HE Mini Rockets 2
Fast Fire Mini Rockets
Fast Fire Mini Rockets 2
Fast Fire Mini Rockets 3
Lancer AT Rocket
Bunker buster rocket
HEAT Rocket warhead
Lancer Bunker
Lancer Hard Point
The artefact to North West of the first artefact inside the new paradigm tank factory has the tracks, and the third artefact on the ridge overlooking the new paradigm landing zone has the engine upgrade, and the fourth and final artefact is up on the plateau inside the research centre and that has the research module.
I still see no necessity to make the Bunker Buster effective against units. You can use combat units at the front against enemy units and bring Bunker Busters forward in their back to fight the enemy Walltowers
Oh I do because I'm sick and tired of bunker buster being unable to defend them selves and having such a slow rate of fire that they aren't even useful when used with other combat units, take alpha 12 for example I send out a few hover bunker busters to dispatch there turrets and ultimately the rate of fire is so slow that actual I may as well just use mortars, because thy aren't actually any quicker than mortars and at least mortars can defend them selves against the new paradigms hover units.
The way bunker busters are balanced at the moment renders them all but useless, the only time I ever use them is on vtols and even then I only use them maybe a half dozen times in the entire game that is how completely garbage they actually are in most cases I can smash the computers defences faster using almost any other weapon and weight of numbers, even if bunker busters only did like half the damage to a given tank that the lancer does it would still be a vast improvement.
Probably but I just wanted to get a since of exactly how much extra damage the flamer would actually need in order to be a viable option against the new paradigms unitsAren't flamers then too strong in the early levels? Did you test these values in Alpha 2,3 or 4?
Here are my latest test values for the flamer
Structure modifier "hard" increased from 40 to 100
Base Damage increased from 12 to 17 (which gives you damage of 52 on alpha 6)
Base Periodic damage increased from 14 to 25
I also reset the weapon modifiers back to
"Wheeled": 85
"Half-Tracked": 75,
"Tracked": 60,
With these values the flamer actually performs acceptably against the new paradigm units, the performance is kinds of similar to the heavy machine gun or the light cannon
ok so here is a custom build of the mod with the following changes for you to try out
Tracks
Weight reduced from 13,000 to 10,000
Base speed increased from 125 to 128
Medium Cannon
Weight reduced from 5000 to 3500
Cost reduced from 125 to 87
Bunker Buster
Cost reduced from 150 to 113
All weapon modifiers increased from 33 to 100
Damage decreased from 125 to 96
Rate of fire increased from 3 to 10
i didn't alter the structure modifiers but they may still need a slight reduction even though i turned the damage down a bit
Flamer
Structure modifier "hard" increased from 40 to 100
Damage increased from 12 to 17 (which gives you damage of 52 on alpha 6)
Periodic damage increased from 14 to 25
i know the changes to the flamer might make it a bit to strong on the earlier levels but I'm unsure how to alter the artefacts so i just changed the base stats instead, just so we can get a feel for the size of the buff that the flamer needs in order for it to be viable against the new paradigms units.