Dylan's July 2010 balance audit

[effigy]

Here's the latest balance proposal from our exiled Dylan:

I. Present Issues

1. a. Anti-tank
   • Many anti-tank upgrades are marginalized by their expense in tandem with the fact that more powerful replacements are available which do not benefit from upgrades to existing weaponry. Other than the tank-killer, which is, like the lancer, a rocket, the higher levels of minipod research are eclipsed by the availability of lancers. The higher levels of lancer research are eclipsed by the availability of scourge missiles.

1. b. Artillery
   • Artillery currently occupies a marginal position in the game so as to encourage either the construction of heavily fortified, stationary locations at which emplacements are built or their complete disuse.

1. c. Burn
   • Currently, residual thermal damage-over-time from thermal weapons such as incendiary mortars and flamers does not "stack," or accumulate. This renders the employment of such weapons in increasingly greater numbers as progressively wasteful. In higher numbers, only the direct damage is found to contribute to the effectiveness of a mass of thermal weapons which inflict damage over time.

1. d. Cannons
   • The only current advantages of cannons over other forms of weaponry are range and durability. These are almost underwhelming when compared with the high build time, cost, and research time of cannons which altogether constitute a hearty and arguably wasteful investment on behalf of the player when other alternatives offer more effective outcomes. Specific concerns include: damage against cyborgs, weight, and availability.

1. e. Opening diversity
   • Machineguns dominate the opening game, especially with no bases. The capacity of a player to research machineguns outpaces that of all other early paths so that the pursuit of other weapons contributes in a purely auxiliary fashion to the battles between "HMG mass" which carry on well into T2. The high durability and damage output of this weapon type, in combination with the early availability of its upgrades, renders it overpowered relative to other T0-T1 weapons.

1. f. Prerequisites
   • Certain prerequisites in the game do not make sense. For example, some research items require a certain levels of alloys - but only vehicular alloys count, not cyborg alloys.

1. g. Recon
   • A key aspect of the RTS game is recon. The early stages of a game, most importantly T0 into T1, usually require the investment on the part of the player in an amount of recon suited to the players' style. The partial or complete disuse of recon must offer a suitable benefit to counterweight the opportunity cost of not knowing the plans of one's opponent or opponents. This type of decision is currently absent from Warzone openings.

1. h. Speed
   • After one chooses propulsions, engine upgrades and attention to unit speeds is largely ignored. Players currently only ask themselves the following questions when designing units and researching: "How fast are my units? How durable are they? How much damage will they do?" The question which is missing is: "How fast are my opponent's units relative to my own?"

II. Proposals
(Dylan suggests that we collectively ...)

1. a. Anti-tank
   • i. Group minirocket, rocket, and missile type weapons as one type.
   • ii. Label the new type appropriately.
   • iii. Rebalance the progression of upgrades to the new umbrella type so that anti-tank is effective but not overpowered in all stages of the game as opposed to solely T2.
   • iv. Triple-check that ripple rockets do not once again become imbalanced.
   • v. Increase the mini-rocket array's durability and weight to increase its longevity and effectiveness.

1. b. Artillery
   • i. Increase artillery type damage against bunkers.
   • ii. Decrease artillery type damage against hard structures.
   • iii. Increase artillery damage against tracks and, to a lesser extent, half-tracks.
   • iv. Enable mortar tanks to turn faster.
   • v. Address the prerequisites of high damage howitzer upgrades (cannon tech??? )

1. c. Burn
   • i. Adjust code to enable the accumulation of burn damage, perhaps in a comma and semicolon delimited string.
     Ex/
     • Sources of damage: 20, duration 5. 60, duration 10.
       Burn value for unit looks like this: "20,5;60,10"
       After 1 second, value looks like this: "20,4;60,9"
       A unit with 4 thermal armor would have its HP reduced by 16+56=72 after 1 second.
     This would replace the current system where to my knowledge the unit's armor value is applied in vain to the fractional damage received in one game refresh, often not reducing it by much to the minimum damage value.

• ii. Rebalance thermal weapons with DOT accordingly.

1. d. Cannons
   • i. Increase cannon damage against cyborgs.
   • ii. Slightly decrease some cannon weights.
   • iii. Decrease cannon piece cost.
   • iv. Improve availability of a variety of cannon options.
   • v. Further diversify cannons so as to promote the use of combinations to address different threats as more cannons are researched.
   • vi. Give heavy gunner and super heavy gunner cyborgs a more reasonable range. (Around 5.9 for both, currently ...)

1. e. Opening diversity
   • i. Slightly decrease HP of twin machinegun and heavy machinegun.
   • ii. Decrease light cannon turret research time (and I think this calls to decrease research cost, in turn.)
   • iii. Slightly increase minipod damage and slightly decrease DPS.
   • iv. Decrease antipersonnel damage against hard structures.
   • v. Increase research time of MG towers.

1. f. Prerequisites
   • i. Allow all non-armor research items to accept either vehicular or cyborg composite alloys of a given level as prerequisites. For example, bombard research should accept either vehicular or cyborg alloys, while python resesarch should not.
   • ii. HMG hardpoint should not require MG bunker.
   • iii. MG bunker should require HMG.

1. g. Recon
   • i. Drastically increase sensor turret durability.
   • ii. Increase both structural and vehicular sensor turret ranges proportionally. (12->15, 14->18, perhaps)
   • iii. A free oil deposit is currently marked on the map for any player who scouts it. When any player builds on it, the blue flashing light disappears, even if it is obscured by fog of war. It should remain blue and appear free until more recent information is obtained on the part of the player.
   • iv. Allow players to select units assigned to a sensor and unassign them without difficulty.
   • v. Either lower the cost of hardened sensor tower to that of its brethren, the normal sensor tower, or allow the player the option to build both once the hardened variant has been researched.

1. h. Speed
   • i. Speculative: Allow players the ability to "clock" the speed of enemy units.
   • ii. Allow engine upgrades to increment unit speeds beyond propulsion limits i.e. apply the upgrades after limits are imposed.