OK GUYS COMMUNISM is getting out of hand

[pseudo pelican]

just an example, it was the amount comwreck was lowered by. but it could be anything ofc

you can make t2 eco / units cost more (or only cost more E), if you want them to come later

[long ridge]

i think changing costs is not the right way
it affects too many things
like punishing the whole class cause you want to make 1 kid change

[pseudo pelican]

its the least invasive change u can make really, compared to changing unit behavior or how sharing works

[long ridge]

they made starlight cost e so it comes later. well instead of it being a strategic mix of t2, it's basically early t2 phase and starlight phase

exaggeration but yeh

[pseudo pelican]

Starlight was never changed to cost more E afaik?

[long ridge]

i mean i assume that was the design of the 1k cost

[fair flame]

Make mexes upgradeable to T2 in place. That removes the "hand out T2 constructors" communism. As that is 'good' teamplay, where we want them to donate metal and give out units.
Nobody is complaining "team pooled its metal and BP to construct a Starfall 37 minutes into the game"

So the environment is competative play and with specific map features contributing.

At the current time overflow resources "flow down" I believe.
Ok. Don't think I've seen the suggestion: let's set donations to flow down only.
Units, Resources they can only go to lower ranked players.

The compromise might be that the OS50 player can donate to the OS42. But that sacrifices the higher OS economy later in the game. Seems like a trade to be considered carefully before making.
Same on giving units "up" the tree for better Micro. If you want your highest OS players to have them, they have to build them.

Pretty sure it would cripple casual low OS lobbies as they are. They're just not playing that way.
Easier to disable donations. Completely. As for sending buildpower to assist ? If you're building over there you're not building over here. If that can't be exploited to find a weakness; map issue. Or a problem on intel gathering.

Out of interest what was the solution to this in the original TA or SupCom ? Why is this a problem now by game design instead of competative/meta

[pseudo pelican]

In TA and FAF, afaik they're not as efficient in assisting a factory so you will want to spam more of them, including in 1v1

Tying sharing to OS would be really weird, it's not used for affecting gameplay in any way once the game starts now, and I don't think it ever should.

For @alpine loom @strong pulsar and others who don't have an issue with slinging in general, do you think the t2/t3 transitions are in a good spot overall, or is there room for improvement on something there?

[alpine loom]

I think t2 happens too fast and invalidates a lot of the t1 game pretty quickly. I would definitely be for extending t1 game somehow. t3 is also too fast. Even when ur not slinging its pretty fast, but cooping makes it like insane levels of fast tbh

when 2 really good players are slinging geospot on strait u can get mausers out in 3 minutes basically

[strong pulsar]

Mausers are too strong atm and the maps have too much metal. Also the most played ones are too porcy. Other than that t2 is alright and t3 too. I am looking at it from not only an 8v8 lense

[alpine loom]

u could probably lengthen a lot of t1 just by changing mex size to 1.6 on most maps

[pseudo pelican]

thatd really change how the t1 phase plays out too on a given map (and its possible to make a new map like that ofc)

if you want to make teching eco worse, could change it across all maps by increasing t2 mex cost

[glossy reef]

Or make t2 mexes give "only" 3x metal instead of 4x

[subtle tangle]

The reverse is kinda true in 1v1s; it often ends in t1 phase

[pseudo pelican]

yes, thats why I think we should firstly lower the opportunity cost of the t2 factory, and secondly make early t2 less powerful by one way or another. So you get smoother transition across all game types

[long ridge]

t2 mex timing is literally cheating in 8v8

[pseudo pelican]

its really a choice between getting t2 mexes online asap, or getting t2 units to the front asap. You want both, it's not an easy choice

[glossy reef]

Cheaper t2 lab, more expensive t2 cons? Makes buying t2 con more significant decision, doesn't massively buff eco player's exponential eco, doesn't make units currently decent vs t2 even better vs t2

[grim compass]

could add more build power in T2 factory too if you want to shift value from eco to units, maybe partially compensated with build time inflation on the units

[glossy reef]

That's...not really the intent, nor is it what that change would accomplish

[grim compass]

I think it would be good, the low BP factories is actually really unintuitive design

[glossy reef]

I've argued exensively in favor of more bp for labs in this very thread and there have been various arguments against it, but
"shift value from eco to units" isn't what it would accomplish

[grim compass]

it would, the lab makes units, not eco

[glossy reef]

#1191802741350223945 message

[strong pulsar]

Going t2 is a significant risk in a 1v1. You want to change that?

[grim compass]

that's true, but what I said is true... if you increase the BP of the factory enough it opens more plays with only units and no T2 eco

[glossy reef]

When you go t2, bp is almost certainly not the limiting factor in your ability to make t2 units

[grim compass]

I think 1v1 could do with an intermediate tech level (that doesn't get hard countered like air)

[grim compass]

if you changed the BP how you'd scale BP and when you built the factory would change as well

[glossy reef]

You need to scale more bp during t1 to function properly during t1 than you need to produce t2 units

[grim compass]

maybe my conceptual understanding is just wrong then if BP doesn't provide an incentive to make the thing and make units

[pearl crater]

Hmm how about going a different way and actually increasing the t2 cost?
Then you'd have to spend more time & resources to boost it => the disparity on the front would grow even bigger and then 1v1 would stay semi-unaffected since t2 is very rare there.

[glossy reef]

It's just better to have 1 person build a t2 lab and have everyone funnel that one person resources so the team doesn't waste 10s of thousands of m each making their own t2 lab. That's the issue which is the point of this thread, and giving t2 labs a bit more bp doesn't address it

[glossy reef]

So then you can make sure frontliners never should make their own t2 lab?

[grim compass]

OK to be clear I wasn't suggesting it as a sole fix, I was just saying it was possible as a part of a shift to the unit-making value of the factory
I was mostly thinking of it in a 1v1 context anyway

[glossy reef]

Aside from potential side-effects, this thread is entirely unrelated to 1v1

It's about optimal play in team games involving heavy resource funneling, and if there's a reasonable way to make that less mandatory or more engaging for all players

[grim compass]

well there was the thing I mentioned that you glossed over which is inflating build times to lower the fungibility of build power

[glossy reef]

Which also accomplishes nothing related to this thread?

[grim compass]

okay, forget I said anything... your understanding may be too advanced for me

[fair flame]

i play 8v8 because I want to see huge armies and experimentals stomping across the map.
Making the t1 and t2 phases longer has another effect. In terms of Isthmus - those units end up contesting "the front". If you make the t1 phase longer then it may mean that 'early t2' in whatever that will be can have disproportionatly more impact on the battlefield.
Right now if the enemy hits you with t2. You can maybe go t2 in reponse. Your team is maybe 60 seconds or less away. However if we delay that by 5 minutes. If an early commander kill boosts you by 1200 metal. Thats extra time for T2 to rampage unopposed. It may actually make whatever co-operative T2 option is more essential as individually you can't compete and have to further rely on a tech or backline player.

Should factory (T2 units) should be seperate to T2 economy (mexes)

im curious why we try to balance for 1v1 and small team and also for 8v8 in the same way.
balance for 1v1 and create a rule set for competative tournament play.
those game scenarios are so vastly different from the regular game for regular people.

Would it be fair to say the devs have a competative background ? That's probably what those with a high OS have; a drive to succeed in competition against other players.
so have those stricter tournament rules, thats probably not how a lot of players will play the game for 'fun' at release; and it does need to be fun.

[pearl crater]

teching frontliner is kindof a meme, you usually go for it after someone else gives you the cons anyways

[glossy reef]

If they're more expensive, you go t2 yourself "never" instead of "after you upgrade your eco"...well, that's already optimal, it would just be enforcing that

[glossy reef]

We live in the "youtube guide" era of video games. Noobs who watched a guide on the meta will flame noobs who either didn't or are playing off-meta intentionally. If the fun way to play isn't optimal, playing for fun = getting flamed by teammates

[subtle tangle]

i rush t2 myself if i see enemy going porc and slow army; early banishers to poop on them

made a thread for t1 unit ideas. if t1 had some more t1.5 options, could help soften the blow from t2 rushes.
https://discord.com/channels/549281623154229250/1197237552890003489

Map design definitely is another issue, as also mentioned. Maps with more stuff in the middle to fight over does help incitive more early army instead of greed boosting eco. A future refence thing.

[dusky steeple]

Really? Have you seen a lot of examples of it?

[glossy reef]

It happens in basically every competitive video game released in the last 6-10 years. In team games, teammates flame you, in 1v1 games you just get stomped by people who watched guides if you didn't watch guides

[glossy reef]

We already have t1 that does reasonably well vs t2. However, those units can't be massed exclusively or they die to some of the t1 units which don't work vs t2. More t1 units which're "ok-ish" vs t2 doesn't solve that

[subtle tangle]

Were you not saying something about modifying t1 units to better contend against early t2?

[glossy reef]

Yes, the specific existing t1 units which're completely worthless vs t2 don't necessarily need to be quite as worthless. Needing to reclaim your worthless-vs-t2 units in order to build only-useful-vs-t2 units doesn't solve the "i have thousands of dead metal in units on the field now that t2 is out" issue

[grand kindle]

Communism is fun though

It makes the game unique, and players don’t do it in random lobbies, but when they do they get the advantage. I don’t see a problem with that? It’s like using a meta unit, not all players play full meta.

[subtle tangle]

The thread also for changes on existing units

[long ridge]

other than front dying in a critical time, it's cheating
<100 sec pay off time is very small

[glossy reef]

If we want to seriously consider an entirely new mechanic which isn't particularly WYSIWYG, but would kill many birds with one stone and might make the game not worse for anyone, and better for most, maybe better for all, from a random noob to a top 1v1 player to high os map rotation player to someone who studies bar academically, i have a suggestion which is an amalgamation of various things which have been proposed. Regardless of what terminology is used for the exact mechanic it would be as follows:

Add a "t2 fund", which all players on a team can contribute to at any time. The "t2 fund" must be filled before anyone is allowed to build a (now significantly cheaper) t2 lab. The "t2 fund" scales directly with player count, and instantly allows all the team's cons to build any t2 lab they have access to in the current version of the game. As placeholder numbers, i'd say something like 500m per player for the fund, -1k metal to t2 lab prices.

Expected effects:
•teamwork and resource pooling is just as valuable as ever, arguably even more valuable
•t1 phase isn't cut short by t2 units nearly as early in larger team games
•lab sharing is still optimal, but to a far lesser extent, particularly in groups not on voice comms highly practiced with each other (people who want to win team tournaments will still almost certainly continue setting their share red resource sliders all the way down, at the very least)
•new players are shown immediately that team coordination is far more important than in other rts
•zecrus has something to tie legcom upgrades to other than time
•people don't need to feel as bad about building their own t2 lab
•all potential modes/teamsizes are acommodated for appropriately

[subtle tangle]

Is it kinda like, once one person gets a t2 lab, others can build one for cheaper ?

[glossy reef]

Kinda, but with a smoother and more visually clear way of pooling the resources, a semi-intuitive way of making it scale with playercount, likely more practical to implement, solves even more issues (for example, navy can upgrade its underwater mexes closer to the time their team's land mexes are being upgraded, meaning they won't be as far behind econocmically, relatively speaking)

In other words, that idea was part of the inspiration, "aging up" in AoE was a source of inspiration, both suggestions to raise and lower t2 lab prices, and basically all complaints from all sides were things i considered

[empty rain]

Well, solved as in adds a new game mechanism and explicitly makes communism gameplay compulsory for all 😜

And just for the record I don't agree with the thread premise that communism is bad/unfun...

[glossy reef]

In a way where everyone is still interacting with the game at all times

From what i gather, many want to play as individuals with their own economies but a large amount of cooperation, others want to labshare, others don't want 1v1 and small team games to get screwed up, others want t1 to last longer, and i don't see the new mechanism being harmful to any of those parties

I'm abundantly aware that any new mechanism has nearly 0 chance of being adopted, but i do feel it's a good solution to a long list of complaints all at once, hopefully in a way that even people with the most opposite of visions for the future of the game could find agreeable

[pearl crater]

Well tbh 90% of the problem can be solved with changing the design of the map, especially since the part of the design that is problematic also makes the game much less fun for 4 players(front liners)

[wicked sentinel]

I think it adds a ton of unclear complexity, and it also greatly constrains the range of choices available to the player at any given time.

And it sets out to solve a problem that doesn't need to be solved, even on the maps where heavy sharing is most viable, people are finding ways to counterplay it. This whole thread is just a kneejerk reaction to a new strategy that they didn't like - but it will get used enough to become understood, countered, copied, and then folded into the long list of really powerful strategies that seem to break the game until people spend a little time figuring out its weaknesses (e.g. a 7-player tank rush on ATG).

[long ridge]

not everyone likes 8 frontline

[long ridge]

just cause an rts can be balanced through maps (think main design in sc2) doesn't mean that it should be

[wicked sentinel]

Doesn't need to be 8 frontline, for example koom is 6 frontline and the kind of sharing discussed here doesn't get abused there, despite it being one of the most popular 8v8 maps outside of strait and glitters

[glossy reef]

2 people pooling resources for a earlier-than-many-would-loke t2 is a fairly standard way to roll over a lane on bismuth of all things. It also solves the extremely early timings at which people buy t2 cons on most maps

Makes it less likely for an individual player doing poorly to get "stuck in t1"...a lot of positive effects beyond the main points of this thread

I'm proposing this as someone who hasn't played strait in roughly 6 months

[pearl crater]

On strait you have a player totally forfeiting his role giving resources to another player that customary is doing nothing until he builds t2, to have it happen on bismouth you’d need to have 10ts players fighting 35+

[glossy reef]

I'm not saying things will ever be as extreme on bismuth as they are on strait. Obviously they won't. It's a different, but also very strong, form of resource pooling which also leads to extremely early t2 on a scale relative to your opponents if they don't do the same, and also leads to gameplay generally far more enjoyable for 1 teammate than another

[umbral jungle]

Can someone share replays of supreme with extreme communism? I just specced a game with min rating 18 and didn't see it. Everyone is building units. I haven't noticed a case where it's so extreme that a player is "not playing the game". I've seen boosting before, but the boosting player is still doing stuff so is actively playing.

[long ridge]

https://bar-rts.com/replays/f184a8652e8ca95d076c66fb8ed9dd9d
mauser rush, defensive nuke bomber, 14:50 maruader hitting,

[umbral jungle]

Thanks will take a look.

[long ridge]

basically abusing the units that overperform when gotten before their usual timing. Yes there is counter play but you basically need to have a plan at 0:00 in the game, or some communism counter strat to have a similiar speed

[umbral jungle]

Personally I think it's really interesting. Looking at that match, the one who mentioned in the chat they were boosting was Captain, who is in the traditional eco spot. I think that most people expect someone to play that spot like Drongo's videos where your focus is to get lots of afus but you don't contribute to your team for a while. But that strategy makes no sense. There has to be something better. Which we see here with Captain using his resources early to help his leader Fruit.

I can kinda get someone not liking this strat as the boosting player didn't build a single combat unit for 18 minutes. But there are also traditional eco strats where you don't build units for a long time too. The other players on team red were building combat units, so if you wanted to do that you could pick one of their spots at the start.

[long ridge]

it is an interesting strat. the thing is you have to use communism back to fight on equal footing. if you scout it early it's much better but short of bombing the lab, once the marauders pop out, 5 marauders at 15 minutes your whole team better be on comms knowing what the response is

15 min and 18-19 minute for 1 afus marauders eco rush is a different universe

bombing geo and tank rush are high risk high reward strats

[fierce bloom]

It’s worse at NA times than EU rn I think… u guys have to deal with fruit and kaiser but us EU folk don’t have to as much

[long ridge]

anyways the theoritical problem with boosting is that you can instantly transfer resources from areas where they don't matter as much or can't be spent as effectively and use them to bypass tech barriers or upgrade the resources to higher tech units

I'm not dying? okay I'll funnel my resources to other side of the map, invisibly and instantly, and boost my top os player to crush that side of the lane

[dreamy sonnet]

Reallocating resources to another front to break it or support it seems perfectly reasonable in a team game

[long ridge]

defending is easier than attacking, especially if you are the one who gets to decide how much you can afford to give
yes but it's unscoutable (something like +5 more fiends). ofc something really extreme like t2 or t3 lab rush is scoutable

all these timings of X did Y so I know they should have Z elsewhere goes poof
boosta boosta boosta

by the time you see they have more units than usual they are already hitting you

[glossy reef]

NA region is notoriously "cheesy" in various other games, including SC2

[dreamy sonnet]

I think some irony here is that we're calling this communism, where really its a few (typically two) people working closely often with a large opportunity cost risk for the rest of the team, on a specific strat which is high risk high reward

[umbral jungle]

I don't think it's high risk high reward for a map like Isthmus. The eco player should be boosting someone's t2 lab because why should he build his own t2 lab if he's not going to use it? He's not pumping out t2 units. I think it's just optimal strategy.

[dreamy sonnet]

Isthmus is very unique and not a good reprisentation of the rest of the game in balance and style. While yes, mathematically it is optimal to not build 2 labs, it also comes down to what is fun and promote fun play

That also comes down to player skill, micro, coordination, opportunity cost - killing the geo player is relatively easy given their vulnerable location

I've not seen any super-hard boosting strats where people forgo a start location anymore, its already pivoted to start normal > early transport > go assist > take t2 con home > carry on as normal in a lot of cases

re Isthmus specifically: The opportunity cost of not having an eco spot, if the game goes to that stage, will often cost you the game. Likewise pond going to geo and not supporting front early, so it ends up being a 2v3.

From what I've played and watched, the power of T2 Veh arty rush is often the resultant "unfun" case, where the other team feel they also have to Arty rush to compete. There are numerous other options:

• Air early bomb geo
• Pond raid geo
• Opponent geo > go hounds + spybot
• front players mass tanks and kill mausers

The critical mass of player(s) haven't really had time to explore counter plays enough yet to do the "very small communication into re-organize to execute a counter play" if boosting is scouted. The issue Chrono raises with not-scouted boosts winning games because counter plays are significently more difficult due to timing is also related to this, albeit with a smaller time window to respond due to lack of knowledge.

Once players know the counter plays and understanding what they should do to assist the counter play, e.g. slow down the T2 Veh arty rush. I suspect this will become another meme-cheese that gets played occasionally as part of a wider range of coop tactics & strategies, like eco coming online into double-air

We see the same thing happen with Air killing Air, the defeated Air alerting the team saying "Build AA!", no one builds aa, and Air wins the game. To many games played like 8 1v1's not 1 8v8.

[fair flame]

Have watched the replay.
The potential for that level of teamwork is one reason I play the game.

My prefered type of play would be for that meta based play and counter play to trickle down so that its regular in pickup random fun games too. Not 3 main plays by Fruit, but maybe a couple of plays with players on same front co-operating a bit more. Because I don't think random pickup games have the co-ordination in general to pull it off.

you're playing the game the way I think it's supposed to be at a high level of teamwork. it ain't broke,

[viscid panther]

We did it guys. From here on out, balance discussions can only get better.

[granite shuttle]

[fair flame]

because of the reaction in the post above I've gone back to read this suggestion again.

you might as well just add a timer.
watching replays its pretty clear that until a certain point in the game mass and energy income is fairly even for both teams. which translates to .. there will be a meta where players donate 10%.
or .. you know the backline players donate all their income to the T2 fund while the higher OS players built units and .. that doesn't really end up looking any different to the current mechanic except it's a pool or fund

I don't play Dota style games. I wasn't a fan of the subpcom2 research trees.
When you invest in a cheap experimental those research points are spent.
With a flow economy you can reclaim and rebuild anew. With sufficient buildpower there isnt even much downtime.

Commanders upgrading every 5 minutes ..
this mechanic seems logical. but why recquire a research fund or a timer. The curent Unbacon demonstrates what imbalance can lead to; if that unlock upgrades or options it might be fairer. The fact that the commander snowballs and gets uber faster is not really fun in games larger than 1v1

i liked the upgrades for commander supcom style. arm, back, utility slot or something ?
i'd like to see many more units with upgrade options. we have t1.5 mexes for legion. im not entirely sure of their merit due to limited energy production so see it more as a couple t1.5 mexes offset the penality.

t1 mexes -> t1.5 mexes (x3 income) -> t2 mexes (x9 income)
Could just as well be x4 and x10 income.
I'd really like upgraded mexes to be more viable than fusion and AFUS. Having control over an area and capturing 10 mexes should be rewarded. Fighting over something. Sitting on a backline and building eco - has it's place. Always build eco, but the player that has fought captured and secured 10 mexes at the 20 minute mark should be ahead of a no risk backline.

at x9 income a group of 3 x 2.0 mexes would be the equivalent to 1.35 AFUS and 5.4 adv. converters .. that still seems low to me. Not worth the risk of taking them if someone else can 'probably hold the front line'

we could give every faction upgradeable mexes and leave t2 factory costs alone. if a player can upgrade their economy without communism and there is a much more significant risk of being unit less if they start pumping out massed t1.

[glossy reef]

people strongly enough opposed that i won't bother defending the suggestion.

[glossy reef]

As for the timer idea, main complaint with legcom upgrading over time, other than it seeming arbitrary, is that it, and any other sort of hard time-gating, doesn't scale properly across maps with different amounts of metal, and doesn't scale properly with different team sizes

[wraith lintel]

I like it but its so messy 95% of people wouldnt understand or use it. So pass, sorry 😭

[glossy reef]

I could further elaborate on how it could be executed clearly and cleanly, and additional benefits, but again, initial reaction from people with vastly more influence than myself was thinking it was a funny joke, so i'm not going to waste everyone's energy

[umbral jungle]

There's an option to disable energy converters. So you can force people to only get metal from mexes. But having a played a game with that option, it felt like there were less interesting choices.

[long ridge]

Tank rush, just make tanks, raid just make static, bombing, just make a flak

Mauser rush / 15 min marauder? What is the counter?

Nuke bomber rush, your air player literally has to be hovering over you, it's safest on defense but also can be used offensively.

And you have to spread your ship = can't trade ship vs ship effectively

Even then nuke bomber kills 2 ship in one pass = 800- 1200 metal in one shot

[dreamy sonnet]

Sorry, not quite sure I follow your points here

[long ridge]

The counter strat you mentioned are much more linear to counter or can be countered by one players reaction

How you counter Mauser rush or 15 min marauder on amphib map like straits or failed negotiation

Hope your whole team is giga Chad spent hours learning radar and simcity or had perfect scout plane usage and land unit reaction? Almost nothing can chase down after a breach

[dreamy sonnet]

Those were just examples to my point, which I guess is: I don't see the overall issue raised in this thread - since boosting to a Mauser rush is strong, but its clearly not the only strong tactic, and as people learn counters it'll be less effective and fall into the list of strats people use occasionally

[long ridge]

Is that a prediction? Not every bad meta solves itself

[dreamy sonnet]

I guess it is, yes. We've already see Mauser rush significently reduced by the small cost increase of the latest balance changes, few counter or delay strats and people just generally being more aware of it. I've certainly seen far fewer games where someone goes to really boost it out too, they either have decided its boring to do, or not worth the risk

[long ridge]

that took outside intervention
18.5% metal increase cost and 17.5% increase in BP cost
significant nerf, and it's still strong

[dreamy sonnet]

The Mauser rush is not specifically the only boost strategy, and this thread is about general ability to boost no?

Anyway, we'll see others come and go i'm sure, i just wanted to add my 2cents to this thread since I don't see a problem and wanted to stand up for the status quo. I'm not sure either of us could prove this either way without hindsight

[long ridge]

aight 👍

[umbral jungle]

I think this style of play should just be normalised. If Drongo made a video "how to play the eco spot" and it showed him boosting another player - people would just do this as normal strategy rather than see it as some sort of cheese. I watched the replay (https://bar-rts.com/replays/f184a8652e8ca95d076c66fb8ed9dd9d) with Fruit's team and the winning team had their eco player boost another. The enemy team's eco player didn't but that also meant he wasn't contributing to the team for 20 minutes. Playing sim city by yourself for 20 minutes shouldn't be optimal strategy.

[upbeat coyote]

This style of play isn't really a huge issue to me in principle. However the part that feel particularly bad is where you basically can't scout these things a lot of times and then you just die. Not a lot of enjoyable counter play.

[long ridge]

oh im sorry it's not 15 min marauders it's 13:40

[viscid panther]

I think the clarity in knowing exactly what a specific unit is going to do is a very special feature of BAR that isnt talked about. Unit upgrades take away from this, and for people who have played similar games, you would know the negative consequences these features tend to have on the overall flow of gameplay.

As much as I think these balance discussions can be beneficial, I don't think this thread has the potential for being productive at all when it's built on the notion that the game as a whole should be balanced not only around a single game mode, but a select few maps that are known for warped gameplay.

[long ridge]

it's any role map, failed negotiations is no different
any map that is not 6+ front

you think 15 minute marauders is balanced on that map either?

contary to popular belief, boosting is not only eco --> carry

but can be frontline --> boosting high os player, or navy player slinging reclaim or instead of going t2 fast

should every amphib map be choked up so that it is not disproportionately hard to defend slung marauder rushes?

you CAN balance the game with maps but why kick the can

[pearl crater]

I think marauders are mostly devastating due to the weak players on teams and you cant fix that.
And to a degree its same issue with boosting

[long ridge]

needa make a tally of how many games fruit makes marauders at 15 min and how many % of games they are successfully defended

it's not a lot just like 8-10

[glossy reef]

For what it's worth, bull's main advantage over tigers is its aoe, and rauders don't nearly have that aoe...so there's that at least

[long ridge]

bull just has slower speed and projectile speed

[glossy reef]

Not saying rauders are fine on amph maps, just that it's not strictly a better bull

[long ridge]

245 dps (good splash) vs 335 dps

yeah it's not a strictly better bull but in dueling situations they are a bit better than bulls while being uncatcheable (besides ticks)

also with their speed they can dodge projectiles

[glossy reef]

Again, i'm not saying they're fine, just wanted to point that one thing out

[pearl crater]

Fruit is a cheese genius that has been terrorizing lobbies for longer than I can remember.

[viscid panther]

Yeah, I do. Marauders aren't very good. Noob trap unit that takes advantage of noobs that don't know how to easily deal with them.

[dusky steeple]

And what are those easy ways to deal with them?

[viscid panther]

emp units, self-d units, mines, T2 walls with pitbull spam...many ways to counter marauders pretty cheaply

ticks trade favorably too

Watching high OS lobbies, I see spy bot emp + ticks as common counter

[wraith lintel]

This is a problem with EMP bots, not with Marauders per se. I have very very little donut that EMP bots will receive a MAJOR nerf sometime in the future, it just needs more people to realize how OP they actually are.
Personally I think marauders OP but not broken level of op. What you say is true in terms of "op vs noobs" but citing emp bot as a valid solution is a joke (even tho it's true)

[long ridge]

those are better for holding off 8+ marauders in a choke

when its an early marauder rush 3-5 marauder goes to every single place and spread out those things are less of a counter

[fair flame]

Thank you for raising that point. Now that you mention it I can see the implications of adding 'hidden' unit capabilities.

I guess this is why the gadget was called 'morph'. It changed the unit into something else for clarity.

Marauders advantage is one of mobility. Both being amphibious and speed.
As a bot they have the advantages in terrain, rotation and moving in reverse.

I think that makes them far more useful than Bulls. The turtle is less useful. The poison arrow seems situational. So it's not just being amphibious

However, if you put 10 v10 in a slugging match .. the bulls win ?
I'm pretty sure that 10 Sumos can slug favourably with Marauders.

But this goes back to the manveuvre advantage they have. They really do get to pick the engagement. Or benefit from being able to get to the engagement and I guess that's why they are in the T3 gantry.

[viscid panther]

Ticks. While you lose out when comparing build time cost, they trade favorably cost wise and do a decent job at that.

Tick swarm will win while being faster. Perfect for defense.

[viscid panther]

Mines and spybots get used to counter this type of stuff even outside choke points. Saw it in the 3 v 3 tournaments to great effect.

Again, I think this entire thread has a very warped sense of how things are best utilized, and that's shaped some...interesting thoughts and opinions on the games overall design.

[viscid panther]

Lol, why the emote? By the way, ~50 ticks alone can beat 3 marauders, which is roughly the cost of 1 marauder

[long ridge]

if everyone on the team is on comms and is a high lv player then yes I think it's reasonably counterable
cause that's a symptom of ticks being a far worse design problem

[viscid panther]

It's a very good counter.

[long ridge]

it's definitely map dependent. if you are on land then marauders come thorugh similiar space you are defending anyways

[viscid panther]

I mean, I was just answering the man's question. Wasn't debating the design of these counter units.

[long ridge]

on amphib map with wide entrances or beaches it's hard to cover

[viscid panther]

on amphib maps, self d units fuck

[long ridge]

tumbleweed were really good but they got speed nerfed

[viscid panther]

Cortex spider things and those tumbleweeds do great vs marauder

2 to kill if I remember correctly

[long ridge]

cortex spiders? the termite? or webber

[viscid panther]

yeah termite

[long ridge]

termite is slow short range unit like sumo. it's only viable if the marauders cannot go around

[viscid panther]

uh, hold on

[long ridge]

like when I fight sumo I just kite and walk around
each sumo could have been a pitbull almost

[viscid panther]

https://www.beyondallreason.info/unit/corsktl

/ https://www.beyondallreason.info/unit/corroach

[long ridge]

yeah I will agree spybot and self d units are effective. depends how spread out the mexes are and how many attack paths there are

also players are busy in their role sometimes. not everyone can throw down a t2 bot lab 1:30 in advance and pump out those units

[wraith lintel]

Even if you accidentally have a t2 bot player that isn't busy making actual units, how do You get rolling bombs to the location where you suspect marauders will strike ? Bombs are slow as fuck. In addition it's not too u realistic to find a scenario where these bombs blow up friendly buildings while "defending".

There is a very good reason why EMP is the way to go versus highly mobile units. As it is, taking a highly mobile units inmobile is sorta useful.

[viscid panther]

Bombs are slow as fuck
?

All 3 bomb units have a speed over 80, just a bit over 10 less than marauder.

and again....ticks are literally a brainless counter

Faster, easy to use, and extremely cost efficient. Marauders are no problem.

Unless you're literally chasing them, having 10 less speed will not mean you won't catch them. If the marauders are heading into you, and the bomb units are closer to you....well....

[long ridge]

rolling bomb got 33% speed nerf underwater

cause was stupid against ships

so catching somewhat spread out marauders underwater will be a bit challenging

[pearl crater]

On strait you can pretty easily prevent all marauder raids by placing walls between air and sea and at geosea beach
Moreover there're abuse strats in which you can just place storages/tumbleweeds on the seafloor preventing marauders from passing forever.

[upbeat coyote]

All of these counters are cool and all if you know they are coming and have time to prepare. However scouting isn't always that easy for a lot of these cheeses so you end up getting blindsided.

[pearl crater]

Well thats a deeper design problem, like it would be pretty cool to get more scouting options for 8v8.
Because if you start nerfing hard hitting strats you'll end up with behemoth bouts every match ;v

[wraith lintel]

Sometimes as a sea player I have to make my own air or seaplane because radars are good but they don't cover inland very well. Sad but that's the dumb part about "team play"

[pearl crater]

yes but its hard to penetrate with those into the eco player territory to get the general smell of what can be coming

[long ridge]

storages is very expensive it's a lategame rich strat

[dreamy sonnet]

If you place your tidals very carefully along the right height line - the mara's aren't able to come up out the water to shoot them and just cannot walk out the sea as their heads boop them 😄

[long ridge]

yes that is true. there needs to be some lethality behind attacks or that will happen.

[long ridge]

yep you can do that but you cannot put any plasma weapon within a mile
I've never seen anyone use a tidal wall in straights xD. I've made them a few times but it never came up

tidal wall is like the "i'm broke but I need a free wall"
super fragile but effectively free

[keen sierra]

Resource sharing might have made DSDR and Isthmus (2 most popular maps) a living nightmare to play, but fear not! It is just meta shift and it will change automatically! Pray to our lord and saviour Jesus Christ for a quick meta change and ensure happy lives for our commanders.

[dusky steeple]

What about an actual naval wall? Will it work? And if it is, then isn't it a better choice?

[subtle tangle]

You can make a line of t2 walls with spaces in between them and still catch Marauders. Save a little metal instead of making a solid t2 wall.

[pearl crater]

if you do double t2 wall you can just repair it forever tho

[glossy reef]

"Just" use an extreme level of communication, have like 2-4 people total build labs at all, and 4-6 people just micro units shared to them. It's how bar is currently designed to be played :)

[soft shadow]

to be honest, i think a decent solution would be to boost the air scout performance

larger line of sight, smaller build power cost maybe

and smaller cast overall possibly, so that you could make them and scout from time to time without much effort

[upbeat coyote]

I do like buffing scouting as well as some thought around having a resource sharing cost? Other rts games have this mechanic and it might be good to explore why that is. Slinging is still viable in AOE as well and there's a tax.

[soft shadow]

i dont like resource transfer cost honestly

the problem is, in all those other rts'es, you cant transfer units themselves, but you can here

so having some arbitrary cost on resources just feels wrong on conceptual level

you can also transfer resources in multiple ways, by sharing units or even doing weird stuff like building solar near other guy and having him deconstruct it

heck, assisting is a thing here, which doesnt exist in literally any other game

you can just fly your commander to other base and click on the factory to transfer resources and build power

the other potential solution i could see would be to decrease cost of mines and maybe boost them in some additional way

in particular:
they use too much energy to build (1.2k) in early game where you may need to build too many of them
the juno interactivity is kinda bad imho, maybe it should just destroy them without explosion or even just disable them temporarily (in particular, this would make actually using minelayer to demine a viable concept)
maybe they could have some additional functionality, like stunning units for few seconds - i think they already do, but im never sure if its actual mechanic or just pathfinder getting confused after pushback

[glossy reef]

Unless someone is utterly wasting it, players pooling their incomes will always be optimal relative to not doing so barring sweeping fundamental changes to the game. All that can be done is make it less bad to have divided incomes, or give players more interesting decisions as to how resources are pooled

[pearl crater]

People pooling their income comes at the cost of APM which is a latent but important resource.

[glossy reef]

If it reaches, "1 person is ecoing, multiple people are solely dedicated to holding the front with eco's units", there's a net gain in available apm and mental bandwidth, surpassing the apm cost of the actions

The current apm cost for doing so is more a major nuisance than an actually significant limiter on effectiveness

Other limiters being individual preferences+social rather than within the game (people liking doing a bit of everything in an rts generally, people not trusting some teammates/just not being able to communicate as much as would be necessary)

[boreal plank]

Yeah, if somebody just wants to give me units so I don't need to micro a base at all, my effectiveness will skyrocket.

Everyone is bad at multitasking, some are just less bad than others.

And, to be clear, I enjoy using my units more than I enjoy basebuilding. I don't consider being a field general a bad thing.

[glossy reef]

#1197728481178558476 message

[pearl crater]

OP take? ^^

[glossy reef]

nah that sacrifices 1 player's APM

even more OP take, but in a way where all players are still actively engaged in the match

[glossy reef]

right now we have direct conflict between what level of collaboration and player role specialization is encouraged by almost every aspect of the game's economy, and what level is encouraged by the game's controls (aside from custom widgets). One should really be adjusted to be in harmony with the other, rather than the current mixed signals, whichever is chosen as the "desired outcome", though there're obviously heavily conflicting opinions on what team games in BAR should evolve into over time

[wraith lintel]

okay so make it every man for himself. No resource sharing, no unit sharing. You can still coordinate attacks and play as a team. Big brain solution LOL.

[glossy reef]

there're obviously heavily conflicting opinions on what team games in BAR should evolve into over time

[subtle tangle]

"Ticks infested my wind farm. Can someone spare a windmill?"

[wraith lintel]

i was more joking really but it would be a solution. Personally i dont think its entirely clear if removing sharing entirely is better or worse, i can easily count pros and cons for both. Essentially you would remove a lot of potential problems and headaches but it would come at a huge cost to player interaction which makes (or breaks lol) a team(game).

[subtle tangle]

Could add something like a 10% share value tax, converted to energy.
For example, to share a corafus, it would be ((9700(m) x 70(m-->e rate) + 48,000) / 10 = 72,700 energy to share. A arm windmill would cost 276.5e to send. Sending just 1000 energy would require 1100 e. Sending 100m would cost 700e. (Tax rate and m-->e rate can be modified.)

if someone dced or resigned and u had to take, would that be taxed? meh

[strong pulsar]

Trying to urgently share a unit but can’t because you can’t pay

[alpine loom]

This is more optimal than making ur own lab in the back imo. And it furthers team to t2 units up front which is doubly benficial

There's only 2 spots where hard starting in their base with them with com is good for coops

[long ridge]

Naval wall is crushed by battleships and marauder

The best underwater buildings for underwater walling are sonar station (occupies a t2 sub) and metal storage

But it takes several thousand metal to wall off so it's only a post few afus strat

[subtle tangle]

5 minute Mausers. :x

[long ridge]

i challenge someone to get 30 os in sea then play against any decent boosted sea. enjoy the fun gameplay.

[rare flint]

and its not that easy to detect especially when its only metal sharing ...

[glossy reef]

Boosting navy player on any map that has one has been common in op map rotation lobby for months because of how much of a difference it makes for navy in particular. Tempest comes to mind as one in particular where "boost navy at start so they can win fast" was a common phrase even 4 months ago

[pearl crater]

I mean the 2v1 sea has been on and off in multiple variations.
The real problem is that usually your team doesn't understand that they have to push while you're stalling 2 players.
(I've got to 37ts as sea before ive stopped tryharding if that's meaningful)

[long ridge]

Boosting hard counters any early aggression

[glossy reef]

Or it's really hard to push quickly in a 6v5 situation

[long ridge]

An aggressive push can not afford to chicken push with radars

Not always anyways

[long ridge]

2v1 sea with two labs and 2 users controlling ships is very hard

Better is just send resources or build Nanos and give them. That is the op part.

[pearl crater]

Yes but its bad teamplay that makes your team lose not op strat

[long ridge]

Sea can be won very quickly with a reasonable boost 500-1k metal

Esp since they get caught off guard with your 1-2 more ships. You rez wreck and gg

Op boost is boosting a strong player not boosting to save a weak sea player. That is a huge resource drain

with more ships you can also bombard safely while rushing your t2 mexes, safely

[pearl crater]

I mean aside from the fact that a strong player should be able to win the sea under 5 mins vs a weak one, you get a scoutplane to scout for multiple kinds of stuff right?
So if you have proper teamplay and your team deems your spot necessarry for victory they can send 2k metal your way early just so you could win.

I mean it's tough, but its 2v1 in one form or the other right?
You should lose 2v1 unless you're godlike.

[long ridge]

you just boost at the start, so safe subtle and big return

you have air scouts but you cannot have it 100% of the time
they get shot down or run into herrings

if you just assume from 0:00 that they are probably boosting then you can just play conservatively or chicken scout

but doesn't change the fact that (mostly) invisible boosting is op

[wraith lintel]

Pond player com boosting sea player lab in archipelago is deffo very impactful

It's not an auto win but it's a huge factor

[pearl crater]

Its all matter of proper resource reallocation which requires proper teamplay...

[glossy reef]

1 team boosting air hard enough for them to rush torp bombers without falling behind on figs would be interesting to see. Has that happened yet in the magical land of supreme?

[pearl crater]

Or pond+eco boosting a strong frontliner.
I wonder how WmdT would do being double boosted.

the rocket bots would probably march straight to the air player xd

[glossy reef]

from the sound of things, rocket bots wouldn't have time to do enough damage before boosting strats which do well vs rocket bots would come online. would probably see better results with a thug push, just because their dps isn't as low but they're still good vs comms

3 players' eco in rocket bots is gonna get rolled over by mass stout from 3 enemy players, for example

[pearl crater]

I'm rn speccing a game in which klab+wmdt stomped one front player in 2 minutes.
Had they more units they'd probably march straight to geo
The guy stomped was 36ts 🤷‍♂️

[glossy reef]

what unit comp?

[pearl crater]

https://www.beyondallreason.info/replays?gameId=216bae650e7e71cc4b99e89a9061d9e4 pawns + blitzes opener

[glossy reef]

ok, like i said, as good as rocket bots are generally, they suck at killing a lane in a short period of time. pawns+blitzes are the opposite

this is a fun replay. would've sucked to play, but fun to watch

also a good showcase of when people should and shouldn't make pawns

[pearl crater]

yes but it shows a potential to develop a different meta, which on turn for example would require different form of boosting/nullify it etc

[long ridge]

yeah the lab swap + boost sort of breaks the geo sea / long beach matchup

you need ally to send additional com to island or you dead

even just regular boosting is very good

[alpine loom]

2v1 sea with me and Kcorp we almost have 100% Winrate with our build

Because so hard to help sea, fat wrecks make it very zero sum

[long ridge]

the instant you get wreck and push them off rez gg

even just 1-2 ships is enough to make the other player unable to do any kind of trading or unscouted aggression because the threat of boosting is always there

[viscid panther]

@pearl crater isthmus players discover normal map strategies

[keen sierra]

Coop is not a "normal map" strategy, it just exists because players are trash and why bother playing the game when u can resource boost someone for 3minute earlier timings.

[pseudo pelican]

Why bother playing the game with slower timings when u can be so much faster w a little sharing

[fierce bloom]

cuz a lot of sharing beats a little sharing and a lot of sharing means some people have very boring and uninvolved gameplay by being batteries for higher skilled players

[glossy reef]

2 high skill players in voice comms co-oping is plenty involved for both of them. Being an afk resource battery is a mixed-skill lobby problem

[glossy reef]

At that point, though, the question could be raised whether we want the game to develop toward a state like counter strike, where not being on voice comms is basically throwing

[fair flame]

I'd say voice is defacto required - teams with will beat teams without
its not quite the same scale and pace as an FPS but if it shaves off a second when APM is required.

[fierce bloom]

there are no non mixed skill lobbies?

even in op lobby and lobster isthmus lobby there are huge variances in skill

[glossy reef]

Sure, voice obviously helps when people are playing "standard", but you're certainly not throwing by not being in voice. If meta is "1 person is building units and eco for multiple other people to use, and distributing as is best for the situation", game is almost unplayable without voice comms. Night and day difference.

[glossy reef]

Not with current playerbase size, no. But even at minrating 30, your team is wasting the bottom player's apm as a resource if you have them afk as a battery with nothing to do, rather than, as a basic example, giving them some spare units to micro

[keen sierra]

eating t1 lab to fund mausers at min 6 = little sharing yep

[subtle tangle]

On strait, if pond funnels into geo spot, geo can have Mausers hitting mid by 5 minutes.

[long ridge]

with eco it's like 4 minutes lol

[fierce bloom]

Better to use TS 50 players apm than the TS 30

[glossy reef]

The 50 os player has limited apm like the rest of us. The more things they need to do, the less effort they can put into each thing

A 30 OS player with 5 grunts and nothing else to do will accomplish far more with them than a 50 OS with a large army, an eco to manage, and those last 5 grunts

[topaz gazelle]

What if sharing worked like overflowing, instead to all, you flow your resorces to someone at the rate you are getting them

[viscid panther]

Agreed. Now when can we kill this thread?

All of you guys just want zero-k resource system. Why not just play zero-k and let BAR be BAR?

[dreamy sonnet]

I actually saw a top player and a bottom player do this once - it was very sad to watch 😕 don't recall ever seeing the bottom player do it again after that game. I like playing support roles but even I find that a bit too dull to bother with

[fierce bloom]

who was the bottom player

[dreamy sonnet]

can't recall specifically it was before xmas

[glossy reef]

Given the fact that different people think this thread is about 4+ different things, nobody agrees which are problems, if any, and yet people are proposing "solutions" to individual pieces regardless, i'd say this thread is gonna keep spinning its wheels for at least 2 more weeks

[vivid lava]

pls

[long ridge]

"Overdrive makes your mexes produce more metal, with diminishing returns as you pump more and more energy into them. Due to this, the more mexes the energy is spread over, the more efficiently you can overdrive them, and the more metal you get for invested energy" wow this is pog system

[wraith lintel]

context ?

[long ridge]

it's zero-k's system for upgrading mexes / converters. makes territory still important and not just X afus in a corner.
unrelated to thread tho

[vivid lava]

The more map control you have the faster you can transition into an afus economy

or you can even take advantage of your map control to overpower the afus spammer

[long ridge]

of course, but there are situations where you kill frontline but are unable to kill backline, then the exponential backline gets big economy which makes map control less important

[glossy reef]

Ok this part actually is as strait-only issue, unless you consider it to be a problem that on other maps, map control in lategame goes from being "literally everything" down to only being "really important", even on other maps with backline

[vivid lava]

thats 8v8 with backline maps, that clearly doesnt grasp the full potential of BAR

and yet for some reason people is thirsty over those 8v8 maps

[long ridge]

i mean there are role / semi-backline maps and lane maps. 2 types

[vivid lava]

none ever plays FFA,1v1s or small team battles.

[long ridge]

that's that. this is this

[hearty solar]

people loves well define job.... its like working

[granite shuttle]

i blame LoL and other mobas for poisoning minds of our players with their lane based gameplay that only creates a toxic game enviroment and lowers game value

[long ridge]

So far 12-15 min marauders is like 8 for 8. In the lobster lobby

If you didn't kill him b4 hand its half gg

Oh I guess abductor counters it. Counter broken with broken

[pearl crater]

ban marauders

[vivid lava]

Yes

[wraith lintel]

Just wait until you see abductor vs demon. Literally mind blowing.

[dense snow]

Game with emphasis on team work has people complaining about team strategies...

[dense snow]

I routinely stop a Marauder push... Swarms of Roughneck and Hornet Gunships do remarkably well.

[long ridge]

you risk dying to the opponent air player

[dense snow]

That is why we have a dedicated air player producing counter air. There is no one way to play the game and there should not be. We should not encourage nerfing useful tactics or strategies because it catches on for a time, someone else will find a counter strategy that works. I am a secondary air player after my eco is up that I use. It is called check and balance. There are risks to the coop rush and counters to it.

[long ridge]

there's a lot of strategies that shared resources pushes out

for one, managing your own economy and BP is de-emphahisized

anytime you get a reclaim field you just pump it into your t2 or t3 rusher

because that produces attacks faster than developing your own tech tree / energy economy

t2 and t3 show up MUCH earlier because of communism. t1 is lol when mausers can show up 4-5 min on a front back map. The consequence is that windows for t1 and t2 strategies can be extremely short, because their higher tier counters can show up so soon.

plp who think communism is a fad or or it only is an issue on some maps are mistaken

some people like the gameplay, other people dont' even play high level and just like to spec/theorycraft it regardless of how it feels to play, and other people hate it.

[wraith lintel]

I have to say the more i experience modern communism, the more I hate it. It makes games very, very unpredictable and the whole rock paper scissors / meta game of early game right out of the window. There needs to be some consistency in terms of what a player can do and with this sharing meta, there are just too many moving parts. It's a very bad development in my opinion.

[alpine loom]

if you are unable to do teamwork with your team that is your skill issue tbh. Everything the opponent does you can do. unpredictability means you should be scouting to figure out response.

[sonic pier]

Well, we already went through the 4 man nuke rush era. Imo Mara's having ABSURD speed is the problem promoting the current wave. A lot of t3 is gated simply by the fact it takes a long time to get your units across the map. Mara's are just stupid fast. Mara is a free hail marry, you don't even get punished for, you can pump out Mara's send them across the map, and still get other T3 units to your front line in time. They have so little downside, they basically out run everything on the water and anything that threatens them on the land.

[wicked sentinel]

Like most of the complaints in this thread, it's only really a problem on strait. They are a very counterable unit that is strong, but has an extremely short window of effectiveness and is usually a weaker choice than other units.

[alpine loom]

When I started playing strait yall just did nothing but ur lanes, so i figured hey, lets teach yall to not just afk in the back and eco, so I started investing in lanes and doing direct communism with team and now yall pretend like its op when in reality you guys were just being super suboptimal the entire time. Now that ur playing the real game u complain that communism isnt fun but in reality it has always been in the game you just werent taking advantage of it like the op lobs were doing. welcome to reality and close thread tbh

[keen sierra]

It is frequent in "op lobby" and has been for a long while, but u still have to agree that resource sharing is quite extreme in BAR. There is no "Tax" or "Transfer Time" or any penalty on it. It made DSDR and Rosetta unplayable in "op lobby" because of 7minutes mausers on an extremely poor map and 9-11minute Razorbacks on a map with geo and 10mex respectively. It also devolved Bismuth toplane (2v2 lane) into a simple Mauser rush lane.

Yes it's the best way to win, but it's not teamwork as one would think of while playing an rts game, which would be co-operation with mixed armies, static defense, utility through air etc. it's just resource sharing where a person controls units and a person shares resource.

It's like archon mode in sc2, completely different from 2v2.

[fierce bloom]

a no sharing option would be interesting

I think that would be quite fun to try and play

[keen sierra]

half of "eco" gameplay is giving away t2 cons, half of air gameplay is sharing transport and scouts

[dreamy sonnet]

You can always tap peoples mex's etc... its different to current but functionally works

the air restriction would be pretty huge

[keen sierra]

u need to share t2 con for fusion

i remember someone mentioning need of a "sharing beacon" building to allow unit and resource share
maybe t1 building worth 400metal 5k energy

[dusky steeple]

Is this the someone you were looking for?

[fair flame]

its backed into the game that you can assist.
that building doesnt do anything. it just means the commander or construction bots/turrets need to walk over to donate

SupCom2 'fixed' this by having diminishing returns on assist. More than 2 builders was useless.

the flow economy of the game and the way buildpower works makes an element of co-operation makes "donation" meanginful only in that

the economy spent here is not spent somewhere else. so the risk is units or building now compared to players have a balanced eco of metal+energy income later in the game.

the exponential growth of eco does mean that boosting an eco makes for a stronger player which is perhaps stronger than 2 weaker players

[timber dawn]

My 0.02c is communism has been an available strat since back in the TA days and it adds a layer of decision making and teamwork that most other games don't have. It opens up a ton of possibilities and allows for some really unique plays with good communication.

I wouldn't mind an option to disable it for those who dislike it but I think in default vanilla BAR games it should always be fully enabled.

[subtle tangle]

sharing is nice. having strategic options like boosting a player is nice. it's not nice if there's no other option to win.

it's like forcing people to play Support in League of Losers. haha have fun watching someone else have fun, sucka, you lost the straw draw. go get your support item and follow your carry, squire.

[subtle tangle]

get a fast pc so ur not stuck playing support

[pearl crater]

Perhaps guys you could start posting replays where you got crushed by the communism ?
Would kinda show the scale of the problem and also present opportunity to develop counters

[long ridge]

look for fruit's games on straights when he's playing with captain perogi
particularly ones with nuke bombers and 12 min marauders

he is a good player but like i don't want every navy transition to just be feed the t3 player to dump the enemy team at 12 minutes. feeding for marauders is better than making t2 ships

[queen terrace]

nonono

communism is fine

[pseudo pelican]

Big difference to TA is how the economy is shaped, there it was more limited how much you could reasonably pump out of a single factory.

Our system of expensive factories but ease of assisting with nanos, makes the issue much worse.

[wraith lintel]

@dark reef just curious could there be a tweakdef that disables nanos or caps them. I always thought it would be super cool to have a FAF printing style.

Guess the question is stupid, obviously you can disable units but then ppl would just make cons to assist. It is possible to disable build assisting or limit it ?

[grim compass]

you'd need to increase factory base bp by some amount too, it's way too low on its own

[alpine loom]

ew faf players coming over and trying to make game faf

[umbral jungle]

During the 2v2 tournament there was a match where the casters described one team's strategy as "Communism v2". It was an interesting match to watch:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2045154615?t=4h17m00s

[keen sierra]

Brother every map is already ruined by this low effort game style, would be good if the new players got to play normally.

Nuclear winter avg game time is 11mins, there was a koom valley meta of lab share which made if effectively 7v7, bismuth top lane is just resource sharing for t2 lab bcz lane is narrow. Eco gameplay on most map is sharing 5+ t2 cons, Air gameplay is ruining ur own buildpower to give out air transports and then beg another player for a ground constructor.

Almost all popular maps are hard set in what you can do, all because resource sharing narrows windows of any timings on t1, t2 or even t3 bcz u can coop lolcannon in lategame.

Uninteractive gameplay at it's finest. But it's fine bcz "muh unique BAR experience"

Consuls were a huge issue in the past, Mausers were a bigger issue recently. Both got nerfed and the only reason they were an issue is because you could share 7 consuls to all teammates and 3 players can simply give metal for mausers and afk.

[alpine loom]

lots of unit coops are kinda just cause the units themselves are overtuned on some maps

mauraders razors mauser etc easy to win lane or game on most maps with a few people consolidating resources into strong units to hit a fast timing

[pearl crater]

perhaps it's time to finally get maps that put more emphasis on map control

[alpine loom]

or just less resources per mex

[pearl crater]

dsdr is a poverty map tho and still gets some coops

[alpine loom]

dsdr not that poverty because there are positions who entire existence is just to increase wealth

[pearl crater]

what income would you find a sweet spot then?

[alpine loom]

honestly mexes should give like 1.3-1.5 imo most maps

[pearl crater]

Hmm lets try getting such map and see how it works?
Seems much cheaper than developing new features that prevent sharing

Modding just income values should be pretty easy no?

[alpine loom]

each map has a value for the mexvalue, I dunno if it can be changed via Bset but i imagine it can

mex map is literally a pixel map but u determine in the map file what the value of the pixels are

each pixel worth x amount basically

[pearl crater]

Y i was just thinking about substituting the pixel value in the map file and reuploading

[alpine loom]

maxMetal = 1.1,

value stored in mapinfo.lua for each map, changes based on map yes

kinda annoying for them to manage maps tho, u need to talk to the mapper guys if they interested in that, but they like to never change anything so good luck

[pearl crater]

Yes but I suppose we only need one map to test the proposal?
Also a feature allowing to bset mexvalue should be also fairly simple to add.

[ivory hinge]

In age of empires sharing resources incurs a tax, that decreases as the game goes on. So at the start you send 100 gold they only receive 70. And even so many tournaments ban it outright until late game.

[subtle tangle]

Wouldnt reducing mex value exacerbate the issue? Less incentive for all players to fight for early map control, more incentive to camp and boost eco.

[dreamy sonnet]

and if people do boost in this instance, the chance of them encountering a player who is able to go t2 to react to their boost is lower surely?

[pearl crater]

But also you get more time to punish inactive players.
I mean its an easy idea to test

[boreal plank]

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Jade Empress in this discussion. If you want to test lots of low-value mexes, she's your girl.

Also, you can modify metal extraction as a lobby setting. You don't have to edit the map.

I suspect you'll still have issues on most maps unless you also nerf wind. Good wind and bad mexes will just promote converter economy.

Same for any map that has safe geos.

[pearl crater]

So lets try setting up a low mex strait lobby tonight?

[boreal plank]

Supreme has safe geos, there's probably no saving it.

[pearl crater]

but there's no cost to try it since strait is already ruined by communism right?

[boreal plank]

And the mex distribution makes map control largely irrelevant on Supreme, too.

[boreal plank]

No harm, I'm just saying you can't fix it because the mex distribution makes map control irrelevant and it also has safe geos.

[keen sierra]

Low mex number/value is main reason to coop

[rare flint]

so your replay to "labs being too expensive so better make one" its just give players even less resources? Gl with that, 2 players will just kill their coms to do same thing. Only t3 goes out of window, t2 is still valid. If you wanna map control to be important you need to give more resources from contested area, not from afk eco wind/afus farm.

[fair flame]

i can see that less metal would make vehicles a more expensive proposition than going bots.
I can see that it makes the ability to afford a lab and go t2 harder.

if a dead commander is still worth 1.2k metal there is a way to

is it just a timing on the window to amass sufficient t1 to offset the early power of t2 units ?

because I'll counter that by saying. I hate low metal poverty maps with a passion. and see the maps with low metal being less popular choices. 3x starting mexes of 2.0+
and i'll follow that up by personally hating Jade Empires with the 6x 1.0 metal spots. It doesnt really test the "less t1 metal" theory.
It's more the fact you have to build 6 and then its costs literally twice as much metal for the t2 advance mexes.

I wrote a tweakdef for the wacky lobby that I've not used or tested yet. It adds t2 mexes to all constructors.
I would have prefered to make the mexes upgradable but there is a gadget blocking that and I'm not developer enough to fix the gadget or add the feature.

If we are going to say communism bad, but sharing t2 constructors is good communism .. we can make changes that accomodate the reasons behind sharing t2 constructors is necessary. With upgradeble paths we can then upgrade mexes into t3 as well. Might be a viable economy option rather than spamming into AFUS. Of course the meta would be get t3 then spam AFUS .. 😛

[boreal plank]

Yeah, the point of Jade's weird metal is to slow you down, not starve you.
T1 cons building T2 mexes sounds interesting, and I'm curious how that plays.

You'd want to test it outside the wacky lobby though. That lobby is so screwed up that you won't learn anything useful.

[pseudo pelican]

low value per mex makes t2 mexes less profitable. total metal can still be high with low mex values, you just need to have more mexes on the map then.

[boreal plank]

Yep, which is what Jade does. And it made a lot of people hate it.

Which is fine, people have different tastes.

[alpine loom]

Jade is just way too enormous, big maps like that are just impossible to play

[boreal plank]

Plenty of people agree with you, but let's not make this a Jade thread.

[empty rain]

So not to be Mr party pooper, but economic theory teaches us that optimisation in gains from trade comes from opportunity cost, comparative advantage and specialisation.

One of the unintuitive conclusions of this is that you can't fix such problems just from adjusting costs or access to resources which is what every starting student suggests. Every set just opens up new relative specialisations, potential gains from trade (here I'm using trade instead of communism, but it's arguably comparable in this context) always remain...

If people don't want players working together to specialise or share, the only real solutions are:

1. don't play team games
2. stop/tax sharing
3. stop there being relative tradeoffs between resources (i.e. eliminate variable build power contributions for example, kill converters, no different eco structures etc)

4. don't play in high skill Games (where skill is defined as teams/playersmore likely to win overall)

But you'll find in the long run that communism is just as optimal on greenest fields or other theoretical maps even if you approach the lower bound of there being no metal whatsoever.

[keen sierra]

Lowering mex value almost removes ur window to get an army sustainable enough to pressure commanders before t2.

[keen sierra]

A high OS game on nuclear winter / dsdr usually ends at 13minutes usually due to team funding a good amount of their resource into the person rushing t2 lab. So its pretty unenjoyable even if ur winning.

[boreal plank]

Does the opposite happen on Forge? I haven't watched many high-OS Forge games.

[keen sierra]

on Forge u expect 1 backliner to hold front for the Mid geo spot to rush t2 as optimal strat. Mex Value is too high and there are 4+ geos for the t2 rusher so coop is almost useless

A Modoption to Disable/Tax resource/unit sharing would be nice

[long ridge]

you have to close some loopholes tho
like gifting structures and reclaiming them, or reclaiming allied structures to transfer metal

[ivory hinge]

The trade off of time vs efficiency would still slow it down. And that's already a trade off in the base game with reclaim vs res and reclaim.

[long ridge]

build metal storage and laz, then reclaim it, just before it finishes reclaiming give the laz to ally teammate
they get the metal

it is a lot worse but still doable
dunno what's the highest metal draining building

[wicked sentinel]

t2 labs by far

[long ridge]

build a t2 lab to communism a t2 lab 🧠

think you can partially build the lab and then gift rez and reclaim it?

[empty rain]

Yeah, I'm trying to say this with little actual emotion and I know people will knee jerk at me.... But competetive sports at high level are...imo... commonly kinda boring on average in terms of strategic diversity.

Once you reach a large specialised population and establish the mechanics that determine the game.

BAR biases towards aggression (rightly so imo), but like say tennis biases towards the serve and short average rallies, the elite level will begin to optimise implementation on short optimal patterns.

[dark reef]

'eventually, players will always optimise the fun out of any game'

[empty rain]

All games are of course capable of awesome pro rallies and matches, even the ones where median competition reduces to short optimisation... But it's general rarity that makes them good.

You can change the mechanics: say towards long drawn out games favouring defensive equilibriums, or mix things up with player drafts and changes... But different people will claim those games aren't as exciting...

And others will claim it's all fine. I mean apparently some people still like cycling or swimming so there's no accounting for the extremes that humans like and others hate.

[long ridge]

strategic diversity will generally fall at very high lvs of play

i mean if you are making a board game, and when playtesting you guys find "why don't you just do X. it more or less beats any thing that doesn't use X"
that's a potential design issue. I think sharing resources can be cool, like sending E to help someone cloak walk. but it's very OP compared to alternatives (making your own lab, traveling your own units, fixing your own economy that got unbalanced cause you got bombed or bad macro)

bombing someone's windmills to delete thier options is a cool strategic move, with resource sharing you can just dump your metal to your team and move on with your life (or team can gift you windmills)

resources that are stuck in your bank that you cannot use effeceintly is anologous to units stuck in a useless part of the map
forcing that on your opponents is good gameplay

[empty rain]

I'm a big advocate of just mixing things up, BAR has this great sweet spot of internally consistent mechanics over 1000s of different game modes and play types but I'm aware that's not popular with all the player base. But then I think most people don't realise the logical inconsistencies in their desires.

Revealed preference suggests a lot of people like consistency, but that desire will inherently lead to specialisation once a large enough population and elite competition take over.

And then they will lose that illusion they had of high relative performance in a small pool with a play style they found enjoyable

And then they will lobby to fix it via mechanics changes.

[long ridge]

what do you mean by consistency

[empty rain]

A relatively fixed set of play conditions

[long ridge]

bar has very large map variety, which is good. like ofc 90% of them are not balanced if you figured them out deeply but that's irrelevant. breadth of experience

[empty rain]

Whether that be 8v8 on straits, or 1v1 on CCR, or raptors, or whatever

Known maps. Accepted meta and preferenced starting positions.

[long ridge]

well it takes a very well designed map (and perhaps some balance tweaks) to get a map that supports multiple main playstyles

if the playstyle/meme you are using is strong enough and you are good enough you can still go outside the meta

[eager oracle]

Sunderence has 0.8-1.5 mexes if you are really interested in playing maps of that style

[keen sierra]

TIL clicking 1 button and sharing metal is high skill gameplay

[timber dawn]

It's more about knowing when to push the button than how to push the button. (not that communism is inherently "high skill", but utilizing it well is a form of skill expression I'd argue)

[long ridge]

anytime t2/t3 units would be better than t1, funnel.
want to boost your top os to crush their lane, funnel
got reclaim, funnel
have unbalanced economy cause you are bad at macro or got bombed? funnel
just funnel to any teammate who has the bp / needs that resource

[dark reef]

you should try some of my map mutations

[long ridge]

it does take awareness if you are constantly funneling, but the basic optimal usage is pretty braindead

[empty rain]

informally, i love map mutations 😛

[empty rain]

For better or worse, skill is an informal concept grouping together a bunch of other human behaviours and factors, whereas OS tries to measure expected win-rates as a function of other player's win-rates and observed outcomes to give players a single number estimate. Most lay people equate the two and assume that one (high skill) leads to the other (high wins), or that high wins implies high skill, but they aren't the same. Unfortunately OS/Trueskill adopted the moniker "skill" and this continues to muddy the waters. But especially in team games, you can be a highly skilled individual player, if you don't get your team to work together you won't win as often as someone who can pull together a team to achieve a winning goal, and OS only cares about whether you win in the matches you play. And how you do that OS wise can be anything, from social factors, to map choice, to who you play with, to choosing to play/not to play, to encouraging your team mates, to specialising in a position and getting there first, to bullying and berating them to send you all the stuff. Is that skill? No comment. We observed in the mentor channel that begginers look around the battlefield by moving their head, intermediates look around by moving their eyes, but real pros look around the battlefield by keeping their heads still and moving the monitor. The later would be a high skill play that doesn't win games, and communism is arguably a low-skill play that does. But use it at the right time in the right games and your OS will go up. And in team games if you share resources optimally you'll outcompete other teams

[umbral jungle]

"We observed in the mentor channel that begginers look around the battlefield by moving their head, intermediates look around by moving their eyes, but real pros look around the battlefield by keeping their heads still and moving the monitor. "

Um what? lol.

[empty rain]

https://tenor.com/view/mind-blown-explode-wacky-meme-gif-8887719

Have you yet to reach enlightenment? 😛

[keen sierra]

Resource sharing has been an issue for a long time, the consul changes, the mauser nerfs etc were all because 1 single player fed metal decided the game and it didnt matter in 8v8s if u won ur lane bcz its not a win condition.

8v8 supreme strait tourney was 1 50os player using 4 other commanders as nanos

and they won 😄

2v2 tourney was 2 players overflowing E and metal into each other 24/7

[empty rain]

More seriously, what I'm trying to say is riding a unicycle is obviously high-skill, but you're not going to win any bike races. Skill and winning are separate concepts, even though we use a metric to measure the later with the word "skill" in its name.

[long ridge]

teamwork is a skill, experience on different maps is a skill

yeah, you can be skilled in a strat but your win rate is somewhat affected by how powerful that strat is and how strong your enemies are

[empty rain]

Yeah, i also haven't said that the two are negatively correlated or unrelated. Just that you can come up with examples of activities that most people would say are high-low skill that don't translate directly or easily to win-rate.

[long ridge]

you can legally be a team game pure battery player and get up to 40 50 os. if a high os player cooperates with you

[empty rain]

And we've had a lot of discussion on this with respect to the "OP-take" strat in openskill...

[long ridge]

that doesn't make you any good at the rest of the game

[empty rain]

OP-take being the best strat for a player to win in certain contexts where they start, just not play and immediately give all their units to someone else.

[keen sierra]

coop is just op take with extra steps

[long ridge]

if you are doing op take with a pro player you'll want to do the tedious macro opener stuff and basic defense that you are capable of
and leave everything else to them

[dark reef]

40 OS rezbot micro pro

[long ridge]

if they can handle it they can just take all your stuff yeah
yeah you only control the rez bots and repair / reclaim. that is quite strong

[dark reef]

people laugh until you're such a ninja you reclaim the enemy eco afus

[long ridge]

reclaiming wrecks and enemy buildings is the best feeling when raiding
om nom nom

[viscid panther]

Yeah, no. I don't know why this thread minimalizes apm value so much.

[keen sierra]

most bar players are capped at 20apm (no joke)

[viscid panther]

I guess you hope that by using hyperbole you can get a change you all so desperately want?

If this thread ever gets taken seriously by a core dev, I'm making my own spring game.

[dark reef]

the game he makes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlgV64CEE7Q

[ivory hinge]

I'm going to guess the age range for people interested in a remake of a 25+ year old RTS is higher than average. and as an old man... yeah, not wrong...

[long ridge]

bar barely takes apm. you underestimate the power of a boosted high os player with pro micro

anyways, having the boosting player do absolutely nothing does leave apm problems, but they can do a lot of simpler tasks, and leave the heavy lifting to the pro

[long ridge]

lol okay 50 is hyperbole, 40 is possible

okay what do you think communism improves the game, besides "that's just how it is"

[wicked sentinel]

Much higher capability to work together and help out teammates, as well as create new interesting strategies that can shake up the meta

Even removing basic resource sharing or taxing it would have massive changes to how the game is played, particularly in 8v8. Everyone would immediately switch to complaining that the t1 stage is way too long and that backliners are the only position in the game that can do anything

[empty rain]

well yeah, I think it enables teamwork and coordination strategies in a team game 🤷‍♂️

And i do think it would be interesting to see coordinated teams battle other coordinated teams.

[wicked sentinel]

Like genuinely, think through what the game would look like if a techer couldn't share t2 cons, if teammates couldn't share rezbots, if frontliners couldn't feed backliners, or if your teammate is having an emergency e-stall and nobody can help them. The t1 stage would last forever, a player on the frontline dying would spell the end of the game the majority of the time, and everyone would be cooporating with each other far less.

[viscid panther]

This entire thread wrapped up in the idea of mixed lobbies, with noobs forced into doing nothing so their team has a fighting change of winning.

How about we complain about mixed lobbies and lack of matchmaking istead, which effectively gets rid a majority of your concerns.

Leave it to gamers to try and turn something cool into as boring and one-dimensional as possible. Man oh man.

[wicked sentinel]

And once again, the fact that this only breaks the game on a map that is insanely over-optimized while being extremely poorly balanced. People do a lot of resource and unit sharing in higher level games on other maps, but it's not gamebreaking and makes the meta much more interesting and unpredictable.

[pseudo pelican]

you would have cooperation in a team game even if direct sharing was banned, the things Hobo Joe lists don't sound so awful, rather a matter of preference

It's a question of what form the cooperation would take, if you change the rules in this or that way

[viscid panther]

The more I read these threads, the more I think all of you would prefer playing Zero-K. Why can't we let BAR be BAR

[wicked sentinel]

I don't think BAR without sharing would be a bad game, but I think it would be a very different game. As others have mentioned, it's not as simple as turning off or taxing direct resource shares, you'd also have to change unit sharing, rez and reclaim mechanics, and lots of unit balance to close loopholes and account for the change in balance.

[viscid panther]

A ton of work for likely regression in gameplay. Not worth it.

[pseudo pelican]

You would still have a lot of ways to pool resources even without direct sharing, but they are mostly things that don't sound very fun - some players skipping taking mexes in order for another guy to build up an eco faster, the t2 guy making t2 mexes next to teammates t1 mexes, reclaiming wrecks and friendly buildings relegated to the guy with the best production...

[viscid panther]

And the kind of meta's produced from your examples is a game I do not want to play. Fuck that.

[wicked sentinel]

Lots of that stuff already happens as the game is right now. Also consider that sharing takes a lot of different forms than just boosting t2 or whatever. It's also crucial to the current air meta, its crucial to getting inquired players back up and running (so won fights don't snowball nearly as hard). Removing sharing would at minimum require removing all of those mechanics, and thus all of the metas and gameplay styles built around them.

[viscid panther]

Even more sinister, actively competing with your team for resources on the map would become a thing

[wicked sentinel]

I just think lots of people are mad about fast teching and finding the most obvious target to complain at, but they have not realized the scope of the situation, and that "fixing" it would fundamentally change the gameplay in countless ways.

[pseudo pelican]

The things you list as worth preserving, are things what other people see as stale

[viscid panther]

stale because they have 500 games on 1 map

[wicked sentinel]

It isn't, though. Nobody here is claiming that sharing rezbots is stale, or handing out transports to teammates. They're all complaining about early mausers/marauders etc. They're mad about tech rushing

But "fixing" tech rushing would break the mechanics that enable all those other strategies that make the game much more interesting.

[pseudo pelican]

I don't think those things make the game better at all

They may not make it worse either, but it would be good either way

[wicked sentinel]

well, fair enough. I disagree but we all have our preferences. But surely you agree that the topic of this thread has been far more narrowly focused on tech rushing units with certain timing windows.

[viscid panther]

The thing is, there's already games that fit these preferences. How about we don't try to homogenize an entire genre of games so we all have something to enjoy 🙂

[pseudo pelican]

Sure, and for the specifics of t2 transition, as I said the proper solution isn't simply removing sharing, since removing sharing would not really fix that issue properly

[long ridge]

i played with glitter lobbies there was no resource feeding and we got t2 just fine xD
removing ability to share t2 con would majorly change how the game is played atm so all the suggestions I made keep that. communism, the issue of resource sharing/boosting is seperate.

[pseudo pelican]

But overall a non-sharing game would be fine, just because it would be different than what people are used to, doesn't mean it'd be bad

[long ridge]

i hate boosting i rather make my own units and explore my own options, but I do it cause it's superior and I'd prefer to win, not cause its fun/engaging gameplay

[viscid panther]

I think it's fine to have opinions, but it's wrong to force games to conform to them, esspecially when others disagree.

[long ridge]

homogenize a whole genre, like resource sharing is bar's entire identity lol
i'm not forcing no one, what's your opinion but another

[viscid panther]

I would say the freestyle form of play is absolutly TA and BAR"s identity. 100%

[long ridge]

reclaim rez, infinite assist lab, pick up enemy units, reclaim enemy units,

[viscid panther]

I won't claim to be some incredibly experienced RTS player, but I've played the popular ones. I've played Aoe2, aoe4, starcraft 1 and 2, and quite a few smaller ones, if only for the single player.

[long ridge]

yeah i've played sc1 sc2, ashes of the singularity

got pretty good in that game, thank god it didn't have arbitrary resource sharing

[pseudo pelican]

are you against making any changes to the game if the patch could be contentious at all?

[viscid panther]

So, I would actually say this is absolutely BAR's identity. It's what sets it apart for me. No upgrades, no proper tech system/tech tree, fragile and freeform eco, topped of with free sharing

[long ridge]

fair enough

the resource sharing can be fun on casual levels, or if you just want to try wild shit. but it's a dominant strat you have to conform to it otherwise you will be disadvantaged (on the backfoot to hyper hard hitting strats). i'm not asking the base game to be changed, just look into a mod tweak that plp can turn on if they want. there's no reason why 80% of lobbies need this restriction, they are not using these coordinated resource sharing strats often anyways. then competitive people can vote on whether they want to play communism/strategic boosting or not

[viscid panther]

I'd have to think on this for a bit. My initial response was going to be yes, but I can think of reasons for something like that.

[left night]

Sharing/Cooping is the most efficient way to play. People reach a high enough level of play in teams, and everyone can see it. You'll see it in pretty much every tourny with teams of a certain size threshold. You'll see players "discover" it in all the high lobbies. And then those same players will often call it "boring" or "unfun", because that is exactly what it is. It kills lobbies. Then lobbies revert to playing normal non-coop, and then rediscover cooping a month or two later, and the cycle repeats endlessly.

And this is the true insidious nature of it. It holds the meta back, it holds players back, because the "optimal" way of playing discourages actively playing. How it effects balance is secondary. The problem is it incentivizes not playing the game, which when you reach the end point leads to players deciding not to play the game entirely.

[alpine loom]

What weenies how can coop be not enjoyable, must be adc mains

[left night]

If we take the strait example, do you really think cooping mausers or perhaps alternating with cooping navy every game is enjoyable? Do you think it leads to the game retaining players, or those lobbies being healthy? The only reason we're even having this discussion is because the vast majority of games and the playerbase in general will never see efficient cooping, hence it not being the end of the world that some people argue it is. It is just stifling to any more advanced high level play being developed when it cannot compete with cooping.

[alpine loom]

i think its so fun that I literally do it every single game

[long ridge]

from what i saw in straights lobby, some plp like it, most plp dislike it

i think there's a elegant balance to opposing positions, there can exist different openings with advantages and disadvantages, you can infer what the enemy could have based on partial information

boosting breaks that with a sledgehammer

we see on map with a contested central relclaim its common for front to ask for like 3-4 winds. Presumably because it has a large advantage over any opponent who doesn't respond in kind.

same thing will happen on maps with navy maps with valuable central mexes. Boosting navy --> win the center + if they don't scout that you boosted you kill their fleet get reclaim and gg

so front/navy player forces teammate to boost them or put the team at a disadvantage.

also there's the wind boosted tick rush, you can't scout it
if you didn't boost and play by standard openings you can get leaked on to hell

[signal rock]

As an avid communism enjoyer I would prefer we keep it so I can continue to boost my team mate and win every game please and thank you. Also please bring back consul hounds ❤️ .

[robust ravine]

And il add, even people who dislike it are doing it, cuz if you dont, mid dies to the enemy doing it

[keen sierra]

i did alot of coop but how is it fun when its the exact same thing on exact same map with roughly the same players

winning = fun i guess

[keen sierra]

Coop is one thing but when u spam the same build on the same map its just lowskill gameplay imo

[alpine loom]

how is it fun when its exact same wife in exact same room tho

[keen sierra]

difference between a human being and a strait lobby full of noobs i guess

[next gyro]

Also supply mechanic as in AoE or Warcraft/Starcraft

[keen sierra]

BAR needs some mechanic to limit resource sharing so its not 1/2 player playing the game and 1/2 player roleplaying nano and it being optimal strategy

[wraith lintel]

Bru Glass says it's fine and everyone else is a stupid noob so the discussion is settled for a week now. Just stop with the common sense pls.

[fair flame]

managed to sneak some rezbots across the map on Twin Lakes Park and reclaim his advanced solars. was funny.

[fair flame]

last night I added a tweak to our lobby. It gave all constructors access to the T2 mex.
some players loved. some hated it.

I'm not certain, but based on the feedback I got; the fact it was different was enough for some to dislike it. Which is to say it made them adjust their buildorder. One of those players has also expressed a dislike for mutated maps. In short they had developed a winning 'formula' and this upset it. (Just as many quite liked it. Will use more)

Now I love the chaotic change and mutated maps, and worry that tthey might be less fun when they are more familiar.
And that is an element of the game I would change; maps having a style and outline but the specifics being procedurally driven and generated for each game;

For the simple reason players given endless time to optimise for a specific unchanging configuration with any available ruleset will identify and develop the optimum strategy. This is where the meta comes from. I think 90% of the comments here are due to 2 maps.

Unless there are hard counters to a set of optimum stratagies there will be a best strategy. You've got to fundamentally alter the game to 'break' teamwork. There isn't a counter for teamwork like there is a counter for an early marauder.
Well, there is a counter. Stop playing on maps where the backline players are safe and complaining about it. If you want to avoid communism like that play on the maps with 8 lanes.

And that's a style of play choice; it's not a problem with the game. I suspect that I will be forever bemused by trying to balance this game for both 1v1 and 8v8 or even considering those the 'same' game.

Because some aspect of a shared plan or co-operation should always trump an equal number of indivduals, if only through defeat in detail if that is possible.

[strong pulsar]

Is it fun if 2 players decide to fight against you in your lane and in doing so beat you? Is it fun if in conclusion you always have to have 2 players in that lane or it’s an automatic loss?

Teamwork is an emergent behaviour of larger team games. If you want less of it play smaller team games. You won’t see 12 min mausers or marauders in a 3v3. Resource sharing is not the problem. Your expectations are just that you want a small team game experience in a big player setup. And on top you use the most chokepointy map as basis for your argument

[pseudo pelican]

That argument could be against playing the game in general - if you just do the same thing over and over, it can get boring. Though nothing keeps you from trying new things, be it individual play or new coop builds

[keen sierra]

What "new" things can one try against 6minute mausers

Similiarly what "new" things were people trying when consuls had hounds?

The fact is nobody here is good enough to win against these cheese strats in 8v8 bcz there is simply no counter other than doing it urself in a better way

What "new" things were people doing when EMP rework didnt exist and everygame was 50 stilletos

[dreamy sonnet]

re t2 arty rush from isthmus geo. I've seen quite a few counters, bombing runs, raids from hovers & amphibs, a few spybot plays, people just rushing tanks and pushing the mauser

They do work, they take coordination and scouting etc.

[keen sierra]

Isthmus players are too lowskill to consider their gameplay imho

Mauser coop shud win most isthmus matches anyways

You can simply look at the entirety of 8v8 tourney on strait, it was all mauser rush when teams were not outmatched and trolling

[dreamy sonnet]

That's a pretty bad faith argument tbqh

[keen sierra]

Also stop calling sharing 600 metal and afking "team work"

[keen sierra]

ye its toxic statement but unfortunately its how it is

[left night]

Everyone arguing there is nothing wrong with coop have also stopped and RE'd the game when there is an OP take at the start. They're effectively the same thing, but one is hugely seen as negative.

[keen sierra]

coop u get the 2nd base to have better energy management + apm of 2 ppl and OP take u just need to do it with apm of 1 person

[left night]

yeah anyone who thinks take is wrong, should see coop as even more wrong

[keen sierra]

roleplaying as nanos at min6, completely afk with 0 micro 0 macro = teamwork and optimal strategy

tbh kind of a map issue on this one

[left night]

I'm not even advocating for a full halt to cooping. I like slow incremental balance changes. Just something like perhaps a 10% tax when sending E or M to another player, or assisting. To give room for other strategies to maybe be discovered that can compete with cooping.

[pearl crater]

Looking at this topic I kinda love how people refuse to try other maps/modes.

Though if people really like roles maybe we could get a modpack that simply unlocks t2/t3 after X minutes of game ?
Because that’s kinda the permeating thing - we don’t want fast higher tech

[left night]

I played a bugged 8 horses game last year where neither team could share units. It did probably make the game longer, and really, really added some depth to when people could afford to finally make a t2 fac.

very different rhythm than normal games

[pearl crater]

Though eh my personal suspicion is that the fun was caused by unoptimized gameplay - nobody knew what to do and could fool around.
With next iterations probably people could just porc up and tech or sth

[left night]

I think in that particular game people would have just ressed t2 con wrecks, or captured them.

[subtle tangle]

*5 minute Mausers, has been done lol

[boreal plank]

I’d rather just start at T2.

[fair flame]

I'd rather remove the requirement to share t2 constructors as the most efficient way to improve your eco before building your own T2 lab and then realise that my building of units and map control and expansion is wasted because one player at the back was 'safe' for 20 minutes and only our own eco player can compete with his eco.

We have big maps - I want mexes and fighting for map control to be more important than AFUS and energy convertors.

[boreal plank]

Could you post that replay where you did t2 mexes in t1? I’m very curious.

[fair flame]

sure. we played a few last night. it was the wacky lobby so somewhat lost in the casual mayhem.
i plan to use it with a more convential set of options.

I've pinged you the tweakdef code for it

[boreal plank]

ergh, wacky lobby. Let me know when it's a normal lobby, I guess.

[fair flame]

Rosetta
https://www.beyondallreason.info/replays?gameId=51cfba65ab8693e3824a878993cc0595

Glacial Gap
https://www.beyondallreason.info/replays?gameId=53bfba6521fdb65db14d9044e82e4b21

[fair flame]

Just noticed a bug or something not working correctly in that tweakdef. If you watch the replay, dont copy the code yet !

[rare flint]

That's actually funny, because when map rotation lobster come to strait lobby and get smashed so hard that he goes to discord with petition to delete this map 🙂 . The true is that you need learn map to know how to play it. Learning one map gives you more time to check units, strategy and micro than spread your time over all maps. But considering your point of view ( i am not sure if we need, just leave him on lane maps with 3 types of units to micro and he will be fine) that strait is for low skilled, why strait players are crying about communism? Because they have the most time to test it in all configurations, air, land, sea and nuke. Game have 2 type of scenerios, line only map or with backline. That changes a lot.

[keen sierra]

Yes you need 2000 strait games to learn that ! i agree

[long ridge]

It might be right tho. Unsupported badly microed mauset push can be countered, amphib attacks are just when someone drops the ball

Just because someone can send 6 pincers vs boosted navy doesn't mean it's an answer

[strong pulsar]

Don’t base the balance of the game on only one map and mode

[long ridge]

There is a response to that (t1 walls)

You guys think that boosting is just a problem on one map?

[dreamy sonnet]

My point might be invalid, that doesn't change Choice's response was in bad faith

[long ridge]

Should every map be a lane map?

[strong pulsar]

No but the problem doesn’t show up in other modes and maps. Make it a modoption and play that if you don’t like the base game

[long ridge]

Exactly. People are saying " oh you might as well (do this stupid thing)". Straw man and hyperbole

Sharing is fine but you can't compete with it with other strategies.

also imagine a bit. even on a lane map, if the lanes are not identical, there WILL be lanes that are immediately more important than others. optimal strat WILL be to boost resources from less important part of the maps to more important part of the maps. same problem just less extreme

[timber dawn]

Lane VS role plays a part but supreme plays different even compared to most other role maps too due to its chokey nature. (as someone who has loved the map since supcom)

The only other map I can think of that has game changing communism (more than sharing cons/excess reclaim) regularly happening is Rosetta.

[long ridge]

that's what happens on navy+land maps if navy lane has bigger consequence than land lane. navy boost is dominant strat

so you force your teammate to boost your navy lane or you are disadvantaged

even if the lanes are identical, boosting top OS to crush their lane while stalling your lane is also a strat

how many of you guys have played against a superior micro opponent who is also boosted
lol you gonna fold in a few minutes. sometimes you take critical damage before you are fully aware they are boosted

[timber dawn]

It is a strat but it isn't without downsides. On most maps without a big choke point if you neuter one lane to boost someone else there's a good chance you lose that lane if your opponents are paying attention and then you end up feeding them metal and allowing them to flank you.

[long ridge]

fuck straight get your brains out of straight

sharing is instant and the side doing the strat should have a 1 minute lead at least

you don't have to share like an idiot you can share after you see who your opponent is, what the porc state is, etc.

[lethal canyon]

lol lane maps... bismuth north is just communism now

[long ridge]

if the enemy team coordinates a push before the game even starts yeah they can hit you at the same time, but reactionary they will always be behind

exactly. anyplace where there is an important lane where it's vital to get more or higher tier unit there will lead to boosting

against an evenly matched opponent ofc I can stall and delay with 3 less medium tanks (unless i'm losing then no boosting). so everyone who is able to semi-safely donates 400-600 metal and bam you crush top lane

[wraith lintel]

while this is definitely true and something to consider please also consider that in all likelyhood a huge amount of games are played on that one map and mode. Maybe there is a reason.

[rare flint]

Communism is the most efficient strategy because you skip "lab tax" with con turrets, even game says that is more efficient to assist lab. It forces you to play that way, its like having op unit. You are force to produce it or you lose game. What we do with op units? We balance them.

[lethal canyon]

right let's balance units around that they are assisted by 8 people

[long ridge]

you know what we learned about the consul buildlist? maybe it's not the units but the sharing mechanic?

are hound/recluse broken? no but getting them avoiding lab tax and travel distance is

[pearl crater]

though the sharing mechanics makes the game quite unique, like why do you want to make bar into aoe/sc2?

[strong pulsar]

Again these issues don’t appear in 3v3

[long ridge]

the game's not magically gonna become sc2 with one change to a mechanic

[timber dawn]

Yeah communism is often a good strategy. But like all strategies there are maps where it's really good and maps where it isn't so good. On the whole I don't think it's a huge game breaking issue across the map/game size pool.

I get the frustration though which is why I fully support an option to disable sharing as long as it's understood that it is not the vanilla way to play.

[long ridge]

yeah honestly a modoption is good enough

[strong pulsar]

Also in that sense what if 2 people gang on one player

It’s also not fun for the receiving side

[long ridge]

you have to build 2 labs in that case. so for example for navy that's 2 naval labs
and you have to walk your con there. that's scoutable, 600 more metal, and you have to constantly give your allied the extra units cause 2 plp micro'ing the same unit type is bad for coordination. if you want to transition out of it you have to reclaim that lab. it's more time consuming and scoutable. sharing resources travels the map instantly.

[rare flint]

Why? building fast communal t2 lab for better mexes is useless?

[pearl crater]

3v3 is more engaging

[strong pulsar]

No you don’t complain about 6 minute mausers

If you play speed metal you also don’t complain about a fast nuke

[long ridge]

sure the strats are gonna be different in 3v3
so what does untaxed sharing add to 3v3 games

[rare flint]

Yes and no, you can share this lab for 1 or 2 better trading units and 1 lab for 3 players shouldnt be so painfull. All depends on map size.

[timber dawn]

It provides strategic options to your team and adds more choices to make. Communism is alot harder to pull off in 3v3 games in my experience since each player often has a fairly large area to cover and weakening one player to boost another ends up being pretty high risk/reward.

[strong pulsar]

Imagine a scenario with 20 players per team, you could very quickly rush a nuke. Your complaints are emergent behaviour of large games and this map in particular

As i have said before: you want the gameplay of a small team game in a large one

[long ridge]

what if one side of the map in 3v3 is more importnat (mid mexes, high position etc.)
optimal strategy is to calculatedly boost that side

it's less pronounced for sure, but it's still there

if the map is uniform then yeah there is no major effect
or it is risky without an obvious gain -- besides playing defensive and boosting the OP micro player

[strong pulsar]

Yes what about it? You adapt and play the map

[timber dawn]

Yep in some 3v3 maps it may very well be optimal but as long as it's not the only viable strategy on all/most of the maps I'd say that's fine. Each map will inevitably boil down to a few common optimal strategies if it's played enough but even then I think bar has enough fuzzyness to never be 100% sure one strategy is always better.

[strong pulsar]

Do you want every map and mode to play the same?

[long ridge]

that's fucking hyperbole. there's a million different things about every map without this mechanic

[keen sierra]

Bismuth DSDR Isthmus Nuclear Winter for 8v8s and its the norm to share all resource with red slider for 4v4s and below as seen in tourney

[long ridge]

removing/nerfing sharing is not gonna make tropical assauilt play like other maps

[strong pulsar]

We got into the finals without doing so choice

[keen sierra]

well top 4 all shared resources

so maybe you shouldve too 😄

[strong pulsar]

It’s not the only way to play. But you seem to know best. There is nothing to teach you

[long ridge]

we listed many common situations where it's optimal and dominant. in some maps it's not a significant issue.

[keen sierra]

sure. you know how to beat people of equal skill without any resource sharing right

[strong pulsar]

Choice where are you on the leaderboard?

[keen sierra]

when i used to play i wasnt washed and no value for my os as you are

[strong pulsar]

You speak as if you were actually playing the game and not only complaining or talking down on people

[keen sierra]

well anyways go ahead preach that its all fine 😄

its very hard to not talk down when ur sub 50iq sabutai

anyways cya git gud maybe u will win something or get value for ur os soon

[fair flame]

its the fact you can share a unit that produces t2. the idea is broken. once the hound got removed, should have been all the t2 units. problem solved.
the issue is having a 'mobile factory' able to build

nobody seems to be complaining about twitchers with fiends or termites and the consul still has gunslinger; which is to say the remaining units are now 'crap enough' or only specifially useful not to bother building them

[long ridge]

platypus i like cause its not a powerful direct unit but has endless possibilities (the fact that it's buildable is very strong tho)
also helps t1 navy not instafold to torp bombers

[eager oracle]

The issue with hounds and recluse on consuls was that they trade too well into T1 armies, with very little risk/micro involved. The remaining units on consuls/twitchers aren't as oppressive at + 6 minutes, but they still have use cases.

[signal rock]

Yeah but the other team can do the same strat so whats the problem?

[wicked sentinel]

the problem is that it was really unfun and became the universal meta, every other strategy was made basically obsolete by it

[signal rock]

Right so communism is dumb and needs to be removed.

[wicked sentinel]

No? sharing is much more diverse and adds a lot of depth to the meta, and plays out differently on every map

[signal rock]

Sigh

[wicked sentinel]

the consul meta made the game less interesting, sharing makes the game more interesting.

[signal rock]

Personal opinion I loved consul and I thought it was amazing fun

[long ridge]

i mean maps play out different, sharing or no sharing
what specifically about sharing leads to greater diversity than non-sharing

[signal rock]

I fail to see how "Lol just dump all your reclaim into our boost position" is fun gameplay but ok.

[wicked sentinel]

Because it enables tons of things that would be impossible solo. And unlike the consul meta, it produces lots of new strategies instead of flattening them

[long ridge]

everything is possible, just at a slower timing. while it's cool to bang out a tzar at 6 minutes with friends and wind boosted tick rush, we are concerned about the balance implications

[wicked sentinel]

trans sharing, wind sharing, rezbot sharing, mauser rush, t3 rush, nuke rush, t2 air rush, or just general economic padding by putting share bars at zero like we've been seeing in tournaments

[long ridge]

saying resource sharing, NOT trans or combat unit/rez sharing

see all those strategies are possible just slower without coop

i don't think economic padding and slider bars at 0 is particularly interesting

it's maybe novel to watch cause you don't usually play like that every game

[signal rock]

Sharing a trans so that you have better map position is also optimal and unfun gameplay if we are to use the consul as a bases, but its still a thing. Why nerf some strats but not others in terms of unit sharing?

[wicked sentinel]

So you don't want to disable unit sharing or ally assisting? How would that meaningfully change anything if I can just have my com boost an ally lab or share mexes and winds etc.

[long ridge]

well even without trans sharing the air player can pick your units up

since trans plays are interesting and there's no way to change that I see no reason to disallow trans

removing boosting (by trading winds for transport) slow down transport rushes at the start and makes them more predicatable

[signal rock]

I'm sure you can turn off picking up teamate coms

[long ridge]

interesting thought...
so air player is the only player who can contest early stuff with their com hmm

dunno if that's good or bad

[signal rock]

Its good because it its optimal and unfun strat like consul was

[long ridge]

anyways that a whole slew of other changes. too much to talk about transports and resource sharing same time

optimal to secure front and fast cap mexes?
yeah kinda.

early com transport is vunerable to aa bots and fighter snipes tho. it's OP but not totally free lunch

[wicked sentinel]

you could, it's already done for enemy coms so just a minor tweak to add ally coms to that

[signal rock]

You know these mouser rushes that people are complaining about? Wouldn't exist if you add hounds back to consul, just saying.

[eager oracle]

Yes... they would. Mauser Co-Op was one of the main counters to consul hound. It arrives faster and mausers shred hounds on the majority of maps

[signal rock]

Maybe straits

[long ridge]

mausers + tank support beat hounds ez
hounds can win on open positions, not 8v8 tho

[eager oracle]

I can't think of a map where consul hound beats mauser.

[signal rock]

I'd like to see hounds vs mousers on rosetta

[eager oracle]

Maybe something really large like Swirly?

[eager oracle]

Happened a lot. Hounds die.

[long ridge]

yeah a huge map where forces are spread out and it's too much investment to put tanks AND mausers everywhere

[wicked sentinel]

hounds are usually not that strong on rosetta because of how rich the map is. They're a t1->t2 transition unit, but on that map you can skip the transitory units and just go straight for stronger stuff like snipers or t3

[long ridge]

also hillier bot maps

[signal rock]

Ok so if we agree hounds are crap, can we add them back then? I'm getting mixed signals here.

[long ridge]

why tho?

they bypass the lab cost and whenever anyone shows up with hounds your t1 becomes a punching bag
i consul lab gives consuls to the whole frontline

[wicked sentinel]

nobody said they were crap, they're a t1 stomping unit and they excel in that role. They are just weak vs mausers and any later t2 units

[long ridge]

incidentally hounds can also kite bulls well if you have lots of space, or there's porc to retreat to

[signal rock]

Yeah but if mouser rushing is so much better than why hasn't it been removed / remedied like the the hound consul removal was?

[long ridge]

it did get a cost nerf
280->320 and similiar bp increase

[eager oracle]

And because resource sharing is a massive part of the game and would have wide reaching implications

But I'm on board for testing suggested changes

[long ridge]

you share resources to:

1. boost a very fast offensive rush strat
2. give resources to finish a structure (or porc)
3. to fix someone's bad macro or getting e raided -- also to optimize cause team-wide, when you have the resources, boosting all teammates t2 mexes out is optimal play
4. help a lane instantly without travelling there and skipping the cost of the build lab. Instead of making say amphib units or bringing land units to the coast to help sea you'd just give them resources. arguably reducing unit diversity.
5. help someone fire e-units or com walk/cloak

[eager oracle]

6. Give dead players something to micro

[long ridge]

that's UNIT sharing
no one is saying remove UNIT sharing

[eager oracle]

Fair enough

[signal rock]

I actually think sharing trans should be removed, its way to optimal and unfun if your team doesn't do it to compete you likely already lost the map. If you want to transport, build your own damn factory and live with the consequences of that.

[glossy reef]

Overflow going to allies with no cost is extremely convenient in many, and that would need to be removed for the removal of resource sharing to accomplish anything. Also assisting ally construction with your own bp, and the sharing of eco buildings

[long ridge]

overflow would have to be removed or taxed at the same rate as sharing
same for building assist and reclaiming allied or gifted structures

it's not a terrible thing, buff to energy storage and increases skill expression in managing and defending your economy

you could even add msg that said "wasted X metal!"

cloakable fusion OP? decoy fusion?

[timber dawn]

Could still always get a small swarm of ticks and build t1 solars followed by killing them and then letting ally reclaim the wrecks. It would certainly cut down on it but with enough communication/apm I think there's no way to totally prevent it if unit sharing is allowed.

[long ridge]

wreck is 60% value only
the most tax we were considering is 50% tax so thats a lot of trouble for 10% gain 🙂

[timber dawn]

Touché

Even more apm intense but could rez the solars and eat them live once they're yours. Idk what the e cost for that would be though and how it would calculate out efficiency wise. Would certainly take some planning.

[long ridge]

yeah rez is still possible

t2 labs are the most metal dense compared to bp

[timber dawn]

I used solars since they require no upfront e that is lost when killed

[signal rock]

Your teammate would 1st need the ability to build those solars or t2 effectively, that's not likely happening for such a small gain in sharing.

Maybe reclaiming buildings should be taxed as well.

[long ridge]

could just store who is the original builder of the rez'd unit/building. if it's not you, taxed
yes reclaiming allied buildings is obviously taxed

otherwise you can have your friend launder their metal to you in metal storages
they can even lend you the rez bots

[dark reef]

there is no way to tax anything effectively without workarounds being found and trying to catch those too also breaks the game in other ways

[long ridge]

1. tax resource sharing
2. tax overflow
3. tax reclaiming allied units/structures and gifted units/structures you did not originally construct
4. disable sharing of economy producting structures, labs, combat engineers, and con turrets. allow either sharing or buying constructors (but not both)

[dark reef]

buying scouts/trans/cons/rez all important early game

[long ridge]

you can still share scout and trans, and rez and con

[dark reef]

allowing exceptions just means a conga line of $exceptedunits going to a reclaim station for metal scapping

[long ridge]

of those, only rez and con are feasible to eat for metal
see 3)

[dark reef]

that's a hell of a lot of code cludging, might be more possible with the attributes system I brought in though

I suspect we'd then see com self-D for wreck donation, but at least that is somewhat self limiting

[long ridge]

com wreck needs a special rule

[timber dawn]

if these options do come to pass I vote that the game mode be called Within Reason.

[long ridge]

prolly sucking allied wreck is taxed 😉 sucks if you can't suck your own wreck in battle... i mean you could give the con to ally to let them micro and suck their wreck

[timber dawn]

I think the cleanest way to solve a bunch of those issues would be to just tax reclaiming in general live or dead at the same rate as wrecks (40% tax). But from what I gather the crowd that wants this option probably wants the ability to still get their full metal investment back for teching etc?

[long ridge]

na 100% reclaim rate is a huge staple of bar

it's very op and very bar'esque

i mean it doesn't directly kill your opponent but rewards good planning

[timber dawn]

Agreed, I wouldn't want that either but I'm also not a fan of playing without resource sharing as an option so wasn't sure how far was too far to make it work.

[signal rock]

Resource and Unit sharing just needs disabled so we can get back to normal and engaging gameplay.

[long ridge]

yeah so tax it so it's still good sometimes but other options have a chance to compete

[subtle tangle]

if a person dc's and you take their stuff, will you get taxed? if they come back and you are trying to give their stuff back, will you get taxed?

[left night]

if a person DC's early you generally restart the match. If they DC later on that team is losing the micro of a player. So it probably doesn't need to be taxed. All the workarounds to get around a tax don't need to be covered, because most of them have built in inefficiencies. Reclaiming allies units? You'll need to waste micro and time doing that. A simple (small) tax on direct M and E sharing, assist building, and overflow is all that is needed. People arguing that every loophole or workaround and even sharing units in general has to be removed to make a significant change to the game are going too far.

[long ridge]

a strict ruling would be you can't take their eco structures, and it will overflow to team at taxed rate

honestly op take is a difficult question

[spiral stag]

Caliburn with the based and accurate opinions again.

How many players have quit because they lost 1v1 on Strait seas because their lane opponent bought rez+con and they didn't. Probably a lot.

Sharing X number of metal/energy has always led to extreme all in strats which are unfun.

The reclaiming 'workaround' is fine because you have to use build power and APM on it.

[long ridge]

honestly this tweak mode is more for certain type of competitive player. perhaps there's 3 options

1. permanent take, can't rejoin. this usually imposes apm sink which makes it not worth it and prevents temporary resource pooling
2. do nothing, their resources overflow at taxed rate, can only take their units and give them back
3. pause game and wait

[spiral stag]

Even if you remove unit sharing it's not the end of the world. The meta will shift to the techer actually building everyone's mexes for them.

[long ridge]

Assisting unit construction or upgrade would be taxed, since it's spending resources for another player.

i think a possible strat is to let the teching player take more mexes and get t2 faster, however that has some commitment and can be scouted, and leads to apm challenges. if the other lanes are failing cause techer took more mexes they now have to make more units and control them / give them to allies.

[fair flame]

I could get behind and support tax and donations as a solution IFF it is:
an option that is ON or OFF as a toggle and is applied to all units/buildings/resources.
why : because most lobbies and players are going to want to continue to play the game as-is and won't be fussed by these specific circustmances impacting their funsies.

which is to say if you enable 'Limit Resource and Units Shares'
there is no automatic rollover. wasted resources are wasted.
you can't donate or share units. not "its ok for a T2 constructor and a transport, but not a consul or Thug". you built it - you need to spend your APM on it, even if you are parking 10 flak trucks in an Ally base.
This will make it quite hard to swap a core or armada constructor. You can't capture an ally unit. Self-D destroys it. So unless you find a wreck to revive ..
if there is a tax on resources; everything gets taxed at the same rate. buildpower is a resource. tax loaned buildpower too.
this includes reclaim of healthy allied units.
there is already a 50% metal loss on wrecks. if someone wants to make a wreck they paid a 50% tax. This includes a self-d cmdr might be the only exception. They did deprive themselves of 300 build power etc ..
isntant TAKE is disabled. Not sure what replaces it, maybe a handover process. but /Take could be broken.

And with all that going into changing the game fundamently - I expect that unit costs and the like would be somewhat out of whack. Everyone needs to get themselves to T2. There might need to be a balance pass on costs for the game mode. Or not. Everyone gets to live with it I guess.
This is quite hard core. Without assist and donations a player that gets wiped is out of the game.

I guess the new meta would just be "you build units, i build units, we gank enemy player together". I'm not sure how you'd nerf that.
Is it worth implementing that, does anyone on the dev community have a desire to do so ?
Does it integrate well with the overall or current dev goals ?

[viscid panther]

Probably because they're not used to having a team that won't do anything outside of the scope of their roles. 40 OS straight eco player will watch themselves die to a few amphibious tanks and blame everyone else.

Straights provides the most toxic and unfathomably stupid experience this game has to offer. And you guys want to balance around it.

[viscid panther]

Then please, enjoy an even more toxic meta where optimal play involves not building your mexes and giving it all to 1 player. How many artificial gameplay mechanics are you willing to add to make your vision of the game possible?

Maybe accept that it's a fruitless effort, that frankly, the lot of you spent little to no mental effort actually thinking how such changes would impact the overall game.

[fair flame]

Please read the last couple of lines in that comment; I asked "Is it worth implementing that" ?

If someone wants to put their time into developing it and making it an option; thats the beauty of open source and free content.
but i doubt if anyone with the time and skills to invest will have it on either the priority list or current dev goals.

[viscid panther]

What do you absolutely love about BAR?

For me its the way you can control units. no other rts has this drag mouse formation. I play this and Age of Empires games and I like the controls in BAR far better. Also, sharing resources in teams [[ is ]] next level. The only reason I even play other rts games is for 1v1. The BAR 1v1 scene is pretty small, so aoe2 is my go to for that.

Frontpage of the BAR sub on reddit.

So no, resource sharing is not a throwaway feature of BAR. It defines the game and draws people to it.

So again, why don't all of you play one of the hundreds of titles out there that fit your vision of what an RTS should be, and let BAR be BAR?

[long ridge]

there's a million things about bar to like i dunno why you are getting stuck over resource sharing

you blame the map, and yet this resource sharing makes every map that's not a symmetrical lane map turn into a boosting fest on the most important lane/unit

[viscid panther]

Of course there's boosting, but no one is playing a Frontline battery

[long ridge]

a battery for frontline?

[viscid panther]

Lol

[long ridge]

"So no, resource sharing is not a throwaway feature of BAR. It defines the game and draws people to it."
yes and I know 10+ people who hate communism and think it's dumb and don't do it despite knowing it's the stronger strategy

[viscid panther]

This really is a pointless discussion. Two parties of people have made up their minds, and that's that. I should've taken perfi's advice from the beginning.

[long ridge]

yes, you certainly have
so much ad hominen

[alpine loom]

I love battery build best build in straits imo

U are able to supply e to entire team so they can all get off the ground snd make rezzers/cons with 0 stall

[ivory hinge]

If you want to try out lobbies without res sharing you can. I think if you accidentally make it a FFA? But with two teams? There is a way somewhere.

[subtle tangle]

Sharing is nice. I think we mostly agree that it's a cool and fun feature. But for rts almost universally it's a balancing struggle, most opting for some kind of tax or limitation to mitigate abuse leading to overwhelmingly dominate strategies

[alpine loom]

Imo if overwhelmingly dominate strategies require teamwork that's good for gameplay

[granite talon]

what no thats now how it works lmao

best strat is to give all away to highest OS in start great gameplay

[alpine loom]

That's not a good strategy imo

[subtle tangle]

Not necessarily. If those overwhelmingly dominate strategies require little skill and involve some people hardly playing, then meh, doesn't sound like it adds much to gameplay.

[alpine loom]

I am usually top os on my team and I don't like getting gifted stuff that I haven't specifically planned for

[granite talon]

but its at the start

[alpine loom]

I'd rather my team play their game together with each other

[granite talon]

^there fore its bad for gameplay

[alpine loom]

I dunno about that unless its huge skill discrepancy

[granite talon]

lowest os givers highest os

[empty rain]

Full give is only optimal with large skill discrepancy and limited ability to coordinate

[alpine loom]

You also lose 500m to overflow if its at the very start

[subtle tangle]

Imagine coming in as a newby and getting harassed because you didn't realize you were expected to give half your stuff away. :x

[granite talon]

ok just make it a little smarter make mexes and E then give

[alpine loom]

Anyways you csm try an account doing just that but I doubt you will succeed

There's merit to Team autonomy

What I do is not just full give, I specifically invest in people with specific goals in mind and specficic limits in mind

I see what they're going for and see what their eco position is and if I think its the right choice I help them execute what they want to do more effectively

[granite talon]

i dont think you get my point

[alpine loom]

At the beginning of every game I ask my teammates what their plan is then I watch their builds to confirm if they need help or not

Also who their opponent is

[granite talon]

the thing is the opponent team has to react to it and actually teamwork or else the lane just gets rolled over and create a snowball effect. it is all map dependent ofc

lets just say the full "teamwork communism" isn't really being done yet and thats a good thing imo

[empty rain]

Well yes, reacting is just generally good in an RTS game, and team reacting is generally good in a team RTS game 🙂

[granite talon]

i fully agree with you on that point. but we also know teamwork is hard sometimes 😛 but you are right

[empty rain]

Now I appreciate that's not the game everyone necessarily likes or joined up playing, but it's where it will evolve to if the player base gets sufficiently large

[granite talon]

true depends on what people want ofcourse

[empty rain]

And players who don't adopt it will have to live with not being as high relative to others in their team rankings, and might have to accept both an OS ceiling and that their natural style leads to enjoyment in mid-level lobbies

All other things being equal of course...

Mod options or changing OS and matchmaking are also other options

[granite talon]

i dont know i think there are still many strats or ways to implement communism that hasnt been done yet. like 8 man communism or/we you can think of and that would change the game hugely in how you play it. could be good could be bad. im not hugely in favor of it tough so im happy its not that far yet. but thats my own preference of course i cant speak for others.

[empty rain]

Yes, I want to see where communism strats evolve

Everyone's talking as though BAR is an absolute advantage dominant strategy game

[granite talon]

if you put it like that. then yes we should keep it as it is. its just not that fun when you have to face it.

[empty rain]

I don't consider it shown or proven that communism strategies result in one strat or that alternative communism strats are transitive

[granite talon]

and that where balance changes come in and throw it all around again so the game keeps being fresh. wich is a good thing imo

you made me doubt about it all more i am less against it now 👍

[empty rain]

I get that it feels brutal to be on the receiving end of asymmetric coordinated activity, I really do, but I don't think that's limited to resource sharing, and the mechanic changes required to stop it would result in a VERY different game. When BAR started we were at a point where it was good to just get two 8 player teams, then it evolved to the point where we could have many 8 player teams but all relatively uncoordinated. Now some higher level coordination strategies are starting to appear, but we don't have the population for them to be mirrored/countered regularly on the opposing team.

If the game continues to grow, the natural next step is regular meetings of 8 player teams with coordination on both sides.

Players who want to continue to enjoy uncoordinated 8v8 will have to settle into lower skill or mid-skill/lower variance match ups, or alternatively mix up their game types to smaller game types or more random game setups, but I don't want to disappoint anyone... There is probably almost no team game in the world where so-called communism will not strategically dominate

[granite talon]

I agree with you fully I'm just thinking about the extremes too much. and don't worry too much you cant please everyone.

its hard to get a fully team of 8 people coordinate anyway.

[pseudo pelican]

no you dont

[alpine loom]

Coms have mstore if u take resources without com mstore u overflow to team

[pseudo pelican]

m going to team is losing it, i see

though if its exactly at game start, you will be getting the first 500m of overflow, and the rest will go to whoever does /take first (and has the storage free for it)

[granite talon]

now im wondering what happens with the metal if you give but the more efficient way is spend some metal first anyway and then give it

[viscid panther]

If I was a mod I would mass ban everyone in this thread, and then ban myself to limit the backlash. It'd be the first internet murder-suicide.

[alpine loom]

thats why ur not a mod buddy

https://tenor.com/view/dancing-cowboy-finger-gun-pointing-moves-gif-17170914

[pearl crater]

truth to be told communism is a dominant strait strategy because strait incentivizes turtling.
On a good map communism would mean a joint assault instead of resource sharing.

[robust ravine]

Huh? No one uses communism to turtle in straits, what are you talking about?
Its either to rush t2 units to roll front or boost a sea to win that sea fast

[upbeat coyote]

Ya most communism strats are just all-ins. But because scouting is difficult people dont and then die to the cheese.

[long ridge]

what do you mean "joint assault"?

it's very accessible cause there's a backline spot. however plp don't realize, lanes esp sea lanes are very safe once they are stabilized or you have an advantage

the whole point of boosting is dump resources to a more important lane to crush it

it will happen on any map that isn't all front symmetrical lane map, and you are forced to boost or play at a disadvantage

me give 4 winds to front, me boost sea lane, me won sea lets feed metal into insta t3 units wow tEaMwoRk

if you won or if you can stall your lane, it's optimal to pool resources into one strat or lane and crush that.

[pearl crater]

basically what happens on lane maps, everyone is engaged and tries to cooperate to kill other lanes ;v

[long ridge]

yes but the thing is, resouce trasnfer is global

any position can give resources (a precursor to units) across the whole map instantly
skipping lab cost

[pearl crater]

if you're evenly matched on your lane you shouldnt be able to send resources tho

[long ridge]

if your lane is not stable / if you can't stall your lane then yeah. or if your lane is the more important lane, team should be boosting you

even if you are evenly matched, you CAN send resources and stall if you judge it's possible
defender's advantage. And for all they know your team could be boosting you

[pearl crater]

I mean I'm not that much convinced to that "you should get boosted" part on lane maps, like ... its easier to just swing your army to another lane - then you dont have to pay the production&travel tax

[long ridge]

if their lane is right by your lane sure
what about everyone who is farther away?

[pearl crater]

Strait is a very hard map to break front on I think we can agree to that, because of that its hard to punish players sending resources & teching instead of engaging at the frontline

[long ridge]

na the front is close and a prime target, so the reverse: people communism to produce rushes to break the front
and kill 2-4 plp
people think straits is a turtle map, yes and no. the backline is relatively safe because they have reaction time to build porc, however the front is very close to each other

and once your break the front open it's tricky to defend the double choke

[pearl crater]

Well then you could just propagate the help right?
Person top help the one a bit below and so on until we reach a person right above the lane that needs help. It requires more teamwork tho

[long ridge]

why occupy 2-4 members when you can just send resources

[pearl crater]

I've got 700h in strait, it is much easier to defend on it than on other maps.

[long ridge]

plus, if your team has a t2 lab but it's 3 lanes over, it's better for you to upgrade your resources to t2

[pearl crater]

I mean regarding the lane thing, why send resources when you can just tech and crush the map from the other side?

[long ridge]

because you only have to win one side fast to win game

the 3k lab could be 9 more mausers

[pearl crater]

Y it can be the side that could send resources, the oponent is clearly weaker so should be easier to remove

[long ridge]

like look at it this way

when I win sea and I get reclaim, I could go marauders myself (18-20 minutes), or I could just give it to geo and get marauders at i dunno 12-15 min

[pearl crater]

Yes but then you risk that the geo player will butcher the job

[long ridge]

?

[pearl crater]

Would you give 15ts resources for fast marauders?

[long ridge]

ofc not. the fact that boosting a low ts is risky doesn't make boosting in general an OP mechanic and dominant strat

[pearl crater]

I mean eh look at this from another perspective

[long ridge]

also some t2 units need support, so you really need the mausers + frontline + spam to scout coms + aa

[pearl crater]

The fact that you can swing the reclaim means that the opposing team should make sure you dont win on sea

[long ridge]

easier to do that on one lane pooled resources then try and win two lanes at the same time

[long ridge]

and what's the best way to avoid a stronger player winning reclaim battle? boost fest
and risk aversion
boosting HARD counters simple rushes. like with you eyes closed

[pearl crater]

Not really, because again you wouldnt boost 15ts, so probably when the meta finally gets to some higher levels people will throw some units into the sea to tip the scale

[long ridge]

you are like saying guns are not OP cause there's clumsy people who won't be able to use a gun properly

[pearl crater]

Yes poison is much more effective but thats besides the point

[long ridge]

so a knife is better than a gun cause some people will shoot themselves with a gun?

[pearl crater]

Actually funny that you mention it, but the police is trained to run away from people with the knifes if they're closer than 10m away, but you're derailing the conversation

[long ridge]

honestly if the geo player is a 15ts who is cooperitive they can just give you all their geo and mexes
and you macro and make the marauders

then when you are done you can just give their stuff back

[pearl crater]

Well then maybe, perhaps, the map is just bad since the roles are meaningless?

[long ridge]

you know, the map roles are simply responsibilities and optimal stratgies (openers)

what does roles have to do with this?

[pearl crater]

A good map shouldnt allow for inactive players

[long ridge]

you've never greeded behind minimal units to defend when you sense passiveness?
do that except feed your top os player / most important lane

[pearl crater]

Have you tried doing it in 1v1?

1v1 maps incentivize map control, you have to be active and present

[long ridge]

you wanna 1v1?

[pearl crater]

sure but I suck at it

[long ridge]

exactly

anyways this is about communism and boosting, a strat you obviously cannot pull off in 1v1

[pearl crater]

though we have similar 1v1 rating, can play

[long ridge]

okay

you have 8 commanders in 8v8
it naturally makes it more defensiable

[strong pulsar]

There is a reason why it’s not played in the pro lobby. The map may be fun for some but that’s because they like to put their feet on the table and sim city

[wraith lintel]

supreme strait isnt sim city, you should definitely play it. It has become considerable more stressful than other popular maps mostly because its optimized, a lot.

[long ridge]

it's more turtly than other maps but not hugely more. air navy is strong, you have to coordinate your attacks

[timber mist]

Strait is a boosted geo player with 3/4 front players + 1 air but it would be too boring to play all day everyday coz about half the team wouldn't be playing

[long ridge]

yeah with boosting navy is irrelevant -- too slow to impact the game, mausers don't care about t1 navy

[umbral jungle]

Does that map work with less than 8 players? Then you have nobody that needs to play battery.

[long ridge]

if one lane more important than the others: boost fest on that lane. This means that navy gets boost fested on maps where there's central mexes and/or large sieging capabilities, and navy is just a minimal units battery on maps where it's slower than another lane's win con

generally ships are extremely heavy metal wise so on any t2 rush map you'd just rather have 3 mausers than a destroyer

and once anyone gets a t2 lab, travel time aside, everyone nearby should just fund that player to build more t2 units

besides the occasional t1 light force and spam

the only maps which are less affected are symmetrical 6+ front maps (no particuarly important or slow lane). what's the point of map variety if the game mechanics are broken such that the maps have to conform to one type of map

[empty rain]

https://tenor.com/view/general-zod-heresy-man-of-steel-superman-destroy-it-gif-25934938

[ivory hinge]

Every time people in this tread mentioned 'turtling' on strait I am just imagining rushing T2 turtles.

[fair flame]

we have penguin meme units. we should have a literal turtle meme unit 🙂

[granite shuttle]

arm has it

[dark reef]

$unit turtle

[vital mortar]

https://www.beyondallreason.info/unit/armcroc

[ivory hinge]

Can we make it damage resistant to torps/depthcharges? That might make it worth it. It does say 'popup' in the description.

[long ridge]

honestly, turtle's problem is sucking on land not in it

[wraith lintel]

Too slow, too little damage, too expensive. Pew pew AA gun so not worth the extra 300 metal you pay for it, especially not if you consider the fact that the amphi lab simply gives you better AA for 125 metal in the first place.

[long ridge]

raiders live and die by speed

[dark reef]

wondering if giving the damn thing a radar instead of AA might be a valid call

makes it a hard point hub for an amphib raid and then prevents trival dguns

I suppose it's more shiva like in idea, eg a moving brick from the sea, rather than 'raider', which doesn't usually work too well in most situations you'd want it in

making it anti spam capable or something might work too

[amber vale]

Or you could just make it randomly shout cowabunga from time to time, y'know

[wraith lintel]

💯.
Earlier I was contemplating suggestion to rather.make pincers instead...

More mobile and you have you HP distributed over more units which is generally better. Can split them up into different directions, less d gun fear. Also better versus EMP
What's even more interesting is that due to the EMP resistance at least one half of the added AA capability is irrelevant anyway.

Let's say *less relevant

[scarlet timber]

how did we go from communism to unit rebalancing

[wraith lintel]

My bad, you are correct.

[long ridge]

lets move to #1186850950770610207

[dense snow]

Put a 5 minute hiatus on sharing units or dumping resources at start of map. It would change a lot of things.

Is it teamwork if it is all about feeding 2-3 guys extra resources?

[pearl crater]

then people would just pool resources for 5 minutes and insta tech to t2/3

[arctic onyx]

I'm curious how well the boosting strategies work compared to more conventional play if you remove all the center rocks and remove the mid geothermal. Teching in mid is faster with that geo and the center rocks heavily reward an early front boost that secures them.

(just speaking of Isthmus, since that's the main map where this 'issue' is present')

I agree sharing is one of the core mechanics of BAR and like being able to support my teammates in various ways when I want and it's at my discretion how much I share (so not actual communism, because individuals are choosing when and how much to share, versus a forced spread of resources across all players, but that's just semantics).

I played a few games on Isthmus today and it was a heavy stomp for all three, putting our best players in front and mid and just pushing aggressively. Certainly not fun to be on the receiving end of such a stomp. I'm curious to see how things continue to evolve.

Also not a fan of nuke rushes, they're pretty unfun, but they're not without risk.

I think changes to the map should be tested long before anyone touches a core mechanic like sharing.

Or just let things evolve and see how things shake out.

[dusky steeple]

Finally! Someone who knows about actual communism more than just "haha, communism bad"!

[dark reef]

it heavily depends where people recieved their information on communism

but not a matter for this thread I daresay

[dusky steeple]

Yeah, right.

[glossy reef]

still don't know why anyone wants to even call resource funneling communism

[wicked sentinel]

it's much more like capital investment

"hello, your sea player is looking for a series B round, big gains will come your way with a strong investment"

[long ridge]

broadly speaking resource funneling is a force multiplier. give it to a weak player and it will be mediocre, give it to a strong player and they will be unstoppable

[empty rain]

They're angel investors 😜

[scarlet timber]

My problem with it is half the time I see it used one person is not playing the game

[dark reef]

it's essentially 'OP take, lite'

[strong pulsar]

In 1v1 I can also reclaim on one side of the map and magically spend it on the other

[subtle tangle]

One player takes all the resources, spills over m and e to other players, and transports all the other coms to a forced windmill camp in some walled off dark corner.

Y'all doing this communism thing wrong.

[dreamy sonnet]

Isthmus, front-pond 4..8xWinds Boost Grunt open typically does not result in more metal in total for you over actually taking the mex's by around 3 minutes or so unless you capture your fwd mex's or kill enemy mexes in raids. Front has 1000ish metal reclaim, 2x2.3mex for 1 minute = 276 metal.

So you have to kill 4 mex's for at least a minute, or actually go and get your own mexes early enough to actually make a difference. The numbers get even worse if you feed grunts.

People are generally not building a t1 conbot early enough to actually come out ahead and relying on skill diff to carry the strat sub-optimally

[subtle tangle]

I think more important is just denying the reclaim from other team. The quick metal boost also means you can pump out rocket bots to push back enemies from their forward mexes early.

[dense snow]

It is not just about providing your team the 1k metal in the middle it is also about denying them access to extractors, which costs them resources. A good push will keep them off their 2.3's and geo.

[dreamy sonnet]

Yes, but i more often than not see the result of the boosted Grunt open is too many grunts, a late conbot (so you don't take mex's at early times), then a late transition to rocketbots and/or thugs to continue the pressure from the early advantage

Since Doushibag's query was "Does the boost actually result in a meaningful difference" - i tried to answer his question with what i have seen and experienced. Not why/can/does it work

[long ridge]

denying 1k metal and taking it is 2k metal swing

just cause plp not doing an opening well doesn't mean it isn't the OP strat

plp grief on geo sea all the time, doesn't mean it's a weak position

[dreamy sonnet]

Hopefully this illustrates the Grunt boost issue with not getting a con out early to make it worth it.

I have metal produced for all players in the top right, Red P1 is up against Blue P5 and Blue P6 on front, with Blue P4 supporting from pond. By 6 minutes after taking about 90% of the reclaim, Red P1 is behind Blue P5 and Blue P6 is right behind him on metal

I'm not saying the strat isn't strong, it absolutely is but imo it hinges on either killing the front players bases with grunts, or taking those mid mexes ASAP. Without one of those, or maybe a big run-by leading into mid/back line chaos that 2000 metal swing is nullified very quickly by the mex's

I've seen this play out very similarly to this from a lot of players including me doing the grunt-boost open, its very easy to not pivot into any real advantage even against relatively weaker opponents, since you wont have the firepower to snipe all but the most AFK commanders, and a few LLT's basically secure the base, which will have 3 mex's to your 1

[long ridge]

i mean what if you go 5 grunt into rocket bots?
with so many units there should be some combination of unit that wins the reclaim effeciently

the goal is not to kill their base it's to get the entire relcaim

[subtle tangle]

grunts just a threat to keep them turtled while scoop. once you see turtle, can make cons. ja if u take 5 min to take ur mexes and make windmills its sketchy. but it shouldn't be sketchy if done competently

[long ridge]

you should prolly choose a good frontline player to illustrate the build. a strat executely badly doesn't mean the strat is flawed

yes all you need is the first grunts, first laz, and first rocket bots
and threaten runby

4.6 metal income vs 1000 metal under contention (2k metal swing)
2000/4.6 = 434 seconds

[subtle tangle]

there's energy in the rocks, too. that's the lowball value estimate

[long ridge]

there was that game with indaclub where he gave that metal to techer and it was disgusting
err hotshot gave it to techer

and techer was like 30 seconds ahead with 1k metal

[subtle tangle]

which can lead to mausers hitting frontlines <5 min

[long ridge]

basically boost into reclaim into more boost
welcome to resource sharing meta

[subtle tangle]

hehe look at ur little t1 army. aww, you have like 7 rocket bots. ooh, looks like you're pushing me a little! you're so strong! ;3
(insert mausers here)

[dreamy sonnet]

Yes, this - open grunts, take the territory then get some more difficult units to deal with up, like 3 rocket bots into thugs to really hammer that pressure home

[long ridge]

i wouldn't make thugs (3 units types) unless you are confident in your thug micro

most plp would find it easier to just control grunts and rockets, which is perfectly fine in my noob frontline opinion

more unit types = harder

[dreamy sonnet]

Fair

[scarlet timber]

You guys keep arguing in circles about if it's op or not and I think you might be looking at this wrong just because something is "op" does not mean it's a problem the problem is if it is making players not enjoy the game and from what I have seen of it it seems to me that someone ends up playing not playing the game (in game modes with more people) and sitting Thier being a resource battery for someone else and sure some people might find that fun still especially if they want to go all out to win but my question is have you looked through multiple gamemods through the different skill levels of people and ask them if they enjoy this cooping if more people say it's making the game less enjoyable for them then people say it's fun for them then you might want to look at solving the problem

[timber mist]

it's just like an op take but even better coz high TS can focus on his micro, on most maps it's 2 players coop, usually lower ts "give" his game to boost higher TS, on Strait it's 2 players boosting the geo spot, so at least 2 players don't play the game.
The best play is to not let lower ts play the game and give all resources to better player, so he can get "unfair" advantage over his lane.
More "enjoyable" for higher TS i guess, while lower TS don't get to play the game, strange game mechanic...

[pearl crater]

But 20ts players playing with 50ts is sort of an abomination tbh, it usually means they have very little impact on winning the game anyways eh.

[long ridge]

high ts has no problem doing their macro and attacking (if it's 1-2 front only). boosting give them more bang significantly faster

[scarlet timber]

Winning and fun are two separate things winning can be fun sure but making sure everyone can have fun is the most important it does not matter if you have little impact you can still have fun and no system in a game should encourage people not playing because Playing is really required to have fun

[fair flame]

This argument is difficult to accomodate. last night there were over 1500 players online. Mostly in 8v8 lobbies. It could perhaps be an argument that many players don't like T1 and we should shift to T2 easier and more quickly. You can't please all of the people all of the time, and I'm pretty sure that 20 players mean 20 potentially different and opposing ideas or fun goals. There should be a game design and development team here. The question of "do we wanta game mode that nerfs or prevents teamwork" and do we have the dev time to implement that, is it worth implementing are the follow up questions. The objectives that they need to consider and meet might be in terms of "a fair game for 1v1 and tournament level competitive matches" with a requirement for "supporting a player base in 8v8 and large team based games".
Those persons on the discord and in this thread are still a very small subset of "all the players".

[scarlet timber]

I am not saying accommodate everyone's version of fun that is impossible but try to accommodate over all and my point is that because of this strat I have seen people not really playing the game and you can't enjoy a game if are not even playing it

[long ridge]

a lobby option to disable would be ideal i think

for many kinds of lobbies the free sharing isn't a problem

[fair flame]

But this is merely the point i was making. "do no accomodate everyones version of fun". must at all times align with development and design goals for the game. no matter if that is the most vocal of hardcore players or the largest group of more casuals calling it an issue. changes have to align to a planned development even if that is open source and 'free'.

and I will directly counter "you can't enjoy the game if you are not playing it". You are playing it.
That level of co-op and teamwork is my very definition of top level play and I expect that if you want to win 8v8 competative matches. Soon after I started playing the 8v8 tournament had games over by 10 minutes and I saw co-operative Tzars being built and then follow ups I think led to mauser rush.

That's the high level 8v8 game. It's bloody brilliant for what it is. That's one of my ideas of fun
The other is; play 8v8 lobbies and get huge armies of t3 smashing into each other.

You might see which set of players from those diverse approaches is going to 'win' if casually encountering each other. And that's what ranked games, match making and tournaments are for.
I can support there being an option to disable it. If someone has the dev time to add that feature to the game.
But you know; add it to the list 100 things desirable before game leaves alpha

[long ridge]

having your econ pooled is one kind of teamwork, but on the other hand for game progression, I do not like how t1 phase gets compressed to 3-5 minutes game time

resource pooling is almost the only viable way to play at tourney lv

kinda ruins strategy diversity that isn't boosting out the most important unit (instead of making more variety of units or fighting all the lanes)

[scarlet timber]

I can't speak to if it's fun or not or if it prevents playing the game for everyone that part was my opinion I will refer to my original statement you must ask the players if it is fun as my view will always be missing context/might be biased

[long ridge]

for example, instead of making t2 naval ships it can often be better for me just to pool and convert those resource into t3 marauder or demon

so just boost someone else, very do nothing

[fair flame]

and having learned some harsh lessons from guilds and playing games. I've learned that:

you cant please all of the people all of the time.

which is to say; there will be something to measure to decide if its broken.
do not going asking 100 people for 100 opinions. you merely dissappointed 99 of them when their expectations are not matched.

The devs go back to the game design goals and objectives and see if it aligns. the devs spend their time delivering on that.
if this matters enough maybe someone will dust of their coding skills and see if they can add the feature to the game. Presumably there is a dev team that reviews these things who will decide if it is pushed live.