SC vs SC:FA

[omega4]

Am I the only one who now prefers SupCom to Forged Alliance?

Mainly because Experimentals in SupCom are truly units to be feared, whereas they're watered down in FA.

Take the Cybran MonkeyLord for example. In SupCom, the ML can actually survive long enough to wreak havoc on heavily fortified enemy bases. But in Forged Alliance, the ML is easily taken down before it can do an serious damage to a heavily fortified enemy base.

And in 3rd Party mods, the ML is a joke, as groups of T3 units can easily take down a ML before it even gets within sight of an enemy base.

[Ze_PilOt]

One of the next focus of the balance will be to bring T3 at an usable point.

What happened in vanilla was that the XP were way more expensive but also way more powerful.

I personally do thing that it was one of the few things that vanilla did better than FA.

So I totally agree with you, but it will be very hard to fight against the majority.

[Karottenrambo]

Agree

[FA_Returnee]

It is relatively weaker, but then the ML is cheap for an experimental compared to the others in its class.

[Softly]

I prefer FA exps to vanilla exps. I think that t3 land is more of a counter to exps in FA than in vanilla.

[Gowerly]

Was. Less true now.

I agree that Experimentals are weaker now, but before hand they were actually ridiculous. Now, at least, an ACU has a chance to get out of there somewhat, where as before it was 2 ticks of ML fire.

[FA_Returnee]

If any land experimental has questionable use, it's the Fatboy. I never build them in online games.

[omega4]

Yes, in SupCom, experimentals were incredibly powerful. But this was balanced by the fact that they were incredibly expensive and took almost forever to make. But this made them true game-enders and units to be both feared and respected.

For me, there was nothing more thrilling and exhilarating to see an experimental like a Monkeylord from afar and know that there was almost nothing you could throw at it, short of another experimental, to stop it. That sense of creeping, impending doom lasted a long time since it did take the slow moving experimentals a while to finally reach you. But when they finally did arrive, it was horror and death incarnate as it laid waste to your base and wreaked havoc.

With each successive game and mod, experimentals like the Monkeylord have either been watered down directly (attribute changes) or effectively (more powerful T3 units).

In SupCom2, experimentals are a joke. They're basically more expensive T3 units. Swarms of T1 units can take them down.

In SupCom, those T1 swarms only served to build up an experimental's veterancy level.

[Plasma_Wolf]

I sort of agree with this, but I'm also happy with the way experimentals are at the moment. It would be nice to see them be extremely powerful, but it may be a bit too much to have the vanilla GC? 240K HP and 25K damage/s.

On the other hand, the fatboy could kill a GC back then without having to move backwards (according to a quick calculation I did by the hand of the old database).

[omega4]

Here are some facts to support my assertion that SC:FA nerfed the Monkeylord too much from its SupCom levels (Taken from the unit databases of SupCom and SC:FA units):

In SC:FA, the revised Monkeylord:

* Had its hitpoints reduced by 31% (45k v 65.5k)
* Had its primary weapon damage per second reduced by 67% (12000 v 4000)
* Had its build time decreased by 11% (12k v 13.5k)

This was supposedly balanced when the revised Monkeylord:

* Had its regeneration rate increased by 1900% (9.5 v 0.5)
* Had its mass needed to build reduced by 49% (16k v 31.5k)
* Had its energy needed to build reduced by 37% (200k v 315k)
* Had its speed increased by 39% (2.5 v 1.8)
* Had its turn rate increased by 56% (2.5 v 1.8)

For a negligible decrease in build time, the Monkeylord costs less to make, is faster, but is also more fragile and inflicts much less damage than before.

There's almost no point to build the Monkeylord, as the same amount of resources can now destroy it much easier (not to mention that the urgency to destroy the Monkeylord isn't as great, given how it inflicts less damage now).