Old FA player, but new FAF player: What has changed?

[TheMipchunk]

Hi, I played SupCom and Forged Alliance mainly from release up till about 2010. I still remember when GPG was still supporting the game, and how the meta would change as they introduced new patches. I recently learned about Forged Alliance Forever and now I'm going to try it with some of my friends, all of whom are old veterans.

Long story short, I can see all the patch notes, but just seeing a whole bunch of numerical changes doesn't really give me a good idea of what has actually changed --- so holistically, what has changed since the last official FA patch?.

- Are there any significant new strategies or uses of units that I should be aware of? Anything that used to be bad become good, or vice versa? Has the cost-to-performance efficiency of different tech engineers changed? How significant are the changes to adjacency bonuses?
- How much better/worse are the experimental units now vs. back then?
- What impact does the new "factory HQ" mechanic have on competitive play?

EDIT: I've seen that there are a few similar threads, but I guess I really don't care about specific changes (since I can read the patch notes), mainly changes to the meta.

[ZLO_RD]

1) engy mod.
-buffs all t2 t3 engineers: you can actually build them now and not worry about being super inefficient, but t1 engyes still more eficient, however after you try sera/aeon t3 engyes you will be surprised how good are they
-allows to build ultiple t2 t3 factories: mod claims that you can still play same way because making multiple factoryes is pretty much same cost as to make engyneers to assist and if you use heavy assist your units come to battlefield faster, and engyneers are more flexible so you can switch around navy/land/air/exp construvtion super easyly...

But new way of making multiple factories is pretty much OP:
- it allows you to abuse adjustency. 4 t2 land factories connected to t2 mex give you more mass by adjustency as if you had 4 strogares
- it allows you to get tech on islands super fast. It almost feeels like "tech teleporting" , you made a engy drop and if you have hq in base, in shortest time you can start spam high tech units in any place... this feature feels wrong for me, but most players say that it adds more interesting possibilities and improves gameplay
- it allows you to get rid of patfinding issues, and weak vunerable engyes for assists

2)t2 t3 air + engy mod + adjustency + late game
so engy mod allows you to trap all your build capacity inside of factories so you can connect all you build capacity to power and mexes very easyly... That with that shit beind possible you may see how people upgraide multiple t1 air fac to t2 and spam just t1 interceptors just to get more adjustency...

but things get worce with t3 air. (not like it is something bad)
- 1rst of all i need to mention that t3 air cost much more power than in 3599 but little less power than in 3603 (not 100% sure about that but it feels so)
- before engy mod people used to make t3 air fac and spam 400-500 engyes to assist it.
Now t3 air fac have huge build power, that means that assisting is no longer that effective (you stilll should assist it early game)
so i already said that having more build power trapped inside of factories leads to more eficient use of adjustency, so we now have huge build power for air factory and making multiple of them connected to t3 power is very eficient way of spamming ASF, and that is what everyone does now... at least on setons you can see huge grids of t3 power + t3 air factory that are made to produce ASF with about 50-70% less power used (bigger grid - more efficiency)

3)Overcharge (OC) now cost 5k power while you start amount of power is 4k and ACU now gives 20 power instead of 10 so build orders are not changed significantly
so to get OC you need to build power storage (500 hp, 240 mass, dunno about power cost, not high build time)
also OC now has more splash (12k damage to units and support coms, 800-1000 to buildings, 500 to commanders)

4) air scout got significantly buffed, it has lower cost, higher speed, radar and sonar.
after death it still scouts with it wreck flying somewhere
sera air scout is different, after death it can see area where it died for 20 seconds

5)1v1 meta on 5 km land map - on smaller map you just spam t1 for pretty long time, but if map allows your tanks to run away from acu you can still go t2 pretty fast but you can die to enemy acu just pushing with arty and OC.
on 5-10 km maps people 95% of time will go t2 or fast t2 land and spam OP t2 tanks/sera t2 bots,
ACU still can be good but if you do not have enought t2 by yourself all your t1 gonna die fast and you may no able to OC fast enought to kill t2 units, then game slowly goes to t3, and 1rst t3 units that were made usually will be used in some kind of drop. But tbh it is hard to tell any meta, cause it is also different for every faction, obviosly aeon will go for t3 pretty fast for example...

6) support commmanders rebalance.
- you now can have preupgraided support commanders being build in gateway, so if you use adjustency... upgraides will also be cheaper xD
- they got buffed and rebalanced to have lower cost and be little less stronger, so you can get them earlyer
- they are fast, they can build and reclaim, they can fight t3 bots and some can fight exp as well (uef sera only can be efffective against exp i think)
- you can also drop them on transport that makes them super OP
- you better try them, they are fun, but be carefull and don't get overcharged

i would also mention t3 mobile aa, sparky, chrono dampener, area regen for sera, shield stack nerf, naval reclaim, teleport snipe nerf (you can see it coming), harbs reclime on patrol... but i ran out of time
let some one else explain team game meta anyway...

[Dragonfire]

backlink:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8807&start=10#p84961

[Col_Walter_Kurtz]

Welcome back. I've had a similar experience only finding out about FAF a few months ago. I'm very much enjoying FA again!