You forgot to include resale markup for the tier1 weapons. The Tier1 weapons should definitely be stronger- to the tune of at least 30%, preferably more. In addition, the starting units for each empire are too strong. In addition, there is not enough terrain which allows you to circumvent outposts.
See, here's the fundamental problem with the weapons (except the tier-related balance). There are no effective skills for chasing the enemy into enemy territory, unless you are already completely dominant. This is because, principally, there are so many factional units with such high health, you will never, ever get a shot off at your opponent, and secondly, they do so much damage that except at endgame, or even sometimes regardless, they will instantaneously melt your face. Plus, all skills for slowing the enemy, or moving faster yourself, or targetting an enemy tank, are tremendously weak. In addition, the bounty for killing, both players and faction units is so low, in both financial and experience terms (plus the skills are so weak there's hardly any reason to rank up anyway), there is little reason to stay around in a fight. Also, the AoE weapons are bad. The Mortar is inaccurate, unreliable, and the splash isn't large enough. The flamethrower requires putting yourself in the maximally vulnerable position, and as previously mentioned, there's no way to survive. And there's no reason to do AoE damage to the enemy anyway because the rewards for killing the factional units are so poor. In addition, the Rocket Launcher is not sufficiently frontloaded. Finally, there are only about three weapons or so that have lategame combinations, and for every other weapon, you have to pay the resale markup, making their DPS/price far too low.
What you should do:
Economy:
Remove the periodic player income. It should be bounties of the units killed by the Empire units only.
Significantly increase the bounty given from all kills.
Only give experience for units you did damage to.
Tanks:
Change all skills to give uniform bonuses per point. Some or many of them can be quite schizophrenic in the benefits per point.
Increase the effectiveness of Homing Missile and Robust Structure on the SmallTank to at least 100 per skill point.
Nerf the cooldown/regen rate for all skills and items to be a maximum of 30 seconds- preferably less.
Clearly explain what the armour attribute does.
Honestly, just remove the Walker from the game. Give the EMP missile and Overdrive to the SmallTank and remove it's ultimate and armour skills. Increase their effectiveness- Overdrive should be at least 10% faster per point, if not more. EMP missile should be at least 1 second per skill point.
Remove the Warp ability. Really, if Player X has been in combat, then Player Y must have an opportunity to ambush him. The Warp ability significantly reduces the impact of high-speed high-damage low-health gameplay, because you can just sit in your outpost and warp out. Or, at least, give it a substantial cost to use.
Empire Units:
Significantly nerf the health and damage, of the starting Empire units, reduce the cost of upgrading them, and remove the automatic upgrades. In addition, nerf the amount of Empire units spawning by default. However, spawn them substantially more frequently- I'd suggest at least double the existing rate.
Remove highground vision from turrets.
Change Barracks so that they always spawn in sync with the Empire units.
Remove the secondary barracks on the up and down lanes.
Terrain:
Give players terrain which gives them a vision advantage over their enemies across nearly all parts of all lanes. This should be useful for shorter-ranged weapons (which may necessitate a global range increase). Make plenty of visual obstacles so that players in this area can be ambushed if they're not careful, and plenty of entrances so that players in this area can ambush other players in the lane.
Remove terrain (especially on the upper lane) where players can place turrets that can't be attacked from the low ground.
Remove all the destructible rocks.
Battletank:
Change self-repair to be a % of HP, with at least 100-125% at maximum level.
At least double the potency of the armour skill and health skill.
Honestly, the ultimate skill's design is just completely broken. It should be removed from the game. Replace with a skill that gives an option to suicide on to a target for, say, 100 damage per point.
Nerf starting health to about 1200.
Reduce cost to about 1200.
Walker MK2:
Replace burst-speed skill with a static speed increase skill that gives at least 5% per.
Replace EMP missile with sight range increase skill from Walker.
Replace Slowing Field with a skill that spawns a few disposable short-lived minions.
Nerf starting health to about 900.
Reduce cost to about 1100.
Siegebreaker:
Replace Instant Repair with a skill that increases the range of equipped weapons- this should be at least 3-4 at max level.
Replace EMP missile with a skill that can create a Siege Tank. The Siege Tank has a long range (~12) and fairly hefty damage, but relatively low health. The Siege Tank is permanent and can only target structures.
Replace Slowing Field with a skill that increases health regeneration substantially for all nearby friendly units.
Buff the default speed to the same as the Walker MK2.
Lasertank:
Change the laser to be more akin to a Void Ray- it starts off low, but increases over time. The laser's damage should increase per level, not the duration. The duration should be at least 6 or so seconds I would say by default.
Replace Shield Generator with a Stimpack style ability.
Change Immortal Shield to be Invisibility Cloak.
Buff default speed to same as Battletank.
Items:
Buff all Tier 1 and Tier 2 weapons across the board by at least 30%- preferably more.
Increase the splash radius of the Mortar, and increase it's range to at least 14. Units hit by a Mortar are now slightly slowed- 10-20%.
Give the Flamethrower a damage over time attribute- just 5-10DPS for the T1 variety.
Unify the weapon tiers so that all weapons have the same tiers.
Create items that can repair towers.
Change the Detection item so that it can scan with a cooldown- say, 10 sec scan, 20 sec cooldown. Make all Empire buildings and player-placed towers Detectors.
Really, I think in addition, the whole Armour system needs an overhaul. It's simply unclear what the point of this is, and the effectiveness of Armour is undecidable.
Principally, what I would say is that the process *can* be automated, and therefore should be. But in practice, what I'm also going to say is that I've had quite a few experiences where the hotkey simply doesn't work- you push the button and nothing happens. Not to mention that the hotkey is NumPad 2 or something.. that's a mile away from the normal hotkeys and I hope you're not on a laptop keyboard.
As for the weapons, well, you're wrong. 3x Tier 1 weapon does 162 damage every 1.4 seconds, so 115.7 DPS. A single Tier 3 weapon is 96DPS. Now, when you consider that if you want to combine- which you do because there's no way you can stack Tier 1 weapons even if you think the combined are bad DPS/moneys- you have to pay a 30% markup for the resale price, the DPS per cost is actually higher for the Tier 3 weapon, as the price for the Tier 1 weapons is 2500 to 1750- way more than the DPS difference. That's also why Tier 2 weapons suck- they don't offer very high DPS for initial cost AND you lose money on the resale.
Then you come to the combined weapon. 3x89 for 4,900 or 3x98 for 5250? 0.056dps/mineral or 0.0544dps/mineral? Certainly not what I'd describe as a substantial difference- especially when you can combine further with green burst but not with three green lasers. Blue burst actually gives more DPS/mineral than a tier4 laser. And, of course, the two bursts cheaply combine into rainbow.
Right, but one item sucks a huge amount of balls compared to one gun. So the guy with the money boost can effectively have three guns, you can only have one, and the items are not very much help at all. Plus, because it takes so long to get from A to B, it's very hard to team up most of the time- especially at the beginning, when the rocks block the paths between the lanes.
Oh, and did I mention that the Tier 2 weapons are a hilariously bad pile of crap? 2x Tier 1 weapon is far superior. And the Tier 2 weapons don't combine, and the combinations are way stronger than non-combined weapons of the same price.
Also, did I mention that the requirements for the weapon combinations are completely inconsistent? It's rather annoying.
Also, the weapon combinations require way too many "slush slots" to store their reagents. You should be able to buy (for a slightly higher price) the final product.
In addition, the repair item should activate automatically if you are about to die and it is ready to use.
You should also remove the rocks that block the paths between the lanes. They just get in the way and remove potentially interesting gameplay.
The game time is a function of the fact that the defences *start out* too strong, so the beginning units are useless against them. Only the heaviest tanks/army units can destroy them. But, realistically, the fact that the attacking army gets nearly twice the income from having all the outposts should be more than enough to breach the defenders. There's nothing wrong with the defences losing potency over the course of the game, if they're not impossible to destroy early, and, you should be able to pay to increase their potency. What I'd favour is nerf their HP fairly hard, but change most of it into shields. That way they are a buffer, not a mountain.
Edit: Also, the money you receive from the faction does not appear to take into account the number of players. It should simply be the bounty of all the units that faction has killed, split evenly between the number of players.
In addition, the game already splits up the money from left players- the map simply gives *extra* money. This is another reason why some leavers give way more than others.
Here's the principle reason leavers unbalance the game. When your ally leaves, you don't get his item value in money. So
If Team 1 has a player leave right at the start of the game, they get 1750 split between them.
If team 2 has a player leave after he spends all his money, they get nothing.
Secondly, the higher-tier items are just WTFStronger than the lower tier items. This especially means that if your enemy gets a large chunk of extra change, you get nothing. This is especially bad because the starting money after tank is 1250- not enough to buy two tier1 guns, but enough for a tier3 gun with a small amount extra. The amount should be increased to 1300 so you can buy two tier1 guns or one gun and an item.
The amount given should be (Player's money + Raw value of player's items) * resale rate (70% atm I believe).
A few other balance issues:
The longbow laser is clearly the best weapon in the game. It's weak against shields but almost all enemies have much higher health than shields. The range is just way too strong because it's easy to stack so much damage, your opponent can't possibly reach you before you total him.
In addition, stacking armour and health is woefully underpowered- not to mention there is no way to know how much damage reduce you get for armour.
The recharge times on many skills are way too high, and the way they don't reset when you die is really bad. No skill or item should cool down in more than about 20-30 seconds. In addition, their effect is way too low. Speed increase of 3%? Seriously? Or a health recharge of 100-500 on a 2,300 health tank. The skills should have way more impact. Except for the ultimate of the Battletank, which is massively overpowered. Along this line, the respawn times are often way too long, and the shield recharge times are also too long.
The outpost turrets are way OP at the start of the game. The early tanks just don't make a dent in them. It's virtually impossible to recapture an outpost you lost. Even if you put multiple teammembers in one lane. Later in the game they are a joke. Their health should scale more appropriately.
The lanes have way too much dead space in them. Even in one of the fastest tanks, half the time I'm just running from A to B.
The rewards for killing players are also way too low. You make many kills but barely get a couple thousand minerals for it. They need to be increased, and they also need to scale better.
It's hard to judge when to wait and when to attack, because there's no indication of when your faction will send you money. There should be a timer on it.
Finally, there are some places on the map on the highground near each faction's bases where you can place turrets due to your own giving highground vision, but can never be killed as there is no "scan" item to see up cliffs for such things.
Edit:
Oh, and one last thing. The Zerg should have more of an incentive to be attacked. Right now, they are more like a stupid tax. "You were stupid enough to go around killing Queens? Now the zerg attack you!". There's really no reason to attack the Zerg. There should be, say, significant monetary rewards for killing Queens, or the best items only accessible by killing them.
I'm a big fan of building more of the army units, but they need to spawn in sync with the regular ones.
In addition, the base defences do not benefit from army upgrades.
0
Anywhere I can see the full patch notes for 4.0 and 4.1? B.Net seems to have a cutoff point for the patch notes where I can't see anymore.
0
Being able to change the rax lane would be nice.
0
You forgot to include resale markup for the tier1 weapons. The Tier1 weapons should definitely be stronger- to the tune of at least 30%, preferably more. In addition, the starting units for each empire are too strong. In addition, there is not enough terrain which allows you to circumvent outposts.
See, here's the fundamental problem with the weapons (except the tier-related balance). There are no effective skills for chasing the enemy into enemy territory, unless you are already completely dominant. This is because, principally, there are so many factional units with such high health, you will never, ever get a shot off at your opponent, and secondly, they do so much damage that except at endgame, or even sometimes regardless, they will instantaneously melt your face. Plus, all skills for slowing the enemy, or moving faster yourself, or targetting an enemy tank, are tremendously weak. In addition, the bounty for killing, both players and faction units is so low, in both financial and experience terms (plus the skills are so weak there's hardly any reason to rank up anyway), there is little reason to stay around in a fight. Also, the AoE weapons are bad. The Mortar is inaccurate, unreliable, and the splash isn't large enough. The flamethrower requires putting yourself in the maximally vulnerable position, and as previously mentioned, there's no way to survive. And there's no reason to do AoE damage to the enemy anyway because the rewards for killing the factional units are so poor. In addition, the Rocket Launcher is not sufficiently frontloaded. Finally, there are only about three weapons or so that have lategame combinations, and for every other weapon, you have to pay the resale markup, making their DPS/price far too low.
What you should do:
Economy:
Remove the periodic player income. It should be bounties of the units killed by the Empire units only.
Significantly increase the bounty given from all kills.
Only give experience for units you did damage to.
Tanks:
Change all skills to give uniform bonuses per point. Some or many of them can be quite schizophrenic in the benefits per point.
Increase the effectiveness of Homing Missile and Robust Structure on the SmallTank to at least 100 per skill point.
Nerf the cooldown/regen rate for all skills and items to be a maximum of 30 seconds- preferably less.
Clearly explain what the armour attribute does.
Honestly, just remove the Walker from the game. Give the EMP missile and Overdrive to the SmallTank and remove it's ultimate and armour skills. Increase their effectiveness- Overdrive should be at least 10% faster per point, if not more. EMP missile should be at least 1 second per skill point.
Remove the Warp ability. Really, if Player X has been in combat, then Player Y must have an opportunity to ambush him. The Warp ability significantly reduces the impact of high-speed high-damage low-health gameplay, because you can just sit in your outpost and warp out. Or, at least, give it a substantial cost to use.
Empire Units:
Significantly nerf the health and damage, of the starting Empire units, reduce the cost of upgrading them, and remove the automatic upgrades. In addition, nerf the amount of Empire units spawning by default. However, spawn them substantially more frequently- I'd suggest at least double the existing rate.
Remove highground vision from turrets.
Change Barracks so that they always spawn in sync with the Empire units.
Remove the secondary barracks on the up and down lanes.
Terrain:
Give players terrain which gives them a vision advantage over their enemies across nearly all parts of all lanes. This should be useful for shorter-ranged weapons (which may necessitate a global range increase). Make plenty of visual obstacles so that players in this area can be ambushed if they're not careful, and plenty of entrances so that players in this area can ambush other players in the lane.
Remove terrain (especially on the upper lane) where players can place turrets that can't be attacked from the low ground.
Remove all the destructible rocks.
Battletank:
Change self-repair to be a % of HP, with at least 100-125% at maximum level.
At least double the potency of the armour skill and health skill.
Honestly, the ultimate skill's design is just completely broken. It should be removed from the game. Replace with a skill that gives an option to suicide on to a target for, say, 100 damage per point.
Nerf starting health to about 1200.
Reduce cost to about 1200.
Walker MK2:
Replace burst-speed skill with a static speed increase skill that gives at least 5% per.
Replace EMP missile with sight range increase skill from Walker.
Replace Slowing Field with a skill that spawns a few disposable short-lived minions.
Nerf starting health to about 900.
Reduce cost to about 1100.
Siegebreaker:
Replace Instant Repair with a skill that increases the range of equipped weapons- this should be at least 3-4 at max level.
Replace EMP missile with a skill that can create a Siege Tank. The Siege Tank has a long range (~12) and fairly hefty damage, but relatively low health. The Siege Tank is permanent and can only target structures.
Replace Slowing Field with a skill that increases health regeneration substantially for all nearby friendly units.
Buff the default speed to the same as the Walker MK2.
Lasertank:
Change the laser to be more akin to a Void Ray- it starts off low, but increases over time. The laser's damage should increase per level, not the duration. The duration should be at least 6 or so seconds I would say by default.
Replace Shield Generator with a Stimpack style ability.
Change Immortal Shield to be Invisibility Cloak.
Buff default speed to same as Battletank.
Items:
Buff all Tier 1 and Tier 2 weapons across the board by at least 30%- preferably more.
Increase the splash radius of the Mortar, and increase it's range to at least 14. Units hit by a Mortar are now slightly slowed- 10-20%.
Give the Flamethrower a damage over time attribute- just 5-10DPS for the T1 variety.
Unify the weapon tiers so that all weapons have the same tiers.
Create items that can repair towers.
Change the Detection item so that it can scan with a cooldown- say, 10 sec scan, 20 sec cooldown. Make all Empire buildings and player-placed towers Detectors.
Really, I think in addition, the whole Armour system needs an overhaul. It's simply unclear what the point of this is, and the effectiveness of Armour is undecidable.
0
Principally, what I would say is that the process *can* be automated, and therefore should be. But in practice, what I'm also going to say is that I've had quite a few experiences where the hotkey simply doesn't work- you push the button and nothing happens. Not to mention that the hotkey is NumPad 2 or something.. that's a mile away from the normal hotkeys and I hope you're not on a laptop keyboard.
As for the weapons, well, you're wrong. 3x Tier 1 weapon does 162 damage every 1.4 seconds, so 115.7 DPS. A single Tier 3 weapon is 96DPS. Now, when you consider that if you want to combine- which you do because there's no way you can stack Tier 1 weapons even if you think the combined are bad DPS/moneys- you have to pay a 30% markup for the resale price, the DPS per cost is actually higher for the Tier 3 weapon, as the price for the Tier 1 weapons is 2500 to 1750- way more than the DPS difference. That's also why Tier 2 weapons suck- they don't offer very high DPS for initial cost AND you lose money on the resale.
Then you come to the combined weapon. 3x89 for 4,900 or 3x98 for 5250? 0.056dps/mineral or 0.0544dps/mineral? Certainly not what I'd describe as a substantial difference- especially when you can combine further with green burst but not with three green lasers. Blue burst actually gives more DPS/mineral than a tier4 laser. And, of course, the two bursts cheaply combine into rainbow.
0
Right, but one item sucks a huge amount of balls compared to one gun. So the guy with the money boost can effectively have three guns, you can only have one, and the items are not very much help at all. Plus, because it takes so long to get from A to B, it's very hard to team up most of the time- especially at the beginning, when the rocks block the paths between the lanes.
Oh, and did I mention that the Tier 2 weapons are a hilariously bad pile of crap? 2x Tier 1 weapon is far superior. And the Tier 2 weapons don't combine, and the combinations are way stronger than non-combined weapons of the same price.
Also, did I mention that the requirements for the weapon combinations are completely inconsistent? It's rather annoying.
Also, the weapon combinations require way too many "slush slots" to store their reagents. You should be able to buy (for a slightly higher price) the final product.
In addition, the repair item should activate automatically if you are about to die and it is ready to use.
You should also remove the rocks that block the paths between the lanes. They just get in the way and remove potentially interesting gameplay.
The game time is a function of the fact that the defences *start out* too strong, so the beginning units are useless against them. Only the heaviest tanks/army units can destroy them. But, realistically, the fact that the attacking army gets nearly twice the income from having all the outposts should be more than enough to breach the defenders. There's nothing wrong with the defences losing potency over the course of the game, if they're not impossible to destroy early, and, you should be able to pay to increase their potency. What I'd favour is nerf their HP fairly hard, but change most of it into shields. That way they are a buffer, not a mountain.
Edit: Also, the money you receive from the faction does not appear to take into account the number of players. It should simply be the bounty of all the units that faction has killed, split evenly between the number of players.
In addition, the game already splits up the money from left players- the map simply gives *extra* money. This is another reason why some leavers give way more than others.
0
Here's the principle reason leavers unbalance the game. When your ally leaves, you don't get his item value in money. So
If Team 1 has a player leave right at the start of the game, they get 1750 split between them. If team 2 has a player leave after he spends all his money, they get nothing.
Secondly, the higher-tier items are just WTFStronger than the lower tier items. This especially means that if your enemy gets a large chunk of extra change, you get nothing. This is especially bad because the starting money after tank is 1250- not enough to buy two tier1 guns, but enough for a tier3 gun with a small amount extra. The amount should be increased to 1300 so you can buy two tier1 guns or one gun and an item.
The amount given should be (Player's money + Raw value of player's items) * resale rate (70% atm I believe).
A few other balance issues:
The longbow laser is clearly the best weapon in the game. It's weak against shields but almost all enemies have much higher health than shields. The range is just way too strong because it's easy to stack so much damage, your opponent can't possibly reach you before you total him.
In addition, stacking armour and health is woefully underpowered- not to mention there is no way to know how much damage reduce you get for armour.
The recharge times on many skills are way too high, and the way they don't reset when you die is really bad. No skill or item should cool down in more than about 20-30 seconds. In addition, their effect is way too low. Speed increase of 3%? Seriously? Or a health recharge of 100-500 on a 2,300 health tank. The skills should have way more impact. Except for the ultimate of the Battletank, which is massively overpowered. Along this line, the respawn times are often way too long, and the shield recharge times are also too long.
The outpost turrets are way OP at the start of the game. The early tanks just don't make a dent in them. It's virtually impossible to recapture an outpost you lost. Even if you put multiple teammembers in one lane. Later in the game they are a joke. Their health should scale more appropriately.
The lanes have way too much dead space in them. Even in one of the fastest tanks, half the time I'm just running from A to B.
The rewards for killing players are also way too low. You make many kills but barely get a couple thousand minerals for it. They need to be increased, and they also need to scale better.
It's hard to judge when to wait and when to attack, because there's no indication of when your faction will send you money. There should be a timer on it.
Finally, there are some places on the map on the highground near each faction's bases where you can place turrets due to your own giving highground vision, but can never be killed as there is no "scan" item to see up cliffs for such things.
Edit:
Oh, and one last thing. The Zerg should have more of an incentive to be attacked. Right now, they are more like a stupid tax. "You were stupid enough to go around killing Queens? Now the zerg attack you!". There's really no reason to attack the Zerg. There should be, say, significant monetary rewards for killing Queens, or the best items only accessible by killing them.
I'm a big fan of building more of the army units, but they need to spawn in sync with the regular ones.
In addition, the base defences do not benefit from army upgrades.