Expansive are too Overpowered on this patch in my opinion and some other players i talked with agreed.
Last week i played alot of games with Teri and forevergm and Teri won most of it playing with Expansive. How did he do it? Well he went straight to Offworlds which the expansive players can make easily, because it only costs 200 steel (excluding chips,glass). With thoses relative cheap offworlds and the Extra claim Bonus which the expansive have ((4 extra claims in total and if you found late you will get 1 extra) Excluding the claims that can be bought on Auction or Blackmarket). looking at the Replays on what teri's build order was and implanting it as my own, i have crushed every player any since. i am now on a 10 winstreak just by going straight to offworlds and thoses players i was up against weren't the easiest ones half of the time. (i am playing FFA 4+)
Solution: i think it is better to take the Special bonusses off from every faction to the Special buildings. Expansive needs to pay 400 steel atleast per Offworld. And on a sidenote i don't like that Scientific gets the Time reduction on a destroyed offworld.(Could be that it is has a Halved Rescource rebuild cost but i am not sure)
With the extra claims and the halved rescource cost of an Offworld, i feel like(not only me) that Expansives are a bit to strong.
It would really depend on the situation and black market items... though yeah, maybe Expansive colonies should have slightly more expensive Offworlds than present.
I disagree, in my experience OW success with expansive is highly dependent on prices as well as circumstances on world.
I completely agree with DeathTacticus that expansive is overpowered right now in beta 5. I've tried playing other HQs but when I play against the better players 9 times out of 10 it's the expansive HQ that wins.
Since offworlds are so important to victory these days I'd like to see a little more parity between the HQ's in terms of setup costs. As DeathTacticus suggested make it 400 steel for all HQ's to set up an offworld (and scav still at 600 since you can mine carbon directly).
Cubit has a good point in that offworld prices aren't always good but most of the time at least 1 resource is worth at least $45k thus making it critical to get to offworlds quickly. Expansive is the only HQ that can really do that because of the number of claims they have and the decreased steel cost. Combine that with the fact that there are times when the EMP and power surges aren't available and expansive gets an easy victory with those conditions (another pet peeve of mine...you should never not have either an EMP, power surge, or slowdown strike in the BM).
I agree that expansive are more powerful than the other factions right now, but I heavily disagree with your solution. This is because you have to ask yourself why are expansive now ontop? They used to be weaker than the other factions, what changed? I think this changed because of 2 things: black market and engineering labs. A lot of the time these days, you'll have 2 or 0 ways to attack an offworld. This naturally makes offworlds mroe steamrolly, and as a result scavenger gets weaker, they cannot competwe in the offworld race against an expansive. There are rare times though where there's 1 or even 3 ways to attack an offworld. If there's only 1 way there is no goon squads so they can just pick apart undefended offworlds at their leisure and proceed to odminate the entire game, and if there's more than 2 they can just throw inexpensive things at the goon squads. Another difference is eingineering labs. They got nerfed incredibly hard, which was necissary, but before that scientific were dominant. Their half research time was causing them to dominate everything, so it got removed. Then it turned out that they weren't the problem, the engineering labs were, so that got nerfed too, however scientific didn't get their halved research times back. This means late-game they have to rely on offworlds too. Finally, holograms. Now that they don't have a BM cooldown people are using them more, and realising they are absolutly amazing. For every person who buys a hologram 3 other people need to buy a spy to counter it. This leads to peopel not wanting to buy spies in the first place because they can become too expensive too quickly. If spy isn't on the rotation then god help you, now offworlds are almost unattackable. People use holograms with the hacker array as well, and it actually makes the hacker array worthwhile, but I'd rather have a worse hacker array than have too good offworlds.
Simply put, when the best option is offworlds, expansive will win. This does not mean offworlds need nerfing, this means other things need buffing.
what changed is that EMPs and Power Surges are now a rare thing and not a reliable counter to expansive any more.
All these conditions make expansive more viable bit by bit:-No EMPs or power surges-resources are spread out-high OW prices-resources aren't in triangles-geothermal spots are present-no black market claims
I still heavily disagree witb nerfing expansive. In my experience they're not OP (in 1v1, dunno bout FFA but who cares about FFA anyway )
When certain conditions are met, each faction can be OP. There's too much randomness involved. It used to be only the map and offworld prices, now we also have a random black market pool. Which kinda screwed everything, to be honest. I like the variety, but I dislike the fact that BM has such a huge impact on your founding choices. Sometimes even more than available resources. IMO, this should never be the case.
Anyway, I agree that expansive is strong. However, I am biased. I love them, always have. I also agree, that they are not the problem. The problem is you have less tools to counter them, as others mentioned already. If we're guaranteed to have at least one BM item with wide area effect and 1 item to attack an OW, they won't feel nearly as OP.
Did expansive win any of the FFA's we played last night?
My issue with this is that more times than not SOMETHING in the offworld is highly priced thus making offworlds important every game no matter what. You have all those resources available that can be viable and there's bound to be something you can launch off for big profits. The extra claims combined with the easily affordable offworlds is too much to overcome. The map isn't always kind to founding scavenger to keep expansive in check. The game shouldn't be designed around someone having to black market someone to keep them honest.
Just to recap for the sake of discussion expansive gets:
At this point you have to assume offworlds are going to be good. If you're wrong and they're terrible expansive HQ's still have enough advantages in sheer amount of territory to make up the difference and still win. It's an even greater advantage if they found last and buy cheap claims on the BM. More claims = more triangles = more efficiency.
In the comparison of hacker array vs offworlds (arguably the 2 strongest special buildings right now imo) offworlds are stronger hands down. Hacker arrays can easily be defeated via spy to find out what they're hacking. A spy will only let you know where the offworld is but you can't capitalize on the knowledge unless you shut it down. As long as expansive has an advantage in setting up offworlds it will continue to be dominant over other HQ's.
I wonder if this discussion breaks down into who likes playing expansive vs those that prefer other HQ's. For some reason people that play expansive a lot seem to not want it nerfed.
Double post!
Don't you wonder why would anyone prefer other HQ's if expansive is so OP?
At this point you have to assume offworlds are going to be good. If you're wrong and they're terrible expansive HQ's still have enough advantages in sheer amount of territory to make up the difference and still win. It's an even greater advantage if they found last and buy cheap claims on the BM. More claims = more triangles = more efficiency.In the comparison of hacker array vs offworlds (arguably the 2 strongest special buildings right now imo) offworlds are stronger hands down. Hacker arrays can easily be defeated via spy to find out what they're hacking. A spy will only let you know where the offworld is but you can't capitalize on the knowledge unless you shut it down. As long as expansive has an advantage in setting up offworlds it will continue to be dominant over other HQ's.
Something should be highly priced offworld so that offworlds are consistantly a viable option. Offworlds are not the problem. I think we have hit a design disagreement here, I want every special building to be viable. It makes sense that certain things can be more or less viable depending on the situation, and we both want some variation in what people can consider viable, but there's 2 ways to solve this issue. Either make the most viable option less viable, nerfing it, or making the lesser viable options more viable, buffing them. If you nerf something, you slow down the game. If you buff somethign, you either keep the speed the same or speed it up. This game does not want slowing down again. I also disaree with your belief that the game shouldn't be designed around the black maret. It always has been, and it's something that shoudl be designed around. If you don't design around complex features within the game that only higher level players use, then your balancing for the lesser players, and not the stronger players. The game shouldn't get more imbalanced the better you get, it should get mroe balanced.
Offworlds are a FOO strategy, that means they're easy to do and difficult to beat. All good games inherantly have a FOO strategy, such as call of duty having the grenade launcher, or Starcraft having the 4 gate. FOO strategies allow newer players to not get hopelessly pumelled into the ground by more experienced ones, raising the fun factor for everyone. You remove the FOO strategy, you remove the new blood. That does nto mean FOO strategies are never too powerful, but they do require more effort in the part of the opponent to counter than a normal strategy. Even if you have to put in more effort, in theory a FOO strategy can still be beaten everytime because you know exactly how to beat it. The problem is we cannot always coutner this FOO strategy anymore, even though we used to.
Stop thinking about just beta 5 and think about all the patches that have ever existed, take design idea's and knowledge we've learned from them all, and apply that knowledge to solve the problem. Identify where it went wrong. Here's where it went wrong: Engineering labs have been recently nerfed, and that nerf lifted a veil, showing us that this game does not ahve as solid foudnatiosn as we originalyl thought. The new black market has erroded a ton of this foundation, and it needs fixing. I still believe the black market needs to have a balance, a certain amount of offensive, defensive and a few wild cards. We do not currently have that consistency.
Think as well, what else changed. In beta 4, the black market was bugged. Power surge, EMP, nanovirus and adrenaline boost were always available. This improved consistency, improved our solid foundations. We fix that, and suddenly we haven't got ways of dealing with this FOO strategy anymore. We have no more counter-play.
Finally, let's look at a third thing changed, scientific got their research times put to normal speed. That was in resonse to beta 4's over-powered engineering labs, but now that they're nerfed scientific have a lot of trouble surviving with the introduction of pirates, magnetic storms and their late-game strategy of out-teching does not always work anymore. It still can work, I beat Zultar with it today, but it's mcuh harder to do. All of these issues errode the foundation of the game, and some of them at least need to be put back. Fixing the problem by applying a band-aid solution of nerfing the offworlds will not fix the foundations, it will just make the game worse in general, especially if mohawk decide to add even more new things.
^^ Very well put, Gameslayer.
I don't think expansive is OP. I play Robotic/Scientific. Never Expansive. That said, I rarely build off worlds. Scientific goes for tech wins (RIP research ) Robotic I go hacker array. Only after buying someone will I get off-worlds if they haven't already built them for me.
The only obnoxious thing with offworlds is that its ALWAYS life support that is highest priced. Playing as Robotic, this is a complete nuisance, as end game in a large FFA, the only reliable, high priced good is the one being launched by everyone else. Robotic then has to invest in the water supply chain to compete. Every Game.
Agree with Gameslayer. The changes to the black market certainly hurt/help certain factions differently depending which choices are available. I proposed normalizing the offensive/defensive options at one point by grouping them and then drawing from each pool, and this whole thread makes me want to re-emphasize it. There needs to be both offensive and defensive BM options in every game, otherwise its just an offworld race, which the expansive should win.
Should offworld prices fluctuate, although much more in-elastically than on-world prices? Perhaps force some end-game supply chain changes over time end game, instead of merely optimizing the highest off-world price. The only counter to a high offworld price is to be the one profitting off it the most.
I completely agree with you gameslayer. I don't think I mentioned it in my previous post. I'm not advocating nerfing offworlds and I'd also like to see some of the special buildings be a little stronger. That being said I'd still like to see a more even shot at all factions getting to them because of their prominence (which was one of the original suggestions).
I think taking the steel advantage for offworlds would be enough to bring expansive back in line (in addition to addressing the imbalance in weight of the special buildings).
All good ideas... did I hear "in line"?
Fear will keep the local systems in line.
I'll say that I think that Off-world Markets are very powerful in most games. Most of my 1v1's in quickmatches nowadays are decided by them. Any company type that is favored by the black market and finds a good founding location are almost quaranteed to win by the fact of rushing to offworlds. Getting just 15 seconds late to the OW race can kill you because every stock purchase that your opponent gets over you makes it 10-20% more expensive to start buying them yourself for each one. OW prices need to be very very low for OWs not to be valid. In games with >40K OW prices and adrenaline boost, OW racing is the only way to go because with they can not be stopped as goonsquad prices are impossible to raise fast enough in a 1v1. With goonsquads in the way, OWs are practically unstoppable 1v1.
OWs are the only major source of income. And moreover, racing to OWs at the cost of high debt is no big problem because debt still doesn't matter a lot, especially when cook the books is available.
This is all my experience with 1v1 though, I don't know anything about FFA.
In FFA onworld prices are much higher late game, especially the life support that everyone is trying to launch, thus OW are less of a cookie cutter strat. In large FFA's it can get ridiculous to the point OW are not profitable and you'd be better off scrapping them with Nanotech. Still marginal scenario, but not impossible. I had a game where I ended up with 9 idle OW's.
If you are producing whatever is being launched (highest priced offworld), then it doesn't really matter if it becomes unprofitable or not to launch, since you just sell it on world instead. The highest priced offworld will have the most on world price support, so
Speaking of end game prices, anyone else notice that the prices immediately start going crazy once players start getting bought out in an 8 person FFA?
True, but that makes OW obsolete. So the assumption whoever wins the OW race wins the game is not necessarily correct. You can capitalize on high onworld prices and still win. Ofc, in this case expansive still have an advantage due to sheer amount of claims.
Doesn't everything go crazy in 8 person FFA... from a get go?
In Beta 6, there will always be either
- Power Surge or EMP
- Mutiny or Dynamite
- Pirates or Magnetic Storm
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