Sim_Kill

Join Date 06/2009

Serious inherent fault with Substrate design

I had not played with substrate at all over the last 2 months from getting this game, and after getting pwned by substrate over and over again, I decided to turn to the dark side and see why I always lost. It wasn't difficult to see why.

On my first game, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I thought I was building T2 when I was building a dreadnought, guessed at what T1 units I should be building and buffed my economy same as I always do with PHC, then when I could afford it and realised how to build normal T2, I just built 1 T2 of each unit on repeat, but by that time the game was already over. I'd wiped out my opponent with a score of 4 to 1.

'Beginners luck' I thought. I played again. This time a 2v2. Again, I had little idea what I was doing. I did exactly the same thing as before, only more coherently, and my opponents lost pretty quickly. I even had time to charge across the map and target my strongest opponent head on. He didn't have a chance. My dread and T1 army just rolled over everything like some godlike unstoppable force.

'Luck... Again.' I thought. So I go to bed. 2 days later, I play again. A 1v1. I mess my start up a little after my nexus refused to be selectable for the first 5 seconds, but it didn't matter. I built similarly to before, only slightly restructured due to lack of resources, and won. Again.

I'd like to stress, at this point I still don't know what any of the strengths and weaknesses of my forces are. I employ no tactics, just build and bulldoze.

I play again. A 3v3. I do exactly the same thing. The smartest of my opponents hit me with a bombing run, vs no air defence whatsoever apart from some T1 units floating around, that I don't even know what look like to redeploy from the main army. So I go to my assemblies, and start pumping out air...

And there is the problem. Mid game, I changed my strategy at absolutely no loss to myself whatsoever. I kill his air and continue to bulldoze 2 of my enemies basis, again, bulldozing everything. At no point in any of these games did I have to take a step back and check was I was doing. I didn't have to plan, I didn't have to employ teamwork, I just bulldozed. And when my enemy did effectively counter using a strategy I had no defence again, all I had to do was stop building T1 units at a few factories and kill the air force with fresh air units.

This is bullshit. Absolute bullshit. There is no way in hell that it's fair for PHC to need 3 different kind of factories to build all the different units (except dreads), and Substrate only needs 1 type of factory factory. Substrates agility to counter any attack with no planning whatsoever is utter bullshit. Not only that, I won all 4 games and I don't even know why. I have no idea what the T1 or T2 units were good at and barely used orbitals at all, and I won hands down every time. I don't even need a strategy; Substrate units seem to have a built in 'I Win' button. It's utter madness.

I have now returned to refusing to use Substrate until they are fixed. They need at least a separate air factory and some all round nerfing.

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Well I would think flexibility of composition is one of Substrates main differences/advantages, along with shields that regenerate over time. The PHC's strengths would be mobile artillery and healing. If everyone is using those strenghths to max effectiveness, maybe its balanced. Or maybe its not. I think you need more than 3 data points. Stardock has all the match outcomes so they can probably munge the data to figure it out.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2416

I am glad to see someone who thinks the Substrate are OP.

Most of the top players play exclusively PHC.

I very much wish the Substrate were a "I win" race to get people to play them more.

There will be many arguments over the coming years over which race is better. Just like StarCraft players regularly complain about Protoss (or as I call them, the tutorial race).

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psychoak

Join Date 07/2007

+225

One thing with the Substrate in their current design is that they can't scale up with a larger, longer game where you'll gain an edge by building up high level dreadnoughts. You really can't use a Savager over the long term with anything approaching the impact of the Prometheus, many of it's upgrades will have to go into repair to get all that hull back since that's it's primary survivability. The Retributor isn't much better, and even the Overmind is still stuck with over a fourth of it's points in a non-regenerative context. Combining PHC's repair with them makes the dreadnoughts and cruisers massively more effective.

Since the ranked matches are on smaller maps, and often end without even using dreadnoughts to start with, their end game problem isn't even factoring.

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These topics are always quite funny. Someone's random anecdotal mucking about in a few games and suddenly a flash of insight with sweeping generalizations on game balance!!

Last I checked the current #1 player in 1v1 plays PHC pretty much exclusively.

Each side has pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses - you're just touching on 1 of the substrate strengths here (point about factories). My suggestion would be to not base balance impressions on random custom game opponents but to instead start playing the 1v1 ladder. That is really the best way to get an accurate impression.

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I prefer to alternate between Substrate and PHC. (Can I repeat my request for "Random" as a faction option? I don't like having to choose)

Previously, I would have called PHC OP, which had both engineer drop and incursion allowing very cheap and quick rapid expansion and super cheese. The recent nerf to incursion, and significant improvement to Substrates Avatar has balanced the playing field with both factions able to expand effectively.

I have been playing around a lot with scenarios scripting test battles. Putting equally priced forces of PHC against Substrate together head-to-head. PHC win on a unit value perspective. However, Substrates advantage with economic Boosts abilities knocks the proportional unit value out of comparison and gives them an overall advantage.

With up coming hints that have been given, (such as PHC refinery) which will improve PHC's economy and add additional counters, should balance this out quite a bit. But I would expect the scales will keep swaying back and forth as each patch iteration is made.

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Quoting Ekko_Tek,

reply 4

These topics are always quite funny. Someone's random anecdotal mucking about in a few games and suddenly a flash of insight with sweeping generalizations on game balance!!

Last I checked the current #1 player in 1v1 plays PHC pretty much exclusively.

Each side has pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses - you're just touching on 1 of the substrate strengths here (point about factories). My suggestion would be to not base balance impressions on random custom game opponents but to instead start playing the 1v1 ladder. That is really the best way to get an accurate impression.

I play a lot of 1v1 ranked matches, all as PHC. I got to rank 5 and seem to be hovering around that figure. I haven't had enough game time to really challenge that. Also, claims that rank players use PHC exclusively, I've never seen that. I've only ever been matched against top ranking players that play substrate. A couple of them told me they only ever use substrate because they are overpowered for this particular version. I said I knew and that's why I avoided them, and he said and if you want to win you can't play fair.

I'll play 1v1 as substrate for the sake of testing to see if I can get higher easier than I could with PHC and report back.

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@Sim_Kill - OK, I see. You can check in the rankings to see what faction players use the most. Recently the Avatar has been the most OP aspect of Substrate and it received a couple nerfs in this recent patch. A lot of the higher ranked players liked to consistently (ab)use multiple avatars combined with a quick bomber and this can be really hard to counter. Certain smaller maps really favour PHC and rushing though imo. Aside from tweaking some unit stats like with the Avatar, I think you'll find that design wise the Substrate are not OP across the board and have several disadvantages/weaknesses - lack of hp healing for example.

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I would like to reference a few other games where the flexibility of a given race is much higher than AotS's Substrate:

- Starcraft => Zerg - Larvae - morphs into all units - 0 to max units in 20 seconds is possible.

- Grey Goo => Goo - Small/Medium Protean morphs into anything anywhere on the map & has combat ability & all terrain maneuverability.

The production capacity's flexibility is an obvious thing to give or take between different races. It is common and seen in other games. The side that benefits from it has strong reactive potential.
The difficulty I see with most PHC players is that once they build a production building they feel obliged to always use it. While the Substrate player transitions almost seamlessly from T1 to T2 and throws in the occasional round of air, the PHC players often keep producing from T1 factories even after T2 is available and possible to amass.

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Quoting Gianttbg,

reply 8

the PHC players often keep producing from T1 factories even after T2 is available and possible to amass.

This is often a good thing up to a point. T2 requires radioactives, if there is left over metal for T1, it is more often better spent than horded. T1 units are still effective against T2 which don't target them effectively and are cheap cannon fodder, making them excellent stocking-stuffers when you just don't know what to get.

Not all maps have the same resource balance, some are lean on radioactive supply which favours T1 production.

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I apologise for bad English but at this state the game is totally imbalanced in many ways.

The new patch made it even worse.

The new changes made it even difficult to play vs completely newcomers.

Does it make the game better if air could lose nearly instantly all hitpoints by stopping the opponont from expanding while there spawn neutral anti air -> so that is not even a possibility now -> too much effort for too much risk -> one less opportunity :/

In fact air is absolutely weak and not worth the minerals. On question: Why does ground anti air kill the air so impressively fast and fighters need minutes for that and then get raped by passing neutral anti air by following bombers which needs minutes... There exsist an argument for that but not like it is now with your beautiful raping neutral anti air. That just forces the player to micro that fighters with the effect that you reach your destination by maybe raped air units with a few hp left. Sorry but that is absolutly bullshit especially if you call your game not micro intensive.

The balance in the midgame playing PHC vs Sub is just not fair. If you do not scout that the opponent mades "Drohnenschwarm" (German name for that) you will just lose even if you have static defense vs air. And now you have problems with scouting by neutrals having anti air. I dont see a situation where sub has to scout in a similar way.

Your new unit is just a waste of quanta.

In order to make your game more interesting: let us build defense faster for the same cost in order to hold an attack which would be very intensive but at the state now its extremly difficult to have a comeback and thats just frustrating and bullshit. That is the same mistake they made with stracraft2 in comparison to broodwar but its not as problematic as in ashes. This is in fact really needed because of the costs of the engineers now.

Some maps does really have balancing problems concerning the new "Drohnenschwarm" unit as a neutral with the old balancing problems of the maps still exsits. One example: on a symetric map neutrals attack the nearby regenerator by you capping and on the opposite position they do not. Because of such things you lose the game because your opponent has the "good" regenerator... If you cannot create maps manually simply build a symmetric function for creating maps.

I am tired to talk about obvious problems.

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Quoting DasUnding,

reply 10

I apologise for bad English but at this state the game is totally imbalanced in many ways.

The new patch made it even worse.

The new changes made it even difficult to play vs completely newcomers.

Does it make the game better if air could lose nearly instantly all hitpoints by stopping the opponont from expanding while there spawn neutral anti air -> so that is not even a possibility now -> too much effort for too much risk -> one less opportunity :/

In fact air is absolutely weak and not worth the minerals. On question: Why does ground anti air kill the air so impressively fast and fighters need minutes for that and then get raped by passing neutral anti air by following bombers which needs minutes... There exsist an argument for that but not like it is now with your beautiful raping neutral anti air. That just forces the player to micro that fighters with the effect that you reach your destination by maybe raped air units with a few hp left. Sorry but that is absolutly bullshit especially if you call your game not micro intensive.

The balance in the midgame playing PHC vs Sub is just not fair. If you do not scout that the opponent mades "Drohnenschwarm" (German name for that) you will just lose even if you have static defense vs air. And now you have problems with scouting by neutrals having anti air. I dont see a situation where sub has to scout in a similar way.

Your new unit is just a waste of quanta.

In order to make your game more interesting: let us build defense faster for the same cost in order to hold an attack which would be very intensive but at the state now its extremly difficult to have a comeback and thats just frustrating and bullshit. That is the same mistake they made with stracraft2 in comparison to broodwar but its not as problematic as in ashes. This is in fact really needed because of the costs of the engineers now.

Some maps does really have balancing problems concerning the new "Drohnenschwarm" unit as a neutral with the old balancing problems of the maps still exsits. One example: on a symetric map neutrals attack the nearby regenerator by you capping and on the opposite position they do not. Because of such things you lose the game because your opponent has the "good" regenerator... If you cannot create maps manually simply build a symmetric function for creating maps.

I am tired to talk about obvious problems.

As far as air and neutrals is concerned, I've never once tried to take over a neutral base with air. I am finding the difficulty level of mid game neutrals a little challenging, but that's purely because I haven't adjusted my neutral cap tactics since the patch before last where millions of creeps and a T2 was introduced. That's fine though, that was a good change as previously neutrals only really had an effect in the first 5 minutes then after that they may not have been there at all.

One thing that does **** me off with air is their complete inability to attack the target they are told to attack (these are the PHC fighters I'm talking about) due to circling a ground target and failing to get the target in its sights in order to shoot at it, then when they do face in the right direction (eventually) half the time they cant fire because they've already offloaded their weapons on something I did not tell them to shoot at and are in the middle of a reload cycle

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The British in Company of heroes 1 (and to a slightly lesser extent 2) take the cake as most unfixably broken faction in an RTS ever as far as I'm concerned.

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