Because the point is to compromise on its current stats to reduce its absurd effectiveness down such that other alternate builds and strategies become feasible (if only a little more than they are now) to counter it or to fulfill some of its role.
Increasing the cost/build time would still make it an endgame superweapon and it would still remain an inevitable must-have for any army especially to fulfill unit caps and maximise fleets. The BC in its current form would only belong if this was a supply cap based RTS.
âLearning to rush BC is easy and I donât want to have to learn something elseâ isnât a great excuseâŚ
BCs are like 2.5x the hp and 5x the DPS of destroyers for just 2x the cost. Itâs really silly.
Yeah they are later tech, but thatâs another problem.
They do need their tech cost reduced along with nerfs to them, though, like I did in my rebalance mod.
A single BC does somewhat justify its cost, as the first one does cost an extra ~7500 more than a destroyer does. (though itâs not like you arenât getting hyperspace for dessies, anyway)
There are a lot of ways to go about balancing, only one of them being increasing the cost or reducing its stats. I would like to see some exploration to increasing the rock-paper-scissors mechanic. This should theoretically make things like combined arms and the actual placement of your ships more important. Spamming just one unit is lesser strategic depth than having to keep track of multiple squads/fleets of different counters to counter the right stuff at the right time. This also promotes scouting, super important skill in any RTS so you know what to build. Basically give a reason to build each class of ship at least other than âmaxed out every other class so only thing left to build is frigsâ.
I think as part of balancing, force multiplier ships like defense field frigates, command corvettes, defense fighters, drone frigates and maybe missile destroyers need to be looked at. Rewarding micro is good but defense field frigates are super heavy on micro (maybe some UI improvements to make them easier to use?) and defense fighter AI is a little suicidal. Still these ships can have a huge impact on a battle and people need to experiment with them a lot more rather than just saying all frigates are weak. An idea is for certain special abilities to be activated one at a time even if you have multiple of them selected. For example have 5 defense field frigates selected, each time you click on the ability only ONE field goes up. Also looking at strike groups, have the ability to intelligently spread out ships with special abilities (grav wells, defence fields, cloaks, drones) to maximize coverage. Promote and expand the abilities of strikegroups.
What I especially liked in the PDS mod is how everything survived much longer. Currently it feels like why bother going after subsystems or engines if ships die super fast anyways? Will make ways to lock down ships (targeting engines and hyperspace modules or using grav wells) more important and will give that epic space battle feel. Though this might be more the realm of mods. The official balance should probably be a bit more streamlined.
Iâm not advocating warcraft 3 level of micro/abilities but I believe there is a LOT of room to give the game a LOT more depth.
While I agree that BC is a game ender but it hardly means itâs unbalanced or ruining the game. If BC needs changed, everything else needs some serious tweaking, then, itâs no longer âRemasteredâ. Without suggesting everything necessary to balance after all these ânerfâ and âbuffâ suggestions, those should be ignored as it needs 100 times more thinking than just altering that one ship. Bugs are still around and when do people think we get a playable so called âbalancedâ game when people suggest random things irresponsibly. Letâs leave HW2 as HW2.
In HMR, Hig BC now rotates vertically as well and that just made destroyers and frigates sink twice as fast as than in classic HW2. It was typical for destroyers and frigates to attack move to either up or down to avoid one of the ion beam or altogether by going directly up or down of it. It was also a strategy required for Vaygr BC as it requires much more RU to upgrade its hull but now Hig BC could be OP as that was the only change given without any buffs to destroyers and frigates.
Rushing BC was never a problem, people just do not realize how to attack early to bust those people who only have shipyard in the back. For those people keen on learning new strategies, I suggest you read some of the strategies in the forum Iâm linking below, so that even without BC, there are many ways to do effective attack before a BC rusher takes control of the map.
âBCs are like 2.5x the hp and 5x the DPS of destroyers for just 2x the cost. Itâs really silly.â
If BC gets nerfed I call that silly as double pumping destroyers start to make more sense and then people start complaining destroyer rushers are silly. Endless.
Every ship has their use at every moment of the game as is. (Yes, gunships and minelayers are exceptions)
I figured that out during the last 11 or so years.
That concept of âit is balanced because you can avoid it to happenâ is a fallacy.
And again not every time you have assist of your allies to rush the enemy team to avoid it to happen. If one of your allies says ânah I wanna build a bcâ you wonât be able to rush the enemy team without assist, and there you go, you are now forced to build a cruiser as well.
There is no way to fight a cruiser without another cruiser, that is not balanced at all. And drop down that fallacy of avoid it to happen.
About âif you change this value it is not remasteredâ you are bringing that in just because of a nerf in one ship? Really? Well I guess that you would be starting a world war if you were a fan o hw1 because not a single value of the original is here, I will not even bring up the gameplay mechanics. Complaining about one ship being changed after all hw1 get changed is kinda selfish.
Paradox made another thread talking about how boring this game is right now, cuz there is no counter to a cruiser, just another cruiser
Perhaps a little obtuse, but there are a few options.
Carrier cloak gen and a ton of ion frigs
Marine frigs and a swarm of vetts and fighters. (not a perfect counter, particularly if there is support, but it is possible)
This is far from a new issue in my opinion. As a matter of fact, hereâs a snippet of something I posted on the Relic forums 12 years ago regarding HW2 balance - ââŚHiigaran BCs are overpowered, frigates seem pretty useless.â
There are counters, for sure, cloaked carriers and marine/infiltrator frigates with support (as mentioned by the previous poster) can work. Iâve also had reasonable success with bombers used mostly just to neuter the opposing BC until my team mate can bring in his pristine BC to finish the job. (Hmm, maybe that not really a non-BC counter at all) Hereâs the drawback, the counters require a fair amount of micromanagement, while the BC can just band box stuff.
All RTSs tend to turn into escalation to more and more powerful units over time. However,in HW1 and HWC, people building HCs and Dreadnaughts were fairly rare - at least in the games I can recall. Generally, building one of these units was either just a vulgar display of power or misguided (i.e., resources couldâve been spent more efficiently, making HCs and their like not very useful in reality). Total Annihilation was similar. Itâs âgame enderâ, nuclear missiles were crazy expensive in time and resources. However, even these had a hard counter. You also had to deal with turtles (we sometimes called them porcs, after porcupines) and a âgame enderâ had a necessary place. Homeworld games arenât as prone to turtling in my experience as other RTSs - probably due to the lack of cover and the 3D nature of the game.
HWR, like HW2 before it, doesnât seem to have a hard counter to the BC, at least not one that most players would find worth the effort. And unlike the other RTSs Iâve cited, there doesnât seem to be much of a downside to going straight to the âgame enderâ unit.
Nerfing BCs would definitely change the R in HWR from remaster to redo, but quite frankly (and as I thought 12 years ago) itâs long overdue. At least making the âgame enderâ crazy expensive would seem to make sense. Another option, and one I like, would be to buff the counters. As I said, I donât think turtling is a big problem with Homeword games, so âgame endersâ arenât quite as important.
I am not nearly pro or experienced enough to comment on balance, but either way it goes I want to encourage caution for any changes made to the BC.
Even if a nerf is in order, my concern is that the BC might become just another novelty super-weapon that never gets built along the same vein as the protoss mothership or the baneblade from DOW2. Even the King Tiger from COH, which literally cost ZERO resources to build, was still laughed at for being so slow and so vulnerable to infantry.
BC tech is INCREDIBLY expensive, and will cost a player tons of production time if they are trying to rush for it. Nerf itâs effectiveness, and you are running a huge risk of people just sticking to destroyers from then on. Personally, from the handful of 1v1s and 2v2s Iâve played, I see games often being decided around the frigate stage anyway. As long as people are ecoing properly and arenât turtling, BCs never see the light of day.
I do not want to see BCs shunted into the ânovelty superweaponâ or âonly seen in big team gamesâ territory. HW is unique because there are so few games about spaceships, and when I think of a game about spaceships I envision gigantic behemoths blasting each other with brilliant laserbeams and thundering missile volleys. I donât want the competitive HW scene to just end up being a game about dogfighting fighter squadrons. Starfighters are still cool and all, but I think itâs safe to say that capital ship battles are what most people bought the game for.
I just wanted to reply here to support AOHNHâs general message about making balance changes right now, even though heâs a total bastard for using that gravity well & salvage corvette rush strat against me 1v1. (But now I know that strat too, so there! I didnât know salvage corvettes were immune to gravity wellsâŚ)
I think making dramatic changes to the gameâs balance right now would be a bad idea. The game is still too young, and there are lots of strategies right now that have been unexplored, especially on the HW1-race side. Furthermore, there are a lot of fundamental gameplay issues/bugs that should be addressed before any major balance changes are made. Iâm talking about things HW1 Frigates & Corvettes not knowing how to properly face their targets, formations not working right (causing HW1 strike craft to behave like idiots), and Vaygr Missile Corvettes ignoring gravity wells.
These issues, when fixed, will dramatically impact gameplay, especially for the HW1 races. Making dramatic changes to single units because they are âimbalancedâ right now I donât think I can see as justified until these issues are ironed out.
That said, I will caveat this post by saying that I have never been a fan of stock HW2âs balance of Frigates being tissue paper (in general, but especially) to Destroyers, and Destroyers being tissue paper to BCs. I will echo the other posters who have said they preferred the balance between strike craft, frigates, destroyers, and cruisers in HW1 to HW2.
BC is classic. Donât mess with it. That would pretty much the only thing that would really upset me personally. There are always ways to counter BCâs. Just figure it out. Some of us have been playing for years and seeing a BC on the map doesnât automatically mean the game is over.
If you must, just balance the HW1 forces so they arenât so imbalanced against HW2. Thatâs all. Thatâs it.
A super weapon should be something that goes along with other weapons, and not the main fleet. Right now people use to max out cruisers before max destroyer or frigates.
And the map design of hw 2 encourages players to get defensive and build it, you donât have to fight for resources, you donât need to control the high ground, you just sit in your resource pocket build a few defenses and build that thing.
Iâm ok with the concept of a super weapon, but right now it is not a super weapon it is the main weapon of the game, if you were able to get just one, if it took longer to build, but no.
Btw the concern of some players about changing that one ship just shows how this game is cruiser centered right now.
Iâd be up for making the cruiser just plain part of the fleet rather than having a super weapon at all. It needs to have a reason to be built and that can either be a rock-paper-scissors reason (good against dessies, bad against frigs) or as a tank (low dps, high HP) or a glass cannon (high dps, low HP)
Cost should never ever be the only balancing consideration. It destroys team matches as seen in many MANY games.
People who want a single I win button is in every game. Itâs normal. However something can be strong so long as it has easily exploitable weaknesses. The stronger the unit the more weaknesses it should have.
Anyway, BCs have a clear advantage and reason to be built WITHOUT their OP HP and DPS.
They can build subsystems, giving them inhib, jump, fire controlâŚ
They have the longest range at 6000, while destroyers are 4500.
They arenât even all that slow with speed upgrades.
And simply the virtue of having the highest DPS makes them easier to jump out and repair. If 10 ion frigs shoot some other frigates, youâll absolutely lose at least one before you jump and you donât get that RU back.
Iâd also say that time is generally a larger consideration than cost at a competitive level, and itâs something I looked at a lot. Itâs important to have these periods where certain things are stronger or weaker, as thatâs what strategies develop around.
HC is classic. Donât mess with it.
Just kidding though. Iâm fine with the HC having gotten changes. I want the two races to be balanced together with nothing sacred. HW2 was not well balanced. HW1 could have been better balanced as well.
Iâd love to see some skilled HW1 games. What Iâve seen so far in all of the 1v1 tourneys have actually showed me that HW2 style is much better than HW1.
[quote=âKadeshi, post:18, topic:128418â]
Justify that you need an overpowered ship to end the game makes absolute no sense. If that were true then hw1 would be a endless game, and it wasnât. The time to kill were even bigger, the firepower were much smaller in hw1 and games were even shorter.[/quote]
I am unable to compare the length of HW1 games vs HW2 games. So far, in HWR, HW1 race battles take longer than HW2.
You can easily counter a single cruiser with destroyers or frigates. The problem is, on certain large maps the advantage of early frigates or destroyers is very hard to actually use against a team that sees and prepares for it. Hence both teams generally go for BC + support.
LOL, doing âjust BC rushâ is far from âspamming BC and marching them forwardâ. You have to be able to defend your base and look for openings to attack enemy RU ops. You also MUST manage support ships - especially strike craft. Be careless with your ships and you will lose the game not because you have less BC, but because they get disabled and picked off one by one without support.
I have yet to come across anyone that has bested me just because of BC. If more players spent a little more time preparing and scouting, it becomes less of an issue.
However, I do understand the points being made and I am open to changes that would balance the game because of the mixing of HW1 and HW2.
Iâd rather not. I find the current RPS mechanics infuriating, in no small part because the armor types and damage multipliers are entirely invisible unless you start cracking open files.
Other people have already explained multiple times how âkill them before they get itâ is bad balance.
Many SC2 players (including myself) would call it bad design, defining balance mostly as ability for each player to win, while design is the âhowâ of winning. Most players do not like âkill them before they get there, or get there firstâ as the design â it is bland compared to the intricacy that was HW1.
Saying that âit would not be remasteredâ does not cut it for me or most others. The campaign is often much different than the multiplayer by the end of it all. Players want a balanced, well-designed multiplayer, even if that requires patches.