Openning a can of worms ISDF V SCION fair? vote on it

[MrTwosheds]

I just cannot believe that the amount of scrap returned by one ship when its build is cancelled, is so important to an experienced player, most want it gone, its an annoyance to have to do it. Making out that its some critical element of gameplay is ridiculous.
Someone just forgot to change it when they altered the empty odf.

[DarkFox]

Subject: Openning a can of worms ISDF V SCION fair? vote on it

I just cannot believe that the amount of scrap returned by one ship when its build is cancelled, is so important to an experienced player, most want it gone, its an annoyance to have to do it. Making out that its some critical element of gameplay is ridiculous.
Someone just forgot to change it when they altered the empty odf.

You're welcome to believe what you like, that's up to you (though I'd encourage you to form your beliefs based on something more than your gut feeling).
Whether it was coded as a mistake or not is unimportant to the discussion at hand. BZ2 is remarkably well balanced. The reason I said removing empty recycling from strat games would be carving a hole in battlezone 2 is because it would secondarily remove:
scion empty scouts
scion drones
scion sentries
scion warriors
scion maulers
scion titans
scion archers
scion gunspires
scion kilns
scion forges
scion dowers
scion antennas
scion overseer arrays
scion jammers
scion service trucks
scion scavengers
scion pools
scion builders
scion upgraded pools
and scion matriarchs.

(note that scion haulers were already out of strat games.)

That's what would be removed from the competitive games, I promise you.

You don't 'believe' that it is THAT important simply because you can't grasp how finely balanced BZ2 strat is between the two races. Your lack of experience in this particular theatre of battlezone2 (and just this theatre - I recognise and respect your awesome contributions and experience in the game, MrTwoSheds) should simply encourage you to leave the decision up to people who know better, rather than voting based on your gut feelings.

Really, this shouldn't even be worth discussing. If you play a lot of ISDF v scion strat, you know what I'm saying. If you don't, then what difference does it make to you?

On top of all that, you can always make a rec variant.

[Zero Angel]

So in sum, the empty recycling game mechanic is essential to inter-race balance in BZ2? Would the balance then be stacked in favor of the ISDF if both teams agreed not to recycle empties in the game? I think that this is something that is worth trying out, for certain

[DarkFox]

So in sum, the empty recycling game mechanic is essential to inter-race balance in BZ2? Would the balance then be stacked in favor of the ISDF if both teams agreed not to recycle empties in the game? I think that this is something that is worth trying out, for certain.

Yeah. And by 'stacked in favour', you could say 'get armoury, win game'.

High aggression chainguns/shadowers are gauranteed to knock scions down to 1 pool for 90% of the early game. With no empty recycling, that's a game over, right there and then, unfortunately.

Sorry my opinion is so bleak.

[MrTwosheds]

I do understand that there is a serious balance issue in early game Scion vs ISDF.
I do not however think that an effectively "secret" scrap cheat is the perfect solution to this. In your well matched vet games I am sure you find it invaluable, in a less well matched game it becomes a very one sided "cheat" where the person not using it is certain to lose.
I am interested in making this game better for all and more accessible to new players, exploits like this one work directly against that. New players leave this game because they think people cheat, they don't know how, and nobody tells them. Your post highlights very well the problems that exist in the strat game, but you ignore the small fact that many players do not know that they HAVE TO build cancel empty scouts to stand any chance at all if they choose the Scion race against an experienced player.

[DarkFox]

The same thing goes for a massive array of BZ2 skills.

Should we remove nose-down speed increases?
How about removing quick weapon cycling?
What about removing the ability to shoot the bomb out of the air?

If a tactic is not immediately apparent to a beginner, that should absolutely not be a reason to remove that tactic. It should be a reason to better educate the new player.

Don't get me wrong, I fully understand that empty recycling is a somewhat esoteric trick to learn about, perhaps even more so than rebinding your 'next' and 'previous' weapon switch commands to appropriate keys to enable instant weapon switching (although I found out about empty recycling years before I learned of the previous weapon key trick, and I doubt the fast weapon switch would ever be removed because it benefits ISDF teams more than scion ones).
I mean, I know it's not obvious and a bit quirky, trust me I do. I'm saying that removing it causes so much harm to the *remarkably* well-balanced ISDF v scion game, it would take a monumental effort to rebalance things, and the truth is we just don't have enough experienced strat players active in the community to even begin to undertake such a balancing act right now.

Your best bet is just telling a new player about this, along with nose-down, auto-level:off, scrap bar/pool management, weapon ranges, weapon damage and armour types, how to use specials, and the other 'secret' information, before you begin to coach them on strategy and unit use/placement.


ps. 'HAVE TO build cancel empty scouts to stand any chance at all' is strong language. New scion players only 'have to' use empty recycling in the same way that ISDF need to use the afforementioned previousweapon key to cycle minigun/FAF... In a super vet game, failing to use these tricks will lose you the game, but in a less 'clutch skills' game in the more basic/intermediate skill range, the ISDF team will fail to capitalise on their chaingun/Mcurtain window of opportunity, and scions will be just fine plodding on to blink or maulers and winning the match.
pps. Okay, it's a little more important than efficient weapon-switching in a vet game, but trust me, failing to use either will lose you the match.

[Zero Angel]

You bring up some excellent points. And I think that we should try some games where empty recycling is forbidden to see what impacts it would have on balance.

[MrTwosheds]

The same thing goes for a massive array of BZ2 skills.

I do not accept that the only unit in the game to give back its full cost, counts as a skill, it is an error and an exploit.

There is no question that it effects balance, performed with care it can multiply scrap generation/time much more than many people realise, with 1 upgrade its >= to a second upgrade.

[Psychedelic Rhino]

Just like the constructor in BZ1, where you get more scrap points than what it cost after recycling.
Doesn't matter how much scrap is left in the game. If you can manage to build a constructor, you can rebuild your
army to full strength in a matter of 15 minutes.

[MrTwosheds]

Not quite that bad. But just a short time ago people were complaining about the Scions over powered weapons! (really? I thought) but not the scrap cheat that they all use to build them...I think many regular strat players have actually lost sight of what actually makes a good game, It is not the Joy of the win, but the battle for it, from what I have seen "the battle" is mostly missing from allot of strat games, A few dogfights, one team gets the advantage, the other team gives up and says Finish It. Scrap cheats like empty cancelling actually just make this situation much worse as there is little incentive or need to go out and fight for resources.
The base build can be done rapidly with just 2 pools, all you have to do is slow the other team down, get a minimal undefended full base and then destroy them before they can recover. It works for both races, but you get more scrap as Scions.
I think we should go the whole way and reduce the both the empty scouts scrap return to ZERO! (and make sure that there are not any other units worth cancelling a build for the scrap return)

[APCs r Evil]

So, assuming Empties no longer return scrap, how would you go about rebalancing the Scions to survive the dominance of the ISDF in the early game?

[MrTwosheds]

Hey anyone remember those 2 other ships the sentry and lancer...
This is about the habits of experienced commanders, not some intrinsic properties of the races, with the ability to scrap cheat their way past an inconvenient phase in the game removed, the commanders would have to re-examine their strategies.
We are actually talking about a fairly small number of people here, to the habitual thug, cancelling is an irrelevance, its just one more complexity they like to avoid by being a thug all the time.
Cancelling is used, by those commanders, with both races, to gain a scrap flow advantage. Its removal would level the playing field a little bit for all.

[DarkFox]

I really wanted to give up on this thread. It's like arguing mathematics with an astrologer.

However, the massive inaccuracy of some more of your points compelled me to retort, again. I'm sorry.

"the battle" is mostly missing from allot of strat games, A few dogfights, one team gets the advantage, the other team gives up and says Finish It. Scrap cheats like empty cancelling actually just make this situation much worse

This is so crucially wrong I would feel you were trolling had I not previously gained an understanding of your viewpoint and strat knowledge. The absolute opposite is the case. ISDF can simply tech to chainguns + shadowers + mcurtains, with zero base defense, then hit the scion pools so hard, that the scions will be stuck in their base, cowering with their turrets, unable to afford any technology. The game is literally over at about 7 minutes, with no way out of it for scions. Hitting a pool with chains + shads is not difficult, and hitting a scion base using M-curtain is uncounterable for the scion team. They do not have the technology to beat Mcurtain, no matter how they try to climb their tech tree (and yes, this includes an early spire), and very soon their kiln is destroyed, putting them even further away from a counter technology, still with only a base pool.
Empty recycling is the one and only thing that allows scions to play a game against ISDF that doesn't end in a one-sided 'game over at 5 minutes' match.

Put more simply, empty recycling allows a player that only has a single pool to be able to afford to build a base. How is it possible that you can imagine that giving the player who has only 1 pool a bit of a resource lift will make games *more* 1-sided? Is it not incredibly obvious that the opposite is the case? It helps the 1-pool underdog, making the game less 1-sided?

Secondly, you mention the sentry and the lancer... Trust me, the sentry is my favourite vehicle in the game. If there was a more effective way of using it, I would have seen it. I've tried literally everything to incorporate it in my build, and it's just about serviceable if used in assault mode, in a 2v2 or a 1v1, to hit the ISDF base at the armoury stage of he game, to punish an ISDF commander that did not get a tower. Without empty recycling, this window would not exist, and the sentry would be back to it's 100% useless status. You really need to grasp just how poor a ship the sentry is for general gameplay.
As for the Lancer... You've really betrayed your strat ignorance by even bringing it up in this thread. It's like you think scion commanders don't use the lancer because they never tried it and have no innovation or something... "the habits of experienced commanders, not some intrinsic properties of the races". What a load of twaddle!
Get in a real game, build a lancer, and see what you can do with them. They are an absolute joke! The one and only use (and again, I've explored just about everything with lancers) is to arm them with multi lock and blink, morph into assault mode, and suicide attack an enemy position to destroy trucks, turrets, and vehicles with point-blank wasp missiles. This, of course, is not an early-game strategy, and once again, is impossible without empty recycling.


Really Twosheds, I respect your position and viewpoint on the awkwardness of empty recycling, and I understand why you want it removed (it feels wierd and wrong, I know), but *please* don't try to make out as though you want it removed for gameplay reasons, because it's exceedingly apparent that you don't understand the actual gameplay that you're discussing, and tiresome to have to keep arguing this while it falls on deaf ears. I am trying to help you understand just how much your suggestions would destroy the game, and you, in turn, and making insinuations that the problems are simply imaginary, because of the uninnovative and herd-thinking ignorance of experienced scion commanders. Frankly, that's a little insulting to players that have played the knife-edge game of strat BZ2 for years.


"Its removal would level the playing field a little bit for all."
And this is the crux of the problem. You consider empty recycling to be a 'cheap' way that vets win matches, and as such you believe that the only reason players want it to stay in is because they want to keep winning with their advantage, which leads you to ignore every reason I give because you think you know the real, secret reason an experienced player would want it to stay. I can't for the life of me understand why, in this community alone among strategy games, there exists a stigma attached to the best players where, instead of being respected, their input being appreciated, and their contributions to the game being celebrated, the community instead tries to find 'excuses' as to why these players, many of whom have over 10 years of regular playing experience, are winning matches in a 1-sided manner. 'It's because they fly'... Remove flying, vets still destroy people. 'It's because of cheap ship configuarations'... Deactivate factory/Rec panel during construction, vets still destroy people. 'It's because they just rush'... Add starting AI:3 turrets, vets still clean house. Now you think empty recycling might 'level the playing field'. The truth is it will not.
What will 'level the playing field' is if the new and intermediatte players go and play a couple of thousand strat games to gain the experience with the game that is currently being wielded by a small minority of players.
Removing empty recycling won't level the playing field one bit. All it will do is destroy the scion race. But you're not gonna believe me about that, because I have too much experience *playing* BZ2 strat for my opinion to matter.

[Zero Angel]

Darkfox makes a good point about the difficulties that Scion have teching up to something decent, especially when you factor larger team games into account (which I wasnt, I was considering at the time 1v1 where it is much harder to suppress pools even with fast chain) -- and honestly teamgames are where it's at in BZ2, at least 2v2 to 4v4 (5v5 is much less manageable and less fun IMO). Also considering that in team games it is even more difficult to use empty scout reccing to fast tech.

However, I think that DF needs to have a good chat with Sly (a master level scion commander that thinks that Scions are more powerful than ISDF with the empty reccing trick)

So, assuming Empties no longer return scrap, how would you go about rebalancing the Scions to survive the dominance of the ISDF in the early game?

What I would do is lower the tech requirements for Gauss, enabling Gauss/Seeker/Stasis sentries to be built at Kiln -> Dower (110 cost) instead of Kiln -> Dower -> Forge (170 cost) (Blink requires stronghold in addition to the aformentioned reqs (240 cost)).

If empty reccing was left in then I would put the penalties onto blink, increasing its base cost from 10% of the warrior's ammo clip to 13%-15% (a 30%-50% increase in the base cost) to make it a little less useful to use blink frivolously or offensively.

That doesnt seem like much but I think it would do a lot.

[DarkFox]

I'm not surprised that Sly feels they are overpowered. Iguana also feels that way, and I used to feel the same. It was only through extensive playing with 1.3 assault blast walkers that I came to understand the end-game implications it had for the ISDF vs scion matchup.

The trouble is, it's *very* hard to find an ISDF commander that doesn't just treat scions as though they're another ISDF, and this ruins the balance. As soon as ISDF make a sabre against scions, they start to lose. It's a very, *very* different game when you're up against blink, and as such, when you're a good scion commander facing fairly fresh ISDF players, it's easy to feel completely unstoppable.

It might be interesting if Sly got into this thread, and maybe some of the emphasis could be diverted from empty recycling, on to the topic at hand... Racial balance.


Oh, re: Your comment about sentries. I'd somewhat agree, but I'm not sure tech shifts are completely necessary. Simply giving the sentry light armour would probably be enough to fix the scion early game if empty recycling were removed - it nearly worked for FE, but sadly the FE laser buff (stupid) allowed ISDF to dominate there too... Still, my point stands, now isn't the time to be readdressing balance when it's already to perfect (if a little conroversial)