Huge props to Stardock for pushing out these releases weekly. Hopefully we will reach a point where weekly balance changes aren't needed
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Really hoping this cuts down on Bomber shenanigans. i know a lot of people were upset with it (myself included).
Have you thought about giving Incursion an Apollo - maybe a bad idea because a Bomber is the obvious counter to a deep Incursion - or upgrading Sentries to have very weak anti-air capabilities (think maybe a single Sky Cleanser?). Maybe that puts too much emphasis on Sentries as a T1.5 crutch, but that might be a way to help with some of these things.
Another way could be "two birds; one stone": i know a lot of people like to say how weak the Engineer being so much weaker than Avatar while being a similar price. It's not a fair comparison - different races, different strengths/weaknesses. Since the Engineer Drop is intended as sort of a mid-game "Tritium base-maker", could you maybe double-up on that? You could have the Engineer have a temporary build-rate buff for defensive structures. Eg, for 30 seconds it has 2x or 3x build rate. That'd allow it to get things like Smarties or Falcon Anti-Air up in the face of conflict but you'd still have to have the resources to support the construction.
Of course - you still have to defend the engineer: unlike the Avatar, the Engineer could be killed by a single frigate unit. Unchecked, it might have a similar issues we are having with the Avatar where a deep drop completely screws up the other player, but i think we are sort of moving in the direction of "if you don't have a defense tower on a point - it's not your point". Which is exciting and encourages interaction (and allows for greedy plays that can be taken advantage of). So that's an interesting meta-game choice to make.
It provides us with another knob to turn between fast expansion vs. teching up. Same as most other RTS games which have logistics.
Right, i agree that it's important! (and it has trade-offs between globals). Imagine if you removed logistics, novice players may not even build Quantum Generators as PHC, leaving out their exposure to Globals and unit upgrades.
In addition, you can't have cost of logistics "too" low or else it sort of becomes a stupid button you have to click every few minutes.
That said, it's not very... interesting? No one gets excited about upgrading Logistics. And i can see that as a valid criticism. One way you could address that is to give it a sort of additional effect. Eg, construct units X% faster (which sort of lets you take advantage of your "investment") or capture points X% faster (which supports rapid-expansion). But that might be putting hidden power in a spot where novices won't look and won't understand.