DarkEmblem

At least things like Zorbs got nerfed and they're in a good state now.

I disagree with this based on the tests I did before on the hidden forum as you know.

Other than that I completely agree with you. Even barracudas are too strong. It takes only 4 barracudes to kill a t3 building, where you'll be sure to hardly lose on in the progress. (Especially against flak, but also gatling & shrike)
Right now, too many units are made either too situationally or too OP when just looking at stats.
Lets look at some stats for several units:

Barracuda 
Overall stats
 

- Pretty fast

- Insane anti building damage (ONLY 4 ARE ABLE TO KILL T3 & SW'S?)
- Very high survival rate (High hp/armour)

- Flying -> Thus can't take damage from every single unit

Their weakness ->

Aeroblazes, gehenna platforms. (Gehenna platforms take time to kill them so you'd have actually lost your t3 by the time they're dead) and maybe skyrays? Who even knows. I've hardly ever seen them die when playing against a player who actually MICROS his air.

Rocketeers
- Quick

- Pretty good at scouting

Weaknesses:

- Dies very quickly

- Hardly no damage

- Actually pretty costly for what they are able to do? (550, really?)

Megalodon

-Quick

-High damage

-Can squish infantry by walking over them

-Stronger with megaarena

Weaknesses

- Can die pretty quickly when focused

What megaarena does: REMOVES THE WEAKNESS A UNIT HAS AND MAKES IT EVEN STRONGER BY ADDING AOE INFANTRY INSTA KILL

You want units to be used more / less?
Balance their stats! There are simple formulas to try and balance your units.
Formulas will be talked more about at the bottom of this post.

Continueing about the Jets in general, if you really want to make the jets more engaging & fun to use for the player, make airfields cheaper, jets cheaper but make them do significantly less too.
You want to have a nice air force, and actually use them in the game for anything else other than sniping tech or a single unit because they are too expensive to keep rebuilding for anything else that's not a centurion, a single hero or something similar? Well tough luck because that's currently not how it works.

Some fun fixes for fixing allied jets for example, would be making them cost significantly less & make them do less damage to compensate the cost and even shorten the reloading time. You could use around 3-4 harriers to kill an MBT instead of two and around 8 to actually kill a miner. (instead of 4) 

Now what does this change ACTUALLY do besides changing stats?
- More fun & engaging gameplay for an air-type player. Due to the shorter reloading time, you can snipe units more often, also increase amount you need to micro.
- Due to their reduced cost, they'll actually be rebuildable without losing too much money thus players will recreate their planes more often.

- Jets will be used more often against anything else other than hero snipes / centurion snipes.
- Rebalanced stats allows them to die quicker aswell, thus anti air will immediately have more effect without even buffing anti air.

Now lets talk about actually balancing units.
Every, single unit will have to be balanced. Is a unit not balanced? Then it will get abused.
Every unit will have to receive a weakness to compensate for everything else they have.
Balancing out the strengths & weaknesses also determines how useful  a unit will be ingame.

You want to have a tanky unit?

What to do?:
1. Low speed, Low damage, normal cost. 

You want it do damage AND be tanky?
You're taking risks sir!
1. Low speed, insane costs, no anti air.

2. Low speed, normal costs, strong against tanks, vulnerable against infantry (for example)

You want a unit that does damage?

1. Low health, normal costs, normal speed.

Damage & quick?
1. Very low health, normal costs, vulnerable against "x unit type"


Units that DEFINITELY do not follow the balance formula:

Pteranodons -> Very tanky -> AREA OF EFFECT DAMAGE -> Very quick -> good damage | Weakness: It's rumoured not to be immortal.
Megalodons + megaarena -> Very quick -> Instakill all infantry within an area -> tanky -> a lot of damage against both buildings & tanks aswell. | Weakness: It's mortal and actually balanced when megaarena doesn't exist.
Zorbfloater -> Quick (with spinblade) -> High survival rate/tanky (regen) -> Insane damage -> insane AoE damage. | Weakness: Fucking dogs that'll never get close enough anyway, or maybe some luck with a terror drone.

Finalize -> High survival rate (insane regen even with 25% nerf) -> DECIMATES ALL GROUND UNITS -> Normal speed. -> 2 heroes thus you'll still have trouble when the other one is dead. | Weakness: Sometimes not being able to be built because foehn won before t3 anyway.

And many more! ( I didnt even mention the weak ones like rocketeers which are basically a unit nobody ever creates, or plagueplatters, those too)
That's all folks. 

I also suggest another nerf for Foehn it's grid. Currently it's cheap, costs a TINY amount of power. (Especially since foehn gets a lot of power out of windtraps),it builds pretty quickly AND it doesn't get removed after it's used in contrary to mines.
 

What this does is allowing the user to completely spam them all over the place. Even when giving them time to arm(which is not going to happen) before they even solve most of the problems. 

Why? Because this is how it currently and in the next patch will work:

The foehn player places the grid front of your army your army doesn't have THAT much time to react and they are basically disabled for the entire fight (which is in my opinion pretty much as strong as an EMP mine current patch) after the fight, they will just get killed off. 

The fact stands, that even when units are on that grid, it doesn't go away after being used. Which is basically even stronger than a EMP mine.

It's also highly spammable due to both the price and power requirement, thus the foehn player can just spam it all over their base. (I've seen people do this)

Now you're thinking "atleast it's going to be able to be auto-engaged by units in the next patch" but that is part of a new problem.
What is it going to be next patch? Cannon fodder? Let's say you have detection and you're playing against a foehn player who created a few stungrids. To make it worse, let's make the Foehn player the subfaction Last Bastion.  Now think of this. Between you and your opponents base there is this. In the back, a plasmerizer. Next to it there is your opponents army and in front of that army is  a spam of stungrids. 

Now as epsilon you've got a few choices here.

You're going to pick off the stungrids (which are replaceable), waste a lot of time on killing them while getting shot at by a plasmerizer. (or you keep walking backwards when the plasmerizer is almost ready to shoot, dodging the shots, but wasting a lot of time, unless the plasmerizer is forced to shoot at the ground, then you're fucked anyway.) 

Not just that, but basically the Foehn player is able to (re)build an army while you're doing all this, basically making your offensive play useless.

Or you decide to go in, waste projectiles on stungrids which act as cannon fodder and you basically die because your army keeps attacking the grids.

Or you decide to go in, (Army gets prioritized over stungrid in this case), your projectiles attack the enemy army, but your melee (brutes mostly, or maybe your projectile shooters walk forward because they're chasing units) decides to run in and everything gets stunned and basically half your army is disabled, and in an even worse situation, your infantry is getting stunned by stungrids while your vehicles get rekt by godsbanes. There is absolutely nothing you can do against a defensive foehn.

Now, a stungrid DOES work on power, if your power is down, your grid doesn't work. BUT IT HARDLY USES ANY POWER. The time when it actually stops working, is hardly ever! People usually make sure to get enough power to have some as back up incase they lose any, or they just have extra power after trying to basecrawl using power plants.

Things I suggest to nerf the grids

Solution 1:

-Greatly (Greatly, in case it wasn't clear) Increase power requirement (Make it hard to have 3-4 stun grids on the field)

-Increase build time

-Increase price

-Reduce health

Solution 2:

-Make it "one building" aka, one part of the grid gets destroyed, all of it gets destroyed.

Solution 3:

- Make the stungrid slow units down by 25-50% instead of stunning units. Which is actually a much more interesting thing for me than of some obnoxious stunfield.

Change name to "Slow grids" / "Disruption grids" / "Slug grids" or anything similar to that kinda shiet.

-Make sure that opposing units prioritize the Foehn's army over the grid.

Now I don't want to make people think that I am talking about "overnerfing" or "Changing too much".

In fact, the contrary. I want to help making this game as "balanced" as can be. And with my current multiplayer experience I believe I can help greatly with this.

Right now, I play a LOT of online multiplayer games, thus I experience most of these things within the game which is what I base my opinion on.

Also, do remember that Foehn is a very new faction. You can't expect it to be balanced right away or for it to be "almost perfect", thus only expecting to have to make small changes to actually balance it. Adding a new faction to the game with new mechanics can be very time consuming and can introduce great imbalances, thus big adjustments/changes are possible to exist. You can't always stick with something that was there, sometimes you'll have to replace things.

 two hero units that heal each other at an insane rate

Thanks for reminding me of something I had yet to adress.

REMOVE THEIR HEALING. Give them like a 10-30% armor buff instead. 

Fin DECIMATES infantry while Alize does the same to tanks. I've had alize kill three tyrants in a SINGLE shot!

This is of course completely ridiculous. While alize does a load of damage and pretty much instakills a few 2000+ tanks in aoe, Fin actually instakills pretty much all infantry that dares to come even near them.

Not just that, but they regen insanely fast when they are near eachother. This actually counts as a super unit. Destroys infantry, destroys vehicles, stealth detection & super regen.

What is epsilon going to do? The best they can do is actually wait for viruses, which are even a higher tech than finalize.

Why wait for viruses? Dunes just get destroyed by fin, gatling tanks get completely decimated by alize and even if a few of them get there, they'll just regen insanely quickly. You can't use Dyabukk attackers either, since they don't do burst damage, finalize will basically regen every single shot.

Suggested tweaks:

1: -Remove regeneration, replace with 10-40% armor buff (depending how close they are or when that is not possible, keeping it at 25% would be best)

    -Slightly reduce Fin ammo & reduce Alize AoE.

2: - Keep regeneration but reduce it by 25-50%

    - Reduce Fin his ammo count & reload speed, reduce Alize AoE.

3. - Keep regeneration

    - Lower health of both Fin & Alize, Reduce Fin's ammo & reload speed, reduce Alize AoE.

Barracudas have a hell of a higher survival chance than a kirov or a quetzal though. Kirovs and quetzals have a pretty high chance of not being able to kill anything because they are very limited to their speed.

Besides, for USA target painter + WCD + mercury strike has very good burst.

EU can reduce a lot of another SW it's damage due to force shield, basically being able to make any SW less effective than a WCD. Forceshield + backwarp can almost even negate an entire tempest since backwarp can be used on buildings too.

and PF is, well PF. Atleast they have backwarp

 And why would I use a sentry gun for defence if a bunker is only slightly more expensive but has greater range, vetsality, firepower and durability while also having the same tech requirements?

Bunkers take time to set up. First you build one, then you need to get either conscripts or flaktroopers to fill it up. Lets say you fill it up with 6 conscripts, the price would be 900 in contrary to the 400 costing sentry gun. 6 flaktroopers would make it cost 1320. 
50-50 would make it cost 1110. 

Now let's say you actually fill them up completely. Now, the enemy player will just avoid the tank bunker and attack your base somewhere else instead. Of course, you'd have just wasted money at that moment. Let's say you go and sell it. You lose 300 dollars and you're stuck with shitty units. Which is also a situation you don't want to be in.

Now there is ANOTHER thing that can happen. Let's say:"Okay, I don't have time to set this all up when I see the rush coming, so I will just spam them as soon as I can." At that moment, your opponent can do anything. He can still choose whether or not he's going to rush you down. He scouts battle bunkers, decides not to rush. Now you're stuck with spent money and your opponent will just out-macro you. 

That's why I prefer sentry guns. You can quickly place them and they are cheap enough not to care about the amount of money when spent/sold, while bunkers are more for going into turtle-mode. For sentry guns to be so shiet should have nothing to do with allieds not having another option in their tech tree.

If that were to be the case, a patriot missle should be worse than a flak cannon, because pacific front has the option to get a skyray cannon. 

But like my suggestion said, make lancers do less damage against buildings. This would mostly solve the problem with the sentry gun. (Even though I also suggest to lower the sentry gun cost to 350)

EDIT:

I agree with NorthFireZ, especially when talking about the diverbee.
In my opinion, the diverbee should get a severe price cost reduction as buff. Right now it costs a lot, can only be useful against vehicles really and there is no way to make them survive after landing a single attack. You actually need to micro them very well, attack-move isn't going to work because they'll gladly attack infantry instead which basically wastes your money.

Even a price of 800-900 would be fine to me.

I believe that clairvoyants need a hp/armour nerf. Currently I find myself playing against people who just spam a lot of clairvoyants (5-15, varies on how big the map is), then place a spinblade for pretty much a guarenteed steal. Both their speed when boosted by a spinblade and their armor make them incredibly hard to kill, even when you have a lot of units. A few of them will certainly survive and pretty much steal all of your cash. Now, terror drones are great against them, but that is only because they kill them in one hit (however, you'll pretty much need as many terror drones as your opponent has clairvoyants due to the delay in attacks and both units their speeds), but pretty much every other faction has trouble killing them. Seals for example, need to actually do multiple hits for one to finally die.

I also believe that jackals do not need a possiblity for the passenger to survive. Jackals are hard enough to kill as it is (Once again, especially with spinblade), and it's just stupid that a foehn player still has a pretty high chance to steal your money/tech just because a jackal was quick enough to stand next to your refinery even though it died at the last second.

Right now, it's pretty much a necessity to even wall your refineries (walls + gate) when playing against a foehn player. 

Also, I know some people love haihead too much here. But you guys really need to think about balance instead of the love for a faction.
Megaarena does need a big nerf. Their insta-infantry aoe kill basically kills any epsilon player without a sweat while actually the armor and speed buff are enough already. THE SUPPORT POWER COSTS ONLY 1500.
Now there are multiple things to actually tweak this.

Megaarena nerfs 1:
Make it degrade hp a bit faster than an inferno tower
Decrease range by a mile.

OR

Megaarena nerfs 2:
Remove the bs insta-infantry aoe kill
slightly decrease the range

OR 

Megaarena nerfs 3:

Raise cost to 30000. Yes. Because it actually denies a complete unit-type and especially Scorpion Cell has NO way to deal with it.

OR
Make megalodons mindcontrollable. (Balance > Logic)
Remove armor buff from megaarena.

Decrease range from megaarena.

Even non-epsilon struggle against haihead way too much. I can't believe how people either still defend megalodons + megaarena or don't think this needs a change at all. It severely impacts people their attitude towards haihead/haihead players.

Just a recharge time nerf definitely isn't going to cut it AT ALL.
 

Minermites also need a nerf. Make their repair rate slower, as they can basically make their army invincible when used within an army. (They are MUCH more useful than a soviet repair drone) And I believe I actually saw someone testing them and I couldn't believe my eyes when they mined an entire orepatch quicker compared to all the other factions their miners. 

Foehn should be low on cash, limited units and have high fire power. Instead of swimming in cash, unlimited units and high firepower. 

Either remove the reprocessor it's passive. (Gain money upon kill) or actually do something about the miners.

Last thing, shrike nests should not be able to follow enemy aircraft outside of their range. Right now it's basically a guarenteed kill on slower aircraft even after the aircraift left the shrikenest its range.


Edit: BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

Right now especially SOVIETS struggle too much against early foehn rushes.

As everyone knows, conscripts merely tickle foehn their units early on and even sentry guns are hardly able to do anything. Just 4 lancers will be able to kill a barracks, power and a miner with ease while knightframes deal with soviets their only option, conscripts. Conscripts are limited to their buildspeed and their limited brain capacity to get a better a gun. If you don't want to nerf knightframes and lancers more, soviets will still struggle too much with foehn their early rushes. That's why, yes. I actually suggest a conscript buff. Just make them cost 80 and atleast give their peashooter an upgrade. Or even just their attack speed. Right now, they actually have to spend more than the opponent foehn to actually hold the attack, since a thing as "defender advantage" doesn't exist when playing as soviets against foehn.

Also, make the lancer do less damage against buildings. It's too insane that 4 just lancers are pretty much guarenteed to kill both a miner and first power plant/barracks during a rush or even just with a SCOUT of 4 lancers. This will also solve the problem of sentry guns being completely useless against foehn during rushes.

Fury drones actually need arming time as a buff, so you can properly micro them what to attack instead of all of them launching at a single conscript that's near them. For example, I move 5 fury drones to the enemy base, I want them to attack a building (battle lab for example) but they just attack that one sentry gun/ conscript rather than actually doing something useful.

I also think the epsilon invaders should actually get another buff. 
I'd suggest increasing the refinery money drain. Currently it takes 60 seconds to drain 600 credits. That is equivalent to having an oil derrick after the initial capture bonus. 

However, sadly the invader gets taken out or denied quickly. Allowing for a maximum of 10 seconds of draining someone his money. 10 seconds being the maximum in a match against a newer player, resulting in a maximum drain of 100 credits. (Basically nothing at all) This while having a high chance of being shot down before being able to escape and not having much further use in the rest of the match. (With tiny exceptions)

I'd request to either give it both a better armor or hp buff and increase the refinery drain OR make it more useful against other units overall.

Turn down the hate volume a bit. lol

 (robot tentacles would be way neat). 

 

Hmm yes I like the way you think boi.

- I suggest that the Magaarena enables Magalodons to become immune to magnetic effects like it does for EMP effects (also you might want to add that they can become immune to EMP to their info page)

Sometimes I facepalm so hard at how much you love OP megalodons / megaarena and you're like "OH SEE I KILLED 5 MEGALODONS WITHOUT MEGAARENA SO EASILY WITH A FULL TANK ARMY LOL MEGALODONS NOT OP AT ALL FK U" (As soviets)

- I suggest that Giantsbanes / Godsbanes get less health but more healing power as compensation.

- I suggest a range increase for the Shardray Sonic Tank so that it can kill Morales, the Irkalla, or T3 ranged defences better.

-Godsbanes/giantsbanes are made to be bulky. I am pretty sure that giving those units healing powers. (They are AA, Anti-armor) n shiet. So even better units to counter other units with than zorbs would be even more unbalanced.
-Shadray does a load of damage against pretty much everything. Increasing it's range would defintely break the balance more.

I still think the megaarena buff applied to megalodons is too strong. I don't mind the armor buff, but the fact that it immediately kills infantry upon touch is a bit too much. Especially against epsilon, which doesn't have as much firepower in their units as other factions to take out the megalodons before they reach their infantry. Not only that, but epsilon is quite reliant on infantry aswell. You only need like 2-5 megalodons + megaarena to take out the entire opposing infantry army, 5 megalodons being quite a high number for the job. Crush all the infantry, and your reprocessor banks all that dank cash aswell.

There is hardly any way to do anything with your infantry other than letting them die. Scattering your infantry using "X" hardly helps either. The fact that megaarena will always be BEHIND the opposing army, doesn't exactly make it easier to destroy.

I played a match against ooo today as China. I had some nuwa's, a centurion, some standard tanks some dragonflies some terror drones and quite some teslas,pyros and flaktroopers and would it not have been for the current megaarena, i'd have destroyed his army.  Sadly only 3 megalodons killed my entire infantry army, with only one dying during the process of them stampeding everything. Using scatter didn't matter at all. Yes, I did kill a lot of his army, but the megaarena gave him too much of an unfair advantage in my opinion. 

I don't believe the way to "deal with this" should be "Not creating infantry" inb4 said reply.

Like I said before, plague splatters DO need a buff.
It only gives units a 10% armor debuff IF it hits, which may not even stack. (And even if it does, there is hardly a chance it will ever stack due to the accuracy)

The barrel has low impact damage and leaves behind a small toxic cloud. Now, this toxic cloud is only good when people will stand within the cloud for a long duration, but people will not stay in the cloud for obvious reasons.

Now, 2 plaguesplatters come at the same cost of 1 hailstorm, yet 1 hailstorm does a better job than 10 plaguesplatters coud do imo, since it actually hits and does good  and reliable damage. To say that epsilon is just a spammy faction and that the problem is solved when you just spam a lot of those units is a wrong way to go at it. Creating 10 plaguesplatters for example is a huge investment (8500, including the buff) for what it is actually going to do, and not is it only hardly useful against turtlers, but it's not useful in any other type of battle scenario at all because other scenarios would most likely mean that the opponent has an army that actually moves, lowering the accuracy of the plague splatter < 1%.

I've suggested that with the plague splatters you should either focus on making the armor debuff aoe larger, so that even when it missed the targeted unit, it atleast still debuffs some units near the point of impact. (Would make them useful against bigger armies, even when they are on the move) and make the armor debuff stackable, since 10% isn't that much and the chance for the debuff to be stacked on the same units all the time isn't that high, unless you actually spam plague splatters, making them actually more useful when you have more of them.

You could also focus on the plague, removing the armor debuff and greatly increasing the size of the toxic cloud left behind, making them more useful in siege scenarios instead.(And less useful in non-siege battles, because the toxic clouds damage your own troops aswell, and since epsilon is heavily dependant on infantry, it could give you quite some trouble.) And you could perhaps use it to zone your opponent by force firing it on the ground aswell, since nobody wants to walk through a wall of toxic. (And if they do, atleast their army is slighty damaged, since the clouds don't do THAT much damage when you're just walking through for a second.

I think that with the plague splatter you could go multiple directions to make it a better unit. Either you could follow it's current design. Low impact damage -> low damage toxic cloud -> armor debuff. And focus on buffing the armor debuff by making the area of effect much bigger. 3x3 for example.

You could also decrease the armor debuff duration to 7 seconds for example, and make the armor debuff stackable. (If it isn't stackable already like other debuff units and it actually makes sense to make a bigger amount of the unit if it's stackable, otherwise only like 3 would be needed)

This would make the unit a great unit to have in fights, even if it may miss it's target slightly, it will atleast debuff the units near the impact.

Or you could go to the other end of the spectrum and focus on "plague".

Removing the armor debuff completely and make the projectile leave a much bigger toxic cloud. Units within would get poisoned, receiving damage over time. There could be a timer on units which are poisoned, allowing them to get damage over time for x seconds after they left the cloud. aka No impact damage -> moderate toxic cloud damage + damage over time for "x" seconds -> No armor debuff -> infantry units "explode" when killed, spreading the disease.

Good vs infantry & moderate against buildings, no damage over time against vehicles.

This would make the unit more of a "zoning" unit. Great to use on turtle-styled players since creating a plague in their defences would either force them to attack you,  spread their units a lot more or just move closer to the center of their base (being pushed back by the plague) so you can pick off a few defensive buildings. Not great to use in head-on combat since the toxic may affect your own units aswell.  But you could create a "wall" of toxic by forcing the units to attack the ground, zoning the opponent. 

Personally I would choose for the "plague" since the armor debuff would not only be "the oxidizer but against ground" but SC has malver already aswell, which is able to debuff ground already too. Also would it not be a "unit you just want to have in every fight" but a unit which could be used more creatively and in different situations.

The game was mostly disliked due to the style of Economy management (no ore), hands down.