troop upgrades again

[DerSatan]

hey, i wanted to discuss a thing i naticed with the troop upgrades:

its is

armor upgrades >>> weapon upgrades

that has two reasons:

1) tanks do need armor requirements, and they are the most important things to get which require upgrades. other things do need the following upgrades:

Bomb: 4 weapon upgrades
Orbital Control: 5 weapon upgrades

Factory: 4 weapon upgrades, 4 armor upgrades
Troop Command Center: 4 weapon upgrades, 4 armor upgrades

Speed Pack Blueprint: 6 armor upgrades
Trader Hunter Pack Blueprint: 5 armor upgrades
Power Pack Blueprint: 10 armor upgrades
Ultimate Pack Blueprint: 11 armor upgrades

again, i think for other items armor upgrades are more important than weapon upgrades.


2) what are creeps for? i think the main task for creeps is to be shields for your tanks (besides giving bounty, but that isnt influenced by upgrades). before the upgrade requirements were introduced, i only researched armor upgrades anyway, because creeps are shields, armor upgraded creeps are better shields.

but not enough, weapon upgrades increase the damage of creeps. that is quite bad, because every enemy unit a force-controlled unit kills will cost your team money. you only get between 33,3% and 16,7% bounty for kills your force did.

link: who gets how much force gold

of course, if you play with creeps/mines/orbital control yourself, weapon upgrades do have a positive effect, but i dont think that can outweight the negative (gold losing) effect, nor the missing shield bonus effect you could have had.



think about it.

also: these 2x reeinforcements you get are pretty much obsolete. i see them sold 95% all time, the last 5% are players who have their inventory full and dont know/see the reeinforcements drop, or have no time to care about them because they are already fighting inside their base.


so my suggestion:

-cut off the reeinforcements
-let the armor upgrade cost ~1600 (more expensive than it is now)
-let the weapon upgrade cost ~1200 (less expensive than it is now)

[RedNova]

Ultimate pack is weapon upgrades by the way, not armor, but most of your arguments are sound.

While the armor versus weapons is debatable, the extra troops are seldom used. Better off to buy them if you want them on factories. If they were mortars however, this could be interesting. Food for thought.

[NoobStrike]

Armor >> Weapon... +1...
Sadly but truely, the only place when weapon > armor is the RARE case where creeps hit your tank...

I think weapons above 5k should have a weapon requirement... 5k+ level 5, go up by +1k = +1 tech requirement. Want to be evil... set that at 3k... (all starting weapons would be fine and right after... boom, you need weapon reqs... You would see a LOT of weapon upgrades among the different teams.

Other wise, I kind of agree with you in making armor cost let's say 1500 and armor 1300...

[TKF]

since there are armor upgrades requirements for tanks, players do only upgrade armor for the same reason. Also structures are harder to kill, while non-combat buildings have no gain for attack upgrades. But also attack upgrades do improve orbital control, mines and bomb.

Also armor upgrades make creeps harder to kill, weapons upgrades does only apply to their attack power, which doesn't matter when they don't hit you.

I can agree that armor upgrades in general are bit stronger than attack upgrades.

[RedNova]

Hmm, it seems that in 8.48 some packs use armor instead of weapons upgrades. Gotta confirm this later.

Hypothesis: if all objects requiring upgrades (including chassis) were switched from armor to weapons, would that balance things out? Less shielding, and access to better equipment would tend to balance each other. What do you think?

[NoobStrike]

Not a bad idea. I still dream of seeing weapon requirements... and more armor requirements...

Seriously, right now, getting ahead often means getting ahead up to the point where there is no possibility for others to catch up.

Having requirements for heavy tank + and weapons costing 3000+ would force top players to buy upgrades (for the rest of their team) to get better weapons or force lower players to buy them for the top player to become godly but making the player being behind even more obsolete (turning game into a 5v4 virtually).

Dunno, will see, time will tell.

[RedNova]

How about his then?

- Mix both upgrades into a single one, ranging from 1 to 60.
- When you upgrade, it cost the same as now, and goes one step up.
- When Force upgrades, it goes two steps up.
- Upgrades are tailored as such: Weapon, armor, weapon, armor, and so on.

That way you cannot choose which upgrade, and it force creeps to be balanced between armor and weapons.

Instead of having requirements such as "13 armor", "4 weapon and 4 armor", "10 weapons", you can have upgrades requirement such as "lvl 20 tech" for example.

Converting some tech requirements, that would mean for example:

Factory -> lvl 8 tech
Orbital control -> lvl 10 tech
Frost robot -> lvl 26 tech
Infernal -> lvl 36 tech
Titan -> lvl 50 tech

They would be quite high (because they mean both weapon and armor), but they can be adjusted a little bit down, for example such as:
Frost -> 20
Infer -> 30
Titan -> 45

It would be MORE expensive than now (by about 20-30%), but more balanced.

What do you think?

[kittyonmyfoot]

I might be missing something here but I've heard this argument before and I've tried straight armor upgrades and I've tried 2:1 armor vs weapon ratios and I've always came back to keeping things relatively even. The reason being is that if I'm upgrading troops then I'm usually the one throwing down the factories and using the reinforcements and/or troop command which means... If I don't buy the weapon upgrades then my creeps won't last hit for crap and I'll be starving for gold.

Now if I'm falling on my sword for my team then that's a different story... but for the most part I am rarely on a team that's worthy of it and if I'm on said team... then they don't need me to fall on my sword for them.

Lastly... yes creeps make good shields but they are also an annoyance for pushing unmanned lanes. If you do just armor they'll push very slowly if you do armor + weapons they'll push very quickly. Ergo... we get better map control and I get to last hit with my creeps if I do armor + weapons. Lastly... when I was going all armor before to rush for infernal. I always ended up getting to lvl req and waiting for an additional force upgrade past it before my teammate was able to buy the Infernal. Even then he fed a little while waiting and was at a substantial weapons & mana disadvantage before he could get rocking and rolling. Just wasn't worth it. If your experience is different i'd like to see the replay ;p

[DerSatan]

I've tried 2:1 armor vs weapon ratios and I've always came back to keeping things relatively even.

even if you buy upgrades in relation 2:1, you admit that armor upgrades>weapon upgrades.

also, yeah it might give you more money when you got 3 factories and a troop command, but your team as a whole will lose money due to things the force kills. you didntargued on that.

but yeah, theres and exception: if you lost your base factories, then weapon upgrades arent too bad anymore (i think you will have 3 player-factories in base then). you just dont lose that much money when the neutral creeps are gone.