My only gripe is that if Chastic Burst is to get it, all titan damage AoE's should get it. As almost every titan has one I think that would be a pretty radical change to titan balance. Maybe it would be a good thing, but it needs to be very well thought out if its going to be done, and should be done across the board.

I'm actually surprised they mentioned us, so I'm not sure what I'm allowed to tell you guys. It's still impossible to balance resources from just from the map files, but if you like large coordinated team matches I think you will like the new non-Randoms.

UM is definitely going to be the defining ability of the Coronata now..  5500 (base) + 3250 (fleet) = 8750 damage...  Thrown in with Malice, that's very deadly (2625 to afflicted enemies) and is effectively the same as Sniping a capital and then firing Missile Barrage.

The AL changes are the most interesting, I'll have to say..  Certainly not how I expected a buff to come to them, but I guess we'll see how things play out.  I guess it does help bring the Advent back to combat supremacy which was always the point of the race, though that got diluted through a load of nerfs over the course of the game.

I am curious as to what exactly the devs are going for with the Coronata though.  It's starting to seem like it's supposed to be the ship of the AL, even moreso than the titans for the other races.  It can effectively instagib+spawn ships (Subjugating Assault), neutralizes a huge chunk of enemy DPS (Suppression Aura), can nuke large targets better than anything else in the game (except a lucky hit by either of the CB's+Malice, but that is incredibly hard to do and requires a very stupid opponent), and can instacap planets.

I guess the point of this buff was to give the Coronata more teeth so that it's not just a tank that slowly eats away at your fleet and reduces your damage.  It probably does give the AL more power to be aggressive which they need, so I guess we'll just have to see how this plays out.

Well lets see, the biggest criticism of UM was that snipe was better in every way. Now the DPS values look like this.

Unity Mass: damage 2500/3500/4500/5500 with 25 second cooldown, or 100/140/180/220 DPS

Unity Mass w/ Max extra damage: 3500/5150/6900/8750 still 25 cooldown, or 140/206/276/350 DPS

Snipe: damage 1200/1600/2200/2600 with 11/10/9/8 second cooldown, or 109/160/244/325 DPS

Snipe w/ Overcharge: 2400/3200/4400/5600 still 11/10/9/8 cooldown, or 218/320/488/650 DPS.

Now its true you don't need to use another ability to get the most out of Unity Mass like Snipe, and UM is probably more antimatter efficient. But you have to take into account Snipe's longer range and that it's uninterruptable. Also the Coronata has no unlimited cap AoE attack, which all other titans have, so I'd say the Ragnarov still kills it offensively, its just UM is now in the same ballpark as snipe.

Yeah they could also throw in Malice and other nasty Advent synergies, but keeping UM much worse than snipe just to make Malice not as powerful doesn't seem fair, not least because in theory any Advent/TEC Rebel team (and we'll probably see more AR players at least) could do the same thing with snipe.

I no longer feel like Wail of the Sacrificed needs to be nerfed personally. In a game where one faction has the Deliverance Engine and another has a gun that lets you shut down all planetary structures and ignore all the rules of the game by leaping all the way across the map any time you please to attack a HW and ignore space-time in general, it seems acceptable. I think other changes would need to be made before Wail would be next in line for the nerf hammer.

I don't really agree here.  Seems kind of silly that the only titan AoE with absolutely no secondary effects or utility become the only target-capped AoE.

That said I DO thing limiting the scope of the damage is a better route then reducing damage.  I'd prefer to see Chastic Burst balanced by reducing it's damage radius and/or cooldown.

At the risk of being irritating my inner math geek demands I remind you that malice is calculated after mitigation to the main target.  Unity mass will generally be used on capitalships & titans(-25% ability damage armor type), which also have a minimum shield mitigation of 17%.

This means at the very least Unity Mass damage will be reduced to 5446 damage- and lower if the ship in question has more then 17% shield mitigation.  At 5446 damage at least 2200 is likely to be dealt to the capitalship's hull, which chaves off at least another 500 damage or so.  So at most we're looking at a damage of about 5000- which for malice will result in 1500 damage propagated(which is then reduced as normal by the secondary targets' defenses).

Of course that's still VERY respectable AoE damage, to say nothing of the enormous single target spike- I simply feel compelled to speak up when people forget that Malice damage essentially goes through mitigation twice as the 30% damge is taken post-mitigation to the original damage targets. My inner math geek can get a bit antsy about errors in number crunches  

harpo

Well, i'm glad to have been a small part of many the discussions where some of these changes were debated. 

I'm quite surprised and thrilled that even one of my suggestions made it to the page. 

Give this to the devs, they have come round and it seems that they respect their player's accurate inputs a lot more then they used to.

I'm quite surprised that they redesigned Unyeilding will on the Eradica, and Unity Mass on the Coronata. I'll be testing these asap to see how this changes the long term potency of both factions. 

Now you will hear the Coronata bells tolling your doom oh noobies and pros alike, and this time you will be afraid!

The coranata was strong when suppression was maxed but now its down right terrifying offensively esp with guardians.  

EDIT Note: I wrote this at 1:30 AM while half-asleep.  Take any absurdities I say hereafter with a grain of salt.

Honestly, if we go back to the days of yore, we have the three races, Advent, TEC, and Vasari, each with their own strengths and weaknesses as well as a focus in which they are supreme as well as a sub-component that added to them and made them less one-dimensional.  

TEC: economic supremacy with the ability to spam cheap quick units.  They get early trade and ultimately get Pervasive Economy and can use Novaliths for economic warfare.  Various upgrades also contribute to their ability to build quickly, including things like Industrial Juggernaut or even Colonize+ on the Akkan.

Vasari: unparalleled mobility with reliance on research.  It has always been the case that a late-game Vasari player is something to be feared simply due to the fact that Kosturas and Phase Missiles will mess you up.  They can be anywhere at any time and attack however they see fit.

Advent: combat synergy and assimilation.  The Advent at the beginning were incredibly powerful and between Illuminators, Guardians, the Holy Trinity (or the new Holy Trinity), and the Battleball in general, their fleets were incredibly difficult to take down while if they landed a single AoE on you, you would be doomed due to uncapped Malice.  They also would win culture wars, though this was never much of an impact on the game because as far as gameplay is concerned, this is just a "build a building to counter them" mechanic and requires minimal action by a player to deal with.  Clearly many of their tactics were OP or just bugged to be OP and so they received nerfs.  Nerf after nerf hit them until eventually there wasn't a whole lot left.  Illuminators were no longer undisputed kings of DPS, the Radiance fell to obscurity from the Malice cap, and various other changes occurred as well.

Barring an overhaul of culture which will simply not happen in Sins I (maybe Sins II, but idk how much more you could do with it before it becomes too 4X'y to be useful in a game with similar pacing), the only alternative buff for the Advent as a conceptualized race would be to buff their military.  It is known that the Advent suck economically.  Resource Focus is regarded under nearly every circumstance as a stupid idea and they do not have the economic boosts the other races have.  The Vasari can scavenge resources from dead ships and the TEC can pull money out of nowhere.  This is supposed to be the case I think.  Perhaps we have been trying too hard to pound the square militaristic Advent peg into a round hole that we think would be balanced.

With the advent of Rebellion (no pun intended), races were split.  TEC was split straight down aggression/defense.  The Vasari were split down research/mobility.  The Advent got a messier break.  The AR are effectively a new race to themselves.  They are no longer interested in assimilating or revenge.  Their sole purpose is now to transcend existence as we know it.  The AL was supposed to be the Advent we know and love, but really, because the AR got more military focus (Chastic Burst > most; Chastic Burst+Malice > all), the AL got relegated to the back seat: culture.

While culture may seem like a perfect idea for the focus of a race, it isn't in its current form.  If you had to manage it more, it would be.  It's a bit like diplomacy: build a unit; problem solved.  The lack of depth and more importantly activity required by the player to use it as a tool against the enemy is the problem.  If you spent 30% of the time you spent working on your fleet with culture once you got it up, it would  definitely impact gameplay and would make the AL's focus on it work.

This of course would take exorbitant amounts of time that the devs don't have, especially this late into the product's life-cycle.

The result is that the AL too must become more powerful in combat to make up for it's shortcomings elsewhere.  It's for this reason, that the more I think about the Unity Mass buff, the more I don't mind it.  So what if the Advent have the best military?  Wasn't that the original point?  So long as they are sufficiently weak economically (so TEC can beat them), they should be relatively balanced (as Vasari have Phase Missiles which neuter Advent ships).

Maybe it's just me, but I think the formula that the devs had at the beginning: economy, mobility, military for the races was a winning one.  It needed refinement of course, but it was something that could work wonderfully.  I think that with time, this formula got diluted and the point of the Advent in particular was forgotten.  I'm not saying they didn't need to be nerfed.  There were definitely severe balance issues with Vanilla, but I think by now you know what I mean.

Yes, I'm biased.  When I first got the game, I tried TEC and got my butt kicked consistently by the AI.  I didn't want to try the Vasari because I felt they'd have some funky playstyle that I wouldn't understand, so I played Advent and adored the race.  As time passed and nerfbats whacked them, I felt more and more like I wanted to play the Advent than I actually did if that makes sense.  I wanted to be able to play them as much as I wanted, and this is especially true of the AL.  Over time I shifted to the Vasari as I never could enjoy playing as the TEC very much.  I'm sure this bias is why I've adjusted the Advent more in Rebalanced Races more than the other races.

Even accounting for the bias, I still think that this may well be a good direction to go in.  Call me crazy, but honestly, the more and more I think about it, the more I'm fine with this change.

Anyways, it's 1:30 AM here and I'm rambling, so I'm having tons of typos due to sleepiness, so I'm going to stop now.  I hope my convolutions made sense.

Yes...many research modifiers (virtually any one that is numerical in nature) have a "base" value and "per level" value...the base value allows you to grant bonuses to the faction that don't require the technology to be researched...the AR also have this with their tech that brings back destroyed ships...

I just noticed that there is no mention of Phase Cannons or Pulse Waves on there.  I hope they come back some day..

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