Comments - UsernameUsernameRev

You can use any jumpjet unit to close the distance (Annihilation Barge, Heavy Destroyers, Scarabs, hero units), teleport in with a Monolith and then your infantry to it, get some Tesla Carbine equipped Immortals in a Ghost Ark, research global jump and use it, unload the Tesla Carbine Immortals to have them attack whatever you want removed, use your teleportation capable sentry turrets, build a Pyramid, go apocalypse tier for global range researches for sentry turrets and the Pyramid, use the Pyramid's super weapon before that. I don't remember if they did change these units but in the previous version the Deathstrike Pariahs (ranged variant) used to be good against everything. Just send them in and watch them tear everything apart. And then there are also Lychguards, which are a global deepstrike squad once either produced or loaded into a Monolith & ready to teleport (takes some time to get ready).

The Doomsday Ark was always pretty mediocre. Biggest bonus: ignores line of sight (actually didn't test whether this is still the case with this version).

Not liking 1.89. Everything has been nerfed. It feels like I just researched 3 tiers of downgrades for my units. The entire 1.89 patch feels like people that play Supreme Commander Forged Alliance are trying to balance Soulstorm as if it was Supreme Commander: Tier 1 exists only to leave it behind asap with nothing interesting to do with. Tier 1 options that used to be available have been removed. Harass has been nerfed to the ground: It used to be possible to actually use specialized harass units that were good vs generators, listening posts (+other races' variants of this) and turrets to raid a base that was left unguarded to destroy generators and listening posts. Not anymore: toothless now, takes forever. It used to be possible to use infiltration units to spot enemy units inside their base as artillery targets. Not anymore: artillery range drastically reduced ! It used to be possible to sneak into an enemy base by avoiding detector units to kill construction units, ambush heroes or freshly trained infantry and destroy generators. Not anymore: turrets got their detection ranges buffed ! It's good that walls were nerfed and turrets got some HP buff, as they were too weak, but as things are now harass has lost it's gameplay. Meanwhile old issues persist: IG still got no upgrade that makes garrisson weapons useful past tier 1, many weapon tooltips lack relevant information (EMP effect, friendly fire, ignores terrain, blinds, minimum range...; some useless), IG's sandbag dude still has an HP bug after armor researches when toggling mobile & stationary mode, no helpful UI counter for Necron how many AMP generators of how many that I can build have been built already (helpful for planning layouts), some units shooting before their weapons are aligned causing their first shot then or after having moved themselves [2 different issues !] to always miss, the IG infantry's planted C4 can't be blown up by the abiltiy for this anymore unless spammed multiple times because it does too little damage to the C4, hotkey conflicts are still a thing, hero units that upgrade things like infantry/vehicle cap permanently (or the other choices) lose that buff until killed, built again and upgraded again if loaded into a structure or vehicle... Many units are now only effective vs one target type, most not effective enough. The ability cooldowns have been nerfed too, far, far more than reasonable, robbing units of their unique use. While some units have been changed drastically others have been left entirely untouched, like the Necron's Annihilation Barge which is still good vs everything, slows whatever it attacks and deals area damage vs infantry squads. Granted: Making units effective vs less and limiting their abilities forces the use of more unit variety and units in general. However: This leads to boring gameplay. As no unit has anything interesting anymore, no longer has any aspect that can exploit a weakness of the enemy or initiate a new strategy by it's unique aspect anymore but everything needs an army backing it up the game becomes blatantly boring. The only really effective thing now are super units and game enders. While many unit weaknesses have been added already weak or flawed units haven't seen an overhaul to buff them in many cases, still leaving them either vulnerable with low armor or too low health, overpriced, with too little damage, too low accuracy, too expensive upgrades or pointless cap cost compared to superior units that cap cost the same. The game feels pretty damn boring now and forces me into a combined army, which is like spitting on all the unique races and their supposed strengths in favor of trying to establish a game balance that tries to fit all with only this one design aspect. That what should be unique and has been so before this patch now feels more like a gimmick that's nerfed to the ground. It's simply not fun anymore. Previously UA honored the races' unique aspects and the units' unique abilities. This patch no longer does but degrades them. It feels like the balance has only been tested in favor of one specific game style catering to big army vs army matches with a huge base that has lots of defense and the game is ended with game enders, not with the regular army. This is much the same as Supreme Commander's experimental spam.
TLDR: Races need to be unique, keep their unique strengths and the same is true for the individual units that are supposed to bring a specific strength to the table. It mustn't take a specialized vehicle group or squad take around 20s or more to deal with anything they're supposed to be effective against. The ability cooldowns have been nerfed too much, many tooltips need an overhaul, hero upgrades that affect the army need a fix for no longer losing these upgrades once loading them into structures / vehicles, all units need to be balanced, not only just some that people picked up while ignoring the rest - hasn't been the case and upgrades matter here too.

Works great, except for 2 issues:
1) plants now block construction space as if they're solid objects, which wasn't the case before
2) Kaurav City map has multiple pathing bugs where units get stuck at the outer sides of the walls of the higher plateau in the middle of the map

Stronghold maps for Dark Eldar, Chaos Space Marines, Eldar work fine so far. Remaining ones not tested yet.
Edit: Can confirm the SCAR error with the Necron Stronghold mission. Also the player's HQ isn't spawned.

There's a bug with the Imperial Guard HQ's trainable leaders: It's supposed to be a shared limit of 10 leaders of any kind. As the Guard teches up that limit reduces from 10 to 7 while it's supposed to go up. Additionally the tech "Uncommon Valor" doesn't increase this leader limit while the tooltip states it does. So the IG have far less leaders available than they're supposed to have. I couldn't narrow down which tech does that but I guess it's the actual tech tier upgrade for each minus one from 10 to 7.

Flaws of this mod: The entire thing is set to loop exactly 100 times to create or read entries, not as many as it actually needs. With enough structures, points, addons this thing simply fails and bugs. The way it saves structures is also by a long string name instead of chosing a short number or letter per race and per structure etc.. It also lists every single structure etc. over and over that exists instead of summarizing where a type of structure etc. is built per territory to not have to name it over and over. When tested the function Difficulty_Get() was never recognized by Soulstorm - neither worked on the territory displaying map nor on the victory/loss screen nor in the actual strategy game mode. Yet this function is used to determine the difficulty played at. The difficulty setting storing variable itself doesn't seem to have a fixed value but depends on the mod(s) used. In strategy game mode the function Cpu_GetDifficulty(World_GetPlayerAt(number_of_the_CPU-1)) delivered the difficulty: 0 = easy; 1 = normal; 2 = hard. The mod decleares a lot of global functions and variables that don't need to be global. There's no error catching for the often used line [for GP, Dat in string.gfind(storedstring, "/([:%w]+)/([:,%s_%-%.%w]+)") do] - which may return nil (nothing found), causing the entire thing to bug out instead of having an if-check ahead of this, testing for nil and if that happens to skip this instead. I tried to find a way to generate any addon information, hoping that addon names could eventually be read instead of having to crawl through each mod's database for custom addons with custom names - but such a function doesn't seem to exist (Dawn of War games' scar code is really poorly or not at all documented !). So this can't be made compatible with all mods, unless tediously updating the addons list all the time. Edit: Also this mod just crashed when it tried to check for addon table#3 for the Necrons, which don't have an addon table#3: complain of nil value while expecting table.

That's not how it works. 4 GB is the maximum the program can address.

Necrons have 2 defensive turrets that are small: Gauss and Heavy Gauss. Heavy is vs vehicle only and costs a lot, regular Gauss is vs infantry only and gets cheaper the more strategic points you've built Obelisks on. Once the Ancient Core is built the Necrons get access to their heavy stationary turrets that have better survivability, long range and can be upgraded with an area effect attack. All turrets benefit from an upgrade that's shown when you select one which massively improves their damage once the 2nd of these upgrades has been completed. There are 3 such upgrades in total. Necrons also have walls that cost 200 power and can install a weapon on top of themselves for 250 power. They're quite tanky and useful vs everything.

Immortals are anti vehicle infantry only and the only reason you should ever use them vs infantry is to slow enemy infantry movement once they have their tesla weapons. Vs infantry Wraiths and Necron Warriors are meant to be used among the regular units. Later on the Deathtouch infantry becomes available. Necrons are already insane at range which you'll see once you've got one or multiple Pyramids and their apocalypse upgrades.

The only time Necrons are bad is during their buildup because while they upgrade their main structure they no longer can produce units there. Upgrading can be sped up by constructing power generators around that main structure. Important are the infantry upgrades for each infantry type for the Necrons. Without them the units have less of everything. Necrons are actually quite tanky. Play the Imperial Guard in comparison and you'll see.

The one thing that makes a difference for ranged combat are the blue shield icons on the enemies that reduce the ranged damage taken by units that have them. Send in effective melee units, like Lychguards and they'll tear trough them Leman Russ tanks but in general that shouldn't be necessary as smoke launchers don't last an eternity. You could also use your main structure, once successfully upgraded through all stages, to tank for you. With the research for the production grid and that toggled active all units in the area around it benefit from slightly increased health regeneration (even things that don't regenerate themselves usually) and slight ranged damage protection. There's nothing the Necrons can't kill and they're really good at tearing through weaker units and resource structures fast.

Why is it required to apply the LAA patch to the GraphicsConfig.exe ? It's not used for running the game, just for the initial graphical setup. This confuses me - what's the point ?

The LAA is an edit of each of the 2 files. It merely sets a flag inside these for that feature. You don't just need to download the LAA patch and you're done but you need to apply it to both files. Re-running the program on the same files doesn't do any harm as it merely sets a flag.

The campaign isn't supported by the mod (yet) and most stronghold missions have bugs that make them crash one way or another. But that's not the mod's fault but rather the poor mission scripting that always assumes conditions instead of properly checking for them, which then causes a SCAR error whenever something doesn't work as expected. If there's a Bugsplat crash however, that's a mod bug issue.

Essentially you can avoid the SCAR error in most campaign missions if you don't do any secondary objectives (this is not necessary for all missions but only few of them, yet works in general).

There are some more obvious examples of how the campaign is not supported (yet), like with the invincible structures in the Eldar's stronghold mission at the player's starting location.

I know what you mean. IG can garrison almost any structure but that switches their weapons with generic lasguns and plasma guns rather than using the weapons of the actual squads inside and with their appropriate upgrade stages / custom weapons. Very hard to balance that one as structures count as garrisoned while the actual squads are still in transfer and not there yet, making this work around the globe easily. Also the units inside wouldn't be affected by morale reducing effects or debuffs while inside a structure, unless that'd be somehow possible to manage at which point bunkers would be a worse choice than the regular structures that make the garrisoned units use the generic lasgun and plasma pistol attacks because there's at least no morale loss / damage suffered and neither debuffs received (except a few very specific ones).

The bunker concept in the sense of making the current turrets garrisonable wouldn't be such an issue though if that'd require a tier 3 or tier 4 tech to unlock instead of being a feature initially. Or maybe instead those initially garrisonable bunkers could replace the current turrets with infantry inside being unaffected by debuffs and morale loss like inside the regular structures and so that IG has no proper turrets at tier 1 and 2 but instead these bunkers and needs to actually man them until they can finally also attach a something on top at tier 3. That could then allow the choice of either adding a sensor on top or a turret (starts as anti infantry turret, upgradeable to missile version). Tier 4 could add the plasma variant as weapon upgrade choice so that the IG starts out weaker but cheaper and with more infantry management for defense than other factions but in the end can improve their defense further than other factions by getting back their turret weapons (or scanner) on top of the bunkers along with the units inside that use their actual weapons.

Necron questions:
1) The time bonus of the Necron - is 100 percent really the limit or does the UI not show anymore while it actually goes beyond that ?
If 100% is the limit - why does the Scarab build speed relic choice only cost 300 energy when it always takes effect while the time bonus choice that is capped at 100% costs 1000 energy ?
2) I've noticed that when building more regular generators, amplification generators, Monoliths (HQ structure), attack scarabs the build time increases but the tooltips of the units neither state that nor the amount - What are the values ?

Suggestions:
1) Attack Scarabs in late game:
Attack scarabs become pretty much useless later on. Could there be a research that removes their population cost as they already get built slower the more squads of them do already exist, which limits their spam potential ?

2) Amplification generator build limit (UI info):
I'd really like an info text, displaying how many amplification generators I can still construct to be able to plan a bit despite chaotic circumstances by how much a just captured point can be fortified with these.

3) Transformation units (Nightbringer, Deceiver)
The transformation units (Nightbringer, Deceiver) aren't doing too well, especially the Nightbringer who is a mix of some burst damage and then a bit of not so much damage. It's a nice extra to have but they don't feel like key units or a huge threat. An apocalypse tech research for both would be nice to turn them into actually terrifying units, like the Nightbringer doing area damage, having a morale reducing aura, attacking more frequently and especially moving faster and the Deceiver removing enemy attack buffs, blinding enemies, making vehicles target their allies.

4) Amplification generator relic tech choice for better resource production:
There's an amplification generator relic tech choice that increases the resource income per amplification generator but not the 1500 resource production cap. Yet the bonus is still only +1% per amplification generator while the tech costs 3000. This doesn't go hand in hand. If I already have 3000 energy I obviously don't really need a tech that increases the production by tiny bits but rather go for a heavy generator instead. Increase the bonus or reduce the costs or make it increase the resource production cap. The way it's currently is questionable. Even another Monolith with some free Amplification Generators would be a better choice in most cases than this tech. Thinking of that: Could also be made into a tech that makes Amplification Generators more durable per Amplification Generator that already exists (much like the Orks' banners HP increase per already existing structure type) and make their selfdestruct usable for free + add some morale loss and EMP effect.

UA mod team - 2 questions:
1)
Would it be possible to make the knockback mechanic that some pure melee combat squads can perform a toggleable action ? Knockback is useful for buying time and whenever you're outnumbered but whenever not it's disruptive and wastes time, which is why I'm asking if that could be made toggleable. The thing is that units that are knocked back are no longer considered a target until they get back on their feet. That makes me assign the same target over and over again on each knockback, as the melee squad then changes it's target to something else or they run off in some other direction. If toggleable is not an option: Could this be swapped with a stun instead so that only ranged squads get a knockback as that actually benefits them without much of a downside ?

2)
I noticed melee units have very few special actions compared to ranged units. Why is this and is there any intend to give them some variety of special commands too ?

You should REALLY create something far more install friendly, mainly a single package with everything that's mandatory anyways. It's very likely that at some point any single of the mandatory mods will update and then there may be version conflicts between the other mandatory mods. This one is a nightmare. Of the several mods that need to be downloaded all of them are named at a different spot and not a single one is linked within such text. There's also that .cmd file that I ASSUME I need to run before doing anything ?

In the game then there are 3 mod choices:
-bugfix
-weapons
-races

I thought this was ONE mod and as far as I know it's not possible to run the game with multiple mods active.

=> There's a total lack of wtf to do how.

Also:
Is this usable for the campaign ? Because before starting multiplayer and getting shot to pieces I'd try to learn what the mod does while experiencing the story of the campaign.

As this mod already adds many unique things I'd suggest experimenting with a different kind of unit cap. Currently units and structures both share the unit cap. Due to that a player can no longer expand at a certain point as it's required to maintain a certain amonut of units in relation to a certain amount of structures to be able to defend what has been created and to perform attacks. At that point the unit cap serves as action stopper, as the player can not expand any further. At least there's the unit veterancy that increases the unit cap but I see 3 flaws with that:
1) Defending is easier than attacking: It's more likely that a unit assisted by defense structures and shorter supply lines survives than one in hostile territory.
2) Defense structures can level up, which they shouldn't be capable of, imo, as they're already pretty strong on their own and allowing them to level up promotes turtling over mobile units.
3) Experience can only be gained by units that are bulky enough to survive and strong enough to score a number of kills. Less than likely to achieve that with T1 and T2 units later on but far more likely with T3 units and experimentals, especially air units that can ignore the terrain, move fast in and out and hit hard.
So bottom line: Experience only works for survivors. If the mod wants to promote action and not sh*t on the T1 and T2 units later on as obsolete garbage tier then instead of unit veterancy the damage done by the player's units to any enemy (eventually not counting hits on shields) should increase the unit cap along with unit veterancy. That would then need a modificator per unit type so that an experimental that can effortlessly farm many T1 / T2 enemies won't contribute too easily. That way actual combat drives the unit cap up opposed to T3 units or experimentals farming stuff or turtle defense farming attackers and being more likely to level up due to stronger weapons and being more bulky.

Eventually mass extractors should also have an influence towards the unit cap increase (and -decrease if destroyed). Either in an absolute number or by buffing the sum of base unit cap plus additional unit cap unlocked by a percentage per mass extractor.

Yeah I know that sounds selfish and impatiant but I want that game speed control button in Contra 009 beta instead of waiting for the update. Any info or hint at least on the files I need to look at ?

Alternatively: The problem with the Stealth General currently is that he neither has good defense nor good offense and still requires a base to operate from. Also Elbrus Storm and Jammer Station offer no unit upgrades, the Hazael hero vehicle should get a salvage crate upgradeable main weapon because it's damage is too low and Gun Buggies along with Assassins should get a "Hold Position" (deploy) button so they don't make room for units just because pathfinding sucks again, causing them to reveal themselves and get shot.
Assassins are also completely useless against unmanned vehicles (Cyborg General's units and enemy hero vehicles) - perhaps they should start with the kill driver weaponry and instead gain AP-Bullets as upgrade, enabling them to just destroy no-driver-killable vehicles while their previous upgrade just affects Jarmen Kell and may boost their damage percentage-wise.

Also remove Bio Bomb that affects my own units and makes them reveal themselves and give Gun Buggies an armor that makes them immune to contamination. Much more useful. Aside from that China's ECM tanks counter all my defense as all are missile based while I also can't use tanks as they get ECM disabled so give RPG troopers a Scorpion style weapon bypassing the ECM and increase their range to actually be able to fire back at Assault General's T-63 instead of not having enough range for that from inside my Palace.

Also I left a comment in the revora forums on how to make non-shooting weapons for the Scorpion tank that allow aiming at units instead of having to guess range and to spam-click what to attack. Much better playable ambushes that way.

Sorry for the wall of text. While I'm at it *shrug*