Ultimate Apocalypse Competitiveness Thread - Ultimate Apocalypse Mod (DOW SS) for Dawn of War

Hi,

Was just curious to know if there are any players in the Ultimate Apocalypse community that enjoy versus other players competitively instead of AI and would generally like to know how many people there are that do this.

Edited by: Protocol-XYZ

Hmm...

Masterofroflness group might be interested. Jordan Lane could also host a tournament but it is unconfirmed. Maybe me?

It's not uncommon to see games pop up every now and then that are open to all. I play in a group of six guys.

It's... not a good competitive mod, though. Most maps are terrible for multiplay unless you enjoy the spectacle. I just played one today. There was a little early skirmishing for mid, but then somebody got a couple turrets out there and the game stalled out into a turtle fest until relic units landed. That's UA in a nutshell. When we want to play something challenging, with consistent action all game, we play literally anything else.

There are a ton of maps designed to give players a home defensive advantage, so a lot of times you may as well have a "NR 20" rule. Turrets cost the same amount as a single Space Marine but they'll kill marines by the fives and tens after an upgrade or two.

It is uncommon to find maps that are open to all, actually.

It might not be a competitive mod, but it certainly has the potential to be. Most of the units are unbalanced and half-assed, but with a proper balance patch you could turn this into a polished competitive mod that has much greater depth than the original game. The amount of abilities each unit has puts even dawn of war 2 to shame, but since the base game is clunky and not micro oriented, it makes the usage of these abilities difficult and, a lot of times, inefficient in fights. That said, I am not sure how much the current player base would like a balance patch for this game, judging from what I've seen, a good number of players seem to be of teenage years and very defensive about their favorite units or races.

Edited by: Chipawapa

The game is really fun to play in player vs player matches. It's getting better and better. I'm not fan of 4v4 games as it causes ENORMOUS lag.

I think a big part of the issue is that I'm seeing a lot of talk about the viability of the various relic units and the titans. Frankly, I almost never reach the tier to build Angron and the overwhelming majority of games where he shows up are going to be unbalanced anyway. As in, the player sat in their base and decided they were going to win by building Angron, which means they could have won at numerous other points but chose not to.

The mod is fun and interesting. I like gaining the upper hand and being able to play with my food until I can build an Imperator, but it is so far from a serious or competitive mod that I don't think you can properly explain it without numerous replays from legitimately good RTS players.

I watch Cylarne's videos sometimes, and if I can be blunt, his ability as a competitive player is pretty garbage. He's often quite passive and it's not unusual to watch him wall himself in. Unfortunately, I think this leads to a strong bias from Cylarne where we're seeing very strong defenses, very weak, inaccurate, costly artillery at a late tier, and a subversive amount of enthusiasm for game enders or super units.

If you tried to play this game competitively, you'd quickly find the meta revolving around exhausting exploits. Walls are a thing I gripe about - there's a Youtube video of Cylarne losing to wall spam of all things. He changed the mechanics of walls to try to mitigate it, but during the entire video there was a lot of hissing and venom to the tune of "No, it's not a balance problem, it's a player problem. This is wallbuse! Wall abuse! Abuse walls!" And you know, that's not a mentality that's going to actual make the game viable and competitive. Cylarne can kick competitive players out of his personal gaming group, but if you hold an actual tourney, people are going to spam walls, spam turrets, and pull other cheap tricks to win, and you'd look pretty stupid trying to shame them out of using easy, efficient strategies like that.

Overall I think UA is more fun than vanilla because I really enjoy just how much more there is to it all, but UA is balanced around a much more passive, non-creative mindset. It's fine if you focus on defense and if you a-click your army blobs towards the enemy without a lot of micro or attention. But the best players are always going to be aggressive and creative, and UA shatters like porcelain under the stress of even mildly competitive behavior.

@Flamingo: Excuse me but no. Lots of people will also have my back on... THAT.

Ok, first off my playstyle is not garbage. ONLY when I go full on defense is when I am with Jordan Lane and his friends because whenever I go competetive with them on my side, it never ends up well because THEY are not good players.I only get defensive when I know I'm losing. You don't know anything about my playstyle. Watch other videos. Turtling is a valid tactic in the mod.

My playstyle, bro:

And dude, seriously, you are talking about a guy(an asshole) who outright spoils the fun out of the entire group I played with and is very demanding. Demanding me to "fix this, fix that" and you seriously think our "hissing" is wrong? Most people will disagree with you mate when they see that video. It was wall abuse because they had over 70k health each + 70 health regen per second. Everything was resistant to nukes, everything was resistant to my army, and you call that competitive? That ONE game is an example of an asshat tactic, and the entire group was denied fun. I only started abusing the bikes after it became completely obvious that the game was unwinnable, and building one or two squads of bikes is hardly going to do anything at that point when the necron player has something absurd like 40 walls sitting in the middle of the map. That many walls can't really be killed either, by basically anything. It really doesn't matter. This wall strat is 100% pure cheating level abuse and something was done about them, because it's just not possible to do anything to someone with that many wall-level turrets.

Let me summarize: You say my playstyle is garbage, then you said my mentality is bad (for competetiveness), then you say I kick people out of groups, then you mock me when I point out someone is abusing a mechanic plain as day? You are questionable.

Edited by: Lord_Cylarne

I could write a list of ways you can improve your game. You're a big fish in a really small pond.

Given the time, if I mained an army and felt out all the little notches and clicks, I could give you a very clear look at where one specific faction is strong and weak. In the vanilla game, that's how meta got formed - people would discover that DE bike spam was how you most efficiently played that faction, and eventually everybody did it or they lost the battle.

If we held a tournament under your leadership, Cylarne, we'd wind up disqualifying all the winners for "cheating" because they'd be performing "bi-buse! Bike abuse!", "turbabuse - cheating with turrets!, or "wallbuse! Building walls in a way that is really annoying!"

I've practiced replicating "wallbuse wallbaboons" in 1v1 games and it's really not especially viable. It takes a while to gain momentum with it, and by the time you reach that tipping point you could have also started spamming monoliths, relic units, or other methods of steamrolling. It's just that wall spam feels the most frustrating because walls have too much HP and buffing them makes them invincible so that you're literally slamming your head into a wall. I think the only way it's going to happen is if you have teammates who bite the bullet for you while you set it up.

In any case, the tooltip said exactly what amplifiers do. Everybody who looked at UA Necrons knew it was theoretically possible to stack those bonuses to that level. You just can't reach it unless you've got a really nice choke to defend for an hour or unless your opponents are substantial worse players than you.

I'm not even going to validate referring to "turtling" as a strategy. It's more like a flinch than it is a tactical behavior, but whatever man. Nobody tunes into a boxing match to watch the boxers cover their faces and turn away from each other like frightened kids, but if you want flinching to be viable then by all means shine on, you crazy diamond.

Edited by: Flamgino

Okay so how can I contact this rofl guy so i can start playing little bit more serious? Cuz well i just got perma banned by some player for soloing 2 players with a wave of conscripts and riders... and yeah finding open games is quite a problem.

Edited by: Endranii77

I won't comment on anyone's skill as a player, as much as I would love to.

But I will say that this is exactly why I've argued, and will continue to argue, that this game needs more testers. Cylarne's playgroup should feel free to enjoy the game in their own way. But it has little to no representation from the competitive community for this mod. That means balance is approached from a limited perspective and tends to do little to meet the concerns of those players. This is especially true if you're kicking out the people using "asshat tactics." Like it or not, those players are the best at finding the exploits in the game and bringing them to light. More often than not, they'll also have some of the most insightful views of balance from a competitive view.

So Cylarne, I'm not saying you need to bring competitive players into your playgroup, or that you need to play differently. But I think you should form a group of testers from the competitive community, and that you should take their feedback really seriously. Definitely moreso than you would the opinion of any given forum post.

Edited by: Wallabe

In a mod with this much content, 2 additional tech levels plus super units plus end game win buttons, i cant imagine the nightmare that would be balance testing. I'm with others on their point though: including competitive players from within the community for balancing should definitely be looked into.

Actually, it might be a bad idea to have Cylarne play with competitive players. You'd just wind up with a bunch of guys rolling over Cylarne's preferred methods of play, and then you'd see a bunch of arbitrary nerfs preventing those playstyles from easily beating Cylarne anymore. The mod would only shrink and get less fun.

I dunno. I voiced my opinion, but what the hell. The worst player in our group really loves the walls and stalling, and I feel like a lot of "balance" advice is being taken from people who are exclusively playing against bots. Consequently, the mod is always going to have these awful turtle doldrums because it's being set up so that you cold hold off waves of AI spam until you have your nukes or titans.

It's not that widely played and the mod was never going to be balanced, so I guess it may as well focus on letting bad players defeat the hardest AI settings by exploiting the AI's head-on tactics. I mean imagine trying to beat a cheating AI with infinite resources if it could spam artillery that disabled turrets.

Balancing a strategy game takes a different mentality than what UA is being operated with. I guess it's best just to appreciate the new stuff to play with and only boot up the mod when I want to play Sim City with giant robot attacks.

I would still love the win condition to restrict turrets and walls to X amount.

This is the main reason i do not play PvP matches and even quit UA for a significant while'

There is just no balance to the units, vanilla DoW was so much more polished that you could find a reason for using every single unit, whereas in UA its just new and shiny eye candy every patch and just big buffs/nerfs to factions that the fanbase hates/loves without any real thought about the mods health as a whole.

I recently played a game against tyranids as an SM and the tyranid player just spammed the usual gaunts etc. , but also brought some gargoyles' what is the counter to an air unit?? maybe AA? well thats what i thought and i build the SMs AA vehicle, and i found out that it did absolutely nothing to gargoyles let alone gaunts....

It would be perfect if this mod had some proper polish and balance to the factions/units, it would make the game much healthier and promote competitive play (and of, more views/dloads/fame).

@UE_emperor Not to dissuade your talk on balance (I did an entire essay on my concerns regarding CD's endgame for Exterimnation gamemodes) but in regard for Tyranids, much like CDs most of their army is actually a single armor type, in this case, Infantry effectiveness helps much moreso than dedicated anti-air weapons in that case. Your Heavy Bolters woulda done the job just as well if not more efficiently against Gargoyles. In general for nids, usually flamer and artillery are great until the AI begin spamming Nidzilla units, at which point you should look into your race's Heavy Infantry counters.

@dragon-kid and yet, with that much gaunt spam (and deepstrike availability) my devastators get swarmed and cant do shit while gargoyles are just shooting happily at everything else, not to mention that an AAs rotary cannon could very easily destroy a little gargoyle....if not outright blow him with a single shot....

I agree that the mod needs better balance but I don't think it should be focused in competitive play. Most people simply don't play online, we play against the AI because either we don't have friends to play with or because of steamwork's terrible servers which most of the time don't even show the games being played. Also 'competitive players' can be quite obnoxious and we could end up like in DoWII's 'Elite mod' in which your opinion only ever matters if you form part of the top 15 or so player's elite.

Exactly what he said. I play against the ai 99% of the time and try a lot of things to make it fun and competitive....doesn't work out often though

Kids and manchildren will always behave like so, we cannot stop from having those arrogant people coming up.

With that said, the benefit of competitive play is that, in order to have it, we need a polished and balanced environment in which to pit each player against each other whereas in UA we have the complete opposite: A faction can have one overpowered cheese unit, have units that stomp everything else in their tier (looking at you inquisition bodyguards) or have multiple units that get a global benefit that make them nigh invincible or annoying to deal with.

These problems make it difficult to have a good experience, whether that would be players OR AI, and thats why it should happen if we want UA to be more healthy as a mod (and subsequently increase its longevity).

I think the point he's trying to make is that the mod should be balanced all around, not just balanced towards competitive play. I think the point we're all trying to make is that we all want a particular unit to have a role and for them to be good at that role. Im so glad to see the God bunkers getting nerfed, but what about the SOB's aura of invincibility? Spam multiple angels and your entire army is literally invincible. Morale break? Ok, but thats only a temporary solution, IMO because all you have to do is cycle your line.

Pergaps it could be an Aura of Damage mitigation instead? Like reduce incoming damage by 50% or something instead of 100%.

Ffs the redemptionists get an aura of invincibility that comes off cooldowm damn near as the effect is wearing off. That just doesn't seem right, and i love the SOB.

Everybody always talks about the super units and the late game, but you know, that stuff really doesn't matter. Not usually, anyway - or it shouldn't.

The thing that really wrecks this mod is the turtling crap. There are units at the mid tiers that are very poorly balanced, and they obviously aren't tested adequately because turrets are such a huge crutch. You throw down a few turrets really quickly on the defensive, they cost less than reinforcing one Space Marine, and you'll have no trouble holding off superior forces.

I've never played an RTS that made stationary defenses so powerful. Some people tell me Age of Empires did this, but that gameplay in AoE was also very slow and involved a lot of meticulous sieges - I never played the game.

The super units for everyone but IDH are thirty to forty minutes in. The game should usually be won by then and the super units are the icing on your cake. If Cylarne is trying to foster the use of super units to the point of slowing down the game and making multiple tech tiers generally not viable, he ought to remove the relic limit and make T3 units be T0, relic units T1, Titans T2, nukes T3, and then balance the economy around those more bombastic levels. There'd be fewer units and maybe he could add way over-the-top turrets like Turbolaser emplacements, because he likes turrets so much.

Point is, it wouldn't be balanced like garbage through most tiers forcing you to wait for your HQ to tech up while your turret wall shreds anyone dumb enough to walk towards it.

Edited by: Flamgino