Reduce Paragon output 10k/1M m/E -> 4k/400k m/E#7131
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📝 WalkthroughWalkthroughThis PR reduces the Paragon T4 Experimental Resource Generator (XAB1401) unit's economy limits: maximum energy output decreases from 1,000,000 to 400,000 and maximum mass output decreases from 10,000 to 4,000. A changelog entry documents these balance changes. ChangesXAB1401 Economy Balance Adjustment
Estimated code review effort🎯 1 (Trivial) | ⏱️ ~3 minutes Suggested reviewers
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I disagree with this suggestion. Yes, if your Paragon is ready and you have enough build power both to defend it and to build new game-enders, then you will win. But that simply means you already had the upper hand, or your opponents played poorly. Let’s compare Paragon and Mavor at the time of construction. Paragon is 1.5x more expensive of energy, and slightly more expensive of mass and build time. You also need to make up plenty of BP in advance to use Paragon, otherwise it’s useless. And BP costs money too. All things being equal, when Mavor is ready, the Paragon will only be 80–90% complete, and you’ll find it very difficult to finish building it, as all your resources and BP will be tied up in maintaining the shields. What’s more, once the enemy has finished building the Mavor, they free up a lot of resources and can start producing Novax, Strats and other units to finally kill the unfinished Paragon. You write that "Mavor deals around 600 mass/s of damage to assisted shields, so the Paragon will have 3.4k mass left over for salvations in a game ender war" That would be true if you had a single shield that covered both Paragon and Salvation. But there are no such shields in the game, and no one is forcing Mavor to fire at Paragon. So it turns out that you need to spend resources to maintain shields both where you have Paragon and where you plan to build Salvation. You can also destroy the Air Grid using Mavor whilst the enemy is building their first Salvation, so that you can then use strats Paragon is the most expensive game-ender, requiring more skill than any other, and also requiring more teamwork to be used effectively. On maps like Astrocrater, Paragon isn’t effective at all, as there’s simply no space to use it effectively (on this map, you’re most likely to see a game-ender). On Seton, the most effective game-ender is Scathis so its radius covers almost half of the opponent's entire map .On most MapGen maps, Yolo will be more effective as it handles bases scattered across the map better than any other unit. What’s more, by nerfing Paragon, you’ll be removing another game-ender from the game: Salvation. Since it’s useless without Paragon, it’s far inferior to other game-enders What I find even harder to understand is why you’re suggesting nerf Paragon by 60% straight away. A 20% nerf would have been understandable To be honest, I don’t understand why balance team focus on Paragon. There are so many units and features in the game that need tweaking. Mercy, CZAR, Absolver, Sera subs, Cybran stealth, Rembo SACU. They need rebalancing far more than Paragon, which is rarely built anyway. |
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Description of the proposed changes
Reduce Paragon's max output so that it cannot simultaneously defend itself against land, air, and artillery while also making Salvations to kill enemy infrastructure. This ability made it far more powerful than other game enders and essentially unbeatable even if the enemy had nearly full map control, which is not the case for other game enders.
Paragon: T4 Experimental Resource Generator (XAB1401):
Discord balance thread.
Testing done on the proposed changes
Simple number change that doesn't need changing.
The balance implications cannot be sandboxed either.
Theory for thought:
Mavor deals around 600 mass/s of damage to assisted shields, so the Paragon will have 3.4k mass left over for salvations in a game ender war. This means a salvation can be built every 59.6s, so the Paragon guaranteed wins in 2 minutes when 2 salvations are built. This compares to 21.1s previously, so Paragon won in ~42s.
Yolona requires 19.2 SMD to defend if it has full 145 T3 engis of assistance to maximize its fire rate, which costs 288 mass/s. Really insignificant cost. The main cost will be in building SMD 4 minutes early for them to load. Yolona also doesn't easily get 145 engis so it's not as high of a requirement in reality.
Anecdotes:
People often do not max out the Paragon instantly, or even at all before the game ends. They may reach around 3000 mass/s immediately, and then increase spending over time if their engineer building infrastructure isn't dead. This means that they do not need to reach the full output to win the game.
The most ridiculously economic game with RAS SACU being spammed into water could have a player reach 3k income. This would give them a fighting chance against a 4k income Paragon. More realistically a team could reach 1.5k income together in the late game. Overall, the nerfed Paragon should be able to defensively match the offensive power of a map-control-based team, even if overbuilding unnecessary defenses reduces the Paragon user's efficiency. The nerf does mean that the Paragon user will no longer be able to simultaneously build Salvations to kill enemy infrastructure; they will have to invest most of their income into defenses and have a "fair" fight before having resources to build Salvations.
Checklist
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