Balance

Revolution was created to give a bit more depth to our weekly PvP games as well as fix some early balance issues (eg barge spam/ramming)

As PvP teams grow more adept we’ve seen the emergence of one particular tactic that is very effective for rush destroying a carrier. A significant factor in how effective this can be is based on the map.

This is mostly a problem on PvP sized maps (20-30 islands) where blueprints are all unlocked. If a team is far from an air island or has to fight a 3-4 shield island to get one then they are at a huge disadvantage.

What we see is that if you are able to secure an air island within the first 8-10 minutes of the game, even if you capture no other islands, then economically you will have enough to buy 4-5 mantas and sink any carrier. This very short time window, and this need to rush for an air island also means that everyone will be at their nearest/easiest air island. The only other option open to you is to run your carrier far off the map and avoid detection (and gameplay) for a long time, but without an air island, you aren’t going to be able to gain any significant strike power.

The standard loadout gives you more than enough IR missiles and flares for you to mount a kamikazi attack using your 5 mantas, releasing your missiles too close for CIWS.

In this rush scenario, once your opponent has got manta production unlocked, your main hope for survival is that they make mistakes in their attack runs.

This seems to work out this way for two reasons:

• The carrier CIWS is unable to kill a manta before it fires, even on a direct attack run
• The manta is cheap. It is only 25% more expensive than an albatross but is significantly faster.
• The starting warehouse stock contains all the missiles required

So, for balance and gameplay in PvP, these three things add up to:

• No need to capture or retain a heavy munitions island as you have all the missiles already
• No need to bring aircraft home after a strike as Mantas are so cheap
• Carrier AA missiles are ineffective as you already have enough flares and launchers

You can basically see how with two well matched teams in a 1v1 scenario, that random map generation will be the most significant factor in who gets mantas first.

What can we do?

In events, altering the map size to be significantly larger and dropping down the starting setup to “minimal loadout” will elongate the “we do not have mantas” window. And starting the game without AI islands at all will give both teams equals access to build mantas and munitions, but the AI PvE aspect is a huge part of the game even in PvP matches. We’re going to research some different ideas.