Base Healing Aura

[BudgetMessiah]

This is one change I don't understand. Who thought it was a good idea to require units to spend more time idling at home? I thought the whole point of DoW2 dispensing with base-building was to allow me to spend more time in the field with my troops, doing troop things. With the nerf to healing aura, it almost pays to let your guys die, as you can reinforce and return to the field sooner than you will if you actually preserve your troops.

Put the healing aura back the way it was. If the problem is one or two unit types healing too quickly when at base, then fix those units. If the problem is that units are too resilient when under attack while under the protection of the base's aura, add some code to retard their regeneration while under attack. This code already exists: it is used in the campaign to regulate healing when outside of combat.

[Buguba]

I think it's meant to be a nerf to retreating, especially after the pathing has been fixed.

i'm happy for it, personally. Units pretty much have a garauntee to escape back to base from a melee horde, and this stops players from abusing retreat.

[BudgetMessiah]

I'm not sure how one is related to the other. It's a pretty indirect fix if that's what it's intended to do. It's certainly no consolation to know that this "fix" to retreating from melee is punishing me when I retreat from a shooty squad.

I think my point remains that sitting around waiting to heal is lame. There's got to be a more direct way of addressing the "problem" of retreating units.

[Goobers]

I originally was in favor of it because it made retreating more time consuming on the small 2vs2 maps.

However having my army beaten, the responsible sluggaz keeping up with the retreat all the way home and shanking my army because there suddenly was no 'home team advantage', I'm not overly fond of it any more.



Although it was probably more to do with the base turrets being so far back on the new maps they didn't start firing early enough, I blame the lack of decent base healing.

[Zephris]

One problem i noted, Carnifexes heal only at the base, so if you have a carnifex at 300 of 900 HP then at base healing rate of 1.5hp/s then it'll take 400 seconds or 6min 40 seconds to reach full health again. As such its perhaps easier to let it die and take out some units and just build another.

[Buguba]

I'm not sure how one is related to the other. It's a pretty indirect fix if that's what it's intended to do. It's certainly no consolation to know that this "fix" to retreating from melee is punishing me when I retreat from a shooty squad.

I think it's completely related. You retreat for two reasons: to heal/reinforce your units, and to escape a losing battle. Usually, those two things co-inside.

With the pathing fix, it's extremely easy to get your troops back to base in one piece. Because you can reliably get your troops back home, it's sometimes unfair to your opponent if he outflankes you with melee/shooty units and you slip past him unharmed because you clicked "x".

Slower healing makes retreating not such a "get out of jail free" card. Now you sacrifice a lot more map control by giving up the battle.

Before, retreating wasn't necessarily a garauntee that your troops would survive. It was therefore fair that you get a high healing rate to compensate. Now that you can be pretty sure that your troops will survive, something has to give. That happens to be your map control.

[Soultaker]

Perhaps there could be different rates of base heal for every race. This could help balance out marines.

[BudgetMessiah]

With the pathing fix, it's extremely easy to get your troops back to base in one piece.

I'm not sure what game you're playing, but with the buffs to melee, this has not been my experience. Even the developers commented in the battle reports that units will need to retreat earlier to have a hope of escaping melee combat. That's more in line with what I've seen.

Before, retreating wasn't necessarily a garauntee that your troops would survive. It was therefore fair that you get a high healing rate to compensate.

Last I checked, dead units don't heal at all. The high healing rate doesn't help in that case. I don't think that was the reason for it.

More importantly, I reject the whole notion of "retreat is a get out of jail free card". The game is to control victory points, not annihilation. If you force your opponent to give ground, you're winning already. If you can't cap a VP in the time it takes your opponent to walk home and walk back, you're doing it wrong.

[BurnedToast]

I like the change, even if it is a little annoying at times.

Retreating to your base to quickly heal up for free was too powerful - especially for tough, expensive to replace units, and it was too tough to crack enemy bases (which should be a viable tactic) because of the crazy healing. It seems much more balanced now.

[BudgetMessiah]

I never had problems destroying troops at their base. If you have, then you probably shouldn't have been fighting in front of their base. There's even a tooltip that advises you to do this in order to throw the balance of combat in your favor. It should be a viable tactic. Why else do you build a fortress except to provide a defensible position?

And, again, if this was really the problem, there's a more precise way to address it: allow the full healing aura to kick in only when a unit has been out of combat for a few seconds, as in the campaign.

[MasterBlaster]

Budget try to kill the avatar at its base at 1.3 healing, but as it is now first person to get vehicles out just chases the other player all the back back to there base and kills them.

Either base turrets need to do av or its game over currently.

[Buguba]

I'm not sure what game you're playing, but with the buffs to melee, this has not been my experience. Even the developers commented in the battle reports that units will need to retreat earlier to have a hope of escaping melee combat. That's more in line with what I've seen.

I'm not sure what game YOU'RE playing, but it's been rather easy for my troops to escape from melee blobs.

In point of fact, my squads are actually surviving when I hit retreat in the middle of a horde of sluggas/gaunts. I couldn't ever say that in 1.3.2.

Last I checked, dead units don't heal at all. The high healing rate doesn't help in that case. I don't think that was the reason for it.

The high healing rate was meant to compensate for the extremely high damage that units would take. Typically, units would make it back to the base with extremely low health, or not at all. Now I frequently see units getting back to base with mid-health.

More importantly, I reject the whole notion of "retreat is a get out of jail free card". The game is to control victory points, not annihilation. If you force your opponent to give ground, you're winning already. If you can't cap a VP in the time it takes your opponent to walk home and walk back, you're doing it wrong.

I agree. Retreating isn't completely "get out of jail free." However, giving ground only means so much when you can come back 30 seconds later with the exact same force, which is what I'm talking about.

The point is that, before, retreating to your base typically meant losing a lot of your force. The fact that you could regenerate quickly and get back onto the field quicker compensated for that.

Now, it's more than possible to retreat to your base with the relatively same force. If you had the same regeneration, it'd be easy to maintain that force. Now, with lower regeneration, you can maintain that same force but at the expense of time.

All this just rewards the enemy more for your retreating. You saved your force, but he gets more map control. Fine by me.

[BudgetMessiah]

Budget try to kill the avatar at its base at 1.3 healing

Well, he's the exception to the rule. Don't fight a god on his home turf.

Buguba, I think we're just going to differ on this. What you're describing, catastrophic loss due to units being caught in melee, almost always results in dead guys, not wounded guys. The AI targets an individual unit from a formation and kills it, then moves on to the next. However, by the time the "next" comes up, the whole squad has accelerated beyond the speed of their pursuers. What I am describing, distributed damage across all members of a squad, results more often from ranged weapon exchanges under cover, as damage will almost always be distributed across members before one dies. This is the same behavior as in Company of Heroes as well. If this change is in response to melee damage and retreat pathing, it's affecting the wrong aspect of the game.

I thought the downtime before was appropriate, as it roughly equalled the amount of time it took to reinforce a squad that had taken some losses. Now I feel that I am reinforcing quickly and still puttering around at home waiting for the "lucky ones" to heal up. This seems out of step to me. Like I said before, I'll end up with a bunch of survivors and regret having them, because it would have been faster to just buy new guys. That's frustrating, and when compared to the build time for reinforcements, indicitive of bad design.

[Exo]

Did you find that previously, there was a problem with the high healing rate, in that:

* The winning side remained in the field capturing various points, but had also suffered some damage. However, being away from base, this damage regenerated very slowly.

* The losing side fled, losing map control initially, but would be able to come back in under 30 seconds, fully healed.

See where that's going? The side that lost the initial encounter now has the health advantage against the player who did the work in winning the opening engagement.

Although this could re-level the playing field potentially, since map control could, at least partially, be recovered, it does seem a little odd as a mechanic.

[BudgetMessiah]

But then the other side could do the same, and whoever holds the field longer wins the game. Isn't that the whole point?

[Facelessone]

Units like the carnifex that can not be fixed like the eldar wraithlord are doomed with this change,you like this people?

[Goobers]

The Zoanthrope healing synapse doesn't work any more?

[Facelessone]

Yeah,get to t3 to heal carnifex.Very amusing.

[GrimDark]

Zoan is t2. And yes, his synapse works.