Great cast! Good hearing from XFactorLive

If only twilight mexes were as useful as exploiters. Unfortunately they're not.

Hit that like to show your love for Xfactor! Thank you again for joining us

Super useful. Thank you

Loving the streams. Hopefully I'll get to join in your games the next time you stream! I'll try to keep an eye out for them. (ign: Wulfe)

Nearly got the right video

Thanks for this! I'm praying for an easy match up on this map lol

do we got a thread or discord server for these events?

So you're 5 minutes into the game, what kind of harassment do you want to be looking at achieving? Ie anything specific to this map besides the usual resource and apm denial ? And maybe a related question, is what lanes to establish for ingress and keep up the pressure? When to transition to the vehicle lab?

just speaking for myself but if i was in a teamgame where the players ask me to do nothing but boom ... i might as well quit right there the game already doesn't sell me on anything with how it promises unitvariety but then a player can realistically only support one or 2 factories and then you are told to not even do that? yea no ... not for me ...

The question is what's the difference between these 2 factions and it's there a way to use that

I am also always in trouble with arm bots. Anyway... My theory is u have to approach the game differently with arm. What feels a no go for me is to fight grunts with pawns unless opponent is sleeping. But u can try to keep him busy and try run by, overwhelm with ticks, eventually naked expansion in beginning. Also I try to use centurions in combo with pawns and rezzers.

Lol I'm chopface and I also dislike ffa

This week is gonna be great, Im excited to get back to 1v1s

Hahahahah . Your first game..... Ouch

What about those supposed noob lobbys where your going against 4 people in discord.

Thanks for this video. Only just got round to watching it. It's really interesting to hear Chisato's thought processes.

Make transportation of a com cost as much energy as cloak walking a com. Run out of E and the trans slows down to 1/4 speed.

Just make it to where you can't pick up coms.

Spy bot ideas: Firstly, spy bots are insanely good, both when ahead and when behind... But they're also satisfying when used properly, so I don't want to see them nerfed to extinction. That said... 1. More energy cost to keep them invisible. They're radar invisible for goodness sakes! 2. Smaller emp range. Realistically it should be difficult to emp 2 t3 units with a spy bot, since they're a cheap t2 unit with only high cost being apm. 3. Make them move slower. This makes them better as a defensive tool versus an offensive one. 4. Make counter intrusion towers show a dot where invisible units are as though it's radar so that units can fire at them automatically. Perhaps this would be higher variance than radar by default, but would take advantage of pinpointers as well. 5. This would be a bit extreme but would kind of make sense: Enemy radar jammers force spy bots to go visible. Jammers create a slight static field of energy, dampening the effectiveness of radar waves, but also disrupting the effectiveness of the cloaking device.

Shuriken ideas: 1. Give light anti air bots to each faction, which would each be about as fast as a pawn, and would be very small, effectively a mobile aa missile launcher. Then these can be moved along with a leak. 2. Make the shris slower so they have difficulties catching up to a leak of fast units. 3. Make shuris barely able to keep stronger units emp'd on their own by making their emp laser weaker. This way you need about one shuri per thug or mace, and shuris would be much worse against t2 units.

Minelayer ideas: 1. Make minelayer tanks healthier and auto reclaim mines as it moves with long range to do so and big mine vision range. This way you can bring a minelayer with your army to get rid of mines. 2. Make radar jammer fields deactivate mines (still would stay invisible but would be effectively emp'd). This would also make minelayers effectively immune to mines because they would deactivate them with their personal radar jammer field.

Rez bot ideas: 1. Replace the T1 rez bots with "utility bots" that are exactly the same except they can't resurrect and they can build perimeter cameras and radar towers, then ressurection bots are in T2 just like in TotalA (though in TotalA the rez bots were only for Core T2 bots.... Maybe that would be balanced though since Arm(ada) has the Fark/Butler). They would still be relatively cheap, but coming from the T2 lab would greatly change things. Then keeping your army alive in t1 is much more important but the utility bots would help with that via repairing or reclaiming the wrecks. 2. Resurrected units have -35% health or thereabouts. Whatever metal is lost by the unit being destroyed, the ratio of the metal cost to that would determine the amount of max health the unit would have when resurrected. For awhile I sort of thought this was the case since there's a halo over the resurrected units, but that's only for looks. This would also fix the "resurrect then reclaim" thing if you update the amount of metal a resurrected unit is worth to its wreckage cost.

rez subs are an example of a more balanced rez bot. Double the BP and metal cost, slower, 150 vs 200 bp. Imo rez makes attacking with non-spam units super risky at all stages of the game. Rez bots: better not attack Shruiken: better not attack Mines: better not attack Communism: better just resign and give your units

Transport update ideas: 1. Make T1 transports carry commanders at about half the speed they do now (because he's heavy). This would make it take much longer to get your commander to an enemy base and it could be scouted more likely. 2. Make T1 transports a lot more expensive with energy cost. This achieves the same as 1 3. Make t1 trash aa towers cheaper in energy and have built in air radar covering their range. This makes transport rushes much riskier, as the trash aa could be part of an early build if they don't cost so much energy. 4. Give commanders a very weak aa missile launcher that is capable of quickly taking down a transport. I like this one because it basically gets rid of the cheese strats, but there would have to be a slight redesign to how commanders look probably.

24:42 where do i find the vod for 1v8?

45:22 I'm so happy someone anwsered this sentence with such an open laughter. :D Makes me think that BAR will be more fun as the time goes by, because such things are discussed and changed. :) Shuris are really making games boring. Regarding mines: There is an option to remove them with mine layer, but can you command it to remove them on a path or big circle? They need something like "fight command". Then it would be much easier. Last time I tried using it, it was a disaster for my micro.

Thanks for the video. Balance is always an interesting discussion and it's good to hear these opinions. I've only played TA and BAR, so it's interesting to hear what the other TA derivatives have done to address some of the balance issues. OG TA didn't have rez bots (from memory, I think the "Necro" was core only and a T2 bot. The Arm equivalent unit was the fark/butler. Both came out in a later patch so I didn't use it much). I'd definitely enjoy more of these discussion format videos.

really nice talk, more of this plz :) Edit: Can you add an overlay to show who is speaking right now?

Great convo! My two cents on t1 transports, I feel the speed at which you can move comm around the map from super early is the oppressive and volatile aspect. But I really like the utility aspect of being able to lift a comm over otherwise impassable terrain - that should be conserved, even in the early game, so trans fills a role of a situational unit you build to solve impassability issues. Therefore a hard nerf to t1 transport speed *specifically when carrying a comm* might be a nice way to tone down the swingy comm-drop/rush-to-frontline type plays and give opponents more time to react. E.g. Make trans travel at the comm's ground speed when carrying the comm

Transport feedback :Adding another two transport units just over complicates a simple solution. Just remove the T1 trans com option. If a new T1 "heavy" transport is added and it's cost is so high that it wouldn't be viable to build unless you have 2 or 3 players to contribute, essentially the unit wouldn't be attractive or viable to build as an individual at all. You'll drop your cash into t2 first and then use t2 transports. Imagine as an airplayer where as u are already limited by mex nodes then all of sudden ur team mates need expensive heavy T1 transports. Jumping to t2 would be hamstrung considerably. Also with the air work ( that makes aircrafts very metal heavy, which in my opinion doesn't accomodate air start positions with respects to metal income) , this would compound the issue again considerably. Finally if mex captures are necessary that can also be done with 1 or 2 cons. So perhaps just increasing the loadbay of a T1 trans so that it can carry 2 cons or 1 con and a support unit to defend the expanding con would be appropriate. A comment on the 17 OS player being asked to make winds and feed energy. "Well then he shouldn't be playing in those lobbies" : - I think more often than not, very high level players join lobbies that have much weaker players in them. And then a pecking order becomes established. Pro rage at noobs, or noobs wanting to learn from a good player. Or more high end players join the low os lobby and then take over the lobby. Considering the percentile of high vs low os players. It's much more likely the high os player is playing in a lobby he doesn't belong in as opposed to the other way around.

Who was the one wanting to get fresh eyes on the Air rework ? Blodir ? I am recent enjoyer of BAR (having never played TA style RTS before) Around 25 OS atm. And I like to dip into air when I can.

rezbots can help attacker mines help to go t2 and it does not exactly make game super boring, otherwise going t2 is too scary unless you already have 3000 metal advantage and later you can make Juno, early on you can use minelayer to defuse mines, just need to make it so you can shift-queue mine-defuse commands

I don't think any changes are necessary. Tournaments have shown that comdrop is not as easy to pull it off successfully. It's always a high risk. What u see though is a wider range of strategies and tactics which is a great plus. Who wants to see the same type of game over and over.

Regular ding com bomb I don’t know if it’s possible but what about just turning off com explosion while it’s being held by a air transport? Still allows for early game shuttling without having to create another transport unit

I dont think any of these guys could walk across a thin beam 100m in the air

awesome video! maybe next time have an overlay for discord so we can see who is talking?

I have a lot of thoughts about these topics but I'm not a competitive player or even a good player so feel free to throw them all out. But I do watch a lot of competitive Age of Empires 2. On the resource sharing I think it's just something you're going to have to live with as a consequence of being able to share units. If I can hand you a solar panel producing 20 energy then I should be able to hand you 20 energy, and it all flows as a consequence of that. In Aoe2 you can't share units, so there's no expectation that resource sharing should work. Originally in Age of Empires the resource sharing was gated behind tech, the market. Over time that's changed and yes now you can share with a percentage penalty. The solution to stop competitive games from getting stale was to implement it as a **competitive rule set** not part of the game. Pretty much all major tournaments now have the rule that you can't share resources to someone who is higher tech than you. Which still allows it as a team play game mechanic, for helping recovering players or balancing resources. But not so stale that the best strategy is always for one person to not play. Maybe that is a better way, rather than a game change? The only in engine thing I can think of is making it locked behind build time, think of reverse capturing. To share units to you I need to 'capture' them to you, and the same for shared resources. Somehow delayed by some build power factor.

Excellent stuff!

i dont think it can be changed bc there are many legit reasons to transport the commander without it being cheese, eg capturing extractors on an island, taking the commander to the front line.

You guys may not have considered just some people actually like playing the back end or being a battery

slow down transport when it's carrying comander

Small correction as you said "they are planning to do trans change before 5v5 tournament" - we want to have it ready, but we want to push it after the tourney so it doesn't disrupt the ongoing practice.

The problem with all games with a competitive edge is that dev have to choose between casual players or pro players. It's a fine line to make everyone happy lol

Like button smashed. I'm glad you mix up the content and have higher level discussions like this alongside all your content aimed at new players. Keep it up!

Trans comm is fun to use, but honestly the game would be better without it I think.

Yoo, thanks for joining us for this one! Leave a like and a comment to show your thanks to the boys for joining us!

5:14 all things are balanced lol

Quick and dirty. 1v1 is best.

Great format.