Orca was over-nerfed with respect to reload time. It was not effective at finishing off vehicles and buildings if it ran out of ammo, because it took way too long to reload.
Its reload time has been set to the old one, but now it reloads 2 pips at a time, so it is slightly slower than originally, but not by much. It's a bit OP when it loads one at a time, it seems.
Someone complained that there was not good warning for the nuke. All you heard was the launch sound, which wasn't that noticeable and a bit like other sounds.
Now it says, "nuclear missile approaching".
Reload period for orca inreased. Fully reloading is roughly equal to the amount of time it would take to go from the center of an 80x80 map to your home base, land, reload, and return to the center. (About 30 seconds).
There is +1 rocket than before, because each rocket has been weakened. This makes the orca take longer to unleash its full payload.
This is combined with slightly reducing the amount of tiberium stored in Refineries. Part of the reason for this is that refineries are targeted lots by ion cannons (one-shot kill) and nukes. Whenever this happens, you lose the money that's in them. By making a silo that stores more, you can store the tib farther away and keep a bit more of it safe.
The other part of the reason is to bring silos into the game as a somewhat strategic structure. By having more money, they are more capturable, because you can steal what's in them. It might also make sense to maybe airstrike them so that the opponent loses what money is in them.
The way to counteract this problem is to build more silos. They cost a bit more though (double) so that you have to think about how many you want.
The GDI APC and the Nod Mobile SAM Launcher are the premier anti-air units that are needed to defend each side from air attacks. Due to the problems of orca spam, they should be given a more prominent role.
Currently the APC is $700 and the M-SAM $750. This might be reasonable against a small amount of vehicles, but anti-air units need to be able to deal with spam. So they will be reduced in cost so they can be bought cheaper. This is important for the M-SAM especially since it's a dedicated anti-air unit.
To avoid the GDI APC being too good, the damage vs. heavy armor will be reduced a bit more, so it cannot serve the role of "light tank". It will still be able to fight light vehicles well, however.
It's really difficult to kill guard towers once they're up. The only reliable ways are to try to take out their power with airstrikes/orcas/etc. or use artillery from a distance. They are supposed to be tough but they are a bit too much.
Guard tower HP should be nerfed because they are wickedly hard to kill. Adv. tower's power should increase because they are annoying when sprawled everywhere and really hard to take out once established.
Seems like taking cover is a liability much more than a protection. I think it's better if infantry get out of the way of artillery rather than slow down and stay in its way. It's frustrating watching your infantry die pointlessly.
Instead of this, a reasonable alternative might be to double-click orders for your infantry to force them back up.
For some reason artillery wasn't exploding. I had set it at 75% odds last time I edited it. Just making it explode again.
It really needs to explode. It only costs $600 and is pretty powerful. This is its drawback, to make it vulnerable if player bunches them up.
Nobody uses repair bay, because it's not a pre-requisite for anything, and it's expensive. Reducing cost from $1200 to $600.
To compensate for its lower value, its HP are being lowered as well, from 800 to 400. Now it should be killable with an airstrike, which is about right.
To anyone paying attention: there has been some discussion over whether repairs should be cheaper. I am agnostic on the issue for now. How about we see if people like the repair bay more now and consider using it, before making further balance changes? Open to discussion.
