Is the Falcon OP?

[MrPenguin]

(This came up on another thread...)

Yes, but the Falcon is a horrendously unfair vehicle and when you live in for the whole match it becomes rather frustrating. Also, the Falcon is probably one of the hardest vehicles to destroy unless you have a very precise aim due to its ridiculous speed. You have to be stupid to be hit by an avril when you're in it.

Well, IMHO the Falcon is pretty vulnerable to the Phoenix or to laser towers, but is otherwise a very tough vehicle to counter. Ironically, Its actually easier to hit at long distance with the LG or SR because you can adjust to its speed; at short-medium range its really tricky.

The problem is when you have a map with a Falcon but no Phoenix or well-positioned laser towers to counter it, like OmahaBeach. On that map the Falcon makes a massive difference, and if there is a player who is focussed on that vehicle (like Fors) then its even worse.

On some other maps such as MagicIsle where there are plenty of countering vehicles, the Falcon is no more a threat than any other flyer.

So, maybe the Falcon isn't OP provided the map balances it with good counters such as the Phoenix. So maybe we need OmahaBeach updated to add a Pheonix instead of a Raptor. WDYT? Any other maps where the Falcon is unbalanced?

Either that or the Falcon itself needs modifying. I don't want to see it go as it is a cool vehicle and many players enjoy it. Maybe if its HP were reduced that would be fine - as it is, as soon as you damage a falcon its owner usually flies off to repair it rather than risk losing it, so even if its more vulnerable I think players will still want to use it.

WDYT?

[Xac]

I think that sums it up quite well. On Slated World it's not a big problem. So either put in a more balanced mix of vehicles, or make it so that one Avril hit destroys it.

[Karma_geddon]

I agree with both of you. I have no problems in having to fight against a Falcon in SlatedWorld, but it is very different in OmahaBeach. There, for example, I often have to fight a Falcon in the Ion cannon node, and my only chance is to jump on a Hellhound and storm it with the lazerz (vehicle that, someone said, might be overpowered too).

Lowering his health to 200 hp might be a solution, I suppose. Works for the Mantas (insanely fast, and insanely fragile).
Or, increasing the spawn time.

[Kentaro]

Respawn time has already been increased in Worbmo's edit of Omaha Beach (not released yet). See here.

[Wormbo]

/me sighs

That map is a nightmare to edit.

[-FuNkY-MoNk-UK-]

It isn't over powered in my opinion, you have to get quite close to do any real damage. It's speed is the biggest problem, but it's not that hard to take down with a LG and shock combined, 5-6 hits and its gone. Sometimes i can't last 2 minutes in the thing because it has low HP. The creator has made good counters, it's very fast and can deal a lot of damage but has low health, rather balanced in my opinion .

Any weapon or vehicle in the right hands can be devastating, that doesn't mean it's overpowered.

[Wormbo]

It always depends on the map as well. A Falcon in the middle of a map can quickly arrive at every destination. A Minotaur on a hill can wreck havoc upon a very large area. Not paying attention to someone driving a Kraken (or even just a Leviathan) across the entire map and deploying it at the enemy core - well, tough luck.
What really turns over a vehicle's balance is an inappropriate respawn time. On the current version of Omaha Beach the Falcon respawns after 15 seconds, the Ion Cannon after 20 and the Minotaur after 30 seconds. Minigun turrets even respawn after just 10 seconds. These are delays that make destroying them almost useless. On the other hand, nobody would probably consider setting a Manta's respawn time to more than the usual 15 seconds, although a higher value like 20 or 30 might actually make sense on an otherwise non-vehicle map that also treats AVRiLs as a kind of super weapon that must be acquired separately.

[Pegasus]

The concept of an "imbalanced" custom vec - obviously implying that the differential skews in its favour, i.e. it's overpowered instead of underpowered - essentially boils down to it being imbalanced against stock content; that is stock vehicles and pedestrian weapons alike.

Wanna figure out whether your shiny, new, 100hrs+ developed variant has imbalance issues? There's a very easy and reliable way to test for that: get two people of as equal skill as possible in every relevant UT skill/discipline together, have one get into said custom vec and the other sequentially go through all the stock content options (fight it in every vec and however they can on foot), and note who wins each duel. Test multiple times and alternate the two players often to control for skill disparity despite previous assumptions. Does your custom vec have a consistent success rate above 75%? If so, congratulations, you're the proud creator of an overpowered piece of new gear. Is its success rate steadily below 25%? Congratulations again, you're probably the only modder in UT history to've ever produced an underpowered vehicle out of excess wariness.
Why are these watersheds so high and low respectively? One reason is, because not even all stock content is perfectly balanced against each other to begin with (and that's okay). That is typically offset via adjusting each vec's scarcity (scorps and mantas are plentiful, levis are rare) and the resulting [in]frequency of 1-on-1 encounters (scorp vs levi is quite rare, scorp driver won't care much that their chances of winning are slim even on Day One, let alone Year Ten). The other reason is simply because there's no such thing as 2 people of identical skill level. Lastly, because fighting isn't the only way vehicles enable players - there's also speed and location access, and a game designer has to balance for those two as well.

Experience gained over several years of thousands upon thousands of such match-ups will usually iron over those statistical issues and will give ppl a fairly grounded (objective even) sense of how likely a fight in one vec against another would be to go their way on average. After so many years, I'm willing to bet most people still playing ONS today will agree that the stock loadout is indeed well balanced, with the scorp perhaps being the only low outlier in terms of overall effectiveness (IMO the game's biggest deathtrap, in fact).

So, with all that in mind, is the Falcon overpowered? To my mind, the answer is absolutely, undeniably in the affirmative. Pitch it against any piece of stock content and, all other things being equal, it will come out victorious over 80% of the time. An average 213 hp/sec of either mid/close-range spread dmg output or steady, scalpel-precise stream from afar, and an agility consisting of nearly-double at minimum accel rates compared to the common raptor make for a pretty potent combination; and merely adjusting to its pace enough to not be crashing it all over the place while wielding such firepower doesn't constitute that much of a skill counterbalance, IMO, either. Do people in Falcons get taken out by peds, stock content or lesser custom rides? Sure, all the time. Are there maps where the Falcon doesn't single-handedly decide the match's outcome? Also yes. But if that's the entire basis of one's argument that the Falcon's fine (instead of, say, cumulative death/frag counts across matches and maps), you're pretty much discarding any significant criterion of power balance.
What compounds the problem to the point of repeated discussion is its ubiquity among custom vec maps, both of which can be traced back to a specific server and a specific period during which certain logic checks became woefully absent in favour of an "arms race". I'm sure most of you are familiar with the other, notorious offenders hailing from that same era.

How should the Falcon issue best be addressed? IMO, better than toning down the stats of what's been an entirely derivative vec like that for 5+ years now (as is recently being attempted with the Wasp) will only annoy those who like it and probably confuse the rest coming up against one as well. I believe a better solution is the one we've already implemented with the mino here: keep it as it is, but just gradually phase out the maps where it alone ruins gameplay, either through re-edits that won't contain it or outright removal from the roster. An OmahaBeach version where the Falcon's replaced with a Phoenix is quite possible down the road - although I by no means mean to shit all over Wormbo's current efforts here, this could be months later and simply applied on his pretty broad edit - not to mention sounds much more interesting, considering how more reasonable Solace's winged bob-omb is.

Lastly,

It isn't over powered in my opinion, you have to get quite close to do any real damage. It's speed is the biggest problem, but it's not that hard to take down with a LG and shock combined, 5-6 hits and its gone.[...]

For reference, it only takes the Falcon 3.3 single shots to take a standard health ped out and it can spit those out in 0.462 seconds. How fast can you pull that LG/SR trigger? Also, "quite close" is where the Falcon does most of its real damage too .

[...]Not paying attention to someone driving a Kraken (or even just a Leviathan) across the entire map and deploying it at the enemy core - well, tough luck. [...]

To be fair, something like that can usually happen only during a nearly empty server, i.e. in a 4vs4 at most. Other teammates were probably busy zipping around in the four corners of the map to flip nodes, the bots that might've seen him rolling over didn't give a damn either and that's how he got there unnoticed and unharmed. Camping and chain-spawnkilling everything there seems kinda unsportsmanlike to me, but I doubt that mattered much in the end as his team must've been down one human throughout the match and, I expect, lost. Fittingly enough, that version of RedPlanet is also another case where the Falcon is the dominant vec of the map - not the mino, nor the Kraken. Anyway, matches with so few ppl rarely confer any expectations of quality gameplay, so I don't really see why OP bothered to report it in the first place :/.

[Dalyup!]

What I said in the quote is rather hyperbolic on my part: the Falcon isn't that bad. If it's compared to the Phoenix or Dragon then it is no more overpowered than those monstrosities. Regardless, I still think it's unbalanced.

You're right in saying (at least from my experience) that shooting it from a distance with LG/shock is easier as you can adjust your aim to its speed but at such distances the Falcon is probably not fighting you or, if it is, has little chance of hitting you. When it engages you at a closer range, you might have a better chance of hitting it since it's a bigger target, but its speed just helps it zoom around you and its incredously quick primary or truly disgusting secondary just let it instantly murder you. I cannot recall shock pushing it around like it would to a Manta or Raptor either, which would assist you surviving. Basically, as infantry, you have little to no chance IMO. In fact, even as a land vehicle, you're a bigger target and easier to hit. You might have more health but that doesn't matter when it can dish out damage at ludicrous rates.

Yeah, if there's a good mixture of vehicles to counter it than the Falcon is not much of an issue. Lasers, as you suggested, are stunningly useful against it. Only problem there is that lasers are usually on stationary turrets - easy to destroy/rarely manned - or on land vehicles that have lasers as a secondary, meaning you can't move at the same time unless you have a driver. The Phoenix is the only one I can think of that can fly and shoot but that's equally unbalanced and can also only really be countered by lasers.

I think the respawn times is the crux of the issue. As far as I'm concerned, the Falcon is a super vehicle and should have a respawn time like that of the Levithan. If it respawns as fast as a Raptor then you need other super vehicles to counter/compliment it otherwise it simply domintates and that makes things unfair.

Also, I just hate all the omnipotent flyers and minotaur. Passionately.

[Wormbo]

Raptor primary: 25 damage/shot, 5 shots/2 -> 125 damage/s, 200 UU splash radius

Falcon primary: 30 damage/shot, 7.7 shots/s -> 230 damage/s, 200 UU splash radius
Falcon secondary: 12 projectiles/shot, 30 damage/projectile -> up to 360 damage/shot, 0.77 shots/s -> up to 277 damage/s

Additionally, Raptor shots start out much slower and have a lower maximum speed than Falcon shots. (1500..12500 vs. 9009..29000, both accelerate 24000/s)

It's probably fair to say the Falcon is a super vehicle and thus its power must be reflected in its respawn time. The standard 15 seconds of the Raptor factory are definitely too quick.