How does a Forged Alliance player learn to play FA Forever?

Is there a single summary where I can see the changes for each unit, ideally with discussion, so that I can start playing FA Forever effectively?

so this is actually two seperate questions :

• a summary
• and how to quickly be performant

And I think the focus of your question is mostly balance (it's a big answer then!)

the summary could be found in many forms but I guess what you're looking for is here :

UNIT DB

ORIGINAL (I think! I hope they haven't used FAF as a reference) : https://supcom.fandom.com/wiki/Complete_unit_list

CURRENT : https://unitdb.faforever.com/

(best to use the FAF multiplayer client unitDB tab as it will be more up to date.) this is the impersonal and clinical approach.

But realistically these stats won't mean much to you

There's also alot of mechanical changes.

The bottom line is no single unit can any longer completely stand out as overpowered.

Let's go over some of the biggest changes off the top of my head :

Balance Changes

• Factory HQs. this mechanic means that starting from a t1 factory of any type, you have two upgrade routes :

  1. The HQ
  2. Normal

  The Normal changes nothing except that it is (much!) cheaper and faster to get The HQ cost more takes longer to upgrade to and possesses the tech for that tree (land, air, sea). You must posses at least one HQ for the "normal" upgrade choice of that tree to unlock and you are allowed to possess as little as one (for savings and speed) but if it gets destroyed. You must upgrade another t1 factory through the HQ line back up to that tech level for the other factories to be able to produce anything other than tech 1 again (yes, in the meantime you will be tech-locked meaning "normal" factories, upgraded even to tech 3 can only produce t1 units until there is a T3 HQ again). This is not shared with teammates. each player must have his own HQ.

  The reasoning behind this change is that it makes the game run much smoother (no more t1 engineer spam) as well as validating the option of building more than one factory which before was a "noob alert!". Now all options are viable and the one that demands less micro/encourages a more macro focus, E.G. : building more factories, is also the one that lags the game less.

  This reduced the overpoweredness of the tech one engineer

• Engineer assist is evened out across all builder units. E.G : per mass that t1/t2/t3/SACU engineers costs, the rendition of build power is the same.

  Before, if you built many t3 engineers to assist a factory or t4 construction, you were a noob because between you and the same level player who used the same amount of mass making t1 engineers to assist, the player with the t1 engys got much more build power.

  Now there is actually a choice between technology need, Hit Points, concentration of build power and speed at which you start increasing you build power output.

  This also contributed to reducing t1 engy lag and OPness.

• In forged alliance 3599 balance, in the GPG.NET competitive scene there was a considerable use of Restorers (T3 Aeon gunships) for late-game team-play.

  These death clouds had a tendency to spiral out of control with exponential synergy at greater amounts (170 -> 1000).

  Now they are still synergetic with one another but cannot manage swathes of T3 Fighters on their own.

• The Donut (otherwise known as the Czar, T4 Aeon air experimental) no longer deals 100% damage with it's ground beam to fighters trying to shoot it out of the sky with fly-bys, and because of the games's design (the center of the unit being both the target reticle for the fighters and where the ground beam of death comes out of, the fighters "must" fly through it).

  Rushing to enable ground fire and picking a spot on the ground for your Donut to blast away at if ever it's caught off guard by a swathe of T3 fighters is still a valid reaction, but said swathe will only loose some 10-15% of it's fighters instead of 100% and the Donut gaining instant 5-star veterancy.

  This makes the Czar a squishy unit once again, meant for punishing ground once air is won, as it was intended. It also means you don't need to micro fighters to fly parallel to their normal attack path, avoiding the beam (a technique that would cut your losses at the cost of only using a fraction of your actual air firepower).

• Bombers t1 and t4, can no longer be hover-bombed microed. this ended up being deemed an engine exploit as it was all we would ever see in higher tier competitive play. First-bomber (the name for a build order starting with air factory in which a bomber is queued as the first unit) was rampant. Hover-bombing allowed the negation of any retaliation.

  the bomber's turn radius, order frequency cap, and bomb-drop sensibility were changed, making the mouse clicks that normally triggered the hover-bomb generally fail.

• maximum load of transports : https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17511

• Mass extractor meta : https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17545 https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17551

• General adjacency bonus meta : now there are more possible combinations and the values for adjacency other than mass storages have been buffed in order to make almost any adjacency a valid choice depending on the context. (encircling a mass extractor with 4 factories is now not only no longer frowned upon but encouraged in small map-size 1v1). Also if you control several races, cross-race adjacency will work, so long as you own all buildings involved.

• Veterancy is no longer a system out of five stars but a meter to next level with very fine detail on the points on the meter. Also it used to be that any kill was equivalent, now the kill is scored on value of the target over killer.

  For example a Donut/Czar killing t1 engineers will have a hard time leveling up but if it kills another Czar it should get a rank in vet on the spot (so the difference in the old rank system and new swings both ways).

• Now water makes wreaks worth half as much

• All units dying over in or within water produce wreaks, not just boats. now submersible tanks, hover units and aircraft dying in water will also leave wreaks

• Shields will not shield individually as they did (this lead to stagnant end-game T4 artillery turtle base vs T4 artillery turtle base meta, which you can still very much do btw, but just not as long, it breaks down after 5mins tops). Shields whether touching or not have a proximity percentage to one another that serves to spread damage received. This generally means if your shields have caved they really deserved to.

• Firebeetle drop Ctrl+K has been patched out. People found out you could load a transport with the Cybran t2 land suicide bomb unit and simply immediately destroy the transport when it was over the Commander. The explosion was strong enough that it made an inescapable radius. this also meant shields and anti-air batteries, no matter the amount were no good. the transport capacity nerfs and changes to the Firebeetle (transports dying no longer trigger the Firebeetles explosion and fall damage will kill them without explosion) helped quell this exploit.

• More focus has been put on t1, t2 and t3 which both in vanilla FA (where t4 and late game was a go-to for every situation) and relatively recent FAF balance (where t2 skip was a valid strategy not only for Aeon but for every race). t2 especially has been revitalized and can now hold it's own (sometimes vs t3). likewise t3 land can now hold it's own against t4 land. similarly Support SCUs are now much more useful, they can also fight better against t4. The sparky (t2 UEF field engineer which can fight and build offensive and defensive structures) has also been buffed twice in a row because of it's under-use.

• Support Commanders (SACUs can now be built with an upgrade schematic already completed (a set of upgrades optimized for different things) this is balanced with their price and build time. It's helpful to give newer players an edge where they lack incentive to build these otherwise very powerful units because they forget to/don't have the micro for upgrading them.

• All factions get a mobile anti-air t3 tank. It's nowhere near as good as static t3 anti-air but it's definitely useful.

• Turrets face enemy spawn point on placement (before construction begins) and if enemy was in intel range closest to where the turret is being built, at another direction, that direction.

  This is more fair-play for players spawning on the lower or left side of the map as before they would be disadvantaged in a situation where them and an enemy building a turret at the same time (the enemy's turret would start shooting right away as it was already on target and theirs would first have to slowly turn all the way around).

• Friendly fire to structures on commander explosion, nukes, and tactical missile launcher is nullified entirely = no more rage-quit bomb your teammate if you didn't like the outcome of a team-game. Also a prompt for reporting will pop up, allowing you to report the attempted teamkilling if you so wish.

Gameplay&UI

Some gameplay-changing mechanics that are not necessarily balance related (https://wiki.faforever.com/index.php?title=Game_Modifications_(Mods)) :

• Right-click with an engineer on t2 or t3 mass point will automatically add building the four surrounding mass storages to that engineer's build queue

• Ctrl+Shift reveals all reclaimable mass deposits over a value of 10 on the entire map

• Overcharge can be right-clicked : this will turn it to automatic. automatic means it will fire at next priority target within range as soon as energy storage is full enough

• Target priority overhaul. the target priority menu is now much more feature-packed and the default is ground fire and the default priorities have been tweaked to reflect what a human player would want in every situation (some of the old target priority's choices were rather odd).

Mods

Some mods that were integrated and some UI improvements :

• Sorian AI. this one was an obvious choice. it has been part of FAF since day one. it is also an improved upon version. also another AI is in the pipeline (AI-Uveso) : https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=88&t=16381
• FullShare. this added a mode that became the most popular for playing Setons where all teammates receive the units if a teammate's Commander dies (total unit cap can also be configured to be shared (this way your maximum unit cap of 1500 goes up everything one of your teammates dies). it's feature of sharing overflow economy/resources instead of loosing it into the void is default in all cases (can be disabled in-game in the policies menu). there have been many more game-modes added. one where all units of that dead commander become neutral, one where they all become AI controlled and hostile to everyone and one where they become part of the vanquisher's army.
• Queue reordering
• Template rotation
• Strat icons over build menu
• Hotbuild. a keyboard shortcut keybind configurator that makes starcraft 2's configurator look amateurish
• Hotkey labels. so you can actually see in the build menu what to type.
• Gaz ui. makes UI more modifiable overall
• Split attack. like the name, issue one big order with a hotkey, get a thousand separate attack orders.
• Notify. uses team-chat to communicate to your team what you would anyways
• Selection-sort. makes selection menu organized.

Feel free to improve upon this answer.

Difference between Forged Alliance and FAF:

Old: The scripted single player game campaign levels were single person only.

New: All 24 campaign missions from (both Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance) can be played cooperatively with up to four players. The difficulty of the campaigns ramps up as players are added. Friendly fire may occur.

Old: Limit for players in skirmishes was 8 players.

New: FAF allow up to 12 players in a skirmish.

Ranking system: FAF has a new ranking system that weights size of skirmish you play into your leaderboard score (1x1, 2x2, 3x3, or whatever)

Patching: FAF does non-destructive patching; It patches the game separately from your current installation. That means that you can continue to use your original game and FAF concurrently – they do not “overwrite” each other.

Mods: FAF allows you to turn on or off mods independently of each other; you can use any, all, or none of them. Each mod changes gameplay differently; some add unit/buildings/experimentals, some rebalance existing units, some change the game rules when playing a skirmish, and some just change what the game looks like (UI mods) but don't otherwise affect gameplay. Because there are so many mods and ways to combine those mods, attempting to describe what exactly FAF is in comparison to the vanilla Forged alliance is almost impossible to do. Take a below to see what some of the FAF mods do.

XtremeWars: (Unit pack mod; rebalances some units). See https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=12675 for details.

Supreme destruction mod: (new units, rebalance, added commander upgrades).

Black Ops project: A whole bunch of related mods. FAF currently allows applying All none; it doesn't allow picking and choosing.

Blackops: Unleashed (adds units) Blackops: special ops (adds units)

Blackops: Advanced Command Units (bunch of new upgrades for the Command units)

Blackops: Balance (rebalance; reduces omni range and aircraft fuel, add some experimentals)

Blackops: Naval Rebalance: rebalances naval units Blackops: Global Icon Support (Adds game support for icons needed for other blackops mods)

Total mayhem mod: Adds 52 buildings, 128 units, and 23 experimentals to the game. Mostly land units; naval and air are sort of neglected. See https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=12248 for details.

Experimental Wars: A whole bunch of new units. See https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=12291 for list.

Civilians Defense: (Rules change mod). A mod that gives the defending side mass and energy bonuses for evacuating civilians, while the other side gets bonuses for killing them and can win if they kill enough of them.

Murder Party mod: (Rules change mod). All players in a skirmish are assigned a unique other player to defeat. Bonuses for doing so, penalties for killing the wrong other player (including the person trying to kill you!). You get points for how long you last, but match winner is the person with highest score, not the last survivor. See https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=300 for details.

Phantom X: (Rules change mod). At 8 minutes into a skirmish some players are designated 'phantoms' (usually 25-40% of the players). Phantoms get an energy and mass bonus and form one team vs. the rest of the players.

Diamond: (Rebalance mod). A rebalance mod designed for professional players. Tighter gameplay than original Forged Alliance There are less 'shortcuts' to victory so you have to really dominate your opponent to get a win. Fixes most of the bugs in the vanilla game.

My recommendation: Watch some of the excellent videos of ranked games with commentary by ZaphodX. He takes recordings of games and comments on correct or incorrect things the players do. This is, other than actually playing games yourself, probably the best way to get a feel for how to play well.