I’m continuing to hack at an improbable number of things, including proper support for unrated games, creating new models and looks for the various Raptor strains, and also working on a motley array of serious and nonserious units, when time allows. My major focus is currently on testing and tuning the EMP Rework, based on feedback, replays and playtesting. Read on to learn more about that!

The EMP Rework is an effort to make EMP much more interactive and less binary for all concerned. Instead of EMP either stunning for up to half a minute, or nothing at all, units affected by EMP slowly lose their movement and firing speed, until an eventual stun, which doesn’t last long. Firing speed decays linearly up until 50% EMP charge, where weapons are disabled entirely, but the unit can still move at half speed. Move speed continues to drop until 100% EMP charge, when the unit is stunned for a short time. This sounds complex but becomes intuitive rapidly, and effectively just results in EMP feeling much better to play with.

I’m intentionally trying not to alter balance, other than the idea of ‘how it would have been if EMP had always been like this’. Currently that means not altering anything that isn’t either EMP damage, or resistance, and as little as possible in either case. Notably though, Stilettos are no longer completely oppressive of everything, and Webbers are competent again, actually feeling like they’re entrapping their prey - which as apparently the sole user of Webbers, I’m sure Scag really appreciates.

Please remember it is still experimental and under development, and post your experiences and any notable replays in the EMP thread, it all helps.

If you’re interested in the technical side, it’s particularly tricky to handle burst sources of damage, eg spybots, compared to sustained eg stilettos, as EMP charge drains away relatively quickly and full stuns are fleeting.

This is mostly a problem on the high HP units, due to how drain time works; charge is added as a literal damage number, but removed from all units at a fixed percentage of health per second. While this is useful in some ways, as say shuriken are inherantly less effective against T2 than T1, it also means the reward from a successful spybot is OP versus T2 armies, but lackluster versus T3, where it is usually most needed, as some T3 is relatively fast moving. This also means that removing the insane overkill damage that used to occur from stilettos etc, which made them oppressive against T2, meant they are less useful even in bulk against T3, since the charge drains away too rapidly, and that was causing several different gameplay issues.

The next rework release addresses this. Given the depth of interactions in BAR, it’s highly unlikely that this iteration will fully solve it, but that is of course exactly why it’s being playtested. Stay tuned and follow the EMP thread if you’d like to help out with that!