Things I would want to See Different

Carbon on the map: Agreed.

Hacker Array Bonus: Perhaps a trade-off? Shorter timer, but less effective shorts/surps? Giving more flexibility to a scav w/ their array.

Power Sharing: Perhaps this should be an option instead? Wouldn't it just change the meta of team games instead of fixing something broken? (I haven't played team games, legitimately asking)

Rainbow Stocks: This is a tough one for me. On the one hand, herd buying is definitely a problem, one which has been hindered by getting more starting stocks in larger games; however, removing this would make it harder to punish players who are being too greedy and upgrading too quickly, thus making their lead harder to punish. What if there was a cancellable build period when upgrading your HQ? If you decided it was too risky, or someone started buying you, you could cancel and get those resources back to defend yourself (while still producing resources during the upgrade).

A build period could be a double-edged sword though. Anyone paying attention to your HQ could just wait until the build is done to strike, but you would have been producing resources during that time to potentially defend yourself. 

personally i'm fine with gang sniping of too fast upgrading players who don't have 5 of their own stock. I agree that scav needs a buff, atm scav falls behind always unless they have some really good carbon. I think your 1v1 free goonsquad suggestion is a good one. Perhaps everyone should always get 1 free goonsquad.

Scav needs 1 extra claim at lvl2, that and maybe some extra high /med carbon tiles per map would be good, but just a small tweak.

I'd be wary of extra goons, atm everyone buys claims and goons and sometime mutinies - in the larger games at least, doubling the goons will really put people off the early BM attacks, which is opposite to what I think should be the meta, you should encourage early BM usage.

I'm fine with early buyouts, even if it is a bummer when it happens to you.

Completely agree that scavenger needs a buff of some sort. Used to be my go to HQ. Now it's almost last especially in larger games. Just not enough tiles to make money and fuel costs kill you and put you into a lot more debt so a scavenger power play is less effective (I miss this!). How many times do you find water, carbon, and aluminum close to each other? I think your best suggestion is that scavengers should have half the fuel cost (or at least 1 extra claim somewhere). I'd be wary of messing with the hacker array for fear of throwing off the balance of the game although I can definitely see your point. Scavenger is definitely the weakest HQ right now.

I'm mixed on the 1 free goon squad thing in the 1v1. On one hand you can definitely snowball too fast if you found second and EMP the other player. Many times your production is shut down so effectively that they have the time and money to shut you down a second time before you have enough money to buy a goon. On the other hand you just need to be smarter with your building placement at HQ level 1. If you get a free goon then your first purchase should be a spy to EMP around that goon. Just makes it longer until you can effectively shut down your opponent and lessens an advantage of founding scavenger that would otherwise have quicker BM access.

(btw, according to the stats, Scavenger is the most successful HQ in MP. Just saying...)

People can Still buy in the person that is leading. 6/7 stocks in that person, Throw some Blackmarket stuff on him and he would be dead nonetheless.  

The meta on teamgames is doing a Powerplay. Which is like the only thing you can do to make money early on. On Team A player 1&2 that going for a powerplay. Player 1&2 don't share power, Player 1 will go in steel which costs alot of Power where as Player 2 goes In power heavily which would make him alot of Money to buy another player early on.

That is Probably because 1 Cubit&pbhead play alot of Scavenger. And 2 If People play Scavenger that means that the map is good enough for it to do so. Which i don't see alot.

Maybe it's just me, maybe it's the luck of the draw or maybe the map gen has changed significantly. But it seems like adjacent iron and water are much more common now and good scav spots are pretty rare. Wasn't like this before.

The main problem with scavenger (and that's how it's always been) is the lack of money early on. Both aluminum and carbon tank pretty fast. Combine that with unfavorable black market and the high value of most patents as of now, and you're in a sticky situation. Late game buffs e.g. hacker array bonuses don't address this problem. Besides, they already have an indirect advantage here since they often can hack carbon pretty easily without being punished. So if you're about to buff them, imo, it should be something relevant to early game. Maybe just a slight discount in resource consumption while producing second tier resources. That would also play nice with the whole scavenger theme. On the other hand, on a map with god spots and favorable BM, they are really strong as is, thus any further buff will only hurt the so fragile balance. 

Rainbow stock is silly, but I will not complain about that again. Enough has been said already. 

I don't care much about 1v1 anymore. Or teams for that matter. A free claim combined with easy BM access for founding a split second later is OP, and that's also been discussed to death. A free goon will discourage early black market and that's really where the most of 1v1 game happening. Free goon in FFA can't hurt though. 

As for power sharing... meh... It wouldn't change the meta - you still have to deprive one teammate of everything and convert his debt into cash. Power just makes it much easier. Enforce power sharing and the game will take longer, but essentially will be the same.

Yeah for teams I think you really have to enforce sharing debt

I'd agree on teams needing to share any resource that relates to debt. While it's possible that we just haven't yet found the right strategy to counter the power rush meta, I think it's a good idea to take that away instead of leaving it as what seems like the only winning strategy. Extending the games is a good thing, as it opens up a lot more opportunities to explore late-game options.

As for scavengers, I also feel they need a buff. Debt, in particular, feels more problematic for scavengers than other factions. That is, robots get to ignore life support, scientists have claim efficiency for producing life support, and expansives have extra claims. Without the extra claims to work with from buyouts, it feels particularly hard to balance making lots of money and keeping yourself afloat debt-wise, assuming you don't have either exceptionally good carbon or carbon you can easily transition out of. In smaller games, it's not quite so difficult to deal with these problems, but in larger games, it seems particularly problematic. What the buff should be is less clear to me. A small stock price boost from valuing all carbon in structures at $40 rather than $80/3 would help (but not much), larger craters would make founding next to carbon more viable, maybe increasing their black market cooldown a bit in exchange for slightly reduced costs could lessen money issues.

My point was that sharing power (or power + life support) is not gonna cut it. It doesn't change the fact you can take a huge amount of debt without negative consequences for your team. You will make money slowly overall, but the problem, as I see it, stands. I really dislike the 'sweatshop' concept. IMO, the team should be as strong as its weakest link. Sharing debt (and perhaps stock as well) will actually punish all teammates if some can't keep up, rather than just extend the game without changing the way it's played.

Wanted to bump this thread again to revisit the point about scavenger needing a buff. Particularly in Quickmatches scavenger can just be awful. The double fuel cost have really killed scavenger play particularly when there's a weak or bad black market (ie. no claims and no adrenaline boosts).

There are lots of maps in quickmatch where there are 2 founding locations: one with iron and one where your only choice is to go scavenger. It's an instant loss most of the time particularly with nukes available to kill your production. You can't keep gooning your high carbon over and over again or you'll go broke.

In QM scavenger vs scientific is almost entirely a game over scenario unless the scientist gets into debt trouble or the scavenger can buy extra claims and/or adrenaline boosts. Same problem applies though - when do you have enough revenue producing tiles to use the black market?

In a FFA it's a little different but i still think they could do with half the fuel cost and maybe 1 extra claim at HQ3. Throw us scavenger players a bone! I hardly ever use it anymore because it's so weak.

Here's an idea: scavenger consumes aluminum for power. So scav can attempt an aluminum debt play, and has an easy time making power, but is even more vulnerable to nukes. Aluminum debt plays are extremely tricky because your opponent can cash in on them hard. It might lead to something interesting. Or not.

Using aluminium for fuel imo is bad because there is almost no basis for it in real life physics. I'd like OTC to continue to be soft fiction based.

I think cutting the market volatility of harvestable resources (water, alu, sili, iron, carbon and power) in half will go a long way in buffing scavenger, which does not realistically have an extra intermediate resource to sell off for a lot of cash.

Additionally harvestable resources can be easily mass produced anyway, which is a 2nd reason to lower their market volatility significantly.

Before market volatility numbers are tweaked, the curve should at least be changed to something more reasonable, like exponential, or at least quadratic. On an exponential curve, if you sell 100 units, the price will always go down by a fixed %, adjusted by # of players, no matter what the current price is. It makes significantly more sense than the current system, and there's only one number to remember instead of several.

Doesn't scavenger have the highest win rate in QM?

I would imagine as of beta 8/9 when fuel got tweaked that would have to go to scientific or expansive. Unless scientists go into debt they're pretty difficult to beat in QM with their fast patents and black market resistance.

Currently, Scavs are picked the least in QM but have the best W/L ratio.

Maybe it has something to do with every map having 'Soren' spot (adjacent iron and water) and seldom anything else, which grants Soren an auto win. Just a thought...

Doubt it. Probably just a consequence of newbies staying away from Scav, since it's the most difficult to play with its early-game cash crunch and the necessity of actually using the BM. It would be more informative to see Scav win/pick rates per player, instead of aggregated. It's possible for every single player to have Scav as their lowest win rate colony, yet for Scav have the highest win rate overall.

An example: http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-badgers-1.html

Jaiwera, do I have to put irony alert in every post?  

Scavenger used to be the go to HQ type for many top players while scientific was garbage with scav god mode spots everywhere and the same strong BM. Now these spots got replaced by sci god mode spots and BM not only less effective (to say the least) vs sci but is also weak half of the time. The result - sci became the new go to HQ. Unsurprisingly. I said this is the past and will probably keep saying this in the future - it's not about factions, it's all about map generation.

I'd expect scav to be rarely played but winning more because new players wont pick them often and pro's play them when the scav has good founds (ie. high/med adjacent carbon).