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Give non-Sera cruisers 0.3 splash to counter aircraft shift-g - #7193

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balance/minimal-cruiser-splash
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Give non-Sera cruisers 0.3 splash to counter aircraft shift-g#7193
lL1l1 wants to merge 6 commits into
developfrom
balance/minimal-cruiser-splash

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@lL1l1

@lL1l1 lL1l1 commented Jul 25, 2026

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Description of the proposed changes

Cruisers need minimal splash so that ASF or gunship shift-g can be countered by defensive AA usage throughout naval T2 stage.
At the same time they need to avoid countering torp bombers too hard.

I added some debug logging and tested to find that 0.3 splash is a good compromise.

Testing done on the proposed changes

Use debug logging commit to see how many units are hit per tick of damage instances.
Use a UEF cruiser (since it fires 1 projectile per tick) and test against various numbers of hold-fire torp bombers and ASF.

I tested 0.1, 0.3, and 0.5 splash. I liked 0.3 with the following results:

  • I got max 2 hits at once for 20 torps that are put into formation about 160 distance away and then right clicked onto the cruiser. The 2 hits happened for the small moment where the torps were flying directly over the cruiser in their attack run.
  • I got 1-7 hits at once for 100 ASF that were poorly shift-g micro'd. The occassional tick would hit 25 times, meaning that if the enemy manually attacks the core of the ASF shift-g instead of letting auto-attack hit stray ASF on the outside, then they can deal massive damage. For very strongly shift-g micro'd 100 ASF (using shift-g + dragging around the move order near the ASF so they clump), I was able to see up to 50 of them get hit in 1 tick.
    I think these ASF results show that the change will discourage shift-g micro over enemy cruisers, as the snowball risk is too great, and that will re-add the depth of shift-g vs non-shift-g in defense vs offense respectively for the t2 naval stage/area.

Checklist

- [ ] Changes are annotated, including comments where useful

Summary by CodeRabbit

  • Balance Changes
    • Non-Seraphim cruisers now have a small area-effect radius on their anti-air weapons.
    • This improves their ability to damage tightly grouped air units, especially ASF and gunships, while keeping the impact on torpedo bombers limited.
    • The change applies to the UEF, Aeon, and Cybran cruiser anti-air weapons.

lL1l1 added 4 commits July 24, 2026 21:21
Seems to be a good balance between torp bomber hitting inability and ASF shift-g countering
I tested by putting torp bombers into move order formation out of range and then attack ordering with holdfire. When the torps fly right over the cruiser it gets at most 2 hits.
Against ASF shift-g it can hit like 50% of the ASF if they're quite tight together like would be with the formationless move hotkey or dragging a shift-g order. It can hit 25% occasionally in slightly more spread out shift-g formations that aren't super optimized move-ordering; if the enemy targets their cruiser properly they can turn that occassionally into frequently. While that is an annoying requirement for AA usage, it is still similar to things like SAMs/carriers/flaks and I don't think we should go any further or else torps automatically suicide on bombing run formations, taking 3-5x damage in that sensitive balance.
This reverts commit 9c5fcd9.
@lL1l1
lL1l1 requested a review from Rhaelya July 25, 2026 05:33
@lL1l1 lL1l1 added the area: balance idea related to suggestions for unit balance label Jul 25, 2026
@coderabbitai

coderabbitai Bot commented Jul 25, 2026

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Review Change Stack

📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

Non-Seraphim cruiser anti-air weapon definitions now specify a 0.3 damage radius. The change covers both Zealot AA Missiles, the Flayer SAM Launcher, and the Nanodart Launcher, with a corresponding balance changelog entry.

Changes

Cruiser AA splash adjustment

Layer / File(s) Summary
Apply AA weapon damage radius
units/UAS0202/UAS0202_unit.bp, units/UES0202/UES0202_unit.bp, units/URS0202/URS0202_unit.bp, changelog/snippets/balance.7193.md
The affected anti-air weapons receive DamageRadius = 0.3, and the balance change is documented.

Estimated code review effort: 1 (Trivial) | ~5 minutes

Possibly related PRs

  • FAForever/fa#7055: Modifies DamageRadius values on overlapping cruiser weapon blueprints.

Suggested labels: area: unit-blueprint

Suggested reviewers: rhaelya

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5
✅ Passed checks (5 passed)
Check name Status Explanation
Docstring Coverage ✅ Passed No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check.
Linked Issues check ✅ Passed Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check ✅ Passed Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Title check ✅ Passed The title clearly and concisely summarizes the main change: adding 0.3 splash to non-Sera cruisers to counter aircraft shift-g.
Description check ✅ Passed The description includes the change summary, testing details, and checklist, with only the optional additional-context section omitted.
✨ Finishing Touches
📝 Generate docstrings
  • Create stacked PR
  • Commit on current branch
🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)
  • Create PR with unit tests
  • Commit unit tests in branch balance/minimal-cruiser-splash

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@lL1l1
lL1l1 marked this pull request as ready for review July 25, 2026 05:39
@vjt4

vjt4 commented Jul 30, 2026

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Can T2 Torps go back to 240M if cruisers all get splash back

@lL1l1

lL1l1 commented Jul 31, 2026

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It's less than splash than before and I tested it to not be as op as 1 splash so no.

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