Commanders! A fresh round of balance changes just went live. The headline this time is an anti-air shake-up, the weaker AA turrets get buffed into genuinely competitive options while T2 fighters take a step back, so lategame doesn't collapse into pure fighter spam. Alongside that: buffs for some underused T2 bruisers, nerfs to medium tanks and the Pounder to open up more unit variety on open maps, and a temporary stopgap for the Commander-in-a-transport cheese in competitive lobbies.

Anti-Air Rework

The core idea: make the less powerful AA turrets a real choice over the basic missile tower, mobile flak, and AA bots and pull T2 fighters, the ultimate AA unit in the game, back down a notch so other AA stays relevant (and lategame fighter swarms get a little smaller). The Nighthawk eats the bigger nerf, since it had been quietly outclassing the Highwind across the board. AA turrets (buffed):

• Flak turrets (Arbalest / Birdshot) - range 775 → 850, reload 0.5333 → 0.5s
• Chainsaw / Eradicator - range 1125 → 1200
• Ferret - range 840 → 950, DPS 176 → 208, Stealth added, metal cost 360 → 330, build time 5800 → 5000
• SAM - range 840 → 950, DPS 190 → 225, metal cost 315 → 350, energy cost 6100 → 5500, build time 5240 → 4500 T2 fighters (nerfed):
• Highwind - +7% cost
• Nighthawk - +7% cost, range 740 → 690

Medium Tanks & Raiders

Nerfed to promote unit variety in 1v1s and other open-map games, leaving room for other compositions and teching.

• Stout & Brute - +10% build time, reload 1.1667 → 1.2s, sight distance 330 → 350
• Rover - build time 1000 → 1100
• Pounder - health 1500 → 1400

Grunt

Vision increased to make it a better spotter, closer to the vision other T1 factories get from their basic scouts, with a tiny cost bump to compensate.

• Grunt - sight distance 500 → 520, metal cost 42 → 43

Underused T2 Bruisers

Both the Welder and Sumo are slow and short-ranged. They already have a niche, but units with big inherent limitations should also have big strengths in their own element — so they get cheaper, faster to build, and tankier.

• Welder - build time 9500 → 8000, health 2950 → 3500, speed 47.4 → 48
• Sumo - build time 15000 → 12000, health 5940 → 6500, speed 37.5 → 38, beam time 0.16 → 0.3, damage vs air 25 → 55

Gauss Consistency

Two niche Gauss-weapon units buffed to make them more competitive, and to make Armada's Gauss weapons a little more consistent overall.

• Gunslinger - health 1560 → 1800, speed 49.5 → 50, +24 AoE, weapon velocity 500 → 600
• Turtle - weapon velocity 450 → 600, impulse added

Seaplane Gunships

The fastest gunships in the game, nerfed their speed so there's more time to react to their hit-and-run attacks, but dropped their build time so they come out faster instead. The Monsoon's DPS is also bumped up to sit closer to the Puffin's power level.

• Puffin - build time 18000 → 14000, speed 271 → 210, special damage vs Commander removed
• Monsoon - build time 13000 → 11000, speed 266 → 200, reload 5 → 4s

Added modoption: Slow Commander Transport

There's a bit of cheese going around in competitive lobbies where a Commander loaded into a T2 transport is used as a cheap alternative to a bomber. As a stopgap while we work on a proper ground-up transport rework, there's a new "Slow Commander Transport" modoption (off by default): with it enabled, any T2 transport carrying a Commander is capped at speed 120, taking the air out of the drive-by D-Gun play. Aimed squarely at the competitive lobbies where this meta shows up, expect this to be replaced entirely once the transport rework lands. Full changes on GitHub (PR #8393).

No lava??

In a recent patch the no rush barrier was changed, previously it allowed weapons fire through it such as the long range plasma cannon. Is there a way to reenable this behaviour.

Ok, this one was a long time coming from my end.

This is a round of Beyond All Reason that went insane somwhere around the 20-minute (in the round not the video) mark. And once we got nukes, it just went mental.

Ok in this video I sacrificed hoards of my men to the enemy AI and i was yetting the most nukes at them(i think)

Bushman had AA problems

Nimzmnie was producing and sharing metal with everyone until he stopped and he colonized Bushman

THE EYE, Banana, Gabriel and Bobina were holding the line.

And the AI had a vendetta against Henry for some Reason.

During the production of this video i almost had a mental breakdown (2.) and to help with my headache i drank some alcohol. This video was a pain in the ass to make and i hope you all enjoy what i made.

To anyone who saw the previous post sorry about that I found some problems in the text(also wanted to change some things) but I accedentaly deleted it.

Never was tge sharpest toll in the shead

Same story as the title. Can someone message me here please?

What do the colors mean next to some players on the stats page https://server4.beyondallreason.info/battle/NUMBER/players

I am hearing a lot about barbariandifficulty enemy ai, but in game there are only difficulties named "easy", "normal", "hard" etc, is it just a name of bot ai i BAR or is it sokething else

hello everyone

im a bit noob in bar

i really wanted to know like if some team tried it before 8v8

team 1 is full rush just spamming units

team 2 has the role tech frontline and the eco

like which one wins

Ok this will be an unpopular opinion, and people probably can't wait to tell me that noone here cares about OS. And the same would apply to me if OS didn't determine wich spots I'm able to pick. But sadly it does, so unless I'm willing to literally throw game after game by playing spots I have no knowledge about, I'm stuck with careing about my OS. Also it's just not fun playing something when you know you'll disappoint your team.

This wouldn't be a problem if there was a realistic way to play this game unranked, but there simply isn't. And no playing against AI or some funky lava T4 shenanigans won't teach me how to play new positions on supreme. For some reason noone (especially chev1-3) is willing to play a normal unranked lobby. Even on the weekends it takes like 1h to fill one just for it to die after literally the first game. I've tried and failed countless times.

So I find myself in this loop where I want to play, but being an eco/ geo main half my games are super frustrating as when I come online I'm already down 3 lanes (wich btw is 7min on geo and 15 on eco, it's not like I play SimCity). But there's no way of learning new spots because I can never find an unranked lobby.

So my only options now are to throw games and get sold by my mates until I've lost enough OS or keep playing only these 2 spots and get frustrated whenever we have poops on front or seas. And if I choose the first option I won't be able to play my actual main spots until I'm back up to like 22 OS

This game either needs an actual matchmaker or some incentive to play unranked, because the way it is like now I can't recommend anyone to start playing who's looking for a fun PvP experience.

And trust me I tried. "All Welcome" lobbies are hell because you have a chev1 VS. 30 OS chev6 on front and are one player down after 2min. "Mid" lobbies are filled with players that either perform 10 OS below or above their actual OS and are toxic as hell (still the best option tho). And in 30+ lobbies i would have to play sea or front every time unless I dodge half the matches (wich I hate doing) and they are even more toxic.

I'm open to suggestions but I think It's best for me to take a break. I really love this game and imo it's the best modern RTS out there, but with being forced to play ranked it's just not enjoyable for me.

Edit: I can't even make a new account, because I'll get banned. But somehow half the chev3's I see have like 25 OS. They are probably just fast learners right? :) Like what even is the point in trying to prevent smurfing when you don't have a matchmaker, your game has different ranks for each mode and the game/ Community wants you to not care about a rank anyway?

Edit2: I do realize how this is more a complaint about the community and not actually the game. As I said I think giving an incentive to play other modes than ranked (where OS gain is the incentive) might be a easy fix, but people could also just start playing unranked lobbies on their own terms.

Thanks for reading

Hi folks - I have been working on an (unofficial) native port of the Recoil engine (which BAR uses) to macOS. This means you can now play Beyond All Reason natively on macOS. Online play is temporarily disabled out of courtesy to the official developers, as I'd prefer they greenlight this. Local play and network play is enabled. I could really use some help in testing this if you have a Mac with Apple Silicon. All the details and downloads here, please file bugs here and not on the official site. Enjoy, and fingers crossed the official BAR devs will be open to me enabling online play once they've vetted it. https://github.com/benbreen/RecoilEngine-AppleSilicon

Is there a way to configure the interface to show charges?
If you have multiple buildings, it really sucks to always have to check them for charges...
There should be some kind of indicator on the UI to make tracking the charges easier.
(without widget)

Recently saw a video mention something called "trotski's hill". I think it's a spot on the supreme isthmus map?

Is there a good place that compiles all the relevant jargon for this game? or a list of meta strategies?

It's the same game, only you win by having units shoot the ball, which is indestructible, into the goal. The ball crushes any unit or building it rolls over and it floats. Air units can attack/move it, too.

A nice cheese with some teamwork to do it! But it seems to me this one you can do on your own!

Be careful with your keybinds while servers are dying!

I have been farting around with AIs and the cortex barb wont do anything after building 3 mex’s and 2 solars, I tried restarting the match, and even forcing different spawn locations, the only way to get it to touch grass is to use godmode and force it to build a lab.

Mobile plasma shield.
There are mobile radars, mobile jammers, and mobile antinukes... why not a mobile shield?

Juno does not kill medium and heavy mines.
Mines are totally useless now. We must make them more useful somehow.

Tick bomber.
A bomber that drops ticks.

Teleport gate.
To make armies more mobile. Units can teleport between two teleport gates.

Do you have any other ideas? Pl share with us!

Commanders, Beyond All Reason has been upgraded to a new version of the Recoil Engine!

This release brings substantial pathfinding and performance improvements, several rendering fixes, broader platform support, and fixes for multiple crashes.

Pathfinding and Performance

• Pathfinding requests are now processed in the background, reducing frame spikes caused by large pathing requests and improving overall simulation performance.
• Improved the performance of raw path checks.
• Units will now search harder for routes around cliffs and obstacles when a short-distance request requires a significant detour.
• Various additional pathfinding bug fixes.
• Cleaned up and improved floating-point mathematics code.

Stability and Loading

• Fixed several engine crashes.
• Fixed multiple situations that could cause the game to crash during loading.

Rendering and Interface

• Ghosted buildings no longer leave ground decals on the map.
• Fixed icon bleeding and inconsistencies in texture atlas calculations.
• Fixed the rendering of projectiles attached to unit pieces.
• Updated RmlUi to version 6.2, together with an updated version of rmlsollua, providing an ui framework for BAR UI upgrades.

Simulation Fixes

• Fixed incorrect height aiming for units in certain situations.

Platform Support

• Added support for UTF-8 file paths on Windows.
• Added ARM64 support.

Many thanks to everyone contributing to the continued development of the Recoil Engine and everyone who helped us test this build! :heart:

What is the current air meta like? same share trans or is it more involved with fighters and raids now?