A serious discussion about mechanics (Charge vs Command)

Classic Fighting Games Ultra Street Fighter IV
41

Gen’s Oga, the charge wall dive, isn’t used in neutral but only after knockdowns because it’s unsafe on block unless you get really good spacing or hit them and keep moving past them. It was really good if you could get the hard knockdown from heavy waterfall kicks though.

Blacque, all normal command grabs, not supers or ultras, take 2 frames to start up. Bison has only 1 frame where he can be punished after light scissor kick. They can’t punish it unless they have Ultra 1 or super and you scissor kick into them deep enough to get grabbed.

42

I KNOW THAT’S WHY I GROANED! I GROANED! I MESSED UP BAD GUYS!

But in all seriousness it really was all my fault. For some reason my brain went “Do this!” and my hands went “Naw do this!”

Or vice versa I don’t even really know which is which sometimes.

Suffice it to say Bison’s torso was buried in the pavement.

43

You mean when you’re like brain: Shit, he’s jumping, hands do shoryuken!! Hands: hadoken? got it

44

I have the moment where I tell myself to just block the mixup on wakeup and instead my hands do a shoryuken. A sad illness that afflicts many a Ken

45

I do that and I play Makoto, there’s something wrong with me.

That could be one “advantage” charge characters have, you can’t accidentally reversal when you meant to block lol

46

One thing (among many) that strikes me as a big disadvantage for charge characters is how severely limited their juggling options in combos are. Whereas command characters seem to have every possible juggling situation available to them, a lot of charge characters can’t juggle in places that seem like they obviously should be able to with or without meter. For example, with Guile, something like fk>fadc>guile high kick>backhand hp seems like it should work (in the same way that Sagat can tag his hk off fadc’d tiger uppers, or into combos and trades), but it isn’t there for whatever reason. A lot of times I feel like I’m playing against SF Alpha 1 characters that can chain anything together into hard knockdowns or specials, but my Guile is stuck in SF2 mode with only basic BnB combos at his disposal.

47

Blanka ex upball is 130 damage, can’t be juggled off of(other than a weird trade to u2 ground), and is punishable on fadc forward.

I think Decapre is the only charge characters who works like you think they would in terms of juggles.

48

Honda’s buttslam allows for juggles (ex headbutt, super, U1) if it hits an airborne opponent in specific scenarios.
In a more rare and impractical scenario, if the last hits of HHS hits an airborne opponent then you can juggle off of that as well.

49

The disadvantage for charge characters is that the juggle opportunities they have can’t be “created” are mostly situational, and they generally aren’t given anything to compensate for that short coming (like the higher damage Guile used to have in SSF4). I’m sure folks like to argue that damage scaling takes the edge off of getting juggled for 13-hit combos from characters like Dudley and Yun, but there is no stun scaling in the game, and that allows them to keep their offensive trains rolling all day (and when your stun is floating around 900, that’s a huge deal). Logically, it’d make sense that charge characters should do more damage with the fewer hits they sneak in here and there (usually off lucky guesses), but again, for whatever reason, that isn’t the case.
Another thing (and I guess I’ll just throw these onto this thread as I remember them) that doesn’t make sense is the amount of target combos given to command characters compared to charge characters. As a source of offense for a charge character who loses their charge (which the game seems designed to make happen often with the all the mix-up/ambiguous shenanigans it has), you’d think they’d have more target combos available to them. Instead, characters like Dudley, Ibuki, and Guy can absolutely wreck you off one poke leading into their target combos and then into their specials… in the meantime, charge characters like Honda have a shikofumi TC that doesn’t even combo, Guile has cr.mk>overhead that he can get dp’d in the middle of, and Dee Jay has… I don’t know what.

50

Yes there is. During combos stun damage scales at the same rate as normal damage. If an attack does 200stun normally but it’s the third attack in a combo it will be scaled to 80% and only do 160.

In addition, current combo scaling is retained when a character is stunned. If your combo was at 50% scaling and it stuns an opponent. The next hit will be 40% as it still is counted as the same combo.

lastly, once a character has become stunned their max maximum stun goes up by 20% (a character with 1000stun will take 1200 stun damage to become dizzy a 2nd time in the same round). Not that it matters since that only is even possible vs like Zangief doing headbutts or Balrog landing U2. It’s near impossible to stun someone twice in a round without killing them. Possible, but only in 2-3 specific scenarios.

51

Give Deejay aa upkicks > u1 juggle that gets the last hit etc.

52

Hmm, thought stun wasn’t scaled. Guile ends up stunned so often it didn’t seem scaled. Lol

53

I think that the damage scaling for Charge characters and the lack of Target Combos outside of Chun Li and Decapre (again specific) is a point of interest that was recently brought up. As a side note Honda is insane and I hate him so very much and I hate him and hate him and hate him therefore charge characters are fine the way they are in fact they’re OP.

Ahem… Sorry I had to rant. I REALLY HATE HONDA.

I would like some nice tips on how to deal with him with Decapre. I’ve watched some battles but I swear it seems like the best you can hope for is to get lucky during your times when you’re close to him!

Back to topic!

I think over all charge characters are not only different (As was pointed out by one of our more recent posters) which is pretty obvious (no offense) but are in fact disadvantaged simply by the nature of the game’s core mechanics. Dashing, ambiguity, focus etc. However that doesn’t mean that they’re worth while, or worthless. After all Honda makes me mad!

One thing I wanted to pose to the community was a break down of the damage on hits with command versus charge then the mechanics behind it, as a closer look at the general flow of the game. I brought it up once before I think but I’ll run through it again.

I learned Bison’s six hit combo that ends with a light scissor kick. I felt like a boss! Cross up to land it and unleash the goodness! Crouching light kick, standing light kick, crouching light kick into scissor kick.

Ryu’s forward hard punch into SRK does 260
Bison’s cr lp, st lp, cr mk into scissor kick does 175.
Now Bison’s jump in hard punch, standing hard punch into psycho crusher does a whopping 322 (Hot damn)
Buuut if we’ve learned anything in this game it’s that relying on a combo that requires a jump in is a bad time.

That’s one example and since we’re carrying on with the conversation I’m wondering what we’ll find across the board. Now Ryu’s combo is stupidly easy for a good amount of damage and you have some decent hit confirm as you can FADC out of any number of the hits, then even link into the ultra if you’re good. For Bison that combo for it’s amount of damage is not particularly easy without practice. I think it took me about a week or so? An hour or more each day to really get it going and honestly I’m still not a master at it so I keep at it as best I can.

I saw a player post a video doing the same comparison with a few of Dictator’s combos versus Ibuki’s and the difference was pretty impressive. For X number of hits Ibuki dealt X damage which ended up being substantially more than the amount of hits Bison used (more or equal in some cases) for less damage. This of course once more factoring in the learning curve.

It seems that if you only had a limited amount of time to learn a character you’re better off going command.

Again this example doesn’t prove the rule but I am looking for others to toss their ideas out. I noticed this issue when I was hit by a Ryu with a few moves then hard knocked down by Tatsu for a good chunk of my life. For Decapre you can really do some heavy damage (x2 cr lp, cr mp into sting yields 204 dmg btw) This can of course be linked into a throw to top it off at 282 at the loss of meter for FADC.

I will admit sometimes I day dream about magically transferring the time I’ve invested in Dictator and Decapre over to Ryu, Ken or any other command player just to see what the difference would be.

HONDAAAAAA!

54

That Ryu combo can’t be FADC’d or combo into ultra. HP SRK doesn’t allow EX FADC. F+HP is safe on block but it’s also 16F startup. Don’t forget that Ryu’s tatsu combos require the opponent to be standing.

55

The frames required aren’t what I was really worrying over. What I was worrying over is performing the move reliably after training. Anyone training with Ryu for an hour can do that and get a great damage boost. I’m sure there are fantastic players that can train with a character like Decapre for an hour and nail all of her links like Standing Hard Punch, crouch medium into sting but it’s a vast difference in difficulty. Also the tatsu combos may require you to be standing but the one I was referring to requires no Ex and does a very good amount of damage. I just think that the damage that command characters are able to do easily outshines the damage that charge characters can do easily.

Any easy 2-5 hit combo that a command character can do blows away a 2-5 hit combo that a charge character can do. Was generally what I was referring to. After all what kind of damage are you getting after a single hit if that single hit doesn’t aware you charge time?

56

well LTG blessed us with his opinion on this matter

thread can be closed now :wink: