Alternate commander morph method

You forgot adding a dozen super complex formulas. 0/10, worst Neonstorming ever.

What I was trying to say is that your idea is already very complex and not at all intuitive as is. As I understand it you want to unlock commander morph levels after a certain time has passed. You want to increase this timer for certain actions performed by the commander (or any unit?) and decrease it for others. In other words, you want to tell players how they should play by introducing new, very "artificial" limitations.

Giving a timer penalty to your automatic morph for building defenses is a very arbitrary rule. If defenses are problematic and make the game too static, then defenses should be nerfed or changed. Unintuitive rules to band-aid the problem are not a long-term solution.

Rules like that tend to be quite exploitable as well.

You could, for example, just keep your com back at home and it would morph faster than the other com pushing the front line, but occasionally plopping a turret or two to help with the push. You'd be rewarding passive play instead of aggressive, even when that aggression comes with turrets.

Or you could bring racketeers and constructors with your commander, use your com only to get mex and disarmed turret kills while your constructors plop defenses all around it (which can be hold fired when necessary to avoid getting last hits on mexes and turrets). Basically, your rules would bring last hitting from mobas into ZK where you have to make sure to get kills with the right units for optimal play. This would be the kind of tedious micromanagent that Zero-K tends to avoid.

There's also the problem that inexperienced players would probably be raged at quite a lot for not knowing or not exploiting all those rules.

I do agree that ZK could use to be more dynamic and less porcy. While unit balance seems to be in a decent spot with with very few exceptions (hi Swift), turret balance seems to have been ignored for the most part.

Lauri, I never said only actions performed by the commander are taken into account, the morph speed is meant to reflect overall tactics (like the hive anger thing) not commander micro.

The only way to obtain a significant morph advantage would be by destroying large numbers of opposing defences and/or mexes without relying on statics yourself and without loosing mexes, and if you can do that you probably winning already or playing against a turtler attempting to prolong the game.

As for newbs being raged at, again, considering they way to morph faster is to have units on the frontline doing damage rather than at the back building stardusts behind solars... the only difference to the present would be that others could give them one more example of why they are using poor tactics.

quote: The only behaviour we need to incentivize is to spend enough of your economy on units rather than comms: IE, playing the game.

This is what I am aiming for, this is why this system does not involve resources for the comm (and thus needs no morph button) and rewards the making and proper use of units.

quote: Then you have to self-d mexes to deny comm morph XP to the enemy.

An individual mex only alters the total morphtime by a small amount and you still take the penalty for loosing it as well as actually loosing it, admittedly being able to self-d any doomed mex just before being taken down forcibly would slightly delay opponent morphing but this seems like epic micro territory and epic micro is a huge modifier when applied to anything in zero-k

Self-d behaviour could be made redundant by further simplifying the system via removing bonuses and only having penalties -for lost mexes and built defences for example- the side effect of this method would be that you would know no commander can achieve level x before y amount of time has passed (not sure if this is good or bad but it would certainly simplify module balance at least).