Cloaky Balance

This may just be my own personal limitations.. but..

I've been working on improving ZKGBAI, as always, and getting good general performance and strength with every factory is something I'm constantly striving to maintain. However, while I've currently got practically every factory dominating I have not been successful with cloaky in spite of putting in more hours of work on it than for any other factory. I've managed to get it to win reasonably well vs most facs, but it takes longer than with any other factory. In particular though, I cannot get it to win vs amphs at all. It seems like on dry land amphs wreck cloaky one-sidedly and nothing that I have tried is able to counter it consistently.

In particular:
-Ducks cost 80 metal each vs 65 for a glaive.
-It takes 3 glaives to kill one duck, because:
--The first glaive dies instantly and does zero damage
--The second glaive dies instantly and does almost no damage
--Only the third glaive survives long enough and does enough damage for the duck to die.

Warriors are also horrible vs ducks on account of being snail slow and horribly short ranged.

-Cloaky has zero counters to buoy:
--Rockos can only sort of fight buoys, but are ultimately disadvantaged by their slower projectiles and the buoys' slow damage.
--Zeus and warrior can't catch them
--Glaives and scythes die horribly, especially if there is more than one buoy.
--Spectres die easily and also cost several appendages plus several more in upkeep.

-If ducks fail, archers can make expansion nearly impossible for cloaky, and are additionally virtually immune to everything except zeus (which can't catch them anyway).

On the other hand, a conjuror dies in two shots to a duck and cannot run away effectively, and scallops have an easy time running over defenses solo (if buoy harass isn't bad enough). So basically cloaky ends up with near-zero raiding/harass effectiveness, while amphs have tons of choices that dominate. On dry land.

I think cloaky in general has two major weaknesses otherwise which are making it less competitive with other facs. The first is that rockos are the only skirmisher that gets outranged by llts, which causes them to die quickly leaving warriors and zeus unsupported. The second is that warriors get outranged by basically every other ground riot. Fights between warriors and redbacks, scallops, maces, levelers and practically anything else tends to favor the other factory always, and then warriors being as slow as they are take forever to retreat and get repaired so that the enemy gains an advantage in maintaining containment. Cloaky's overall lack of mobility seems to be a greater handicap than it is for shields or amphs since those facs at least have units that can balance it out. In theory glaives and scythes should fill that role, but in practice they're too easily countered to make up for cloaky's lackluster direct attack strength.

Better players than I have already opined that duck and buoy are game-breaking balance messes, so the problem isn't the cloakies.

I've been trying to avoid yet more super-special unit handling code. Scythes are also problematic because they're too expensive to send them to die vs porc, too expensive to form mobs of them, and if I have it send them any later than immediately the enemy gets free map control. Other issues with scythes, although AI specific, is the fact that pathfinding gets them stuck on buildings frequently, and every attempt to fix that so far has failed utterly and absolutely.

I already have glaives avoid confrontation for the most part, but that doesn't stop them from dying. The biggest problem is simply that cloak cannot seem to exert map control whatsoever. Harassing is fine and well, but if it fails (and there is ALWAYS a chance of complete raiding failure) then cloaky has nothing to back it up, seemingly. The only thing I have yet to try is increasing rocko spam, but that would come at the cost of fewer raiders.

Cloaky vs. Amph was a horrid matchup even when Cloaky dominated in other matchups.

Glaives are nearly 100% useless in the matchup, the moment you scout Amph you should build no more (unless the map is super huge). Instead make Rockos. One-on-one the Ducks win still (probably) but as numbers increase Rocko gets an edge.

Spectre is your one and only counter to Buoy.

Unless you somehow take a huge lead and can make many Spectres, you have to facswitch before Grizzly comes out.

I still don't think the matchup is even, particularly after the Spectre nerf (which was kind of necessary for other matchups)... but the above should pull Cloaky winrate above 0%.

---//---

In general I honestly think Cloaky is underpowered at the moment. They greatly suffer by a comparison to Shield (in particular, Shield has an easy answer to almost any cheese).

I would also note that inherently Cloaky play is based around misdirection, clever unit movement, etc. which are things I would very much expect an AI to do comparatively badly at.

I suspect that in matchups where the AI's capability for Glaive micro is not useful Cloaky will be any existing AI's worst factory. (or at least a bad one. Dunno if the AI can play Tank either.)

There are three units that together beat amph in direct fights.

Rocko: This does generally well against amph units. Even duck doesn't do great against it. This should form a significant fraction of your forces.

Zeus: This does generally well against all amph units except boey. Its lack of mobility is a problem, but its pretty good at this in general.

Sniper: This beats basically every amph unit except ducks. It is very, very powerful against amph.


Additionally you have:

Glaives: Useful for harassment, and just generally being in the way. Do not expect to use them in fights, use them for direct raiding.

Scythes: Very hard to chase for amph because of their speed and cloak. Incredibly difficult for them to respond to if well managed.



Generally Zeus and Rocko will form a significant core of your army, with boey deployment being countered by snipers.
Use your radically superior raiding and mobility to throw them off guard and win economically.



This is how you beat amph as cloaky.

To add to RyMarq 's post here's some price comparisons that might be useful:

1 Rocko = 1.125 Ducks = 0.3 Buoys
1 Tick = 1.5 Ducks = 0.4 Buoys
1 Warrior = 2.75 Ducks = 0.733 Buoys
1 Zeus = 4.375 Ducks = 1.167 Buoys
1 Spectre + 2 Solars = 11.125 Ducks = 2.967 Buoys
(Spectre needs 34s of reloading to make cost vs Buoys)

Note that most cloaky units in this list are faster than any amphib unit other than Duck/Archer. Spectre is about as fast as Buoy/Scallop/etc. Thus your AI should theoretically always be able to kite or avoid fights against armies that do not include Ducks. So in the end it all comes down to winning the kite battle and finding a way to deal with Ducks. The kite battle should be won by Spectres (if you get there), provided the map is not super small and that you have any sort of vision (eg. Scythe, Gremlin). So now all you need is something to protect your Spectres against Duckspam: Warrior, Zeus, Tick, to some extend even Rocko should all be decent or super efficient in this.

In other words, using the list above you could try to create any mix of units that can deal with equal-cost Duckspam at near-0 losses while still having metal left for some Spectres+Solars to eventually win a possible kiting game.


Another random idea:
Add 1 Conjurer to your army for the areajammer, use it to repair when needed. An areajammer could help messing with the enemy AI a bit. This could be quite efficient once armies grow large enough and you have an excess of APM for repairs. Remember, the larger your army the smaller a 140m investment becomes in comparison.

The code for this could be similar to using shields/Convicts and would thus be reusable.

I need to play Cloaky vs Amph more before making good comments on the matchup. So with that in mind...

Glaive has trouble vs Duck but Duck is really slow so Glaive should be able to keep track of the Ducks and pick its engagements. Duck is not great vs defenses and Cloaky has Tick so Cloaky should be able to defend its expansion. Scythe can be used to keep Amph from naked expanding and prevents the Ducks from massing in one location. So the raider game is weird but perhaps not unsalvageable.

Buoy is really inefficient against Sniper. It has high cost, less speed and dies in one shot. I think Cloaky should aim to get an early Sniper. If Amph has a Grizzly then there should be enough leeway in resources for Cloaky to switch to something which helps them against Grizzly.

Warrior always seems lackluster. It seems to lack range to be an effective riot and its low health prevents it from doing anything else. Zeus seems to be the choice for riot, even though it should not be.

0) Don't be Failer.


Oh, aeonios I have a theory about why your Specters are not doing so well. Is your opponent an AI? Is it an AI that cheats to find out the location a projectile was fired from? Iirc I read something about AIs doing that. That would allow your enemy to know exactly where Sharpshooters are standing and thus removes a big part of their strength. Human players need to look super close and squeeze their eyes, which costs time and focus.

There's problems with both amphs and cloaky:
duck's need less alpha (one shot kills glaive, leaves bandit with 1%hp, it's very all-or-nothing, meaning all vs glaives and nothing vs bandits)
buoy(s) easily hits raiders, even glaive(s). Their projectiles are too fast, but I'm not sure if this alone would be enough to make them reasonably bad vs raiders, since slow projectiles don't matter that much at the raider's short range, their high hp gives them time to slow down raiders and finish them off.
Warrior doesn't reliably make cost vs most raiders. Especially when they are spread out, have good range and/or high alpha. Riots need to be able to damage raiders before they are close enough to shoot back. Warrior has low range, but the main problem is that it turns it guns slow and innefficient (kiting problem Sprung mentioned).

Also, defender OP, it pwns glaives, warriors and ticks and can be effective vs scythes, zeus and even hammer (when placed on a hill, newly built defenders are not being ran away from by hammers attacking something on fight move,...). Most of the time they require much attention to counter and even to not spontaneously lose units to.