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Retreat command not working?

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6 years ago
Hello,

I am playing a bit of Zero-K against bots. I tried using gunships to set the automatic retreat mode: I expected them to retreat to the nearest airpad when damaged. However, they keep on fighting and never go to repair unless I explicitly order them to do so.

I looked at the wiki, but the only article about retreat mentions "Retreat zones" that seem to have disappeared? I don't have this icon in the orders tab. The gunships correctly show the red "+" icon when damaged, but they stay where they are.

Thanks!
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Skasi
6 years ago
Afaik the retreat zone button is in the top left or next to the minimap or something like that. It's no longer in the main command menu.
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6 years ago
Thanks, found it! It is indeed in the top left corner.

I tried using it: built an airpad, and laid out a zone on top of it. However, it doesn't seem like the gunships try to use the airpad at all... Is there some notion of priority to set up so they go straight to the airpad for repairs?
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Lynx
6 years ago
I too have set a retreat zone above an airpad, expecting air units to retreat and use the airpad, but they instead hover above the airpad waiting to be restored by a con. Thoughts?
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6 years ago
Gunships currently don't use airpads when retreating, only planes do. Possibly it could become an option in the future, for now make a Caretaker instead.
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6 years ago
Caretaker is also much more efficient for the job of repairing things compared to an airpad - as long as you don't need to rearm.

Airpad provides 10 total build power for repair, split in four pads of 2.5 buildpower each, so it will be repairing individual units 4 times slower than Caretaker.

it also costs 350 while a Caretaker costs only 220.
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Skasi
6 years ago
On that note, when will air repair pads be reduced to 1/4th?
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Lynx
To me it seems from the above like retreat command is not working for the case of gunships + airpad. Will this be fixed?
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6 years ago
I don't expect it to happen in the near future because to an extent this is by design.

Airpads are not really meant to be used by gunships. Their primary role is to provide bomber rearm, if gunships used airpads by default then the pad would waste time doing something else than rearming. Repairing is just a convenience feature so that the bombers don't go back damaged.
Of course you could build dedicated pads with the explicit purpose of repairing gunships when you aren't even using planes but you shouldn't do that because it is strictly inferior to a nanotower - 60% more BP per cost, takes less space, has actual buildpower so can repair land units or assist construction, lower weight, makor stronk, nerf pls.

The main issue I see is that people don't know that the pads are crappy at repair and meant for rearm. I don't know whether this can fully be solved in ZK because people will bring their expectations from other games where buildings that can repair garrisoned units have it as their main (usually sole) role - especially OTA airpad, but also eg Red Alert Service Depot.
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Why isn't the airpad good at repair? Seems like it should be better for cost than nanos, not worse. Un-intuitive.
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Lynx
6 years ago
Indeed; I assumed it would be better for repair and used it for gunships for this purpose, manually clicking as appropriate to effect repair.
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6 years ago
Would it make sense if the airpad repair gun repaired everything in a short radius (with priority to anything on a pad, of course)? That way, it would become a more expensive version of the caretaker, with the option to rearm as well.
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6 years ago
Why would the airpad be comparable at repairing? It is almost unique in its ability to rearm aircraft, in the sense that it is by far the most efficient way to do so. To buff its repair rate would be to buff a weakness of bombers and remove some of the usefulness of light AA. Even if your AA does not kill a bomber it still deals damage that their owner probably wants to repair. They can repair this damage slowly on the pad or more quickly by building extra infrastructure. If airpads repaired sufficiently quickly by themselves this choice to build extra repair infrastructure would be lessened.

Generally, the design is to make everything good at exactly one thing because that is how you let people make choices about composition.

I wrote some more technical reasons around gunship retreat here: https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K/issues/2521

quote:
Would it make sense if the airpad repair gun repaired everything in a short radius (with priority to anything on a pad, of course)? That way, it would become a more expensive version of the caretaker, with the option to rearm as well.
No, a nano turret for the airpad opens up consistency and UI issues. Every non-factory thing which visually has nanospray can repair, reclaim and build. Is airpad going to be the exception that can only repair? Is it going to be better or worse than caretaker? Are you trying to give people a reason to make airpads with no bombers?

The nanobeam would also weaken a current piece of the design. The airpad does not repair and rearm aircraft simultaneously, this is to make damage dealt to surviving bombers more meaningful. Other constructors can still repair these aircraft so it would look weird if the airpad beam did not.

quote:
On that note, when will air repair pads be reduced to 1/4th?
Bulky choices can be better game design. When will there be a 500 cost Behemoth with a single gun and double reload time? When is the 50 cost mini factory that can only make Scythes?
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6 years ago
quote:
No, a nano turret for the airpad opens up consistency and UI issues. Every non-factory thing which visually has nanospray can repair, reclaim and build. Is airpad going to be the exception that can only repair? Is it going to be better or worse than caretaker? Are you trying to give people a reason to make airpads with no bombers?

The nanobeam would also weaken a current piece of the design. The airpad does not repair and rearm aircraft simultaneously, this is to make damage dealt to surviving bombers more meaningful. Other constructors can still repair these aircraft so it would look weird if the airpad beam did not.


To prevent inconsistencies, it would work like a caretaker, with repair, assist and reclaim (but with priority on repairing what is on the airpad). It would inevitably be weaker than a caretaker because of the price, if nothing else. As such, it would always be more interesting to build a caretaker if you need one without the pad. It could also have a shorter range, no need to reach much further than the pads themselves.

However, the "rearm or repair" would indeed be a problem, I hadn't thought about that point. The behaviour of such an airpad could be confusing for newer players, who may not understand why the pad suddenly stops nanospraying things.
Well, I guess a description and a tip somewhere about pads not repairing gunships will have to do, then.
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6 years ago
Call it a bomber rearm pad. Restrict it to bombers. Note in a tooltip that it also repairs bombers after rearming them.

Let gunships, Swifts, Hawks, and Vultures retreat to normal retreat zones and be repaired by nanotowers and construction bots, just like any other unit.
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6 years ago
The reason that retreat even interacts with airpads is that planes cannot be accurately told to land at a particular position.
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