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Cyclops even more op

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I think while trying to tame an angry bulldog, you've created a dragon.

It's now even more so the go-to unit. There is no hardcounter, it can just stroll into a frontline mess up heavy defence and units and leave safely, patch up, then again... No micro really required.

Best nerf would be to slow it down, alot, so if you want to Peirce the gates, U gotta make it stick, or be stumbling home getting battered.. at least giving opponent time to come up with a reasonable counter measure
+1 / -0

5 years ago
It got nerfed. Maybe more people just realized that it's better to invest on cyclops than on striders.

Cyclops has a near perfect mix of attributes to counter striders : tanky enough to survive aoe, fast enough to catch them, enough range to not be kited by the shorter range striders and kite cheaper riots

having higher hp/cost and good speed relative to striders also makes it less susceptible to anti heavies and artillery.



+2 / -0

5 years ago
I actually think it got buffed, a little support and it's deadlier
+0 / -0

5 years ago
How is it any deadlier than before? I'm sure old Cyclops plus support would be better than current disruptor cannon Cyclops with support. We don't want to owl Cyclops, do we?
+1 / -0
I kind of thought it was a crippling nerf.

But maybe it attracted attention, and now people know.

GBrankdyth68 for one seems to think it's entirely useless and doesn't belong in any competitive games now.
+2 / -0

5 years ago
It literally does the exact same DPS, except it's slow is harder to use now.
How is that a buff?

???
+4 / -0
5 years ago
I will say that it needs to be slower and have less range than minotaurs. As of right now, it can kite and run faster than the tank foundary's other assault unit. Anti-heavy units usually have certain aspects like stunning, cloak +low health + high dmg and reload, or disarming capabilities. In this case, we have a faster unit than others (like snipers, skuttles, rackateers, lancers, etc.) that is able to tank and output large amounts of dmg, has a large range, and is easily able to be stacked up.

I am in favor of shortening range and speed by 10%, and giving it a 2.2x dmg boost, and a 2x longer reload so that it does the dmg, but doesn't become a tanky skirmisher, and it does better at its primary role of anti-heavy.
+0 / -0
I honestly can't tell if AUrank4hundred is trolling or not. 0_o
Have you tried using glaives? A dozen glaives or a couple of dozen fleas will kill a cyclops in <1500 elmo (if the front lines are closer than this then see Emissary below).
Things that slow it like moderators, placeholders, buoys, another cyclops (lol) will also stop it retreating more than 300-600 elmo (technically a cyclops can kite a moderator but if they are attacking you they're going to need to turn around so you tag on the turn).
If you can manage the micro a couple of widows and some appropriate backup (e.g. fleas or redback) will work well.
A large number of Venoms will take around 500 elmo, though I wouldn't necessarily recommend trying it as it can go wrong too easily.
Dominator gives you their cyclops in a few hundred elmo.
A shield makes the hit and run attacks much less painful (allowing your dominators/moderators/etc more time to catch up).

^ The above are all assuming similar metal costs for your own army (ie. 2200 metal). Things get much worse for the cyclops user as armies get bigger, past 10K Cyclops raiding won't work unless you have a sufficiently large metal advantage that you should have made a minotaur ball and rolled the enemy's base.

Also, the Cyclop's damage is piss poor for its cost. If you actually want to mess up an enemy front line use Emissaries. They have similar DPS/metal but have fantastic range and are much much faster.
No chance of any of the above counters working on Emissary thanks to its exceptional speed and range and you can bombard for days rather than for a few seconds before running away.
You're going about things the wrong way if you're trying to mess up front lines with tank fac and you're using a Cyclops to do it.

USrankDrascalicus : Uh, I think you've gotten confused about the Cyclop's speed. It's quite a bit slower than the Minotaur already and is slower than the Lance etc. Your speed nerf is already in effect (it's actually more than 10% slower than the Minotaur).
It's damage per cost is also one of the worst in the game.
+0 / -0
FIrankFFC
5 years ago
Yes glaives are great as enemy who has Cyclops can't get kodachis and ogres that can easily kill them right
+0 / -0


5 years ago
quote:
Also, the Cyclop's damage is piss poor for its cost. If you actually want to mess up an enemy front line use Emissaries.

Ah, it's just that Emissary is the perfect unit. Artillery range, riot aoe, raider speed, tank health.
+2 / -0
@[ffc] : The context was cyclops doing raiding and getting away again.
If they have brought along other non-Cyclops units then it's time to have an army vs army battle as those other units are much more killable than a cyclops is.

Bring in some ravagers or something and kill off the kodachis and ogres, then laugh as the cyclops runs off with its tail between it's legs (or else your raiders will come for it), having lost a bunch of kodachis and ogres in exchange for a ravager or two (or unit mix of choice, any reasonable front line army mix will work here).

Seriously, the very low DPS per cost of the cyclops makes it a particularly bad for mixed armies, everything but the Cyclops will be killed while it's helpless to do anything to change the tide of battle with its ~200dps canon (overkill does bad things to in-practice cyclops DPS). It's stronger on its own (or in Cyclops groups) as a heavy raider that can run and hide behind a friendly army/porc and repair if confronted with a strong enemy force.

That's why the un-nerfed Cyclops was so strong, it didn't need an escort in most situations (you might include the occasional kodachi nearby in case you run into a pure glaive army) which meant you didn't lose any units to attrition on your raids. New Cyclops needs an escort so if you can kill that escort while not losing more metal than the escort cost (and forced the cyclops to retreat) you've found a winning combination (and this is very doable, try a few army combinations in a skirmish vs inactive AI).

Note: "Tanks" in the gaming sense of something with lots of HP that's meant to soak damage need to have something that forces the enemy to attack them rather than ignoring them in favor of killing the other more easily killable units that have much higher DPS/HP ratios.

EErankAdminAnarchid : Emissary has one of the worst hp/cost ratios of any unit, so I assume that last bit was a pun :D
+0 / -0
I think it just must be flavour of the month, new distict sound makes them noticeable and attractive. Just played a ton of games where they are the dominating factor. I possibly have been caught up in the craze not creating alternative armies. Something still feels op about them
+0 / -0
5 years ago
I am reminded of the "GG-Lord/Winfestor" era of late Starcraft 2: Wing of Liberty.

"GG-Lord/Winfestor" was a Zerg playstyle based around the Brood Lord, a flying artillery that could shred bases and helpless armies, but crumpled to anything that could reach them; and the Infestor, a support unit that could render armies helpless.

Brood Lords and Infestors were in the game, unchanged from the very beginning, but the combo wasn't a meta mainstay until half-way through Wings of Liberty's lifespan. Simply put, rushing Brood Lords and Infestors was too risky. Dumping resources into two high-tier units left the Zerg player vulnerable to early raiding from even a moderately aggressive opponent, and the Zerg player would take too much damage to be competitive. Zerg had to build Zerglings and Roaches (tanky ground fighter in Starcraft 2) instead, and only reached Brood Lords and Infestors if the game lasted over thirty minutes and naturally progressed to end-game units.

What changed was the Zerg Queen buff. The Queen, an economy/base-defense unit, had its ground-attack range nearly doubled, increased from 3 to 5. This made the Queen much more competent at holding off early raids; so much so that Zerg players had success replacing early Zergling/Roach armies with nothing but Queens. This allowed Zerg to rush tech, and Brood Lords and Infestors started hitting the field before the Terran or Protoss players had an opportunity to build a counter or preemptively assault the Zerg player.

I bring this up, because in Zero-K, Tanks and the Cyclops weren't in the meta until recently, and it wasn't the Cyclops that was buffed...it was the Welder--the economy unit.

Take that for what you will.
+3 / -0


5 years ago
I think USrankPhytophyte may have hit the nail on the head as far as balance of old Cyclops goes. If tank was not a viable starting factory and thus needed a second fac building, it would only appear quite late in the game. An old-style Cyclops is far less useful and intimidating when army size is ~5K metal rather than 15K, its weight matters a whole lot less then and it'll have a much tougher time surviving.
Similarly, if Kodachis only appear after 10 minutes in game then they go from overwhelmingly good to mediocre.

In theory if Welder gets turned into a battlefield reclaim unit that's a poor choice for construction and expansion and tank fac becomes a non-viable starter you could probably unnerf Cyclops and game balance would be improved. (though I wouldn't necessarily recommend this approach)

AUrank4hundred : That makes a lot of sense... They're definitely more noticeable and cool looking now. And given they'll tend to survive inconclusive battles they look better than they actually are.
+0 / -0

5 years ago
I think the Welder buff was only relevant insofar as it made people rediscover Tank. If something happened to Welder but not Cyclops then people would stop plopping Tank but still facswitch and abuse Cyclops.
+0 / -0
Welder had a minor buff as a consequence of a major buff and then an almost equally sized nerf.

Kodachi was massively buffed though, cost went 180 to 160 and more direct damage - and unlike the share it did with the fire DoT, this part stacks.

Facswitching to the pre-nerf Cyclops was totally a thing.
+1 / -0


5 years ago
Wasn't the 1000 cost of the fac switch a bit of a deterrent making Cyclops appear late enough that it couldn't do its "rampage around then retreat, taking advantage of its large weight" thing?
+0 / -0
Factories cost 800. They costed 1000 very briefly before Steam release iirc. For most of ZK's history they costed 600.

Facswitching to pre-nerf Cyclops was a bit of a meta-meta thing when it worked. Upon encountering a non-tank player in high-level 1v1, a Cyclops-aware opponent playing tanks themselves would quickly realise that all they had to do to win was to make a Cyclops, so they would conduct less aggression and focus on defense.

This provided weaker economy - especially as welders aren't cheap - against an opponent disregarding static defenses and going for heavy, raider-covered, but otherwise naked expansion. The combination of those factors would conspire to allow the non-tank (which means Rover, because other factories don't have Dart) player to actually pay 800 extra metal for their first Cyclops, which would also be unexpected by the tank player.

Alternatively, if the tank player went for heavy tank-raider build, Cyclops would be the most economical thing to get rid of it, because Cyclops used to counter all other tanks.
+1 / -0
5 years ago
I think the new cyclop is kinda weak. The disruptor while sounds good on paper, mixing both dps and slow together. For some reason, I feel like the old cannon has better range because at times, while chasing other units, even within range, the new cyclop won't fire.
+0 / -0

5 years ago
The cannon's physics were not touched.
+1 / -0
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