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lobpot - jack drops

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22 months ago
I'm done. Until jacks are deleted from the game or cannot be transported, I will not play.

I played this game for the lobpot - that's it. I liked landed swifts and because they were considered "op" or lame or whatever that ability was removed so I quit for months, but lobpot is fun so I returned.

However, MASSIVE numbers of players have complained about jack drops for A LONG TIME - YEARS - far far more than complained about landed swifts yet jack drops are not removed. It takes way more micro to deal with jack drops than landed swifts - in fact all you have to do to deal with landed swifts is drop a few razors or threshers and job done. Not so with jack drops - they are a problem for the entire game.

I'm done; have fun with your dying game (most hours there is nobody in lobpot anyway)

+0 / -0
22 months ago
p
+1 / -0
22 months ago
XD
+1 / -0

22 months ago
see you tomorrow
+8 / -0

22 months ago
Jack drops are annoying but there are ways to deal with them.

If your team has a good air player that isn't sleeping they can get shot down before getting to the target. High dps stuff like Scorcher can swarm jacks and kill them. Also, a heavy combat commander with dual heat ray can deal with smaller jack drops. Gnats and the like can freeze jacks up and turn something dangerous into a metal donation.

The problem is that teams generally dont play like teams but rather as a series of duels.

If a known jack dropper is on the other side the team needs to take that into account and work together to defeat the strat.
+3 / -0

22 months ago
puppies work great. so do gnats or spies. or any long range AA at all. an active air player can neutralize this too. and high value static targets get emp turrets. or multiple vernoms.

generally speaking:
jacks have a great amount of hitpoints. a jackdrop eliminates jack's slow speed. this leads to a fast change in battlefield compositon, popping up hitpoints at a single point on the field.

so: scouting as always is crucial. information only can lead to corect response. if you identify a potential jackdrop, it is worth to invest in counter measures. don't forget, the jack-dropper has a non-neglectable investment beforehand, which is missing on his team's own frontline. so, dont sleep and be active and you get metal donations falling from the sky PLUS more map if you push with your mathematical advantage.

jack drops are high risk but can, if not taken care of, have winning impact of a game. like ANY other strategy. it is not deterministic to win you the game.

AUrankAdminGoogleFrog wronte a similar analysis in some previous thread which i cannot find at the moment, leading to a fact-based decision not to change this mechanic.
+5 / -0

22 months ago
Based on what I read in previous threads about jack drops, I don't think jacks themselves are OP.
The problem is the charons. At only 100 metal (+ gsfac, but that is usable in lobpot) they give jacks 172.5 movement speed (3x normal).

It does take a bit micro, but probably less than pyro does..

Perhaps slightly increase the metal cost of charon? Or slow it down even further when carrying Medium units?
+2 / -0

22 months ago
quote:
AUrankAdminGoogleFrog wronte a similar analysis in some previous thread which i cannot find at the moment, leading to a fact-based decision not to change this mechanic.

Did you mean that?
+1 / -0

22 months ago
yes, thank you DErankHoppili . you are my hero!
+2 / -0
22 months ago
Also, I spectated a part of the game where you resigned, and a successful execution of a strategy like a jack drop, dante rush, cloaked snitch, troll com, etc., depends on who is the one who is executing them - and you were against Red Eagle, who is really good with jacks. Plus, you had really bad players on your team, one player who teamkilled another and got kicked and the other one got kicked shortly afterwards. And finally, the enemy team, as mojjj suggested, didn't have many units on the frontline, even with those two horrible players, you were almost able to break through.
+2 / -0

22 months ago
A decent air player with swifts deals with jack drops indefinitely.

As for jack drops killing comms, if you morph up your comm so that it has 2 weapons (with the disruptor ammo upgrade it's even better) the jacks will have a hard time destroying it. A handful of riots accompanying it could also do the trick.
+2 / -0

22 months ago
quote:
A decent air player with swifts deals with jack drops indefinitely.

If you mean killing the Charon I would say that even experienced players have problems with this because you never know what is at the front of the enemy (could be 10 cloaked anglers), I mean of course you can kill the Charons but whether that is so cost effective is another question....

quote:
As for jack drops killing comms, if you morph up your comm so that it has 2 weapons (with the disruptor ammo upgrade it's even better) the jacks will have a hard time destroying it. A handful of riots accompanying it could also do the trick.

But by the time you have unlocked two weapons on a commander, the opponent may have already collected a decent number of Jacks, which means your commander will be trash in a few seconds, trust me morphing a commander is just bad > losing the commander > less metal income > less units > less map control > !resign
+2 / -0
22 months ago
Multiplayer B1366240 15 on Alphabet Siege Dry v1.20 is more of a free win for our team. It's hard for anyone to stay calm and focused on the gameplay with disruptions like tking and votekicking. The psychological effect is huge and sometimes enough for deciding the outcome.
+2 / -0


22 months ago
Honestly a Jack drop is a metal donation to a vaguely aware team...

A dozen glaives will shred a Jack drop in seconds while a vaguely on the ball air player can just intercept them.

And if you have no air you're probably dead anyway...

How often do you see Jack drops in Paladium?
+2 / -0

22 months ago
While they are unreasonably annoying, especially so if in hands of a good player and even more on bigger maps where a jack can cross from corner to corner of a 20x20 map in seconds, the main 'power' of jack drops or Pyro drops is precisely in the lobpots you like.

With 10v10 or more players you run into an issue of not having enough production to properly push the frontline if you're facing enemies of equal skill, either a single player that's dueling you or a disorganized ball of 3-4 players.
If you push in too hard you'll probably get swarmed from the flanks, your attack wasted and all that metal you invested now neatly deposited inside enemy lines for them to reclaim.
So considering average lobpot of 2-3 good players and 90% of the rest of us your choices are to either support other players, filling in gaps where you can, harrassing enemies and exploiting their mistakes or doing some meta works-only-in-lobpot strategies.

And right there comes in jack-drops, a more complex to do and direct version of creeping in a bunch of Scythes into the enemy base and dealing mayhem.
There's a lot of players, everyone's doing their own thing, the best players in both teams are probably doing tug-of-war on the front and relying on rest of the team to handle the rear and WHOOP, something flew over - eh the rear line players will handle it - oh nope there goes the geothermal - oh nope there goes 2 commanders - oh nope I can't help all my units are at the front - oh nope there goes another geothermal.
You're winning actually, more metal flying over you than your team is loosing. Oh but the constant rear-line nonsense now has the rear-line players running around like headless chickens, now there's no Eco being made, rearlines are becoming porc towns, someone made 15 storages because their AFK fac assist commander died.

It's not an effective tactic, it takes a lot of set-up to do compared to the scythe infiltration for example, or an even more similar tactic of sneaking in a Djin(or building one with Athena) to start mass teleporting an entire army behind enemy lines to delete enemy teams's eco.
Takes a lot of preparation that you enemies can exploit and if it fails all you did was give your enemy a donation.
Does cause chaos, just look how player cursors move like mad once a group scythe attacks is heard.



Granted I'd vote for a mechanic change that if a unit jumps while air-borne that it should could as an AA target until it lands. Like getting thrown by a lobster then using the units jump-jet.
+2 / -0

22 months ago
Early jack drops are pretty scary, you need to be looking at your front-line-ish comm when it happens to have a chance of survival. Jacks are alarmingly fast when hunting comm. There are also other terrible ways to die though.

If a team comes together against a jack spammer, I figure is just a way to get free metal. Too powerful? Not sure, its usually skilled players that do it.

IMO the worst is when jacks get flung over the whole map, landing like a feather absolutely anywhere. BS. Its annoying to be prepared for every conceivable insane attack anywhere, any time. I think flung units should be targeted by AA.
+4 / -0

22 months ago
Paladin rush, nuke rush, Dante rush, NERF THEM ALL
+1 / -1
A jack costs 600 metal. A commander produces 4 metal a second, not to mention the e gen. Now metal is worth more at the start of the game compared to the end because by then you'll have all your mexes capped and overdrive, making the -4metal/sec not that big of a deal compared to the 600 starting metal they spend they could've been spending on taking more mexes, capping mexes and eco. Not to mention the reclaim.

There are two exceptions however.
1. low metal large team games- here commander income will always make a significant fraction of your economy, thus taking out enemy commanders is absolute key. Lobs tend to act independently, and this is amplified in low metal maps so people won't invest in countermeasures such as gnats (700 metal factory). These types of maps tend to favour rushes. I have no idea why 1v1 maps like fields of isis are in the teams map pool.

2. FFA- it's harder to scout everyone in FFA and FFA maps tend to be a lot less open, making jack drops easier. FFA players also tend to cloak their jacks before they drop them, so you can't know when a jack drop is imminent.

As for stopping a jack drop, I've found that some stun units such as venoms aren't really cost effective as you need a lot (and venoms in numbers can be janky due to friendly fire). The most cost effective stun-based anti-jacks are either gnats or widows. Fleas work too, as do bandits, but other raiders only work on open fields and you will usually lose a few. Moderators are excellent vs them, but placeholders don't stop them from jumping. I almost never use the shieldfac, but I've observed racketeers to be quite effective.

The point I'm making is that jacks don't need to be nerfed, players just react to it in ways that they shouldn't; they stop expanding, they play less aggressive, they begin porcing etc. If there is an effect in teams, it may be due to jack drops being focused on the more experienced players to take them out of play. Commander death is rarely the end- especially when your team has like 15 more of them. The effects of a jack drop can look bad, but you have to remember they spent 600 early-game metal to take out what is the equivalent of a single mex and a couple solars. This isn't even mentioning the reclaiming, and assuming the worst case scenario.
+3 / -0


22 months ago
USrankstrikeshadow post replays. I don't remember whether I've even seen a replay where someone uses Jacks to be a lot more effective than everything else they could be doing. I haven't seen one recently, not since the speed of a Charon carrying a Jack was nerfed (around about the time of the initial complaints). It is hard to know what to do about complaints that a strategy is too effective when I don't see examples of the strategy being effective.

If complaints were the only requirement for nerfs then ZK wouldn't have so much interesting stuff, which I think would be a shame. It's unclear how many people complain about Jacks, but I get the impression that it is outweighed by people saying they're fine. There is some threshold where complaints are enough, but I don't think we're there. Also, replays would still be vital since I'd still have to figure out what was actually going on and formulate a change. Complaints are only really good for indicating that something is wrong, they're not good for figuring out exactly what is wrong.

Multiplayer B1366240 15 on Alphabet Siege Dry v1.20 has some ok examples at the start, but it is trolled pretty hard by two players on the losing team so I wouldn't put much stock in it. The first drop worked and the second one didn't, then trolling took over. Notably the first drop used an Owl so actually cost 1040. Tracking the success rate of early drops like these would be useful. The drops later in the game could have been achieved with cloakers, and were so expensive that they could have been a strider instead of a drop. When someone drops five Jacks you've got to consider that you could instead have faced a Dante or Merlin.
+5 / -0

22 months ago
Why do we have com produce metal anyways? When is this going to change :(?

+2 / -0
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