Ok lets look at this game. A Revenant on each side, they fire at a commander within a few seconds of each other.


The North one ignores the commander and blows up a depleted Felon. The Felon actually would have survived one shot if it was on hold fire, but that is advanced tech that I wouldn't want balance to hinge on. Hugging the Thug may also have been a good idea.

Previous activity on the front was a West player lose four Scorchers trying to kill an engineer comm, since a Felon showed up.


The commander jumps at it to try to get some damage in, but then dies to Felon. The Thugs don't cover it when it aggressively jumps.


North ends up like this, with the Revenant on 30% health.


The South one fires once at an engineer comm, then circles around the turrets and kills it as it retreats with a second shot.


It then goes right towards the forwards base and kills an Angler. Then it retreats on 11% health.


Things sort of stabalise and nothing happens in the air for a bit. But West has only 75% of the total value and army value of East.


Two Revenants snipe and engineer comm, but the one that was not repaired from two minutes ago is stunned and dies.

At 4:30, a 2500 cost shieldball pushes in North and kills the entire enemy army of Fencers. Two Revenants try to kill the shieldball, but spend a lot of health to only get one Felon due to all the shields.

East has built up 1500 in ground AA by 5:00. West has none, but can't exactly afford to build it either.

At 6:00 a push South by West is foiled by support from a Minotaur and Revenant, although it might have run out of steam by then anyway.

GoogleFrog
Sure, I could have activated Hold-Fire on the Felon. Congratulations to the micro-god who could have done that
Sure, I could have kept the Felon close to the Thug. He would still have died immediately afterwards.
Sure, I could have jumped later. But what good would that have done me? 10 seconds! The time the Rev needs to reload. I had to jump because I knew that either the Rev would die or I wouldn't be able to stop the enemy Felon in time. How naive...
I stand by my point of view. If I have to think every round that someone might build this one unit, then Zero-K is no fun for me anymore.



Let's say I knew at the start of the game that this unit was coming and still go shields. Ok, so I know I need AA. Only pure AA loses out to everything else. So that leaves me with raiders as an option, so I build bandits. Now comes the Rev, flattens a bandit, I get a bit of damage squeezed in. Meanwhile, the enemy shield ball appears. He shreds my bandits, of course, and now I die anyway.


I don't want to praise myself now, but I'm not exactly one of the weakest players you'll find here. If I can't stop this stupid unit. How are 80% of the players supposed to do that?

I stand by my point of view. This unit is destroying this game for me.

I think you have to listen to what you say and write GoogleFrog because it's all a contradiction.
I saw right Anir because I was next to him in battle. The Revenant is perhaps too strong a unit in its current state. It seems ridiculous to talk about building aa when the player who has air or gs should be making aa and not just attack units. Because either I make units to counter ground units or I give metal to make aa and that weakens me against the enemy's ground units.
I am glad you brought this up, because out of the last 20 games I have lost 18 for this reason.
1. So it's easy to see that Revenant rewards its metal cost because it gives so much damage;
2. There should as in other games be players who cover a specific role , in this case the role of air or gs, as I have already mentioned, and who are smart enough to also do Swift, Trident, relieving ground troops of that burden (see Jummy's games who could play air)
3. There is a rush to make Revennat faster to win the game.
Is it fun? no
To my request that I make in every air cover game, the genius who plays air or gs always responds the same way :Just do the aa .
So you need Nerf Revenant, don't do mathematical calculations if the person who produced it specced + metal than did shield, he still achieved his goal:
win

I feel like Rev is a sort of like rock paper scissors.
It beats heavy commitment to slow moving units, and loses to high mobility raiders.
With the prevalance of incredibly fast "teching" in big teams or chockey maps, its no suprise that rev thrives off shutting that down

In games with a large bot raider population, rev usually falls flat.

GoogleFrog what I meant in my reply, (perhaps given too eagerly as I was a party to that game), and re-reading what you said in the post, you actually only made a mathematical examination of the advantages/disadvantages of Revenant, both metal costs etc.
But I interpreted what Anir said, and which then was my own impression ( in my case also in other games played) the impossibility of dealing with Revenant in the early phase of the game, with the means at hand, without the support of the aa given by air or gs.
And in this case whoever chooses Revenant wins easily, and I don't know how important the metal ratio spent to build it is. But as Anir said, the game loses interest in this way