Loading...
  OR  Zero-K Name:    Password:   

Forum index  > News   >

Zero-K v1.0.9.7

66 posts, 4410 views
Post comment
Filter:    Player:  
Page of 4 (66 records)
sort
so what about just pretending skuttle had jumpjets and actually -balancing- it by, say, giving it the ability to influece its velocity and direction while in air by using the jumpjets, making it somewhat able to aim, but not as reliable as the way it worked up until now? or by applying or combining with my other proposal from my other post above? as opposed to taking this unique and fun menchanic out of the game entirely, by turning it into a useless troll strategy.

otherwise jump must be removed from skuttle entirely because its totally unrealistic that a bomb made of steel half as high as a house can jump anywhere, with legs as small as this :P
+0 / -0


11 years ago
>I justify it because the airjump units clearly have some some sort of jets while the others leap.

I agree with Pxtl here. The distinction between jump-capable units and non-jumpers is very clear; the distinction between jet-using and leg-using jumpers is very obscure. Having different game mechanics for them violates expectations and adds mental burden for no good reason.

As for the justification you mentioned: that's reasonable, but I don't think it's compelling. To my mind, jumping from one ground point to another using a jetpack is very different from flying to a particular ground point when falling, and it breaks my immersion to see a unit "jump" while in midair - even using jets. Obviously this is a subjective matter. But I think the gameplay consistency of having all jumpers work the same trumps the much softer notion that a jumpjet-jumper could, maybe, do an airjump.
+0 / -0


11 years ago
Also, using a Newton and a tform ramp to fling units across the map is a very clever idea and a very dumb gameplay element. If you were designing a game from scratch you'd never include it deliberately. It's in Zero-K by accident. Yes, yes, "emergent gameplay" and all that, but not everything that emerges is worth keeping.

Ramp-flinging fits about as well with Zero-K as the santa hat modoption. It's cute and fun and I'd hate to see it disappear, but there's no reason it should be a viable tactic in a competitive game.
+0 / -0
11 years ago
I dunno Klon, how do you balance one unit that is potentially an infinite range, shield penetrating, tacnuke. And also a crawling bomb with a short jump and a big decloak radius. Either it's OP as one or terrible as the other.

I have no problem with the splitting of jumpjets and leg jumpers air control, it's pretty obvious which units have jets and which don't, I actually think it's pretty neat.
+0 / -0


11 years ago
DErankKlon, why? Is it fun having any building in your base explode at any time because of cloaking bombs from the sky? Why have this as any kind of viable strategy?

USrankCrazyEddie, it's a huge stream of fire/smoke coming out of the unit's backside. No it isn't immediately obvious but it is fairly easy to remember and too cool to remove.
+0 / -0
11 years ago
I was exploit more or less because on porcy maps it is instawin. Sandcastles where you exactly know where is fusions and so on.

Actually there was good counter of such "hack". You need solars or just nanoframes arround fusions so scutle or anything simply cant issue jump command.
+0 / -0
i can understand any argumentation that says its a bad thing that you cant defend against it properly. i even agree to that point to some degree. partly this is only because people simply dont know how to counter it, partly because there are no easy counters for it. most other counters to things are really easy, here all methods of countering are either complicated or tedious, like surrounding your singu with nanoframes or cheap buildings. but it is not impossible. it is, however already a strategy that is tedious to employ. you should count that in the consideration if its op or not. it required micro and continuous attention.

but heres my point, i already have given 2 ideas above to keep it in the game and have it be viable, but both more difficult to pull off as well as less reliable. i think both ideas are good and effective, yet they dont destroy the whole thing. making it impossible for skuttles to use their "jets" in air destroy the skuttle/ramp mechanic entirely.

USrankCrazyEddie i think its an awesome gameplay element. your argumentation is basically "if its funny and ingenious, it better be entirely useless, or it has no place in competetive game". i find this a ridiculous point of view. BECAUSE it is funny and ingenious, it MUST be viable. otherwise you can just leave it out of the game, because everybody who is doing it is only hurting himself. you should be rewarded for doing a funny and ingenious thing, in any game, and not punished. and making a ramp for your skuttles is one of the most fun and ingenious ideas ever seen in a game. we should be proud of having that thing in the game we all play, not treat it as our stepchild.
+0 / -0
11 years ago
Little known fact:
Athena uses less energy when moving compared to being static!

Trolled by the changelog?
+0 / -0
quote:
== Lobby == * Added multithreaded engine checkbox.


how does this work? when enabled, game does not start when click "rejoin" etc in zk lobby. do i need additional stuff to use it?
+0 / -0


11 years ago
I think I have a fairly good idea of how to defend against it. Here are some options:
  • Cloak everything and never let construction be scouted. Fairly difficult.
  • Put things at the bottom of the sea or deep in a hole with decloakers flying above. Use terraform. Only works for energy.
  • Completely surround the important things with structures preventing the jump command. Takes a lot of space, does not work if near any combat because frames are unstable.
  • Float Vindicators above important things. Requires too many Vindicators. They must be cloaked to be used near front.

None of those things are things I want people to have to do.

The nerf involving air control would take quite a UI to pull off. It's not really emergent and ingenious if a bunch of rules have to be written about what it can and cannot do. Anyway the effect is still that people have anything killed with only annoying counters which don't really work.
+0 / -0
well i dont know about the technical side of it but to me it sounds fairly simple actually. just change the way jump in air works to just give it the same impulse it would be getting when used on ground, added on top of the impulse the flying skuttle already has. would this require a great amount of work to do? i would really like to have it work that way, it seems like a fair compromise solution, allowing for just a little control over where the skuttle is going.

anyhow, those counters are what i meant, tho there are probably more options (emp/capture for example). i agree, all of them are annoying, but its not like it would make sense to skuttle just about anything out there. as i said, only in few games things worth skuttling are ever built, and very likely you could protect all of them once you are aware of the enemy using skuttle ramp. its really not such a big deal to make a row of solar around a singu, nuke or protector. its probably a good idea anyway to do that, regardless of the possibilty of beeing skuttled, tho i must admit pretty much nobody does that right now. but typically, if those things are unprotected and get scouted, they are likely to die to some kind of attack, from which skuttle is hardest to counter.
+0 / -0


11 years ago
That jump system is infeasible.

Firstly units have costant speed while jumping.

Secondly you said "units have impulse while flying" which is false so I don't trust your knowledge of what impulse means.

Thirdly I assume you are suggesting that people should aim Skuttles by tell them to boost themselves in a direction while flying through the air. This is not a workable UI, it would be impossible to use.

It would require a ridiculous amount of work and the end result would be basically impossible to use.



Look, it's just not happening. The counters are annoying/impossible (you forgot front line) and saving the mechanic is convoluted.

Your argument at the time for keeping it was that defences and econ are OP. That is debatable but should not be fixed by a single thing which is far better than all other ways of attacking defences.
+0 / -0

11 years ago
klon i watched you kill beyond 80-100K worth of stuff from a mere 5-7K expenditure

and turn a lost game into an overwhelming victory

and then consistently commit stupid ratio of metal killed/for cost in further games

that shit OP lul
+0 / -0
yes i did say that ecoporc was too strong overall, and i still think it is. thats not the sole argument why skuttle ramps are a good thing tho. anyway. i must admit my knowledge of physics is limited at best. as far as i know the impulse is essentially the event of a force interacting with an object accelerating it in a certain direction. this is probably not accurate, and i already used it falsely before. i fail to see how this would devalidate my argument however, as long as you understand what i am talking about :)

so here is for clarification what i mean in more accurate, yet possibly not entirely correct terms: when a skuttle is ordered to jump anywhere, it receices an impulse accelerating it in a certain direction, resulting in it moving there at a certain speed. beeing in air, the skuttle already has a speed and a direction of movement. so if i would apply the same jump-impulse on the skuttle while it is in air, its speed and direction would change by a tad amount. this is what i am driving at.

now if the physics simulation works in that way and skuttles jumpring from ground get indeed accelerated, as opposed to say just magically moved outside of the physical context, you could apply the same thing to an airborne skuttle.
there would be no need to change anything about the ui, you just use the exact same jump/circle interface as you did before. if you jump backwards while beeing in air, its speed will slightly decrease resulting in a shorter arc, and so on.

@[GBC]Praetor that was just a single game. if you just go ahead and watch some random replay you can essentially prove that anything is op. 1 glaive killing a factory gets a ratio of 1000% cost. a single scythe killing a nuke: 2800% wtf! if you use just that fact as the base of your consideration then you must come to the conclusion that glaives, or anything, is terribly op, because that sort of thing happens all the time. and there are lots of things and strategies that can turn a loss around, esp if the enemy dont know how to handle it. and there are many, many more reliable win strategies than skuttle ramping, which so far only won a single game for me on any map other than sand castles. also your numbers are wrong, i spent at least 2, probably 3-4 times as much as that, and i doubt very much it was anything above 50k i killed with skuttles. i killed some fusions for 1k each, a nuke that was going to die to singu explosion 10 seconds after anyway, 2 berthas, a behemoth, 2 screamers, some factories and nanos, an anni. that sounds like a lot but actually its not. count it, its something like 30-40k. ah yeah and an 50% finished bantha that in all likelyhood probably would not have seen the end of the game, and could at that point already have been killed by regular, walking skuttles or some random other units. thats another ~5k.
+0 / -0


11 years ago
quote:
there would be no need to change anything about the ui, you just use the exact same jump/circle interface as you did before. if you jump backwards while beeing in air, its speed will slightly decrease resulting in a shorter arc, and so on.
This UI is unusable.
+0 / -0
11 years ago
why? dont get it. its just the same as before, how is it unusable? you see the circle on the ground below skuttle, you jump somewhere. you could easily predict the direction of the impulse given to the skuttle.

what about the physics part, could it work that way technically?
+0 / -0

11 years ago
Does making repulsive newton not save from skuttle? I dunno, never tried it but should be possible. If not make it possible by changing skuttle weight or whatever and there you have the counter.
What fun is it to not having skuttles fly around the map anymore? :(
And skuttle ramp is always visible for the enemy as all terraform is, so you can predict flying skuttles incoming if you have map awareness.
+0 / -0
Klon, no and no.
  • Impulse is a 3d vector. Hard to give.
  • You can't even predict where it is going to land normally.
  • You can't predict how much impulse to add to change the velocity to exactly what is needed to hit a certain point.
What you want has difficulty on the order of playing Kerbal Space Program.

swappan terrain changes are only visible in LOS. They are impossible to cloak though.
+0 / -0
whats the difference to applying impulse to a skuttle that is on ground? those do have a movement vector too right, even if its zero length? so mathematically the exact same thing would happen, normally.

other than that, i was making a suggestion to make the ramping more difficult in order to balance it, instead of just taking it out of the game. since you earlier said you want to balance it, i thought the changes were made to, well, balance it, not remove it. now youre saying you dont want it the way i proposed because its too difficult to handle for the player. that doesnt make much sense to me, considering that you removed it from the game in the first place, yet stating that you could still use it just without jump, which is in any case most difficult to handle. yes ofc it would be difficult to predict where the skuttle would go, that was the whole point of it - but the player would have a little more influence than without jump.

now if you think its not a good idea to reintroduce it in that way, what about my other suggestion? it would be realistic if skuttles would fall from the sky at a normal rate, after "braking" with their "jets" at the point they wanna go off. so they would drop down to that exact spot and then in most cases instantly explode. thats also a way to nerf it and still keep it in the game.
it accomplishes basically 2 things:

firstly, you cant just lob a skuttle into enemy base and then check out what cool things to skuttle anymore. you need to scout for a target first, using planes or whatever, to hit something.

secondly, you cant make adjustments to your initial choice of landing zone. this makes it also harder to handle terraform, as you need to pick the exact location properly or the skuttle will not land at all. if enemy has made terra around his singu etc, you probably wont be able to skuttle them.


+0 / -0


11 years ago
So how is what you propose a good gameplay mechanic?
+0 / -0
Page of 4 (66 records)