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Zero-K v1.0.9.7

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how is it not? skuttle ramp already was a great gameplay mechanic, apart from beeing extremely funny. difficult to pull off, yet very rewarding. imo that is what makes a good gameplay mechanic, among other things.

i didnt feel it was so much op so far, because the amount of micro and time involved balance it against things that cost more or are less effective, but are way easier to use. my proposals further increase the difficulty of using it properly. also the increased rate of failure increases cost.

the way it works is essentially "yes, you can launch a jumping suicide bomb from a ramp and throw it hundreds of meter through the air but then you have to deal with the fact that its jumpjets can only fire for a brief amount of time, not enough to land it safely anywhere but maybe enough to give it that extra boost to get it to the target you wanted to hit" that sounds like fun to me.
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Doesn't that sort of play go against the principles of ZK's design? ZK seeks to avoid micro. The ZK approach to this problem would be to automate that micro - have a simple "unit-launching-platform" building, or a widget that allows you to drag-select a group of of cons and say "build me a Newton-ramp for unit X" or something like that. Something where you take a unit and say "I want to drop this unit *here*".

It's not that unit launching is *bad*, it's really freaking cool. It just doesn't seem to fit right with what they're trying to do here.
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is that so? i never heard of it. what zk does is to allow you to avoid annoying, unnecessary micro of stuff like building mexes, etc. clicking 9000 wreckage pieces one after another to reclaim them, and what else. thats a good thing to avoid. i dont think that can be generalized. avoiding micro for units felt like an option to me always, not something that was intended to take precedence over the players own possibilities.



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11 years ago
quote:
how is it not? skuttle ramp already was a great gameplay mechanic, apart from beeing extremely funny. difficult to pull off, yet very rewarding. imo that is what makes a good gameplay mechanic, among other things.
It is not difficult to pull off in a 'strategic' sense. The isolated minigame with little interaction with your opponent is what is difficult to pull off.

I like to balance assuming infinite micro and then make widgets and gadgets to fill the gaps. This way the game does not break when someone comes along with enough micro to do the activities that were balanced to be high micro.

Skuttle launching is many times better than any alternative artillery options. That is the balance problem.
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11 years ago
imo, one should try to take the micro requerments into account when balancing. And restrict automation to prevent balance issues with micro.
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11 years ago
So then in an 8v8 you get 3 people to manage the front line and put the rest on launching Skuttles?
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11 years ago
I think ZK dev are not opposing the idea of automation widget, that's why players can create and add their own widget to ZK if they wanted too.

People can keep the widget to themselves, but.... that's not nice :P
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11 years ago
no matter how much you automate, the micro will shift to a different part of the game. The way you give input to the game will be a limitation in any Real Time game. The only way to get rid of micro is to allow for (tactical) pauses.

On skuttles. I think it is gimmicky and relies on dodgy engine mechanics that can change overnight. It should not be a viable to use them as serious artillery (imho)
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AUrankAdminGoogleFrog you just dramatically overestimate the effectivity of it. i said it lots already, in most games skuttle ramps are entirely useless. in very long, porcy games it can be good if one player does it, but he will be entirely busy with it. you have a point when you call it an isolated minigame, as most people cant skuttle and keep attention over the rest of the game at one time.

it is of course not a win strategy to have 5 of 8 players throw skuttles, even 2 is too much. its very similar to ecoporc actually, if 5 of 8 players just eco then very likely the other team will just overrun you, same for skuttles. plus you need targets to skuttle. if enemy is beating you with units then youre just wasting time and metal with your ramp.

all this essentially means, if youre not playing sandcastles or speedmetal, your ramp is probably not gonna win the game, even if you kill a few valuable things with it.

if at any future point someone would program a tool that would allow a less micro intensive approach to the whole thing - tho i cant quite imagine how that should work, as you still have to tell it where to go so you just kinda spare yourself a few clicks - the situation might look different.

@[GBC]Spring i agree with on the point of it beeing dodgy, it probably wasnt intended that way with the skuttles stopping mid air and softly levitating to the ground. that you can use newtons and ramps to throw stuff maybe wasnt intended either, i dont know, but it is great. call it emergent design :) it just happened, and its a good thing. so what i made those proposals for is to put skuttles on ramps in a more logical context with what is happening and make it work less like a bug exploit. skuttles wouldnt just ignore gravity anymore, and they wouldnt be able to just instantly stop mid air either.
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11 years ago
allow Big Bertha to use small units as ammunition
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11 years ago
I approve of Knorke's idea. Just give it a D-gun command and it automagically grabs the nearest idle unit that's under its weight limit and fires it at the target.
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quote:
googlefrog you just dramatically overestimate the effectivity of it.
I don't think so. Remember I said "Skuttle launching is many times better than any alternative artillery options."

Sure there are situations in which it is completely useless. These are also the situations in which things like BB and tacnukes are useless. But once you are in that situation (and if you have the attention) you may as well launch Skuttles to kill structures instead of using tacnukes or BB because Skuttle is that much better.

I also meant isolated minigame in that there is very little player interaction.

quote:
it is of course not a win strategy to have 5 of 8 players throw skuttles, even 2 is too much. its very similar to ecoporc actually, if 5 of 8 players just eco then very likely the other team will just overrun you, same for skuttles. plus you need targets to skuttle. if enemy is beating you with units then youre just wasting time and metal with your ramp.
It is completely different to eporc. The number of people who eporc decides the proportion of a team's income which goes into economy. Many people Skuttle launching is fairly cheap and says nothing about economy. I'm sure 3 reasonably good players could hold all fronts if they had the majority of the resources.
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11 years ago
yes cause that isn't currently implemented as a unique weapon

COUGH JUGGLENAUGHT COUGH
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"I'm sure 3 reasonably good players could hold all fronts if they had the majority of the resources."

y but same goes for eco, if 3 players can hold front to allow for skuttles then they can do the same for eco - even more so of course as the eco will benefit them, and soon skyrocket due to the exponential nature of eco growth. the effectivity of skuttles dont grow with your own investment, rather with that of your enemy. also, if the team has the majority of ressources, they probably gonna win, regardless if they use skuttles or anything else, esp if theyre good enough to hold against 8(!) players with just 3.

but what reasonably good players cant do is to make skuttles and anything else at one time, both due to limited microing capabilities as well as likely due to income constraints - even if it was cheap what it really isnt. if you assume 30% go fail, which is rather low, you have like 800 metal for 1 thing to destroy. that can be a very good ratio depending on what you kill but its still not exactly so cheap that you can afford it besides producing other things too. having multiple people throw skuttles is probably extremely annoying to fight against but is not a good idea.

compared to other artillery options, well it is mostly better at taking out single structures at long range, but thats pretty much it. berthas very bad accuracy indicates that i wasnt made for that. skuttle ramp dont have continuous fire at no cost at all. bb requires no micro to have it just shell random stuff and little micro to have it shoot specific stuff.

compared with silo the silo wins in many cases, ofc in silo range. its 100% accurate, costs are comparable, it has different kinds of ammo, its overall more versatile. it needs a little less micro. skuttle is better and cheaper at killing defenses, but also fails more often at it. if you wanna kill the enemy moho on a small map, youre not going to make a skuttle ramp.

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11 years ago
You missed the point completely. Player attention distribution is not necessarily linked to team resource distribution. You can have 5 out of 8 players launching Skuttles but only spend 20% of their team's income doing so. So 5 players launching Skuttles is in no way the same as 5 players making energy.

Anyway this was meant to show that in this environment it is silly to balance things by an extreme micro requirement.
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but skuttle launching isnt that cheap. its like making units, you just shoot them through the air. 550 a piece, plus initial investment for newtons and ramp. only in very large games with overcharged econ this will not consume a large part of one players income. but then the high micro cost do matter a lot, since those people could do way more things with their eco than to just throw skuttles, and the enemy team probably will. and whos gonna make all the eco if everybody is just throwing skuttles or holding fronts.
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11 years ago
quote:
Sure there are situations in which it is completely useless. These are also the situations in which things like BB and tacnukes are useless. But once you are in that situation (and if you have the attention) you may as well launch Skuttles to kill structures instead of using tacnukes or BB because Skuttle is that much better.

quote:
Player attention distribution is not necessarily linked to team resource distribution. You can have 5 out of 8 players launching Skuttles but only spend 20% of their team's income doing so.
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no its not. read again, above are reasons why skuttles are better in some, and worse in other situations.

no attention distribution is not linked to team ressources distrubution, BUT you need attention to use ressources properly PERIOD. even if those hypothetical 5 players, and you know that is a ridiculous assumption, its just not gonna happen nor work out the way you said, even if those 5 guys glut all their metal to the 3 front guys they most likely just cant use it all. yes they could make some more nanos and just spam the shit out of their factories but its still way, way less effective than making specific units from different factories and have them microed by 16, rather than 6 eyes and hands.

all the while 5 people are desperately searching the enemy base (which nobody scouted btw) for fusions to skuttle but they dont find any and so they just go ahead and skuttle mexes, while the enemy already won 15 minutes ago by making units and taking map control. also they arent dumb and spam singus, nukes and annis but instead just take the skuttle rain easy and make some good old ground units.

its just totally unrealistic. if it ever was that good, people would already do that and nothing else. they dont. in fact, NOBODY (besides me a few times of which only 1 time worked) uses skuttle ramp in any game on any regular map, and that essentially means : it cannot be that great.

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11 years ago
quote:
no attention distribution is not linked to team ressources distrubution, BUT you need attention to use ressources properly PERIOD.

Incorrect in general. The saturation point is reasonably low most of the time.

quote:
all the while 5 people are desperately searching the enemy base (which nobody scouted btw) for fusions to skuttle but they dont find any and so they just go ahead and skuttle mexes, while the enemy already won 15 minutes ago by making units and taking map control. also they arent dumb and spam singus, nukes and annis but instead just take the skuttle rain easy and make some good old ground units.

As I said before. Don't use Skuttles when they are not needed. You can't say a unit is not OP if it is unable to win any game by itself.

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if it ever was that good, people would already do that and nothing else.

That would require an infinitely fast metagame which no game has.
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"The saturation point is reasonably low most of the time." What is that supposed to mean?

Ok so then we agree that there is no realistic scenario where it would make sense to have 5 people throwing skuttles. That there are situations where it is strong doesnt prove anything on its own. I believe very much that you are wrong regarding the metagame. I wanna stress out that this statement "if it ever was that good, people would already do that..." is true for any game i ever played online. op strategies are typically found very soon, in fact, banshees were rediscovered the very day their firing arc was increased. same goes for any patch day in any game. that skuttles can be thrown with ramps is well known for a long time, at least since i play here which is about 3 month, but most likely much longer than that. its been practiced on sandcastles since i played the map the first time. you cannot claim that in this very long period of time it just wasnt discovered as the op strategy that it supposedly is. its used on sandcastles a lot because it is great on sandcastles, maybe op, but well, its sandcastles. even if it wasnt a very special map that doesnt represent the average map that is played, its still just one map. on any other map, it was never discovered as op because it just isnt. if you say its op as a long range prescicion artillery, ok that is arguably true -especially because there is no such thing in the game yet-, thats why i made proposals to make it balanced. but the sole fact that it is on average not a successful strategy on normal maps (tested) already shows us that it probably was already balanced, all things considered.
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