For the general Hammer topic I agree with Licho:
"I think problem is caused by non-flat maps crowded by people and defender spam.
This favors hammers/long range stuff"
I also think commander weapons have made defence pushing from the very start far too good.
I think Hammer is a response to parallel Commander push with no room between the commanders for mobility. Once you've got Commanders spamming defence and no room to move anything the answer is artillery.
I suppose the obvious answer is 'nerf Hammer'. The alternatives are force people to play less crowded games or do something about Commanders that can push with little fear of an early raider attack. I would really rather do something about Commanders...
With possible counters to Hammer, anyone tried Firestorm or Pillager?
Crayfish I would not like to rejigger all the factories again. The units aren't redundant, there's reasons for why stuff is where it is, I'm pretty sure we're not going to move units around. Anyway teams start with lots of factories and you can multifac later on so the answer to a powerful unit isn't to nerf the factory that it is in.
I responded to a ticket about vehicles sucking but Google Code decided to timeout again so I could say it here:
"About a year ago in CA vehicles were really quite good, more common than bots and Samson spam was a really big problem. About 18 to 12 months ago we had a smaller but more experienced playerse and a fair portion of that was lost about 10 months ago with the change to Zero K.
The slow speed is due to the engine. The current engine version really really messed up pathfinding for vehicles. The old behaviour used to be really good with vehicles not slowing down at all to turn, they basically would move at top speed until they reached their move command destination.
I have tested the test engine builds and pathfinding has been fixed. So with the old knowledge that vehicles worked earlier I am hesitant to buff their manoeuvrability just to require a rebalance when the next engine version is released. But the timescale for this could be months.
Conversely some other things have changed in ZK, the bot factories have more diversity. Notably the commander is a lot more powerful which I think hurts vehicles a lot as they are more aggressive instead of skirmishy.
So maybe if people are really worried about this we could just buff their acceleration and deceleration massively as that was the main issue with the engine change then nerf it back to the current levels when the new engine is released."
In short engine broke vehicles and it will be fixed with the next engine release. Hopefully that is soon...