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Balance Discussion: Gameplay is getting unilinear and repetetive

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13 years ago
Hello,

Last weeks I've been playing this game pretty intesively and so I consider myself worthy of making some comments and judgements on the gameplay and that, in my opinion, needs some balancing.

The situation at hand leads unilinear and repetitive gameplay where people favors basically either cloak bots or jumpjets (sometimes shields are one way, but not as good.) Cloak bots are the primary faction that forms the basic framework for other (usually for supportive shield bots, jumpjets or gunships) without it you most likely will lose. Why so? Because cloak bots have everything you need. It has most cost-efficient solutions for any role: raiding, assaulting, rioting etc. More over, It has the hammer! Yes, without this unit you most likely will lose the game. It is crucial unit in the beginning and in the end. The problem isn't only with cloak bots being overpowered but vehicles being very useless. Its a suicide to start with vehicles, whether the terrain is flat or not. Situation is like reversed BA in which vehicles are almost any kind of situation best solution and other units are just not needed curiosities, which player chooses not for winning but for having fun.

TLDR:
(1) Cloak bots are way too cost-efficient. In other words: Overpowered. Hammers need somekinda nerf. You can't win a game without hammers?
(2) While vehicles are almost useless,
(3) this leaves other factions (shields, gunships, jumpjets) basically in supportive role. Teamgames are won usually those who are able to combine supportive factions most efficient way (not necessarily intuitive or creative way, which would make the game interesting)
(4) Leading repetitive and unilinear games
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13 years ago
I agree, i am trying to play vechicles (light & heavy) and especially light factory - is all way weaker than jumps/cloak.

Scorchers are too expensive for swarming, Ravagers (assalut tanks) are almost useless (too bad, i like assalut tanks, but their weapon is too weak - cant win vs light unit swarm, cant win vs defences (shields), cant win vs heavy units).

My idea is to add machine guns as secondary weapon to assalut tanks - it really can bring back tank battles to gameplay, not only Goliaths.
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13 years ago
I think problem is caused by non-flat maps crowded by people and defender spam.
This favors hammers/long range stuff
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13 years ago
On flat terrain vechicles should be natural choice - but they're not, they are not really faster (look armor raiders and for example pyro or glavies) nor not able to trample defences.
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13 years ago
No matter what you do, please don't make it so that Comet Catcher is always light vehicles vs light vehicles.
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13 years ago
Fully agree with this. I find that the cloaky bots fac is far too versatile compared to the other factories. Between glaives, hammers, warriors, zeus, jethros and ticks you can counter anything. You can switch in moments from spamming cheap light raiders to producing specialist measures to counter anti-riot units(i.e. ticks).

The factory even makes sharpshooters - if these were a vehicle they'd be in the heavy vehicles factory.

I suggest:

1. Move ticks and perhaps also other walking bombs to the spider factory. They fit in better there and make it a stronger factory.
2. Decrease the EMP time of the tick, it paralyses for too long anyway (compare to units such as venom or zeus). Blast radius could be increased slightly to compensate if necessary, but honestly I don't think it is necessary.
3. Decrease hammer range to the same as HLT range. Heavy defenses should require heavy artillery. Alternatively, decrease hammer accuracy.
4. Not as much of a priority, but sharpshooters could be moved to the specialist factory.
5. It would be possible to rejig the factories completely along the lines of e.g. cheap and expensive bots instead of cloaky and "shield" (only 2 of the 10 units in the shield bot factory actually have shields, likewise most cloaky bots don't cloak). Some units are pretty much redundant (e.g. jethro and vandal; glaive and bandit) and could even be dropped if the bot factories were rearranged, although I don't generally favour the approach of reducing content.

I find heavy vehicles useful but haven't yet seen a good use for light vehicles. If speeds could be tweaked so that vehicles really were faster than kbots (right now they're not, even on flat) then this would make some difference. Ravagers can be useful in very specific situations but they're too easy to counter and too difficult to defend against riot and air. Light vehicles don't even have any on-the-move anti-air capability, slashers have to stop to shoot and aren't as good as dedicated anti-air anyway.
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13 years ago
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...
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13 years ago
Sounds good about vehicles being fixed in the newer releases, the way they manoeuvre (or fail to) is definitely a big mark against them. Their flat-out speed is still not that good though, ravagers are easily overtaken by glaives or bandits on flat iirc. Are glaives just a little too fast?

I also dislike the increasing empowerment of commanders, but maybe that's partly because it's new and I don't understand it all that well. Generally commanders are still reasonably easy to kill. However, I find the nanolathe/resurrection upgrades game-breaking; the rest of comm morphing seems reasonably balanced but being able to resurrect a crabe in 20 seconds, build a stardust from the bottom of a cliff in 4-5 seconds or repair at massive speeds and distances is just too powerful.

Firestorm costs 1200 metal, pillager costs 700 plus a factory, hammer costs about 100 if I'm correct. It's not fair to compare them, and the point remains that the cloaky bot factory fulfils too many roles; heavy vehicles and jumpjets less so.

Also, pillagers die quite easily and one of them can't penetrate a shield, whereas ~7 hammers can. The only sensible counter for hammers is more hammers. Wolverines don't cut it, they're too fragile and hammers may even outrange them, not sure. Plus their mines get shot before they detonate half the time.
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13 years ago
Somehow I prefer light vehs, when possible. But yeah cloaky bots maybe have too many specialists, stealth raider, claoker, sniper, tick.
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Skasi
13 years ago
The only advantage cloakies have is their high variety: they offer 11 different units as opposed to 7-10 that other factories offer (only exception being shipyard, but sea needs units removed/merged/whatever anyway).
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13 years ago
I think that it (cloaky factory) should be removed or have some of its units changed. It has few cloaking units and many that act more like shield or specialist bots.
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13 years ago
Hammer spam is a problem. But it is probably a problem with players and maps. Hammer still needs a nerf though, imo. The accuracy change -did- change their effectiveness vs mobiles, and they were popular before. IMO they should be slowed down, made high trajectory, or made move-or-fire. A general DPS nerf probably wouldnt hurt either. Hell, given the sniper, we could actually totally remove this unit.

Ironically the best thing i've had luck countering hammers with is Ravagers. On a map like 3v3 green comet, say, you can totally overrun any defender/hammer spamming player and demolish him with ravagers. Changing their acceleration dynamics would be disasterous, after beating Godde's vehicle play on darkside twice he agreed that although its really hard to outmanouver a jack with vehicles, half the micro comes from their handling dynamics and its a shame we have so many bot factories that dont include this mechanic.

As for cloak/shield/etc, the name of the factory is somewhat arbitrary. Mobile cloak and shield generators were meant to be factory exclusive, something i'd still like to see happen (and a general nerf, shields are too prominent, possibly because arty is so strong in the metagame). There is (or shouldnt be) a real distinction between 'heavy' and 'light' factories, except for tanks and mechs. Rather, they are specialist factories which have unique units that require specific strategies.
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13 years ago
Totaly agree its neer impossible to win/hold front early/mid game without hammers and some LMT or roits near them, because they are so cheap,

10 Hammers > 1200m Fire walker
5 Hammers > 1 Pilleger

Hope the vehicles get fixed at the moment a 50m glaive can kill a 130m vehi raider on flat ground WTF

1000m 8 Hammers> 1000m 4 Assault Tanks on flat ground due to hammers retreating and firing and tank dying before taking any of them out WTF shouldn't work like that
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13 years ago
I just tested with massive vehicle acceleration and it doesn't fix them. They still do little turns and slow down to half speed when trying to move in a straight line. Nothing short of letting them turn on a dime will fix their movement under the current engine version.

With Glaive and Scorcher, I hope you're aware that Scorcher does massive damage at close range. But movement is a problem here too as Scorcher moves at half speed while turning as well.
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Skasi
13 years ago
Just stop complaining about Hammers. There's no reason to nerf them, rather the other way around. And there's not a single unit that has a shield in the cloaklab, so how could they act like one, TheDarkStar? Oi and "specialist bots" sound useful for every factory - it makes them all special!

Crutch, your math is teh fail. Firewalker can beat 9001 times their cost in Hammers.
If you seriously can't think of a way to beat them, just spam them yourself and see what the enemy does. That's the best way to find counters to anything.
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13 years ago
your right skasi
my bad what i should have said was 1 sheild + 5 hammers > firewalker
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Skasi
13 years ago
Get fleas then. Or a tick. Or a roach. Or racketeers. Dang why am I even telling you. Go find out yourself, I just told you to!
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13 years ago
Stats dont show that hammers are op. They still die instantly to fire, bombs etc..
I still blame current overcrowded games, defense spam, weak assault and strong riot commanders
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13 years ago
Licho is completely right. When you talk about game balance you cannot separate it from the map you play on and the number of players.
It is important to state what (range of) maps you want to balance the game on.

If you play 6v6 / 8v8 on smaller maps you use the game in a way it wasn't intended to be used (please correct me if i am wrong here).

Imo, the game works best if there is room for each player to expand and maneuver his army's. Ie, open spaces on maps emphasize the speed difference of units while small/chokeheavy maps result in static defense spam. (note that small is relative to the ammount of players, lets call 'small' area/player)

About hammers. Stay away from crowded games and small maps then they are pretty balanced, or even weak.

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Skasi
13 years ago
The game is intended for any map. It's just that the map affects balance much more than anything else. You want to pick the factory/units you think work best on the current map. Artillery can be very powerful on small maps. However the cheaper a unit the more useful it will be on big maps, because they wont cause jams. In some cases artillery, like anything that out-ranges something else, needs a lot of space to be able to efficiently skirm the enemy.

As you can see Hammers are useful on small maps because they are artillery and just as useful at big maps because they are very cheap and can make good use of the space. However that doesn't mean there's not enough counters. I can think at least of a dozen units that would work very well. At least two of them will be viable in any given situation, I am sure.
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