Neonstorm thread: Other possible nerfs for the Licho

The devs have nerfed the Licho's weapon, which is great and all, but it displays how hard it is to balance the Licho - the unit is all about impunity.

Some have proposed giving the Licho a single target-role (heavy/riot/building-only) etc, which basically means hte Licho will still be about impunity, but only for a specific type of target.

I suspect the Licho will always be a pain-point of balance because of this (much like the capcar, another generalist impunity-driven unit). I'm wondering if we can throw out some more permanent solutions.

To get the ball rolling, some posibilities:

- Nerf Licho's speed after bomb is delivered. This means the Licho is guaranteed to obliterate its target, but you probably won't get the Licho back. Therefore, you only pull out a Licho when something absolutely positively has to die. Obvious problem: you can do that already with a swarm of Shadows. You'll lose some shadows but they'll lose the target.

- Greater cost for firing the licho. Maybe it takes a long fixed-time to rearm on the pad, so employing a Licho means you've got a hangar-queen you can only fire once in a blue moon, like the ion-cannon from the Command and Conquer series. Your superweapon is no good if the enemy can rebuild faster than it can destroy. Some sort of stockpile-like mechanic could also provide this service.... but the UI for stockpiling a licho would suck.

- Convert it into a stun-unit. Boring, I know.

- Related to stun, another potential use of the experimental Black Hole device? It's an implosion bomber, giving it a non-damaging Black Hole Device weapon would be thematically consistent and might produce better gameplay than its current powerful attack. But it also would mean it's useless against buildings, and that sucks.

perhaps give it wheels on long poles like that car from Wacky Races so it becomes vulnerable to low bridges? also a wizard staff

stun unit...pffff. Licho is alrady only really usefull bomber

some thoughts:

if you can provide reasons your idea is bad, which you have done in every case, there is not much point taking it further.

if your idea requires a more obtrusive and more demanding change than another idea which achieves the same effect of making the unit viable, then it is almost certainly a worse idea.

people find reading other peoples neons very uninteresting and rarely do unless it becomes clear that the neon is going to be developed into canon (infinitely rare). these are indulgent, write-only documents in most cases.

lastly, you have played 5 games in the last 13 months. How you can pretend to perceive current balance or the meta - and therefore feel qualified to make balance or unit overhaul suggestions - completely escapes me.

This post has been downvoted below -5 and collapsed, click here to expand

Giving emp to /ANOTHER/ heavy unit after that horrific implementation of the bantha's missiles which serve no purpose other then placeholding

also doubling up emp/disarms specialists in one factory




(edit; thats my default reaction to any implementation as such to do with EMP)

quote: i dont think anyone would pay for 2k stun plane

I would pay that for the good old stiletto

I want the air game be different from ground and some difference between gunships and planes.


Ofcourse some peoples don't want to lose their Hero-Unit - we need a strider-hub-plane:
It blocks a whole reload pad (: If to hard to implement, give the hub an uber pad :)

That would increase the cost by 500m.


I see it coming: Licho will become a new Krow - just sacrifices some hp for speed.

I think the intended role for Licho is slow attrition. It should have really poor damage for cost but be quite hard to kill. Single point damage should be the domain of Shadows and Phoenix should give some AoE (although I don't really like AoE).

This is probably not yet the case. I did not want to lower AoE further because it would not match the ceg. Although I am sort of waiting for people to discover that Shadows are quite good.

quote: Greater cost for firing the licho.

I was thinking of doing this but not in a wacky Neonstorm way. I'd simply increase the refuel time for Licho and perhaps implement something which prevents plane from refueling if not on full health. This would at least make partially damaging a Licho more important and increase the time between strikes. But none of this proved easy to implement so I will just try out the current nerf for now.

quote: Although I am sort of waiting for people to discover that Shadows are quite good.

prepare to wait for an infinite period