It came to my mind that i harbour harsh feelings for some units in current ZK. Not that they are particularly overpowered or underpowered.
But they meet a pair of certain criteria that makes my skin crawl each time i see them:
1)
Unpleasant and unrewarding to fight with. It's just hard to use them and
feel efficient while doing so. They break my
flow, and being a flow junkie is the only reason i play the game, really.
2)
Unpleasant and unrewarding to fight against. Much as it feels bad using them because of whatever ugly qualities they have, these particular units also project the feeling of despair and irritation each time i have to fight them, because of some particular properties making any action against them just as unrewarding as an action taken
with them.
My list goes as follows:
1: OPanther The current state of the panther with its "heavy antiheavy antiraider raider" makes me want to cringe. They're monotonously effective against most everything, but they also deal only a little real damage. They cause fights to stagnate and at the same time you cannot afford to not use them. They one-hit stun most units, and two-hit stun the rest, causing unpleasant stutter-step movement for all involved. And if they fight each other? Ugh.
2: HalberdWhile somewhat reasonable when used with fight command, Halberd quickly becomes frustrating for both parties when you reach the skill levels where you can holdfire and aim individually. Virtually unstoppable by the defenders, in curled mode it is a fast-moving brick that you just shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot. This gets tiring very fast, and it's not like it's any big deal once you kill one. And for halberd users? You have to hold fire and be shot, shot, shot, shot, shot, controlling each shot, maybe killing some things but
not fighting. Halberd
feels like a dull brick that is all about
not fighting. Except unlike a very similar dirtbag, you have to babysit them much more cause they supposedly
can fight and you should fire shots sometimes if you want to use them.
The only time i feel efficient when fighting Halberds is when i manage to snatch them with Dominatrix - and oh i know how many of you dislike
that one.
They do have a redeeming quality of enabling hilarious penetrating overwater raids in late game, streaming past heavy defenses and ignoring bomber fire to kill juicy eco, but that's about it, every other use of them is disgusting to play with or against.
3: ShipyardRemember or those organic and physical unit classes based on no contrived special damages, as enshrined in ZK design goals? Shipyard makes ships that go in water and piss this water on those design goals and fight in a medium that seems to
be a separate game called Sea ZK, and that game seems to be built from nothing else but targeting hardcounters where you need unit A to kill unit B, because nothing else is even capable of attacking unit B.
It's really not as disgusting as the first two nominations (that's why it's #3), but the targeting hardcounter structure has some local optima that quickly degenerate into disgusting monocultures. Doesn't help that even if you don't settle for optimal unit selection (which is snake spam), there is absolutely no weapon diversity underwater.
Adding insult to injury, ships are required to be
op by design because their domain-specific units are required to be able to whack any unit deployed by other factories entering the naval realm (since their other weapons simply
cannot attack other domains)
What do you think? Do you find those units disgusting or nice? Or maybe you find other units disgusting?