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Nuke Balance

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9 years ago
For a while I have thought that nukes might be having a bad effect on team games. A reasonably even game can develop until suddenly one side has a nuke and the other team soundly loses. It feels like there was a lot left in the game before it suddenly ends. The nuking side is probably a bit on the defensive but not significantly, as you would expect if they were rushing a game ender.

This is the type of game I am talking about: http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/327485

It would be easy to wave this away as people not knowing how to play. If making a nuke does not put that much of a dint in your economy then perhaps both sides should rush one. I think a reason we don't see this is that many people prefer to play the units game. So they forget about nukes.

You could also say that people just need to scout more. But to do that you have to sweep the whole map and often. A nuke can appear in 5 minutes. This is costly and then when you find a nuke you have to pay at least 5k to cover all important areas in antinukes. Then they can bomb your antinukes.

Countering nukes is expensive so you may as well rush one yourself. That is if you would not rather play the units game than maximize your chance of winning. Given that games are cut short by nukes it seems better to just nerf nukes.

A decent number of people play more large teamgames than I do. It would be useful to know what they think.


So what are nukes for? In balance we have always said that they are for creating single points of failure in lategame. So instead of having to destroy an entire base or frontline you can strike a small number of targets (the antinukes) and nuke the rest. This still seems reasonable to me. A defense line can be quite resilient to artillery but you can probably find a way to kill the protecting antinukes. A bomber force cannot clear out a base but can hit an antinuke.

Nuke balance is quite nice because there are only a few parameters:
  • Silo and Antinuke cost.
  • Silo and Antinuke health.
  • Antinuke range.
  • Antirnuke rate of fire.
  • Nuke cost
  • Nuke stockpile time.
  • Nuke damage and AoE.

The important parameter seems to be cost. Decreasing antinuke cost would make them more spammable which would reduce their single point of failure property. This would be a change against the design so, while it would be possible, I would be very wary of such a change.

So Silo + Nuke cost seems like the important factor. A silo with one nuke costs 11k and often makes back its cost on the first impact. For that price you could buy 3 Dantes, 2 Berthas or a Bantha. Those things do not seem to be as powerful as a nuke because people automatically set up some counter while playing the units game. So cost could be increased. Too much of a cost increase brings it near Detriment and those tend to be more powerful than nukes. This is a bit of a dodgy comparison because it is not as if Detriment is finely balanced, perhaps it is too cheap.

My favourite change is stockpile time. I think significantly increasing stockpile time would have great effects.
  • The launching of the nuke is pushed later into the game.
  • More opportunity for nuke scouting.
  • The nuker takes more of an economic loss because fixed amounts of metal lose their value as the game progresses. Even if the antinuke cost is equal to the silo + nuke cost the antinuke team would win because they get to build their antinukes with a stronger economy.
  • Individual nukes would be much more important. The nukers would have to scout more carefully and pick the right spot to nuke.
  • The antinuke team would not need to scramble so hard after the first nuke hits. They would have some time for recovery and be much more likely to get back in the game. Currently you are likely to get hit again 2 minutes after the first nuke so almost everything has to go to antinuke production.

I would also increase stockpile cost because 3k seems far too cheap. Individual nukes should be important. Silo cost could increase too but that seems less important.


Do nukes play well? Does stockpile time sound reasonable? How much would be good to try?
+3 / -1
Skasi
9 years ago
The problem is not nuke, the problem is games being so porcy that there is no other option.
+11 / -0
There is always an other option. (Bertha, Behemoth and all other stuff of arti units. [impaler, pillager and tremor])
And tac nuke of course.
+0 / -0


9 years ago
They seem to do it too early. Before other options are exhausted.
+1 / -0

9 years ago
IMO the damage and AOE of nukes would be best kept as it is. That is what makes ZK nukes awesome, compared to say the puny but spammable nukes of SC2 or some other games.

I don't really have enough experience with large team games to comment on whether nukes are currently too cheap or fast to build though.
+2 / -0
idea 1)
i liked the SCBW mechanic to nuke, which required a ghost to mark the target and stay there till the rocket hit. it is cloaked unit which cannot move while guiding the missle.

is this useful for ZK to have?

additional, i would like the nuke to randomly hit anything on the map when the target marker unit is killed while the rocket is in the air.

idea 2)
a gamewide counter would be nice, like xx:xx minutes till nuke building ready / nuke missle ready. this applies for all superweapons like in some oldwer strategy games (AoE2 ?) when finishing a world wounder ends the game you could see the enemies position and estimated finish timecode.
+2 / -0


9 years ago
I somewhat like the new Evo nukes which kept all their AoE but lost so much damage that they fail to destroy some important economy structures while still wr8king untold devastation due to AoE and destroying everything below that margin, most importantly defenses.

But many ZK defenses are just built to withstand nukes.

I kind of like the option to increase the stockpile time and maybe even missile cost as the second best option. It would be interesting if total cost of silo+missile didn't change, with more cost migrating into individual missiles.

+1 / -0
I'm with Anarchid here. A simple nerf is to just increase the cost of the missile and decrease the cost of the launcher. This means that you can't rush a nuke as fast with a big economy and gives more time to scout the launcher when it stockpiles. Sure, in many games the launcher only get 20-30 metal per sec when building so the initial hit would still come at roughly the same time. However, after the initial nuke hits, the other team have longer time to build anti-nukes and every nuke that is stopped by anti-nukes is a considerable bigger loss to the player sending the nukes.
Individual nukes could cost something like 5000-7000 while the launcher only costs 5000-7000.

Only potential risk that I see is that newbs might not realize the cost of the missile and start building nukes much earlier with a smaller economy.
It would change the status that nukes has as game-enders in FFA and lategame in large teamgames with lots of eco as continual nuking would be a lot more expensive but I don't really think that it is a problem considering all the other possible game-enders in the game.
+1 / -0
note: missle stockpiling has a max buildpower of ~20metal/sec. but the unit guide says 18 m/s and 3min stockpile. what is the true cost of missle in metal and time?
+0 / -0

9 years ago
What I hate on nuke is when u fight hard for front and make small steps in direction of enemies base, while it is nice fighting... and suddenly one nuke destroys all :-( Then u have to tell everyone to build 3000 metal anti and thats really bad...
So I wouldn't remove it, but cost increase sounds good. Or cost reduce anti?
+0 / -0
For naysayers, Firepluk's elo indicates that nux rush is currently an optimal teams strategy (combined with scallop drop, but that's off topic...). I don't think that was an intended consequence, so it seems pretty clear that something should change.

+1 for increasing stockpile time (and maybe reducing build cost).
+0 / -0

9 years ago
I'm fully against the idea of nerfing nukes, they are balanced just right, the idea of them being OP has never even occurred to me

If the enemy team rushes nuke vs me and I lose to it then I wouldn't think "this is stupid, nukes op!", I would think "wow, so thats what they were doing this whole time, I'm stupid for not scouting that". There's not really any excuse when swifts make for such OP scouting
+2 / -0
9 years ago
Nukes are no by any means over powered. The problem is that it exludes one player from playing the game and makes them focus on the nuke alone (considering income per player) trough a lot of the game. And once it is finished it is only fun for that player alone because of how he destroys one of the 2 sparring armies or backseat economy. Joy from that is understandable but then the rest of that player's team feels like... they have acheived nothing themselves and all praise goes to nuke guy if he succedes.
And there is a huge factor of risk too so if it gets scouted and that nuke countered by anti nuke it is a huge disapointment for a nuke player :\ and rightfully so.
+1 / -0
Global notification that a nuke-launcher is complete and the warhead is stockpiling? We don't need to know *where*, just say who owns it.

"Radiation warning: Nuclear armament under construction by player X".

Make more interaction in that 5-minute window.

Second off, the late-game economy itself is part of the problem. Too much geometric "growth that begets growth". Nukes are affordable because players spam singus and get metal for them. I know there was a plan to tone-down the power of Overdrive - was that ever implemented?

The problem with nukes isn't that they're OP, it's that they're just not *fun*. Compare vs. the Starlight that gives you a target to try to counterattack.
+1 / -0
quote:
The problem is not nuke, the problem is games being so porcy that there is no other option.


my 2c

I still think this is just another bad manifestation of players getting a 33% personal return on the OD their energy structures generate. Eco snowball into nuke is so viable. If eco was shared properly between the players making units and the snowballing eco whore, then for a rear player amassing 10,000m would not be any easier than it is at the front. I dont feel the nuke itself is in an especially bad place, just that the players making eco at the back (not playing the unit game) still have a disproportionate amount of the teams income and rushing nuke plays to the strengths of that.

Make OD full communism the same as mexes = this problem solved.

edit: me and fred discussed this. Our mutual agreement was that OD communism would bring us back to ZK as it would give early pushes in large teamgames meaning again #JustSayin.
+5 / -0


9 years ago
In general I don't think that nukes are so big problem. I often see nuker team lose. What I instead see is that nuked team fails to notice it or build antinuke fast enough.

I think what mojj suggests would help a lot..

  • increase nuke flight time
  • when nuke is launched play a siren and paint a big target in the area (can be aproximate with some error built in)


Im also not against stockpile time increase or global alert when nuke starts stockpiling but I think that having a target + siren would add some drama (quick try to move units out!) to game and drama is good :-)
+3 / -0

9 years ago
Adding an indicator where it'll land is one of the worst things you could do imo. Even in SC, one of the most epic things is hitting a live army with a nuke.
+4 / -0

9 years ago
USrank[GBC]1v0ry_k1ng

I'd prefer to see a nerf to high-level OD itself, not the self-return. Crazy 1-player singu-farmed-nukes in FFA aren't really better, and that comes purely from the OD system, not from the sharing problem.
+1 / -0


9 years ago
High-end OD has been nerfed recently even to the point that CZrankAdminLicho complained about grids going red with no singu yet linked.
+3 / -0

9 years ago
Making a nuke is risky. It costs a lot of money and in the time you finish the nuke the enemy mostly has a big ground advantage against your team. The purpose of the nuke is the surprise. Thats what they are made for. If we give sirens and other things showing where they land they will be useless. Increasing the cost of the nukes and the silo will make the game worse, it will force people to make banthas, berthas, krows etc. I never made a nuke in a team game even if i have a lot of experience, because they never make cost in time and you die because of its investment.
The tactic works when a smurf is rushing it all game and hits with it with no problems.
Since many players who suggested nerfing even tho they dont use this tactic in big team games i propose for them to play a lot of team games where they rush nukes and see what happens :). I specifically suggest that the 1900-2400 elo players try this and see what happens when your metal investment doesnt work.

If i remember correctly every time i plaid against Firepluk most of his nukes faild against me, because i was planes and constantly scouted him. The suggestion is to keep the nuke as it is, they dont do a lot of dmg, they just kill like 3-4 mexes, 2-3 factories , a moho from time to time but you get the point. A 2000 missile capable of doing strong aoe dmg is really needed in this game. Nerfing it will make the game porcier and it will make most of the players to rush zeniths instead of nukes.
+2 / -0
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