Zero-K v1.3.6.1

Recent free time has yielded improvement to two features and a whole bunch of fixes.

Jumpjets

Jumpers can now jump onto wreckage, map features and structures. The Jumper will slam into the structure, possibility sustaining damage, and slide down the outside onto the ground. Use at your own risk because your units could slid somewhere inaccessible. On the upside they can just jump out if they are stuck. The jump UI colours have been shuffled around slightly to indicate when a jump command will hit a structure.

The purpose of this change is to fix two annoying limitations. Skuttles should be able to jump onto spire turret and it makes sense to sacrifice one Jack to kill a buried Singularity Reactor. Both of these things are now possible.

Antinukes

Antinukes have been improved with consistent behaviour as well as UI improvements to tell you exactly when your nuke will be intercepted. The switch to this engine version caused antinukes to make a poor attempt at stopping nukes which pass through their coverage. This behaviour is now fixed, antinukes make a very competent attempt to stop nukes passing through their coverage.

The important balance change here is that antinukes block every nuke which will pass over their coverage, not just nukes which will impact within their coverage.

Minor

[Spoiler]

Fixes

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I just noticed that pressing spoilers won't work when news is on homepage.

quote: Skuttles should be able to jump onto

was about time.

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great work!

If a nuke passes through the area an anti-nuke protects at any point in its flight, the nuke dies.

Those radii have the same values. Perhaps you are talking about the weapon range? The rule is as follows:

If:

• The future path of the nuke projectile intersects the cylinder marked by the coverage circle around the antinuke.
• The nuke projectile is within the weapon range of the antinuke.
• No other antinuke projectile has been fired at the nuke projectile.

Then the antinuke will fire at the nuke projectile.

The point was:
1. I had to do something.
2. UI
3. Interaction/Choice/Subtlety.
4. Buffing antinuke is not a problem.

1. Antinukes were broken and some sort of helper gadget was required to make them work. It took a bit more work to make flyover intersection instead of point target intersection but some work had to be done and I think it was worth it.

2. The antinuke UI used to be bad. It annoyed me that it was perfectly knowable whether a scouted antinuke would be intercepted but this knowledge was not indicated by the UI. The static circles were a mix of guesswork and application of safe margins. The new UI is 'interactive' in that it teaches people about antinukes by highlighting the enemy antinukes when giving the relevant order (firing a nuke) and indicating whether interception would occur.

3. Flyover intersection adds subtle choices to the system. People may now want to consider silo placement in order to get the best approach or force the most antinukes in response. Of course the choice may ignored by many people but that is ok. Antinukes have choices too; further forwards antinukes are risker but cover more. Previously if you wanted to protect a base you had to make an antinuke fairly close to it. Now there is more risk/reward. These are good choices to have in ZK. They are not vital choices but they reward attention to detail. This is where depth comes from.

4. Compared to the benefits above, a buff to antinuke is not a bad thing. This also somewhat equalizes antinukes between different map sizes.

I haven't seen it in practice, but I actually vastly prefer this system.

One antinuke means one point of failure means more antinuke sniping. Having to put the antinuke forward of everything for it to be cost effecient means it will be closer to the front lines and easier to snipe.

The whole point of antinuke is to make a single point of failure and a tense game of intel and deep strikes. It's to give the late game an objective beyond the grinding armies against eachother.

We'll have to see whether the change makes nuke non-viable though, as you won't see that brinkmanship if nuke is not good enough to use.

Great release thanks!
"Skuttles should be able to jump onto spire turret" or onto a walled mohogeo, a very old frustrating limitation, thanks again!

Nope.

But, units can jump off Surfboard onto land (and water for Recon Com).