"Teams All Welcome" testing ground for units

As from the title i suggest we make the "teams all welcome" room a testing facility for new/old units that don't have a role in the game yet.

The 1 vs 1 meta won't be affected because we will disable these units there and in the tourney matches and maybe ffa.

Unit selection and then giving them a specific task to a factory will be made mostly by admin community but also by a vote system where everyone can vote( beyond level 10 so smurfs will have no chance).

For example I will propose Kestrel as a torpedo airplane launcher that has a small sonar. From here admin community will decide to give it a try and if they do we make a vote where we :
a) decide what kind of torpedo( slow torpedo, emp torpedo, disarm torpedo)
b) how many torpedo it will have to fire( I propose 2 of them for example)
c) speed
d) cost
e) etc...

Unit is implemented with the wanted variables and then we test it over and over in the team games without harming the actual balance. When we find a good role to that unit by over testing it then we will introduce it to the 1 vs 1 meta and tourneys.

What do you guys say ?

Also can i have a link to all of the unused units in this game ? Do we have a webpage for that ?

Orfelius is zero-k centered on 1 vs 1? Why do we have team games then ? I see more team games than 1 vs 1 ? That's why i proposed for team games unit testing ( we need a plane that bombs sea, we need a gunship that does the same etc...) and then if they are balanced correctly we put them in the 1 vs 1 to.

Unused units, I mean models that are not used but will provide new unit features to the game.
Conditioning the game for 1 vs 1 purpose only will block fun to the game. Just make a poll and let's see how many people enjoy 1 vs 1 or team games. And you will find out that team games are most wanted( especially high elo team games). 1 vs 1 is a thing of "I am better than you for sure" and is made out of "I move my mouse faster than you or I have better keybinds".

"Sorry, but this is now how the things work. " it's just you saying that...Let's do a pool and see how the thing are. I am just curious how many people enjoy 1 vs 1 or team games. Is it a bad thing for a bit of zero-k democracy?

!move Scandium

The possibility to alter arbitrary unit stats via setoptions is a good idea! (Permenant change for the complete game)

Additionally when cheat mode is enabled, we could have some unit stats panel ingame to change things on the fly.

How about a !modoption then that enables "planned"/"WIP" units and other "requires balance testing" things? Or a complete "testing branch" - a new branch of ZK that could later be merged into a stable. Or something else.

quote: As from the title i suggest we make the "teams all welcome" room a testing facility for new/old units that don't have a role in the game yet.

Sounds too much like turning the most busy room into a testground. Clusterfuck room is already bad enough without potentially broken/unbalanced units.
And there is already enough votespam, a new-units-modoption would surely be controversial and cause even more votespam.

Imo the easiest & best way to make balance-version of a game is as a map.
[Spoiler]

^ all above unless the unit has been pretty much broken due to some earlier shenanigans, engine change or whatever (like bro'lor ultra buff with that innocent looking projectile spread fix).

That being said ZK devs cough*GF*cough might have not been sufficiently careful in the past. Underscored 'past' in hopes that I wont come off as some ungrateful ass and since I do think that GF is doing a good job altogether.

quote: For me it will be perfect to test things over and over again and even provide strong balance feedback suggestion. I just try to help you guys. If such a widget is made il spend decent time to improve and adjust units if needed (...) it will get polished more to 100% after we the players will try "new things".

read the previous post
this is not how balancing works

you do "testing over and over again and provide feedback" by just playing the game normally

units cannot be objectively discovered to be balanced in a game as complex as ZK through math, so small numerical tweaks can be meaningless unless they cross over some boundary (eg. cause it to outrange some other unit, or start 1-shotting)

you need to see how units perform in various real environments, how they relate to other units, and where they stand in the metagame, not just say "i adjusted some value from X to Y, played a sterile game and didn't see any problem" and especially not by saying "it's now 100% right" afterwards

at some point you do get to tweak stuff but using a dynamic variable which changes values multiple times during a single game through trial-and-error is not usually a good method to do that (example: det has 85800 health. would the rounder value of 85000 be better balanced? maybe, but i can play a bunch of games with det tweaked to 85000 health and there would be no tangible difference at all)

quote: So newbies won't be face to face with imbalaced units

yes they will, for the duration of the games with the tweak mode, and considering big teams tend to have large streaks of games with such shitty options enabled it's safe to say that's going to be most of the time

Well thx that you cleared things out GoogleFrog, i always agreed on your balance feedback even if sometimes make me a bit sad in the start when i see the changes. After some time after you made the changes i notice that you were right so I am fine with what you do, and that's why i respect you. I admit i have no coding skill, i was just trying to find a way to add more units to the game (for me more units= more game complexity and i STARVE for a game like that).

Well now i change my idea to this : Ingame widget that changes variables of units ( dmg, aoe, range , line of sight etc.), and I will test this alone in my own host if the widget is provided. As I said, most of the times i trust your judgement GoogleFrog and I will agree with the things you said about the widget when you said " is so complicated that I don't want it to touch the codebase".

I was just trying to find a way to make this game have more units, unite types, more unit interactions. I already said in many threads about these kind of units.

For example:
Outlaw- Emp outlaw, Slow dmg outlaw, Disarm outlaw
Thug- Normal bombs, slow bombs, emp bombs, disarm bombs etc, napalm bombs etc.
Glave- normal bullet, slow bullets, disarm bullets etc...
And so on.

Giving this game more complexity will create a lot of balance workout i agree, but I can help with this balance if needed. I always wanted this game to be more complex but never brake it in the way where most of you guys won't like it.

As i mentioned many times, I play tons of strategy games, and nothing is like Zero-k from what I saw. No game has such complexity even if you guys won't belive me now. That's why Imo if we mange to increase it's complexity and take care of those bugs that people talk in "Zero-k has been greenlight" thread we will have one awsome game.

Is it that bad to create more complex game ?