This release is primarily a balance patch with some much-needed love for Amphbots. They have finally received an "artillery" unit and, as is tradition among the Bot factories, it has new and unusual mechanics. This artillery, the Lobster, throws allies (and enemies) at its problems and should have many creative uses. Limpet and Archer have also received buffs and there are nerfs for Siren, Racketeer and Blastwing.

Balance

Added Amphibious 'artillery', the Lobster.

• Uses nearby units as ammo, launching them at its target.
• 340 cost.

Removed the water tank mechanic from Archer. Now it constantly fires at full capacity.

Slow waves no longer deal damage to ally units in order to buff Limpet and for consistency with Outlaw. This affects Limpet, Commander Slowbomb and Disco Rave Party.

Racketeer:

• Health 950 -> 780
• Reload 6s -> 7s
• Timer 8s -> 9s

Siren main gun reload time 2s -> 3s.

Gunships now ram and climb cliffs instead of teleporting to the top.

Mechanics

• Made overdrive not spend all excess energy unless every player has full storage. Hold back some energy from overdrive to be given to players who have less energy income and energy in storage than their teams average spare energy.
• FFA maps now default to shuffle even when played with 2 teams.

Interface

• The default Ctrl+Z hotkey no longer ignores builders. Settings for current players are unaffected.
• Allies now have more vivid and distinct teamcolours in small teams.
• Energy economy breakdown now shows overall overdrive efficiency.
• Added a large cursors option, mostly for an issue with 4k screens.
• Structure terraform up/down mouse hold very slightly more lenient with regard to movement.
• Added Artemis to Unit Marker.
• Made all units easier to select, particularly factories.
• Rearranged the ingame menu. Most importantly, moved Hotkeys and Unit Behaviour to root. Fleshed out the simple settings menu.
• Commander shock rifle now shows directional particles (same as Phantom sniper).

Fixes

• Fixed Crab attack jittering issues (#2693).
• Fixed icon distance settings being overridden to the default (#2715).
• Fixed a rare resource bar crash at game start (#2692, #2252).
• Fixed Gesture menu hold threshold being 0.5s if you set it to 1.0s (#2679).
• Fixed startbox editor crash (#2694).
• Fixed Gesture menu preventing minimap clicks (#2677).
• Fixed extraneous lobby button when there is no lobby (#2127).
• Fixed the language list being spammed with untranslated languages (#2614).
• Fixed Quake enabling buildings to be stacked in the same spot (#2650).
• Fixed Libyan flag being the old green one.

Really cool unit concept, although unless you're launching things into the water it seems the damage received by the unit lessens the utility a bit.

I forget-- is kinetic damage a set value or proportionate to total health?

What exactly is the team colour change? I can't find anything in the code about it, unless it's in the Chobby repo.

Great work on the fixes and improovements!
The lobster is very interesting concept and will probably see some interesting synergy with limpet and scallops.
The ballance is also very wellcome especially the racketter hp nerf.

Blastwings (and potentially other gunships) are nerfed as an indirect consequence of

quote: Gunships now ram and climb cliffs instead of teleporting to the top.

which makes them easier to defend against on maps where they were previously problematic.

Did not notice the earlier introduction of Limpet...

If you want consistency, also with the idea that there is no special damage class, should you not simply make slow affect all units, including slow waves coming from outlaw ? (in this case, there would a cost to protecting the shield ball, which seems on reflection not illogical)

Mobile roach cannon ftw.

Okay, so the colours aren't implemented any differently, got it.

I checked the date, its not April 1st. The Lobster looks like trololo dream made true

I initally wanted to recoil at devs naming a unit Lobster, but the unit is a perfect fit. A glorious troll unit. But the name does kinda impede communication (and make newbies even more confused).

It has a lot of usabilty problems though:
It fires when there is nothing to fire.
There is no command to make it fire just once. (F makes it fire all the time) Give it a D-command.
The "turret" rotates too slowly. This is really unintuitive. It should fire instantly.
Units which guard the Lobster dont stay in its throwing range.
On maps with weird gravity (like SpeedMetal) the throwing is really broken and really funny.


The Archer and Limpet buffs might not be enough. They still seem pretty bad. But I see no good way to fix them.

Amph still doesn't have great anti-cloak or anti-shield options though. The main amphs, the scallop and buoy are prime sniper targets. Shield will probably paralyze all opposition with racketeers. I would like to see buoy have more HP at the cost of projectile speed and slight cost increase, to make it more useful in team games and against shields. (1650HP, -12.5% proj. speed, 330 cost)