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Title: MatchMaker 5038
Host: Nobody
Game version: Zero-K v1.6.5.5
Engine version: 104.0.1-287-gf7b0fcc
Started: 5 years ago
Duration: 29 minutes
Players: 2
Bots: False
Mission: False
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Team 1
Chance of victory: 42.9%

USrankFealthas
Team 2
Chance of victory: 57.1%

EErankAdminAnarchid

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Okay, i'm not playing zk again until something is done to tank.
+1 / -0

5 years ago
I too enjoy the strategic diversity HT provides.
Goli > less goli
Goli > scorcher/dart
Goli > panthers
Goli > tbird
Goli > ultimatum
Goli > grizz
Goli > nuke
Goli > eco
Goli > stinger meta
+1 / -0

5 years ago
Grizz OP u kept sending them 1 by 1 vs 4 goli and not abusing the hill in the middle which wouldve kept them alive.

Also u wonnered this game till u make silencer lol

P.s. nothing beats eco
+0 / -0

5 years ago
My lichos fired by themselves...
27:30 they hit a grizzly for no reason.
28:40 - licho drops bomb on pene despite target clearly being the domi.

It seems when you give licho an attack order it will drop bomb on anything in its path to that target.
+1 / -0


5 years ago
Sure, making more goli instead of silencer probably would have worked but fuck that.
+2 / -0

5 years ago
making more grizz or some striders would have also worked

u cant just half ass build a meme unit like nuke and rage when it doesnt work

ultimatum obviously eated cyclops for pudding so idk why ur so anti cyclops as though it cant be countered when ur ulti made like x4 value vs them

you could have flown straight down the middle with ravens and hit his econ, you could have athena to the back of his base and make a army in the crater or something, you over run his super heavy monospam cyclops with light unit like glaives

monospamming cyclops is ok but its stupid to act like you couldnt have easily beaten it
+0 / -0
TLDR: EErankAdminAnarchid spends approximately 14:00 to 21:00 using their faster army to intentionally enter battles in which the opposing army costs significantly more than their own. They then spend the last 10 minutes doing weird stuff and losing on attrition.


At around 15:10 he attacks with 850 metal in raiders (plus a heavily damaged Cyclops) into a defending force of 5250 metal. It would be ludicrous if 1/3 the cost of a Cyclops in standard ground troop could come out ahead against two Cyclopes.


Here it is again. In this case the 1000 metal in raiders actually killed a low health Cyclops before they all died. This is about as good as can be hoped for. EErankAdminAnarchid keeps throwing small armies into a growing force of repairing Cyclopes.


Look at what this behaviour does for attrition.


A big battle, perhaps the final one. EErankAdminAnarchid attacks a 9000 metal force of Cyclopes and turrets with 3000 metal in raiders and a Cyclops as backup. They also have a Grizzly but it is far out of position. The fight is effectively 5000 vs. 9000. EErankAdminAnarchid kills a Cyclops, at the cost of their raiders, which is a trade of 3000 for 2200. This is quite a good trade considering the initial forces. USrankFealthas has three Cyclops remaining so can, along with some reinforcements, push and clean up the remaining enemy forces. They pick off a Cyclops and two Grizzlies.

About 22:00 onward has EErankAdminAnarchid attempt weird counters (Ultimatum, Dominatrix) when they have already thoroughly lost on attrition. It is as if EErankAdminAnarchid thought Cyclops costs only 1000 metal and planed their earlier engagements accordingly. They got to choose when and where to fight and kept taking poor fights. I'm having a hard time drawing conclusions on Cyclops balance when such poor attempts are made to counter it.

This is perhaps a problem of intuition and slippery slope. One Cyclops is 17 Scorchers but it looks a lot smaller than 17 Scorchers. This many Scorchers would easily kill a Cyclops and many would survive, marking a win on attrition. Even taking the factory switch into account EErankAdminAnarchid could have had ten Scorchers and two Darts. Instead they attacked at 15:10 with a bit more than half that.

I have seen many cases of large units winning just because attempts to counter it fail to remember a basic rule of strategy: Avoid taking poor fights. Army cost is generally a decent stand-in for army power. People tend to underestimate the cost of large units, so large units tend to get fed. Perhaps models are due for a rescale, but Cyclops is about as large as reasonable without an extra movetype. Models also affect balance simply because I like to have hitvolumes match models.

Perhaps the intuition issue would be solved with a cluster detection overlay that detects armies and displays their cost. Nobody would take this fight if it was abundantly clear that the enemy force costs more than 5x their own.

Such a widget would confuse new players so I wouldn't enable it by default, if someone were to make it. However I think it would be useful for learning or experienced players to train valuation intuition.
+10 / -0


5 years ago
More extreme solutions to the feeding problem involve changing the game design to match the commonly held intuitions. Perhaps repair could cost more energy, to make partial damage a bit more effective. If we are tried of the current balance repair could even cost metal.
+0 / -0

5 years ago
alternatively adjust size of units to slightly more reflect their worth and make it more intuitive.
I am very on board with nerfing repair at any rate
+0 / -0


5 years ago
Unit sizes can be adjusted. I would rather make large units larger than touch small units. Are you volunteering? The task is not trivial as there are a lot of things to check (animation, hitvolume, pathing) you you'll likely need to use some terrible modeling program.
+0 / -0
quote:
This is perhaps a problem of intuition and slippery slope.

Dunno, from the inside it felt pretty much like this:

1) Cyclops appears. I realise i have Blitzes and that they do nothing vs Cyclops. The only counter to Cyclops in Tank is More Cyclops.

2) I realise that because the enemy already has More Cyclops, and that they are actively pushing my territory, i cannot just have More Cyclops.

3) It feels that Cyclops is an assault unit that isn't very accurate against raiders and has a low rate of fire and kills only one raider at a time, so it can be very effectively taken with dart/scorcher (at about the same rate as other assaults) so i try that. Obviously it fails because all of these assumptions are wrong: Cyclops is accurate vs both Scorcher and Dart, it has AoE, and fairly good RoF. Also it has enough range to work with the square law. It can only be practically attacked at about the same cost, which makes Scorcher not really a counter if you consider that the Scorcher does have much cheaper counters.

4) Realising that, i try the weird counters, but it's too late, and also the nuke gets scouted. Game over.

I think it is uneconomical to try countering an already deployed Cyclops with Scorcher at this efficiency with a fairly even economy. You need to facswitch and produce a Cyclops worth of Scorcher while the enemy Cyclops is already pwning you, during which time, the enemy does his best to produce 2000 cost of another Cyclops, so now you're again at a disadvantage unless he overextends. So now you repeat the moves, and you have a 3:2 ratio that could already work if not for the fact that the Cyclopses have taken a third of the map from you by now.

It's just too much of a qualitative leap in a tank mirror. I don't think Cyclops is this nasty elsewhere or that it is the problem with Tank.
+1 / -0
I think it is VERY fair to say that the cyclops has no AoE.
You know what counter you didnt try? Fleas : P Oh and widows I suppose...

I had hoped increasing a units size was somewhat trivial...
+1 / -0

5 years ago
Also, i think that only 2 thunderbirds disarm a cyclops. Which then can be overrun by raiders like the scorchers.
+0 / -0
I think strictly looking at things from a metal vs metal perspective is flawed. Some units kinda scale exponentially in groups rather than linearly.

For the cyclops (and a couple other big units) the issue is in multiple layers.

First when you have 3 of them, the equal cost in scorchers is 51. You simply cant use an unwieldly group like that and most of the scorchers will be idle, and clumped just being easy targets for aoe and not being useful, it gets worse if theres chokeholds in the maps where they are even more useless.

The cyclops has a slow cannon... making attempts to reach them by short range units like raiders a lot more difficult... with 3 of them its a lot easier to completely slow down the frontline which clogs everything up... and the raiders just become easy targets and its difficult to call them a counter at that point.

The "counter" to heavy assault units, like the raiders are supposed to be, are themselves very very easily countered. adding a few riots, or just building porc behind the cyclops and keeping them near porc to retreat to completely shuts down this " counter ". You would have to invest a monstrous amount of metal into raiders to hope they overextend and even then get lucky. Investing so heavily in raiders is a recipe for disaster as the attrition would kill you, and you are heavily limited in tactical options once things like stardusts litter the map. Adding insult to injury a thunderbird will disable your force easily and dont even disable the cyclops on accident, leading to further attrition losses.

I dont think repair itself is a problem, but the scaling of the unit in numbers (specially against its supposed counters) and its ease of retreat due to the slow cannon.

Removing the slow would make the unit garbage though and its not simple to tune the unit.
+1 / -0

5 years ago
Do you seriously consider changing general mechnics to fit with unit-balance?
+0 / -0

5 years ago
I think heavies don't pay enough of a premium for their weight. The weight premium is currently under priced.
+0 / -0

5 years ago
Slow cannon could be removed. Why this sidearm actually?
+0 / -0

5 years ago
Its a big part of what makes it a "tank buster". The slow beam allows it to kill other heavies.
+1 / -0
Grizzly is better than cyclops so not sure why were talking about cyclops nerfs
+0 / -0
5 years ago
Grizz is better for a moving and throwing away in situations you are drowning in metal. But the cyclops 50% more health, ~35%ish more speed and slow cannon make it jaw dropping easy to retreat alive and repair in comparison to the grizzly. The slow cannon also makes it scale very well in groups as it can snare a heavy and prevent it from getting away, securing a kill which the grizzlies cannot.

That said the grizzly has a different role.... while it is assault for stingers, its mostly an anti skirm for amph. Where the cyclops is a snowballing attrition god that can runover porc and lol back safely to repair. A lot of its power falls in how easy it is to retreat in a realistic battlefield.

I've been thinking though... with the cyclops and minotaur for just walking over porc, why does tank have the emissary? isnt that incredibly redundant? If the emissary is going to be such a good aoe anti skirm riot skirm.... it should probably not be an artillery as well. I was thinking maybe it should be more tanky and have less range than a stinger, making it into a skirm instead.
+0 / -0
Page of 2 (22 records)