Chicken issues

Let me preface this with the fact about half of the games I've played are chicken games, and some of the issues i'm about to state are either known or not really noticed, so here:
1. Chicken can't attack underwater units - Technically speaking, they can but when the chicken is on water or underwater themselves, they can't harm units that are submerged, making amph bots op against them on watery maps.

2. Chickens movement on water is really inconsistent and buggy - Most chicken travel on top of the water, there are some exceptions, like with the cockatrice, which travels underwater. With that being said, spidermonkey, basilisk, and sporeshooter all get slowed down by a very huge margin, usually taking 5 minutes to just cross a lake of water.

3. Chickens can be easily overwhelmed in the early game - So hear me out, the best way to win a chicken game is to get everyone to spam glaives and just kill the roosts before they even start, or to corner them. Some suggested counter to this, is to just put the chicken at a higher level, however this is still a problem even on suicidal.(I also just played a game with 6x wave sizes and still was winning by abusing amphbots and raider spam)

4. Some chicken late game units come very late, maybe too late - Take the chicken spire for example, if it appeared earlier, it would actually force players to get out of their deeply entrenched base and rush out to kill the spires like how people rush out to kill a big Bertha. (on the topic of chicken spires, they do a lot but are hardly recognized due to their silent nature, my suggestion is to make them more dramatic in their firing, and explosion, to alert players to them.)


Solutions:
1-2. Have all chickens(except flying units) just travel underwater - Cockatrice do it, why can't the others? Also allow them to attack units underwater, with the exception of ranged units. Also fix the movement of the all terrain chicken units.

3. Give the chicken an early game riot control unit - Chicken currently can be outswarmed early on, If they had a riot unit similar to the outlaw, it would allow to them to not be so easily overwhelmed, and actually aid in forcing players to mix up their armies and add skirms to the defensive screen. Basically, add a unit to destroy the homogenization of players early armies and actually make them think instead of spamming out the same unit.

4. Move some late game units to mid game - Like i said, the chicken spire, but also i also believe the talon should come earlier. The talon is an air superiority fighter for the chicken, planes and gunships can hold the sky from early-mid game, and often players only focus on bombers and ground support, completely forgetting to build any air superiority for the late game when you will need them.




In summary, my points were mostly made to try and change up the meta and actually force players to play offensively instead of camping out in their base until they die from rocs and blobbers.

quote: Chickens being weak to heavy early raiding is to a large extent by design. This is how the real game is played and Chicken was meant to reflect it. Currently the mechanism to prevent early roost wipe is the tubes that spawn due to aggression, possibly this could be made more potent. A chicken riot also sounds fine but would likely need to be a new unit and tweaking tube spawn rates is easier. Chickens having slow tech is a syndrome of the previous problem. Killing roosts delays tech (this is also to reflect the real game) so if you're wiping them out right from the start they never get much opportunity to upgrade.

1. Thats understandable and more or less obvious, however tubes tend to only target 1 unit at a time, and i mean all the tubes, making them very impractical for dealing with cheap raiders, like glaives. Probably should change how that works so they don't just target the 1 unit.

2. yeah that would probably require a new model but we could potentially repurpose a blooper model and slightly change its appearance to fit it. (we did it with the spidermonkey model already, i see no problem with it)

3. The current way chicken is almost always played doesn't really fit how it should be played, people will almost always hang back and rely on stardusts then slowly move their way up the defense ladder to compensate for the tech increase. Giving chicken some ways to counter this, especially in the mid-early game when it makes or breaks the game is important.

My points seeked to change up the meta for chicken, and honestly, chickens don't follow the games meta that well, unlike a normal game, chicken has to be played exponentially more defensively and methodically than a normal game because the chicken get free units as apposed to the players.


I also forgot to mention some other problems, when it comes to the custom chicken settings, the variables aren't exactly obvious and sometimes inconsistent, would be nice if there was a tip that appeared when you hover your mouse over them explaining their purpose and how you can use the setting.

Thats partially incorrect, like i said, chicken can stalled on the water.
This happens when a cockatrice gets surrounded by amphs or subs, because the chickens can see them, but they can't touch them, which means chicken can't attack underwater anyways.

We could add the listener back in to add sonar, but chicken still home in on your position.

and now what if they cant reach the surface now.

It would also be trivial to give underwater-targeting weapons to most projectile-armed chickens, to.

http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/617356

This replay has examples of the issues i stated, however i was not able to replicate the normal chicken stall.(Where they try to target underwater units and get stuck, its different from the problems plaguing all terrain units)

However, i also found in this game that wurms are also slowed in water, in fact they were almost stuck in it. In the video, its clearly shown that the spidermonkeys, sporeshooters, wurms, etc were all getting stuck in water and sped up whenever they touched land. I'm not sure what causes this problem but it completely breaks the chicken.

Chicken spires aren't too problematic.
If they cause damage to you, then its your own fault for letting them take root so close to your base.
Heres a tip:
1. Raid
2. Have a big defensive screen of units
3. profit



Its range is about 3000 less than a disco rave party, 2000 less than a BB.
It does 1000 less damage than a BB
It's firing rate is 3 seconds longer than a BB
Its projectile speed is roughly 3 times slow than a BB

I argue that its weak in the late game because of this, if it came earlier then you could make an argument, but nothing about it in comparison to our buildings make it "op"

Well, a common culprit is overcooking.

The regulatory agencies have a lot of public households worried about needing to cook to an internal temperature of (in the US) to 165 degrees F. But experienced chefs avoid cooking it above 155, and there is a marked difference. Of course the reason for stating 165 is in case someone inexperienced tests the wrong part of the meat and if there might remain a pocket that's less than 150 degrees.

Best of luck.

_Shaman is working on chicken updates, please wait. yes, they will work udner water too.

If you could, give the latest test version a try and let me know what you think of the changes. I've tested them personally and come to the conclusion that the chickens are quite okay with sea maps now. Although I need to work on spider monkey a little as it's somewhat useless right now in sea games.

Currently there's even more planned for chickens (at least on my end):

- Better defenses a la chicken flak
- Death and creation animation (though this has sort of fallen flat due to technical reasons I don't fully understand)

Please do give feedback on the changes!

Thanks,
@_Shaman