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Make gunships fly higher

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Following gunships (1 plane) when not engaged in combat (building for constructors) should fly 50% higher:

Crane, Wasp, Banshee, Harpy(Rapier??), Trident.

When issued build or engaged in combat they should lower their altitude to current level.

Reason: To make gunship start more viable (hopefully without other detriment side effects) in 1v1/2v2 and flex AA less punishing for gunships. Flex AA makes you be able to fight back when you are attacked - which is perfectly fine. However the strength of air player should be the ability to use the mobility to choose the fight you want to fight. That means avoiding glavies and other raiders to save your ships should be easier.

If at least 5 people agree I'll make a ticket to make developer reminder discussion.
+9 / -2
quote:
To make gunship start more viable (hopefully without other detriment side effects) in 1v1

This blind RPS is desirable because...?

To make my point more explicit, this will arbitrarily cause problems for factories with expensive or high-burst AA (e.g. Tank, Jump, Amph) in the games where one's opponent happens to plop gunships, without meaningfully affecting the factories with cheap and reasonably buildable AA (e.g. shield, cloaky, veh).

Locusts not being immune to raiders is core to their balance. Being able to path over cliffs and water effortlessly, and being more than 50% faster than Glaives, allows you to "choose the fight you want to fight" already.
+3 / -0

5 years ago
relative to a year or two, i think there have been changes that made gunships less effective:
- relative nerf to harpies
- buffs to riots
- buffs to some of the mobile AA units which were relatively underpowered compared to other mobile AA
- losing lots of speed when they collide with cliffs (the previous behavior where they "bounced" over the cliffs was nonsense though)

The ones that fly very close to the ground, like locust, should fly a bit higher.

They all should also follow a smoothed air mesh and avoid bumping into steep cliffs and losing so much speed.

for a given cost, air units in ZK are generally stronger to compensate for their vulnerability to mobile AA and restricted fire arc. I don't think locusts follow that curve. Locust deals 50 dps, that's just slightly more than a flea. They could get a 50% dps boost and not be OP.









+2 / -0
5 years ago
Im a very frequent gunship-starter, I usually opt for them as long as the map isnt completely flat or too small. Alot of the value is intangibles like your opponent having less experience dealing with a gunship start than a rover start, or triggering an overreaction of AA.

Alot of the options have razor-thin timeframes of utility. A single harpy + radar can do all your anti-raider till about the 4 minute mark when mobile AA shows up. Blastwings get one free shot before picket+radar, best used after your opponent has done their initial econ.

Now at about the 5-6 minute mark you better have a land factory, if you spent metal on anything else you're probably dead by now. If you can pull off the transition then you're in a good spot, very early game and you have the options of a air+land fac already.


The big downsides are their vulnerability and speed.

- Constructor costs 300, but gains little advantage by being a flyer as fleas can still target it.
- Once they start taking damage, gunships often arent fast enough to disengage before dying
- Bad value. If you wanna go out destroying some mexes and llts you might be looking at around 1000 metal for 5 locusts or 760 for a nimbus.
- Lack sticking power. Glaives and ronins can dance around and tie enemy units up at the point of engagement, preventing them from going somewhere else, gunships dont really have this so your opponent can go where they please.


In conclusion, I think the dirtbag should be added to the gunship tree.
+1 / -0
I think it would be nice to experiment with making the air cons cheaper
+0 / -0

5 years ago
quote:
Locusts not being immune to raiders is core to their balance. Being able to path over cliffs and water effortlessly, and being more than 50% faster than Glaives, allows you to "choose the fight you want to fight" already.


I merely want them to take less damage when not fighting. Also I should emphasize that I want constructors to get that buff the most. Also them flying higher won't make them any less vulnerable to AA.
+0 / -0

5 years ago
Gunships seem to have completely fallen out of the 1v1 meta(other than krow rush lobbing). Not entirely sure why, but planes just seem better.
+0 / -0

5 years ago
because plains don´t get countered by 220 metal.
+1 / -0


5 years ago
Why would a Crane, Wasp, Harpy or Trident ever want to fly lower? Missiles and construction has cylindrical range. Players would be incentivized to exploit UI jank in order to keep their gunships high while fighting.

Locust would want to fly lower to engage units with its spherical laser, so perhaps such a change could be interesting for Locust.

If you want to buff gunships, take a look at Razor.
+2 / -0
5 years ago
Gunships are also so appalling at doing damage that a mex is like a 10 second time investment for alot of its units.
+0 / -0
5 years ago
I find Gunships are best as a supporting factory. Harpies can tangle with most early raiders and defend mexes, but after that theres not much you can do. 10 Bombers fighting a Razor vs 10 of any gunship. Aircraft are fast enough to dodge some and not need to be in fire as long overall. 10 harpies will have trouble with 1 Razor. I think the solution here is either a raider that has a useful "raiding" weapon (think Kodachi of the sky, although maybe settle for riot cannon), A long range "arty" type gunship that might not outrange a Razor, but could atleast extend the range and usefulness of gunships when the map is shutdown with AAA, Or maybe some type of "flare" system or radar Jamming system armed gunship could also be helpful. I dont think AAA is to strong, I just think gunships are in a pretty bad spot where they sit.
+0 / -0


5 years ago
http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/633964

I made a gunship factory in this game and found myself not wanting to make the mainline gunships. I played fairly poorly though.
+0 / -0

5 years ago
I agree with the OP that gunships should fly higher, but disagree with the "engaged" mechanic.

The only one clearly underpowered is the locust, and maybe the constructor. Harpies might be just slightly, but their attributes are extremely annoying. Imo that's one of the reasons we rarely see locusts. People just build harpies instead: in small groups they defeat everything that isn't dedicated anti-air, even if they take some time doing it due to low dps.

Nimbus is pretty strong for its cost. Revenants are also pretty strong, just hard to use.

An option to have raiders engaging gunships that fly higher is changing the attack range from a sphere to an ellipsoid stretched vertically 2x.
+0 / -0

5 years ago
I think this comes back to the old problem that AA is balanced to kill planes, which only need to be in an area for like 2 seconds. while GS need to stay for a while to do the same damage.
+1 / -0

5 years ago
if gunships should be tough, probably give some/all the x4 armour when not firing?
+1 / -0


5 years ago
Rather than make Locust conditionally invulnerable to retaliation except by AA, i'd suggest making it more different to the Harpy by making it even faster and maybe just a bit more damaging..
+0 / -0

5 years ago
If AA is specifically designed to kill planes, why does it suck so hard at this then?
+3 / -0
5 years ago
quote:
flex AA less punishing for gunships

No. Using flex AA is fun. It makes for more tactical choices. If your gunships are dying to raiders, seriously reconsider your tactical choices.
The problem is gunship vulnerablity to normal AA.
Normal AA is really, really boring.
Its also ridiculously overpowered if you compare it to normal units - nobody sane would tolerate units with ridiculous range, super-fast speed, homing or instahit projectiles and infinite damage stackability all at the same time. Of coursem this is to counter planes, which have many similar features.

All the AA right now is really samey. There could be powerful EMP cannons temporarily stunning and downing flyers, forcing ground units to respond and clean up. There could be weak AA missiles with really really high AoE, giving players a counter to stacked up planes and gunships. But no. We have what we have.

Gunships can't choose the fight they want to fight. Because Swift exists. All gunships that are not Nimbus+Trident or Krow will become useless when Swift appears. I wish this was changed, but lets be real, that'll never happen.

I would like some general gunship buffs, though. Wasp and Crane could be buffed too, I have rarely seen them used.
+3 / -0

5 years ago
nice idea. make chainsaw emp only, but 1-2 missles to completely disable every plane (except licho?) for a decent time ( 5sec?) so the plane lands. also does the copperhead turret do any damage at all? i do not have positive experiences about this. if chainsaw is emp, adjust its stats to copperhead to fill the missing dps. also, we have no slow damage on any AA (i do not think this is a good thing on ground def turrets)
+1 / -0

5 years ago
Okay I will limit it to: make constructors fly higher when not constructing so a plane doesn't get killed by a frikkin' flea. It can get killed when constructing.
+0 / -0