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Zero-K v1.0.9.7
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= Zero-K v1.0.9.7 = We're steadily climbing higher. Here are the changes since v1.0.8.7. In particular we are using Spring 91.0, unit targeting should be a lot better and there is a texture for terraform. == Balance == Hammer * Range 820 -> 840 Phoenix, reverted fire burn time nerf. AoE nerf stands. * Max on fire time 10s -> 15s Clam * Can no longer resurrect * Health 800 -> 1300 Athena * Can now resurrect * Health 200 -> 400 * Speed 9.17 -> 7 * Cloak cost (3, 10) -> (2, 5) (moving, static) Jumpjet units without visible thrusters can no longer jump while flying through the air. This includes Sumo, Skuttle, Dirtbag and Archangel. Pyro, Can, Freaker and Recon Commander can still jump from mid air. Resurrect cost: 1.5x -> 1.25x energy and time == Graphics == Reduced unit on fire effect particle count and removed smoke. Terraform textures the map with a metal texture. This looks good, makes terraform more visible and indicates which units can walk on it. * Sparse squares as passable by everything. * Steeper slopes have dense squares and are not passable by vehicles. * Black walls are only passable by spiders. == PlanetWars == * planet is only made neutral if owning faction loses all influence. * structures that need a planetary target (guerilla jumpgate, string connector, planetbuster) cannot be retargeted during their power-up sequence. If you change target, sequence starts again. * link connector is now active and can connect anywhere * planet buster leaves the planet so damaged that it cannot be economically exploited again * guerilla jumpgate is now active and projects 1.5 influence per turn * technologies are now active, they unlock units and provide 1 influence bonus per battle per tech * defensive structures - grid, interception network and bomber defneses - are destroyed after successful invasion == GUI == * Minimap "clear" button removes all drawings. * Minimap metal map button displays mexes and geos without changing map to black. * Changed default colors for line of sight view to be much more brighter and bound F4 to new metal map display. == Lobby == * Removed ATI/Intel driver checks and compat. options, most drivers now work fine. * Added multithreaded engine checkbox. == Engine Fixes == We have been using the new engine Spring 91.0 for a little while. It seems stable enough and comes with new fixes. * Crashing planes no longer fall through the map if stunned. * Beam Lasers and Lightning Guns are no longer blocked by stunned shields. * Lightning Guns can no longer shoot into water. * Fixed all the strange 'Defender does not fire' type behaviour. * Fixed rare issue with nanoframes reaching 100% health but not completing. == Fixes == * Weapon targeting should be a lot more intelligent. * No damage is dealt after an Outlaw dies. This is a workaround for allied units receiving damage from allied outlaws which die. * Fixed ATI minimap bug. * Reduced occurrence of bomber and gunship landing bugs. * Jumpjets no longer act as an impulse capacitor. * Fixed units sometimes not flashing blue when emped and the UI is disabled. * Fixed UI keys bug. |
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Even though I liked flinging skuttles and jumping them down, I can't say that it's a bad change. Only problem I can see is using a Jack the same way, since it has high HP and good DPS. |
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Great stuff! |
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So basically only coms can rez now. |
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Read whole changelog pls, athena can. |
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i dont like making skuttle ramp impossible now. it was after all one of the most fun game mechanics ever to be seen and quite unique to zk. |
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It was a practically unblockable to destroy defences or economy for much less cost than any other way. I did test using Vindicators to hover over your base and decloak the Skuttle but it turns out it takes too long for Skuttle to decloak if the Vindis are reasonably spread. It was sort of a counter but too expensive. The interesting mechanic was why it was removed in one of the least extreme ways possible. You can still launch Skuttles at your opponent if you have really good aim. Launched Sumos are likely to survive the impact. Launched Jacks and Pyro can still do a similar role but are somewhat more counterable. |
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Anthena is too expensive and thats why only coms can rez now. |
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nice, keep up the good work gentlemen. |
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I dislike this skuttle nerf, it was entertaining and not too broken. I like the clam, hammer and phoenix changes. I like the athena change to be a Resurrection unit. What I would like to see next is the Athena's unit building capability removed and it be turned into a dedicated Resurrection unit in one of the air-labs - it NEVER gets used as a covert unit. |
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orly? I used athena as covert unit 3x just yesterday with much success ... yeah *NEVER*.. Try it more its fun and pretty strong. |
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I sometimes use athena as a spy. It has incredible mobility and insanely short decloak range. Plus the ability to plonk a radar tower behind enemy lines on a nice hill out of LOS is very useful. |
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    GoogleFroga more moderate nerf would have been to just make stuff using jumpjets in air accelerate downwards at a normal rate once the jumpjets have fired, meaning flying skuttles would immediately explode when they hit ground. this would still enable people to snipe off single targets, but requires more prescicion and also more preperational scouting. good scouting was already a requirement to use skuttle ramps properly outside of laboratory conditions (eg sandcastles2). the argument that you can now still use skuttle ramp is not actually valid. neither thrust nor exact direction are anywhere near predictable enough to make skuttle ramping without jump a valid strategy to use. it can now only make cost in the luckiest of circumstances. you nerfed it too much, now its broken. which is sad for the reason i mentioned above. also i wonder a little why this strategy gets immediately nerfed once i won a single game with it. there are some really op things that people keep winning games with (that dont have actual counter either, like banshee rush covered by planes) and noone does a shit about it. its not like skuttle ramp was a 100% win strategy, its nowhere near that. in fact in 90% of games it would already been utterly useless. now its useless in 100% of games. the reason for this is that it is quite unwieldy to pull off. in typical games, neither of the players has time to do all the things to get a working ramp up, and micro every single skuttle. in the game which we are both refering to i was practically doing nothing else. in addition to that, 50% of my skuttles went fail. taking out a factory worth 600 metal with a skuttle worth 550 is NOT insanely effective and op. even if it comes at long range and unprepared, its still barely making cost. also it isnt unblockable, its just difficult to block. you can surround most important structures with cheaper other stuff, or even nanoframes and make skuttle hit those instead. you can use terra, or you can just destroy the ramp. you might as well argue a big bertha was unblockable while in fact you just have to protect every important structure with one of more shields - which is pretty nasty and expensive. making a skuttle ramp comes a little cheaper than the bertha, but the skuttles are continuous cost that bertha doesnt have. i may also add that in typical games there is just no reason to do it. most games just dont have so expensive targets to snipe. if you can take out a moho geo youre really lucky and then you only made cost (considering the cost of the ramp, and probably jumper fac too) if enemy was stupid enough to surround his geo with lots of base structures. you could snipe off the occasional fusion or factory, but thats hardly worth investing that much time, a missile silo requires a lot loss micro and is more reliable. |
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yes -- I agree. Bring back viable skuttle ramp! |
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I really want to just say "Nope, I'm balancing this". With Skuttle jump you can unblockably kill any structure with a little effort. It is much more flexible and less costly than alternative options. It was removed because I think that is a bad thing. It was known about for years. The recent improved Newton physics made it a lot more predictable. I had used it and was thinking about it a bit for a while. |
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its not very flexible. ramp can cover something like a 120 degree angle in front of it, probably less. that means its very unflexible in fact. nor is it less cotly in most situations, unless its a really badly porced up game. nor is it totally unblockable, you just gotta know how. nor is it as reliable as other such options. and just like other such options it can be quite easily countered by cloaking your stuff and preventing scouts to penetrate your front lines. |
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As much as jumpy-launching is hella cool, it always felt like an exploit of the zk physics system. I'd go so far as to say that the new approach is too inconsistent and all the remaining jumpies should get the same nerd, rocket-propelled or not. |
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I disagree. using rockets to slow fall would make sense, while jumping in midair does not. having pyros able to slow a fall would make sense to me. |
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I'm not talking about the physics of it - obviously it makes sense from a physics perspective (although a tumbling unit might not be able to use its jump-jets), just a gameplay-consistency thing. Having a distinct set of rules for a concept as strange as "can jump when impulsed into the air" is a pretty obscure distinction for players. These kind of trivial differences can be counter-intuitive for gameplay. |
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I justify it because the airjump units clearly have some some sort of jets while the others leap. |
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so what about just pretending skuttle had jumpjets and actually -balancing- it by, say, giving it the ability to influece its velocity and direction while in air by using the jumpjets, making it somewhat able to aim, but not as reliable as the way it worked up until now? or by applying or combining with my other proposal from my other post above? as opposed to taking this unique and fun menchanic out of the game entirely, by turning it into a useless troll strategy. otherwise jump must be removed from skuttle entirely because its totally unrealistic that a bomb made of steel half as high as a house can jump anywhere, with legs as small as this :P |
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>I justify it because the airjump units clearly have some some sort of jets while the others leap. I agree with Pxtl here. The distinction between jump-capable units and non-jumpers is very clear; the distinction between jet-using and leg-using jumpers is very obscure. Having different game mechanics for them violates expectations and adds mental burden for no good reason. As for the justification you mentioned: that's reasonable, but I don't think it's compelling. To my mind, jumping from one ground point to another using a jetpack is very different from flying to a particular ground point when falling, and it breaks my immersion to see a unit "jump" while in midair - even using jets. Obviously this is a subjective matter. But I think the gameplay consistency of having all jumpers work the same trumps the much softer notion that a jumpjet-jumper could, maybe, do an airjump. |
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Also, using a Newton and a tform ramp to fling units across the map is a very clever idea and a very dumb gameplay element. If you were designing a game from scratch you'd never include it deliberately. It's in Zero-K by accident. Yes, yes, "emergent gameplay" and all that, but not everything that emerges is worth keeping. Ramp-flinging fits about as well with Zero-K as the santa hat modoption. It's cute and fun and I'd hate to see it disappear, but there's no reason it should be a viable tactic in a competitive game. |
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I dunno Klon, how do you balance one unit that is potentially an infinite range, shield penetrating, tacnuke. And also a crawling bomb with a short jump and a big decloak radius. Either it's OP as one or terrible as the other. I have no problem with the splitting of jumpjets and leg jumpers air control, it's pretty obvious which units have jets and which don't, I actually think it's pretty neat. |
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  Klon, why? Is it fun having any building in your base explode at any time because of cloaking bombs from the sky? Why have this as any kind of viable strategy?  CrazyEddie, it's a huge stream of fire/smoke coming out of the unit's backside. No it isn't immediately obvious but it is fairly easy to remember and too cool to remove.
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I was exploit more or less because on porcy maps it is instawin. Sandcastles where you exactly know where is fusions and so on. Actually there was good counter of such "hack". You need solars or just nanoframes arround fusions so scutle or anything simply cant issue jump command. |
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i can understand any argumentation that says its a bad thing that you cant defend against it properly. i even agree to that point to some degree. partly this is only because people simply dont know how to counter it, partly because there are no easy counters for it. most other counters to things are really easy, here all methods of countering are either complicated or tedious, like surrounding your singu with nanoframes or cheap buildings. but it is not impossible. it is, however already a strategy that is tedious to employ. you should count that in the consideration if its op or not. it required micro and continuous attention. but heres my point, i already have given 2 ideas above to keep it in the game and have it be viable, but both more difficult to pull off as well as less reliable. i think both ideas are good and effective, yet they dont destroy the whole thing. making it impossible for skuttles to use their "jets" in air destroy the skuttle/ramp mechanic entirely. CrazyEddie i think its an awesome gameplay element. your argumentation is basically "if its funny and ingenious, it better be entirely useless, or it has no place in competetive game". i find this a ridiculous point of view. BECAUSE it is funny and ingenious, it MUST be viable. otherwise you can just leave it out of the game, because everybody who is doing it is only hurting himself. you should be rewarded for doing a funny and ingenious thing, in any game, and not punished. and making a ramp for your skuttles is one of the most fun and ingenious ideas ever seen in a game. we should be proud of having that thing in the game we all play, not treat it as our stepchild.
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Little known fact: Athena uses less energy when moving compared to being static! Trolled by the changelog? |
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how does this work? when enabled, game does not start when click "rejoin" etc in zk lobby. do i need additional stuff to use it? |
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I think I have a fairly good idea of how to defend against it. Here are some options: * Cloak everything and never let construction be scouted. Fairly difficult. * Put things at the bottom of the sea or deep in a hole with decloakers flying above. Use terraform. Only works for energy. * Completely surround the important things with structures preventing the jump command. Takes a lot of space, does not work if near any combat because frames are unstable. * Float Vindicators above important things. Requires too many Vindicators. They must be cloaked to be used near front. None of those things are things I want people to have to do. The nerf involving air control would take quite a UI to pull off. It's not really emergent and ingenious if a bunch of rules have to be written about what it can and cannot do. Anyway the effect is still that people have anything killed with only annoying counters which don't really work. |
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well i dont know about the technical side of it but to me it sounds fairly simple actually. just change the way jump in air works to just give it the same impulse it would be getting when used on ground, added on top of the impulse the flying skuttle already has. would this require a great amount of work to do? i would really like to have it work that way, it seems like a fair compromise solution, allowing for just a little control over where the skuttle is going. anyhow, those counters are what i meant, tho there are probably more options (emp/capture for example). i agree, all of them are annoying, but its not like it would make sense to skuttle just about anything out there. as i said, only in few games things worth skuttling are ever built, and very likely you could protect all of them once you are aware of the enemy using skuttle ramp. its really not such a big deal to make a row of solar around a singu, nuke or protector. its probably a good idea anyway to do that, regardless of the possibilty of beeing skuttled, tho i must admit pretty much nobody does that right now. but typically, if those things are unprotected and get scouted, they are likely to die to some kind of attack, from which skuttle is hardest to counter. |
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That jump system is infeasible. Firstly units have costant speed while jumping. Secondly you said "units have impulse while flying" which is false so I don't trust your knowledge of what impulse means. Thirdly I assume you are suggesting that people should aim Skuttles by tell them to boost themselves in a direction while flying through the air. This is not a workable UI, it would be impossible to use. It would require a ridiculous amount of work and the end result would be basically impossible to use. Look, it's just not happening. The counters are annoying/impossible (you forgot front line) and saving the mechanic is convoluted. Your argument at the time for keeping it was that defences and econ are OP. That is debatable but should not be fixed by a single thing which is far better than all other ways of attacking defences. |
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klon i watched you kill beyond 80-100K worth of stuff from a mere 5-7K expenditure and turn a lost game into an overwhelming victory and then consistently commit stupid ratio of metal killed/for cost in further games that shit OP lul |
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yes i did say that ecoporc was too strong overall, and i still think it is. thats not the sole argument why skuttle ramps are a good thing tho. anyway. i must admit my knowledge of physics is limited at best. as far as i know the impulse is essentially the event of a force interacting with an object accelerating it in a certain direction. this is probably not accurate, and i already used it falsely before. i fail to see how this would devalidate my argument however, as long as you understand what i am talking about :) so here is for clarification what i mean in more accurate, yet possibly not entirely correct terms: when a skuttle is ordered to jump anywhere, it receices an impulse accelerating it in a certain direction, resulting in it moving there at a certain speed. beeing in air, the skuttle already has a speed and a direction of movement. so if i would apply the same jump-impulse on the skuttle while it is in air, its speed and direction would change by a tad amount. this is what i am driving at. now if the physics simulation works in that way and skuttles jumpring from ground get indeed accelerated, as opposed to say just magically moved outside of the physical context, you could apply the same thing to an airborne skuttle. there would be no need to change anything about the ui, you just use the exact same jump/circle interface as you did before. if you jump backwards while beeing in air, its speed will slightly decrease resulting in a shorter arc, and so on. @[GBC]Praetor that was just a single game. if you just go ahead and watch some random replay you can essentially prove that anything is op. 1 glaive killing a factory gets a ratio of 1000% cost. a single scythe killing a nuke: 2800% wtf! if you use just that fact as the base of your consideration then you must come to the conclusion that glaives, or anything, is terribly op, because that sort of thing happens all the time. and there are lots of things and strategies that can turn a loss around, esp if the enemy dont know how to handle it. and there are many, many more reliable win strategies than skuttle ramping, which so far only won a single game for me on any map other than sand castles. also your numbers are wrong, i spent at least 2, probably 3-4 times as much as that, and i doubt very much it was anything above 50k i killed with skuttles. i killed some fusions for 1k each, a nuke that was going to die to singu explosion 10 seconds after anyway, 2 berthas, a behemoth, 2 screamers, some factories and nanos, an anni. that sounds like a lot but actually its not. count it, its something like 30-40k. ah yeah and an 50% finished bantha that in all likelyhood probably would not have seen the end of the game, and could at that point already have been killed by regular, walking skuttles or some random other units. thats another ~5k. |
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why? dont get it. its just the same as before, how is it unusable? you see the circle on the ground below skuttle, you jump somewhere. you could easily predict the direction of the impulse given to the skuttle. what about the physics part, could it work that way technically? |
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Does making repulsive newton not save from skuttle? I dunno, never tried it but should be possible. If not make it possible by changing skuttle weight or whatever and there you have the counter. What fun is it to not having skuttles fly around the map anymore? :( And skuttle ramp is always visible for the enemy as all terraform is, so you can predict flying skuttles incoming if you have map awareness. |
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Klon, no and no. * Impulse is a 3d vector. Hard to give. * You can't even predict where it is going to land normally. * You can't predict how much impulse to add to change the velocity to exactly what is needed to hit a certain point. What you want has difficulty on the order of playing Kerbal Space Program. swappan terrain changes are only visible in LOS. They are impossible to cloak though. |
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whats the difference to applying impulse to a skuttle that is on ground? those do have a movement vector too right, even if its zero length? so mathematically the exact same thing would happen, normally. other than that, i was making a suggestion to make the ramping more difficult in order to balance it, instead of just taking it out of the game. since you earlier said you want to balance it, i thought the changes were made to, well, balance it, not remove it. now youre saying you dont want it the way i proposed because its too difficult to handle for the player. that doesnt make much sense to me, considering that you removed it from the game in the first place, yet stating that you could still use it just without jump, which is in any case most difficult to handle. yes ofc it would be difficult to predict where the skuttle would go, that was the whole point of it - but the player would have a little more influence than without jump. now if you think its not a good idea to reintroduce it in that way, what about my other suggestion? it would be realistic if skuttles would fall from the sky at a normal rate, after "braking" with their "jets" at the point they wanna go off. so they would drop down to that exact spot and then in most cases instantly explode. thats also a way to nerf it and still keep it in the game. it accomplishes basically 2 things: firstly, you cant just lob a skuttle into enemy base and then check out what cool things to skuttle anymore. you need to scout for a target first, using planes or whatever, to hit something. secondly, you cant make adjustments to your initial choice of landing zone. this makes it also harder to handle terraform, as you need to pick the exact location properly or the skuttle will not land at all. if enemy has made terra around his singu etc, you probably wont be able to skuttle them. |
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So how is what you propose a good gameplay mechanic? |
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how is it not? skuttle ramp already was a great gameplay mechanic, apart from beeing extremely funny. difficult to pull off, yet very rewarding. imo that is what makes a good gameplay mechanic, among other things. i didnt feel it was so much op so far, because the amount of micro and time involved balance it against things that cost more or are less effective, but are way easier to use. my proposals further increase the difficulty of using it properly. also the increased rate of failure increases cost. the way it works is essentially "yes, you can launch a jumping suicide bomb from a ramp and throw it hundreds of meter through the air but then you have to deal with the fact that its jumpjets can only fire for a brief amount of time, not enough to land it safely anywhere but maybe enough to give it that extra boost to get it to the target you wanted to hit" that sounds like fun to me. |
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Doesn't that sort of play go against the principles of ZK's design? ZK seeks to *avoid* micro. The ZK approach to this problem would be to automate that micro - have a simple "unit-launching-platform" building, or a widget that allows you to drag-select a group of of cons and say "build me a Newton-ramp for unit X" or something like that. Something where you take a unit and say "I want to drop this unit *here*". It's not that unit launching is *bad*, it's really freaking cool. It just doesn't seem to fit right with what they're trying to do here. |
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is that so? i never heard of it. what zk does is to allow you to avoid annoying, unnecessary micro of stuff like building mexes, etc. clicking 9000 wreckage pieces one after another to reclaim them, and what else. thats a good thing to avoid. i dont think that can be generalized. avoiding micro for units felt like an option to me always, not something that was intended to take precedence over the players own possibilities. |
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I like to balance assuming infinite micro and then make widgets and gadgets to fill the gaps. This way the game does not break when someone comes along with enough micro to do the activities that were balanced to be high micro. Skuttle launching is many times better than any alternative artillery options. That is the balance problem. |
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imo, one should try to take the micro requerments into account when balancing. And restrict automation to prevent balance issues with micro. |
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So then in an 8v8 you get 3 people to manage the front line and put the rest on launching Skuttles? |
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I think ZK dev are not opposing the idea of automation widget, that's why players can create and add their own widget to ZK if they wanted too. People can keep the widget to themselves, but.... that's not nice :P |
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no matter how much you automate, the micro will shift to a different part of the game. The way you give input to the game will be a limitation in any Real Time game. The only way to get rid of micro is to allow for (tactical) pauses. On skuttles. I think it is gimmicky and relies on dodgy engine mechanics that can change overnight. It should not be a viable to use them as serious artillery (imho) |
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GoogleFrog you just dramatically overestimate the effectivity of it. i said it lots already, in most games skuttle ramps are entirely useless. in very long, porcy games it can be good if one player does it, but he will be entirely busy with it. you have a point when you call it an isolated minigame, as most people cant skuttle and keep attention over the rest of the game at one time. it is of course not a win strategy to have 5 of 8 players throw skuttles, even 2 is too much. its very similar to ecoporc actually, if 5 of 8 players just eco then very likely the other team will just overrun you, same for skuttles. plus you need targets to skuttle. if enemy is beating you with units then youre just wasting time and metal with your ramp. all this essentially means, if youre not playing sandcastles or speedmetal, your ramp is probably not gonna win the game, even if you kill a few valuable things with it. if at any future point someone would program a tool that would allow a less micro intensive approach to the whole thing - tho i cant quite imagine how that should work, as you still have to tell it where to go so you just kinda spare yourself a few clicks - the situation might look different. @[GBC]Spring i agree with on the point of it beeing dodgy, it probably wasnt intended that way with the skuttles stopping mid air and softly levitating to the ground. that you can use newtons and ramps to throw stuff maybe wasnt intended either, i dont know, but it is great. call it emergent design :) it just happened, and its a good thing. so what i made those proposals for is to put skuttles on ramps in a more logical context with what is happening and make it work less like a bug exploit. skuttles wouldnt just ignore gravity anymore, and they wouldnt be able to just instantly stop mid air either. |
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allow Big Bertha to use small units as ammunition |
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I approve of Knorke's idea. Just give it a D-gun command and it automagically grabs the nearest idle unit that's under its weight limit and fires it at the target. |
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Sure there are situations in which it is completely useless. These are also the situations in which things like BB and tacnukes are useless. But once you are in that situation (and if you have the attention) you may as well launch Skuttles to kill structures instead of using tacnukes or BB because Skuttle is that much better. I also meant isolated minigame in that there is very little player interaction.
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yes cause that isn't currently implemented as a unique weapon COUGH JUGGLENAUGHT COUGH |
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"I'm sure 3 reasonably good players could hold all fronts if they had the majority of the resources." y but same goes for eco, if 3 players can hold front to allow for skuttles then they can do the same for eco - even more so of course as the eco will benefit them, and soon skyrocket due to the exponential nature of eco growth. the effectivity of skuttles dont grow with your own investment, rather with that of your enemy. also, if the team has the majority of ressources, they probably gonna win, regardless if they use skuttles or anything else, esp if theyre good enough to hold against 8(!) players with just 3. but what reasonably good players cant do is to make skuttles and anything else at one time, both due to limited microing capabilities as well as likely due to income constraints - even if it was cheap what it really isnt. if you assume 30% go fail, which is rather low, you have like 800 metal for 1 thing to destroy. that can be a very good ratio depending on what you kill but its still not exactly so cheap that you can afford it besides producing other things too. having multiple people throw skuttles is probably extremely annoying to fight against but is not a good idea. compared to other artillery options, well it is mostly better at taking out single structures at long range, but thats pretty much it. berthas very bad accuracy indicates that i wasnt made for that. skuttle ramp dont have continuous fire at no cost at all. bb requires no micro to have it just shell random stuff and little micro to have it shoot specific stuff. compared with silo the silo wins in many cases, ofc in silo range. its 100% accurate, costs are comparable, it has different kinds of ammo, its overall more versatile. it needs a little less micro. skuttle is better and cheaper at killing defenses, but also fails more often at it. if you wanna kill the enemy moho on a small map, youre not going to make a skuttle ramp. |
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You missed the point completely. Player attention distribution is not necessarily linked to team resource distribution. You can have 5 out of 8 players launching Skuttles but only spend 20% of their team's income doing so. So 5 players launching Skuttles is in no way the same as 5 players making energy. Anyway this was meant to show that in this environment it is silly to balance things by an extreme micro requirement. |
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but skuttle launching isnt that cheap. its like making units, you just shoot them through the air. 550 a piece, plus initial investment for newtons and ramp. only in very large games with overcharged econ this will not consume a large part of one players income. but then the high micro cost do matter a lot, since those people could do way more things with their eco than to just throw skuttles, and the enemy team probably will. and whos gonna make all the eco if everybody is just throwing skuttles or holding fronts. |
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no its not. read again, above are reasons why skuttles are better in some, and worse in other situations. no attention distribution is not linked to team ressources distrubution, BUT you need attention to use ressources properly PERIOD. even if those hypothetical 5 players, and you know that is a ridiculous assumption, its just not gonna happen nor work out the way you said, even if those 5 guys glut all their metal to the 3 front guys they most likely just cant use it all. yes they could make some more nanos and just spam the shit out of their factories but its still way, way less effective than making specific units from different factories and have them microed by 16, rather than 6 eyes and hands. all the while 5 people are desperately searching the enemy base (which nobody scouted btw) for fusions to skuttle but they dont find any and so they just go ahead and skuttle mexes, while the enemy already won 15 minutes ago by making units and taking map control. also they arent dumb and spam singus, nukes and annis but instead just take the skuttle rain easy and make some good old ground units. its just totally unrealistic. if it ever was that good, people would already do that and nothing else. they dont. in fact, NOBODY (besides me a few times of which only 1 time worked) uses skuttle ramp in any game on any regular map, and that essentially means : it cannot be that great. |
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Incorrect in general. The saturation point is reasonably low most of the time.
As I said before. Don't use Skuttles when they are not needed. You can't say a unit is not OP if it is unable to win any game by itself.
That would require an infinitely fast metagame which no game has. |
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"The saturation point is reasonably low most of the time." What is that supposed to mean? Ok so then we agree that there is no realistic scenario where it would make sense to have 5 people throwing skuttles. That there are situations where it is strong doesnt prove anything on its own. I believe very much that you are wrong regarding the metagame. I wanna stress out that this statement "if it ever was that good, people would already do that..." is true for any game i ever played online. op strategies are typically found very soon, in fact, banshees were rediscovered the very day their firing arc was increased. same goes for any patch day in any game. that skuttles can be thrown with ramps is well known for a long time, at least since i play here which is about 3 month, but most likely much longer than that. its been practiced on sandcastles since i played the map the first time. you cannot claim that in this very long period of time it just wasnt discovered as the op strategy that it supposedly is. its used on sandcastles a lot because it is great on sandcastles, maybe op, but well, its sandcastles. even if it wasnt a very special map that doesnt represent the average map that is played, its still just one map. on any other map, it was never discovered as op because it just isnt. if you say its op as a long range prescicion artillery, ok that is arguably true -especially because there is no such thing in the game yet-, thats why i made proposals to make it balanced. but the sole fact that it is on average not a successful strategy on normal maps (tested) already shows us that it probably was already balanced, all things considered. |
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Sad that the jumping thing has dominated the discussion instead of the resurrection change. Also, omgtankyclams! I like the idea of a flying con getting resurrection, but it seems redundant on the Athena that *already* can already create units at the front. What I'd love to see would be a new super-sluggish but nano/cost-effective flying con to replace the Crane in the Gunship lab, and give resurrection to that. |
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imo the problem about clams rezzing was that rez was given to a regular con unit that was already ok at what it does. having regular gunship plant cons rezzing stuff will result in the same problem. athena is a thing that you wouldnt normally build anyway, so its probably best to have rez on that, because you will have to make something special just to get the rez ability, not just a few more of something youd have made anyway. |
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I know... it's just that there was a trend of giving special powers to the base cons. In classic CA, all Arm cons could cap and all Core cons could rez. In ZK this has continued with the pew-pew on the Welder, the shield on the Convict, and the cloak/jam on the Rector. I was hoping to see the development of powers on the remaining vanilla-ish cons, not a step back. |
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Does anyone know the link to get the latest version? I'm on linux so no ZK lobby and this means I either download manually or wait until it's available via whatever hosted torrent that Springlobby checks for download. Cheers. |
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sorry for the double post. just realised this thread isn't about 1.0.10.0. Just presumed the latest thread in news was about the latest version O.o |
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spreng@planetbuster:~$ rapid clean-update Using data directory: /home/spreng/.spring Installing: Zero-K v1.0.10.0 [===================================100%======================================] Uninstall Zero-K v1.0.4.25? [y/N]: y Not pinned: zk:revision:6257 spreng@planetbuster:~$ |
