Players leaving/moving to BAR?

Personally I don't think Zero-K gets justice given the high quality and excellent gameplay - it's an unfairness. It's clear that being behind the curve graphically is a part of this. BAR-quality graphical assets and website would make a real difference, but wishing for a bunch of artists and webdevs to appear and start working on ZK won't accomplish anything. That said, injustice doesn't matter too much so long as there's a community around the game, so it would be good to see an excited and growing community. In lieu of huge investment into graphical resources, gameplay change for the sake of change could generate some interest around new players and old ones, when compared to an ever more polished but relatively static game.

I like the idea of merging the player base.

Perhaps his point is that others should step up and do more. You're all part of the dev team in a loose sense. There is no hard barrier.

quote: If you prefer the game staying in a stable sweetspot (which it is, I believe) AND modification itself is relatively inaccessible there will be no developers stepping up. Saying things like 'just make a mod yourself and test it out and then we'll take a look' effectively becomes a dead curse. Previously, I argued that a design overhaul could be done by getting as much people as possible engaged: opening a competition, forum threads, listening to eachother ideas, etc. If things get picked up from that, even some small changes, people get motivated to contribute more. It could create enthusiasm, 'momentum'.

quote: I see ZK as stagnant on the content side, how long has it been since ZK got new units? I'd try to get people to accept some of the ideas and content of mods like Future wars into the main game.

These are decent comments, but there is a question behind them that needs asking. What is the end goal of such development? I would want to see a goal in mind for a design overhaul, or at least some guiding principals for what sorts of new units to add. Otherwise it just feels like messing with things for the sake of messing with things. Changing things for the sake of it isn't nearly as satisfying as changing things to make the game better in some way.

I don't doubt that changing things for the sake of it would be, in some sense, effective. People like change. I shifted to being a bit more reactionary and experimental with balance changes (some time around 2017) for this reason. A change can either be an overhaul of an old thing/system, or the addition of something new. Both have issues, and both seem to make the game overall worse (on average) if purely done for the sake of making a change.

• Overhauling old things always results in some portion of people who prefer the previous version. Superfluid wasn't just a change for the sake of a change, but it would still be interesting to hear it was an example of the sort of design overhauls you're suggesting.
• Adding something new is less likely to disappoint existing players, but there is only so much of this a game can take before it collapses under the weight of its systems. This has arguably happened to long running games like Path of Exile and Dota 2. New ZK players sometimes comment that there are too many units, that it's overwhelming. Factorio avoids such a collapse by keeping the core game simple while leaving the hardcore complex stuff to modding.

All this is to say that I've ruled out cynically messing with ZK just for the sake of change. And my overall take on how to design a ZK-like game already exists. So to see significant change we would probably need someone else to come in and improve upon ZK. But there would be significant constraints, such as not adding too much complexity (to keep the game approachable) and not annoying too many existing players. Keeping the campaign and AI working is also important. This is a tricky needle to thread for anyone, so I suspect finding someone to improve graphics or sound would be much easier. In fact katastrophe is working on sound and graphical tweaks (mostly from BAR engine work) come in all the time.

Rather than finish with "This approach seems impossible" I'll finish with an adjacent idea that just about anyone could pursue. What if we kept base ZK essentially stable but spiced things up with wild stat tweak events. Maybe assaults would have 20% more HP and speed, or light turrets worse, cheaper commanders, or a crazy buff to an underused unit. A sort of "weekend event" schedule of quick mods was one of the ideas I had in mind when I made Quick Stat Tweaks. Most ideas would be pretty easy to configure and set on an event autohost.

• We could have a backlog of these things and routinely run them perhaps every second week.
• If an idea comes up that can't be easily quick stat tweaked, then it's good motivation to make it tweakable, then run it in a month or so after the next stable.

This would create some variety for players and make game internals more accessible to modders

The main task of quick stat tweak events would be social. Someone has to collect and polish the ideas (probably best if most of them eventually come from players, for engagement), announce that an event is happening, and keep an eye on it to ensure its working. We would also have to gather feedback. Do people need a normal teams room during the event, what about the coop or FFA hosts? Just silently making a new host with some tweaks on it won't do anything.

See http://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Quick_Stat_Tweaks

About the graphics:
I wrote recently that I would want to make the graphics worse. That was a bit provocative, but I just found good examples of what I mean.
So far, most people seem to take BAR as a kind of beacon for zk`s graphical overhaul/improvement. I am not quite sure this will work in the very long run. Someone already pointed out that BAR itself is basically just acceptable by modern standards, and those evolve quite fast. This makes the overhaul a continuous endeavour, not something you just do once every 10 years or so. What I meant with "worse" is probably not what you think of. Look at this:


(From: "Pharaoh - A new Era" Intro-Animation)

Does this look better or worse than zk? I would say it is worse on a technical level: Most objects are drawn with big chunks comprised of single colours (look at the plants and rocks in the foreground). This is balanced a bit by the simulation of mist/athmospheric diffusion that is generated by "bleaching" the colours in the background (mountainside) and spraying some half-transparent white over parts of the foreground (lower right corner, double-function use as fog and amplifier of the sun-reflections in the water). The only more sophisticated parts of this image are the reflections on the water, in which you can see how effective lighting is to elevate it over MS-Paint-assosiations.
Now, same graphics with a heavier use of lighting:



To be clear: I do not say zk SHOULD look like this, I am aware that this would require a lot of work and a good bit of "taste". But I would like to give this input notheless, because it seems noone thought even just in that direct so far. The upside of these "abstracted" visuals is that they don`t age nearly as fast. It would also help to differentiate zk from both TA and BAR.

quote: my experience with TA-likes with BAR's economy model is that it adds a bunch of bad incentives: - puts emphasis on growing economy instead of coordinating team to attack : players trying to build units to engage the enemy can easily become useless as they fall behind the eco race - optimal late game army compositions tend to converge to build queues with the highest weight units together with the lowest weight units (imagine a team in ZK with 1000 m/s income that builds 4 units : swifts for fighter screen, paladin, detriment and glaive spam) - very high unit counts create performance issues

- with vast eco the "optimal" late game mix in bard is:
--5 labs making t1 units (provides scouting, fodder, and AA)
--1 t3 strider lab making artillery
--1 t3 strider lab making Krogs (mainline)
--3 labs making mid range fire support like sniper or morty (anti-enemy light)

ZK actually used to have a similar late game in the early days, the preferred unit mix was:
- 1 lab making rokko
- 1 lab making morty(was it called hammer back then? it got massively nerfed because it was actually good)
- area cloakers
- fleas
- occasional heavy assault (usualy goli)
- raiders (usually glaive)
- cons to reclaim

imo the ZK meta has deteriorated massively from its old heyday

quote: I guess you haven't spectated a large lobpot game in a while?

i have, its terrible... the number of units in the entire map is the number of units both sides used to throw into the meat grinder as cannon fodder every few minutes. its static and boring, we've basically devolved to trench warfare at this point.

im sad the OG Zero K replays are gone, anyone have them archived?

i tried to DL something like the 89th ZK game ever but no luck
http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/89

the few casts of early team games i could find, but even off the top of it you can see the air game is more active and there is far less focus on static arty lines, most porc and defenses were countered with units back then (not sure, but probably because units are OP)

ddaboqepp

why don`t you mod it to your wishes finally and see if people like it?
You could also do some work on the lighting of certain maps...

My first take on those videos is "we had a lot to learn about the game back then". Any game feels more exciting when it is fresh and it is easier to find and learn new things. (Corollary: A single game cannot stay in that state forever.) Sab and Forever are (some of) the highest rated players in those games and are still strong today, but I think they (along with everybody else) have learned a lot and become a lot stronger in the last nine years.

Certainly in the first video (on Titan Duel) I think air might look more interesting because one or both teams are making mistakes. Balls of Raptors circling each other above one team's clearly controlled territory isn't good play now and I don't remember any reason why it would have been good play then. It is a little less bad in this instance because neither team is making ground-based AA other than Pickets, but it still isn't really achieving anything. Besides the occasional Phoenix run, neither air player seems to have much effect on the land game.

It's a bit hard to tell what is going on throughout the second game because the camera zooms in a lot, but it seems like north team underbuilds AA against a gunship + planes team in a 4v4 at a point in time when Revenant/Black Dawn was in the meta, and gets punished for it. I think you could in principle see something similar happen today, but people in high level games are generally more aware of the need to make AA in such situations.

(Also north team has two jumpfacs and builds a pretty limited selection of units from them. I don't think ZK would have stayed interesting if jump/hover/tank/amph had remained as limited as they used to be. Even though one could argue that buffing those factories broke the game in some ways.)

The third video is a player PoV from (if I remember the old rank symbols correctly) a pretty low level game. Seems like the northeast player gets air control for free and then just makes mass Raven.

quote: - 1 lab making rokko - 1 lab making morty(was it called hammer back then? it got massively nerfed because it was actually good) - area cloakers - fleas - occasional heavy assault (usualy goli) - raiders (usually glaive) - cons to reclaim

This composition sounds like it would perform quite poorly against cloaked Snitch (I guess at the time this would have been Roach + Eraser?), plus something to clean up the assaults afterwards. Maybe you're going so far back in time that that was not viable for some reason, but as far as I know cloaked shield-bomb has been theoretically feasible and potentially strong for far longer than it has enjoyed its current level of popularity. As a community we got better at the game.

quote: raptors used to be pretty immune to ground AA, and swifts used to be beasts capable of serving as anti-ground. this is pre-air nerf/aa buff. Fighters back then were the meta because swifts were actually a pretty big threat.

Nothing about this makes orange charging their Raptors into south's base at 9:55-ish in the first video and then losing them all (along with the reclaim) in a long, drawn-out dogfight anything other than a mistake that strong air players today would be quite unlikely to make.

quote: remember the 10-20 swift balls that we used to make on big maps because they could shred cons and stop expand?

What about them? You still see this sort of thing occasionally today in small teams games on large maps, but if they are used offensively they tend to get punished by opposing Swifts.

quote: roach/tick is a small scale tactic, in that situation you may knock out 5 rokko, that would do exactly nothing in the grand scheme of things

Cloaked Snitch can feel pretty oppressive in the current game, even when it is not often getting better trades than for five rockos or similar cost each. (Which would be making nearly triple cost, at present numbers anyway.)