Chicken Balance?

I don't think I'm super alone in feeling that chickens are a bit inbalanced. I've played... maybe 20-50 or so games over my time in zk? so, maybe not a whole lot but this always felt pretty strongly

Chickens feel pretty balancced, up to about lobbers. maybe some games swap the order pidgeons and spikers come but it always felt pretty balanced, if not a bit slow.

The part I'm kinda eh about is after lobbers. it always felt like after you survive lobbers and cockatrices the only real threats left are blobbers. Dodos and blimpies can maybe sometimes snipe a funnel but other than that it's just all about cerb/aegis vs blobbers. DDMs really just shut down all the non arty ground chix, even tiamats die to a few DDMs, while blobbers require serious investment in aegis and cerb to fight. Always felt like they needed to be buffed by to at least 2-5x the heath

Idk, it just kinda feels like the diffcaulty of chix is determined solely by the amount of blobbers the chix gods give you. Maybe we should also make waves more varied with up to 4-5 chix types in the end game

Maybe I'm all wrong. I did just watch a bunch of players roll 2 waves of blobbers and just die

Just my 2c

So something like this?

• Buff things that are immediately pre-lobber.
• Buff the weird stuff that happens post-lobber.
• Maybe there is room to make artillery that disables DDM (long ranged AoE web slinger for slow damage?) to give the more assaulty chickens more of a chance.
• Maybe Cockatrice MK II could be developed.

In general, for chicken, a bunch of improvements to graphics and animation have been done by Forboding Angel and a few in BAR. The chickens are all PD, released ages ago for various games in Spring. Someone looking into chicken balance/role redesign should probably start with the updated models rather than what we've got. They may be lacking updated visuals for some roles we added later (Wurm maybe?), which is why starting with the graphics update seems best. Removing some niche thing like Wurm seems worth an update.

Here is a pretty empty ticket: https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K/issues/3634

Brackman I don't think for cost matters.