zero-k would be more fun without aspis/aegis.

too many shields ruins the fun and makes team games long and tedious since the shields not only recharge each other but also really limit the avialalbe strategy against them.
i was wondering why i had more fun in BAR lately when i always prefered zero-k.
there is no shields in BAR, (except one static that only repel cinetic projectiles.) thus making unit warfare movement dependent instead of overly defended position and shield balls which counters are all few and exepensive. (thunder airplane, emp missile, burrowed bombs, tremor, merlin).

i am not against the funnelweb since it is expensive and has a niche anti emp protection.
other shield bots units are fine too. they will stil be as strong as regular shield balls except that they wont be able to tank like crazy anymore and be actually vulnerable to fire like stated on the wiki.

i am not advocating for deleting aspis/aegis of the game as anyone can just disable them as they like in the loby options but i hope to raise some reflexion about that matter. the game needs to be both balanced and fun.
most of the time, in a team game, the team with a shield bot player will win if the opponents don't have one.
too many people complaining that shield bots are too strong or too annoying to play agianst / and shield balls too sturdy to crack except with extreme mesures... well the fix might be as simple as getting rid of the problematic unit.

personally i don't find overusing shields for protection and shieldbots ball fun at all.

On the contrary, I believe that Shildbots is partly an example of a good balance of defensive bots.

First of all, the shield system in Zero K is unique.
Secondly, shields consume part of your economy for their existence.
Thirdly, shields are susceptible to counterplay tools associated with a bunch of different bundles that can deal damage in area or massive counterattacks with good timing. For example, Tremor, rockets, fire artillery, invisible mines, Berta, ect.
Fourth, the shields are forced to play off the snowball. The team that takes the shields bets on a long game and loses at the beginning of the game.

On one hand, shieldballs have been continuously nerfed to the point where I find them unviable in 1v1.

On the other hand, the strong counters to shieldball has been continuously nerfed aswell. Area cloaker has been nerfed which nerfs snitch as a counter aswell. Skuttle has been nerfed. Thunderbird has been nerfed. Widow has been nerfed which was useful for stunning lone Felons without screening or Outlaws. Tremor has been nerfed aswell.

On the third hand, countering the shieldball with more general counters is simply a matter of avoiding fighting the shieldball and then concentrating your forces to destroy the shieldball in one go when you have enough forces.
So in a uncoordinated teamgame, this might make you feel helpless against a shieldball, because countering it, requires teamplay.

So yeah, you are correct in your analysis from an uncoordinated teamgame perspective.

Building up a shieldball is boring because because it makes you relatively weak in the beginning of the game and you basically have to hide behind your teammates so you don't get overrun by several enemy players.
In the midgame, if someone goes for dedicated counters, they can still attrition your shieldball if they go for dedicated counters like cloaked Snitches and Likhos. Every time you expose your shieldball you risk getting blown-up.

On the fourth hand, if you don't have dedicated counters, and not a big enough army to fight a shieldball, you are simply helpless against it and you need help from your teammates to counter it.

TL:DR
git gud. use teamplay. ask for help and coordinate with your team to counter shieldballs

the problem is the snowball effect, as stated various times in the forum. get enough and you get invincibility. mostly affects big team games.

suggestions:
* limit recharge and or recharge sharing. probably 1 shield can receive from only 2 other shields or recharge can be only 1.5x the normal recharge of a single shield. (numbers to be fine-tuned) this does barely affect 1v1 if at all.
* cooldown after a hit. shield cannot recharge for 3? seconds after taking damage. (numbers to be fine-tuned)

after i read some of your posts i noticed something..

i believe you like the idea of villans Cliver5 mostly because you mentioned them like 12 times spread accross your forum posts.. but i unsure that shieldbots are 'criminals' as this line of thinking implies they did something they are not supposed to do..

if i was going to superimpose a fictional reality upon this game then imho its probable that a hedgemony of autonomous millitaries had actualy already declared everything opposing war criminal.. probably the ability to wage war would have been indoctrinated and the concensus streemlined by any athoratarian self governing stratocracy simmilar to WW1/2 where you could be arrested or killed for anti war propaganda.

so in this game units that fight are probably concidered innocent in a strange kind of way.. since the laws of the lore; are the morals of; aichients so bereft of humanity that the warmth of there once human hearts faded long before the last of the dying stars.

however i understand that you may wish to continue to vicariously anthropomorphize an extra layer of conflict within the psyche of the units themselves and thats ok if you like that kind of thing..

now i dont play public team games in ZK much, but when you all say "shield ball" im assuming you mean people just welding 40 aspis together and walking into your base unharmed?

i just checked the metal values on things, it takes 2400 to get a silo with both a shockley and an EOS, and with aspis being 600 a piece, that means that you dedicating the same amount of metal that they need to for 4 aspis units (before factoring in the cost of actual combat forces) gets you the exact tools you need to turn a few aspIS into some aspWAS

now i've never actually seen one of these before myself, so i dont know how truly bad it is, but the metal costs seem to check out in my head, and if you need more than one silo to cover your whole base, you probably have enough metal to afford it because a base that big oughta be producing metal

and if there's water, invest in a reef, those missiles are a lot cheaper than the shockleys, can stockpile more, and the reef is mobile, plus it's a landing pad to carry a likho or napalm buddy around for the cleanup job

another thing that might be useful, is a buncha puppies and halberds set to hold fire rushing in together, they have similar enough movement speeds that you shouldnt need to use formation and slow the pups down, and since puppies have lower attack range than aspis shields, this means that they should only attack once inside and the halberds will hopefully keep the fire off the puppies long enough to let them in, after all what's a player going to do? manually tell their units to shoot each puppy individually? (unless there's a command to attack specifically each of one type of unit in an area, like how there is for reclaiming, even then the halberds are fat enough to body-block some projectiles)
plus puppies deal a small AOE with their damage which further punishes units for being all balled up under a shield together

this strat doesnt seem too bad since if it's late enough for a shieldball then there's probably wrecks for puppy treats, and halberds are pretty cheap for how sturdy they are (210M for 4350EHP!)

only problem i can think up rn is that there's probably going to be thugs and stuff in there, which have much smaller shields that the pups will bump into, how do overlapping shields handle AOE damage?

if you can give me some examples of what a standard shieldball is composed of (which units and how many of each on average), i can take to sandbox mode to test some methods to crack it and share my results here once i do

i have returned from testing, i just went and made what i think a common shieldball would be, it contained 25 aspis and 5 of each other unit from the shieldbot factory (minus snitch and convict), which totaled out to be 24,800 metal slightly more than a detriment

so, i limited myself to half that budget to find a solution that was mobile and doesnt use the previously mentioned "few and expensive" counters

my first plan was one that worked well enough i think, 100 gnats and 15 pyros (11,800 metal), send gnats in first, then have pyros moving in time to arrive as soon as shots start firing, the EMP from the gnats shut down a LOT of the shields pretty quick, and stopped a lot of return fire that would have hit the pyros, and the pyros able to do full AOE burn damage through the now shut down shields really gave the bots a nasty kick in their shielded pants

not total victory though, since a few survivors were left, 4 rogues, 3 outlaws, 2 thugs, 2 felons, and 2 vandals, though all at half health and with no shields

so while not total destruction, i think it works good enough, those few units are pretty scary still, but definitely not going to breach your late-game base, and since it's both faster and has more terrain access than a shieldball, they cant run away, keep in mind this was less than half the budget of the shieldball and i forgot to remove some of the caretakers i had up from earlier testing, so they also had the healing from 3 caretakers

im not usually one to just say "git gud" and call it a day, but i do agree with PLT_Godde, if you can almost completely destroy a shieldball with half the materials used to create the shieldball, and not using any of the counters that people dislike using (which btw are still good counters and are other options to help possibly make the metal input needed that much lower!), then i think you're just doing something wrong

EDIT:
i went even tougher and did 25 aspis and 10 of each other shield unit (again minus snitch and convict), now this one is very tough to deal with while still only using half their budget, i never did beat them, the main issues i run into on this version are the fact that felons and thugs have smaller shields than aspis, and the 300DPS aura while inside the shield from the outlaws, this greatly reduces the effectiveness of the main anti-shield tactic of mine, running inside and jumpscaring them, my best bet was to use a ton of pyros to run in like on the smaller test, and then hope that the enemy is either not using attack move so they dont retreat, or that they forget the pyro leaves a burning area behind on death, this resulted in about 25% - 50% of the ball destroyed depending on if they were running away, and if they did or did not walk over the after-fire

so yeah, i suppose if they have an army worth almost 35k in value, and you're stuck with only half that, you might just need to use missiles, cause at the end of the day this never was about "there's no counterplay to that strategy", it was about "i dont want to use the counterplay to that strategy"

i thought gnats get shredded by fellon?

quote: Aspis was nerfed with about 16% cost a few months ago

cost mostly affects 1v1. the problem is snowballing in lobpot, where cost has 1) a lesser impact 2) doesnt adress snowballing