quote:
But to me, ZK sea combat always seemed a bit dry, like it could use a few more units. Maybe a really big battleship that's vulnerable to submarines? Or perhaps a minelaying hover unit like Dampener from ZW?
I know the balance here is even more delicate than usual, but I just think it would be cool to have more variety of units. |
From my perspective, the main barrier to more sea units - perhaps even a whole second sea factory - is the modelling/3D art requirements. As modelling tasks go ships could be relatively easy since the animation requirements are minimal, but I simply don't have the skills. If I had a large amount of time at my disposal to work on Zero-K I would probably spend it on Planetwars rather than trying to learn 3D art skills.
However, if somebody else has modelling skills and is interested in contributing to a second sea factory, I think it is the easiest place to make a factory-sized addition to Zero-K. As the post discusses sea does have some unique design constraints but also has opportunities. More importantly, a new land factory has to fit well within the already very complicated land metagame of eight factories. It would be far easier to harmonise a second ship factory with the three existing sea-going factories. (Or to create two new ship factories, distributing the existing ship units between them both.)
My word of advice to anybody thinking about making a factory-sized contribution to Zero-K is that you are going to need buy-in from the other stakeholders, which means both the existing developers/designers and the wider community. I think in principle a broadening of the sea game would be welcomed, but there is more to it than that. All of the recent significant design changes I can remember which came from outside the core dev team (my 2016 sea rework,
RyMarq's changes to sea before that,
dyth68's Funnelweb rework) had the following things in common:
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They were addressing a part of the game commonly viewed as deficient
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Their development involved frequent iteration and feedback from the core developers. Some of your cool ideas are going to get shot down for technical reasons or because they don't fit the vision for the rest of the game. You will need to be able to accept that with equanimity.
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They were frequently tested by the community. At any rate this was important to my sea contributions.
quote:
Was thinking something more like this short-ranged Vanquisher I saw in the unused units wiki. Did this ship ever make it to the unit roster at one point? Interestingly, the article does not mention it. |
The Vanquisher model is, pretty transparently, two Corsair models mashed together. It is quite ugly. If it was ever in the game it was well before my time as a player, let alone developer.
A lot of stuff about specific decisions or units didn't make it into the article. I feel like the blog series is more about the philosophy of game design than a minutely-detailed history of Zero-K, and at any rate (for sea especially) one must understand the philosophy for the smaller-scale decisions to start making sense. Also Steam posts only have so much space.
The stories about Serpent and Surfboard made it into the blog because removing units in that era of Zero-K was pretty remarkable, and in the case of Surfboard the fact that Zero-K doesn't have so "standard" a thing as a sea transport is remarkable in itself. Serpent's story is very strongly connected to the philosophy of Zero-K's design, really more so than the balance - Serpent had such terrible HP/DPS/movement numbers that in most games it wasn't very strong, but in the games where it
was strong it was extremely unfun.
Some random trivia to whet the appetite:
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The 2016 sea rework more-or-less predates all of the "modern" 1v1 sea maps. I made Shimmershore, Aurelian and Izki Channel afterward so that we had something to play sensible games on. Test versions of the rework were mostly played on Inculta Wet. This is a very big map and tends to favour fast-moving units, so Siren was outrageously overtuned when the 2016 sea rework went live. For lack of any better option we also played some games on Titan Duel using a modoption to raise the water level, but the resulting underwater trenches played havoc with Amph usage.
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Envoy (at the time, Crusader) used to have an anti-sub depth charge weapon - you can still see the launcher on the back. This was removed because it made the unit a bit too all-purpose. Siren retains the hybrid-weapon idea, but you can't really use it as your main artillery unit normally.
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On the subject of Siren's missile weapon, a significant part of the reason it exists is so that Shipfac has a way to handle Urchins on shore-cliffs. This often isn't a big concern on modern maps, but in the bad old days Sail Away was popular.
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Hunter used to be a riot unit. It was bigger, slower, and not terribly good.
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Mistral (at the time Enforcer) used to cost a lot more, be a lot bigger, and have nearly-artillery range.
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At some point in development of the 2016 rework, the Corsair model had the sonic gun and the Siren model had the shotgun.
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The reworked ship factory is (quite loosely) based on World War-era navies. Much earlier navies would not map well onto the sorts of weapons and vehicles portrayed by Zero-K, and more recent navies are dominated by the influence of air power, nuclear armaments, et cetera in a way which did not seem like it would map into compelling Zero-K-style gameplay.
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Reef used to have a small-radius antinuke. Even more outrageously, Scylla (at the time Leviathan) had an antinuke. The game is much better now for Antinukes not being cloakable or concealable underwater.
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Once the antinuke was removed, Leviathan/Scylla was a very poor unit. As far as I recall, the main change which made the unit viable again was to double (!) its buildpower.
