Another great blog thanks Frog.
I'm a little confused though as you seem to be suggesting that this has been somewhat removed or is less of a thing than it used to be?
I had noticed that units (currently) do a LOT better retreating than they do attacking and had wondered about writing something on this. I think this is a part of why I hate the current Pyro - it's easy to kill if it moves forward, but very hard to kill when it is running away. To be fair though, this applies to all raiders currently - one of the worst for it is a Kodachi - that thing will kill an almost unlimited number raiders if it's running away.
It leads to the bizarre situation where to kill an enemy raider, I actually need to spend 2-4x the resources to corner it and kill it. I could, however, send my units to their base and give them a similar problem and just run away when attacked - I'd planned on experimenting with this sometime. Counterintuitively, I think it actually gives a very large advantage to the attacker if they know not to charge in and just leave units as a threat.
I think this actually leads to a lot of micro in the general battleline of a game now I think about it - units moving forward do poorer than units retreating - the maneuver function seems to make your units chase enemies as well, which I think means they can be baited like this.
Thinking back onto TA, I think this was a thing too - retreating units did seem to perform better provided their turrets. However... In TA the speed of the turrets of units was slow and sometimes decisive.
- Potential fixes - all with problems - I think the turret speed might be the only viable one, but it would have too many other implications.
- Speeding the projectiles with respect to unit speed to reduce the bonus.
- Forcing units to shoot in the direction they are moving/facing.
- Limiting the turret speed of units to give attackers a chance to close before being shot.
- Gallilean projectiles - I feel like this would work except for artillery getting a run up to throw their spear... I remember playing a jetpack FPS called tribes and it definitely had these hahaha - your brain calculated it after a while.
