Hammers and 9-Fold Balance

The discussion on thread 888 seems to have touched a nerve.
No one is suggesting an uprising just yet, but there is... talk.

The problem brought up in thread 888 was this:
Players in team games these days fly the hammer flag more than communist Russia.

The reason for this is simple, I think.
After putting the quills on their noobcupine, cloak bots or shield bots are usually the first factory for a new player to make, and Hammers are the longest range units in them. This is because most new players are not familiar with the terrain of the map they are playing on.

Here's what happens next.

New players are, to put it gently, a little less than aggressive. It's just like Proverbs 26:13.
When artillery starts to hit their lovingly built sim-base, the typical response is a lot of hand-wringing and shields when our heroes ought to build radar and mount swift counter-attacks.

You and I know that these generally faze artillery, but noobs are usually too scared.

Sometimes I find that a relatively courageous player is willing to send out a few riots, even scouts, even as a distraction.
When this happens, the enemy hammers get confused or the hammer-producer, assuming it's a newb himself, will run them away to take care of the "threat," which he will immediately assume to be a comm (on radar). Either that or the Unit AI will kick in.

Regardless, given a team game comprised of newbs, the first team to build hammers will often, usually, win out. (NOTE="See game 27561" ; URI="http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/27561")

Ultimately, this is not due to a lack of balance, but more to the fact that 0-K is not just Zero-K. Zero-K is made of about nine games formed by the following criteria:

team OR 1v1
new OR experienced OR veteran
cohesive team OR thrown together (for team games)

Each of the 9 permutations will play differently, and have a different balance of units.

In an expert 1v1, Hammers will be a sideshow, if used at all. Krows, Dets, or Dantes will not even be considered.

In team matches played by cohesive teams, however, they become the game enders.

In a team match played by newbs, with a forest of LLTs and turrets, Hammers will be so effective that one side will accuse the other of cheating.

All sets of players will cry their way to the devs, each with opposite complaints. Because they are each playing a different game, though, they usually have more sense to them than meets the eye.

Hammers are not OP in Zero-K. However, in Zero-K-TN (team noob), they ARE.

This is part of the reason why I applaud the unlock system. It keeps the units that are unbalanced in Zero-K-N from use in that mod, and allows them in Zero-K-E.
Balancing Zero-K requires that we take into account the presence of nooblets in our midst.
A slight nerf to the hammers is just part of the price we have to pay.

This is partly a response to thread 888, but after I keyed it, it seemed like I ought to post a new topic.

A link to thread 888 follows:
http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/888

Hah, that's exactly what I said ~18 hours ago. Licho always agrees with me, because of my shiny elo. shines

Hammers had an accuracy of near zero (it couldn't even hit a Singularity while moving, was nearly as bad as minelaying artillery) and now it's near infinity: can even hit a Glaive. Units in ZK always get OVER-nerfed or buffed I think. :)

After quickly looking over the unit code, look what I've found!
(higher numbers mean higher more error, thus more misses)
accuracy is 350
movingAccuracy was 1400

movingAccuracy was removed ~50 days ago, complains about Hammer started ~30 days ago; there haven't been any serious complains before that, not since CA at least. The change was only a "try" as can be read in the commit message: http://code.google.com/p/zero-k/source/detail?r=3364
I assume GoogleFrog tried to fix the UnitAI gadget (it made Hammers move back and forth when they shouldn't) this way, which is the wrong thing to do it. That's just my guess.

That's just due to micro vs macro. 1v1s play much more different simply because there's more micro requirements per player and that single player HAS TO BE and sometimes even IS aware of everything that happens.
You know, unit balance would be waaaaay different if there weren't any micro requirements: Ticks, roaches, skuttles, cloak, terraforming would all be considered OP. Or probably not, because units would always spread up and roaches would never make cost. It's hard to tell.
A good example for this is StarCraft. There's an AI that makes excessive use of Mutalisks, simply because of how powerful a swarm of them can be when spreading up, when every single unit hit&runns, flees, etc at some 20k APM. Units meant to counter them suddenly fail even to kill a single Mutalisk.

Now imagine that with Fleas. Kill any builder, llt, mex, solargen before it's even constructed. Use any objects collisionvolume and any terrain perfectly to stay outside of los.

The problem is Skasi that they were the only unit afaik to have a movingAccuracy. Everything else has the same accuracy moving or stationary and the difference in just the hammer wasn't documented anywhere. It was like a secret that only the most veteran veterans knew about.

I think it would be better to make hammer high-trajectory instead, as that is a characteristic visible ingame.

Well in the past I would alway run at hammers and kill them. Now if you try that you get hit.

> You don't even know what moveAccuracy does.

Go fix the engine wiki then: http://springrts.com/wiki/Weapon_Variables

Jasper, which kind of units? Raiders are not hit by Hammers, other units like assaults should be able to shrug off their damage.

I would say the number one issue with killing Hammers with mobile units is being killed by the turrets built around the Hammers, not the damage from the Hammers themselves. I'm leaning towards 'games are more crowded and porcy' as a cause, other artillery is more common too.

> Go fix the engine wiki then:
You fix the wiki, my account there apparently contains illegal characters for wiki login and noone can be bothered to fix it.

Or defenders need a longer build time

"when our heroes ought to build skuttles and skuttle swiftly"
fix'd

Remember you changed hammer Google. You can say as much as you like that this didnt make them OP and they still cant hit raiders, but when you have a big pack of them, some shots do connect.

There -are- counters, and it -is- largely noobiness, but -i- lost a couple times to the new hammer metagame when i came back from vacation. It shifts the game just that little bit towards shields and artillery, which isnt where it needs to be imo. So I think there is grounds for a hammer nerf, especially in light of googles changes.