New Sumo

Headbutting?

quote: heat rays did a perfectly fine job at rioting

No, Heat Rays turned Sumo into an anti-everything-other-than-air monster.

Give it teeth?

edit: Oh also, Klon here is proof that old heatray Sumo was op

Sumo has had a lot of problems, but in particular is its assault ability (not its skirmisher ability), which makes it overshadow jack.

Impulse guns are a great option precisely because they are useless against statics.

quote: that said, im not entirely against newtons, but as more of a supplementary thing.

I.E. diluting interesting mechanics to dumb the game down.

quote: I.E. diluting interesting mechanics to dumb the game down.

what? i dont think its about dumbing the game down, its about not having a "weapon" that produces extremely random and at times just odd results as the main weapon on a unit this expensive.

if there was a unit the size of say a moderator that had this and only this purpose, it would be another thing.

i always liked these whacky things that you can do in zk, and i think most people do. just they should also be useful overall, and not just plain whacky.

Expensive units generally should be more specialized/weird, and not just "something that also goes pew but is harder to kill".

The design goal is that pricey/heavy units do not obsolete cheaper/lighter units.

One possible method is to make the pricer units be specialized/weird. I think this method is fun and interesting.

One possible method it that the pricer unit is less cost efficient than the cheaper units. I think this method is boring. I think the major incentive then to build the more expensive multirole unit is that micro-managing one unit is much easier than micro-managing a mixed army of units.

Outlaw waves defeat one of its supposed counter classes.

There was a lengthy discussion in #zkdev earlier today, and some design-space constraints were agreed on:

1) That Sumo should have its current hitpoints order of magnitude.
2) That Sumo should keep its fun attack jump ability.
3) That Sumo should be rioty.
4) That Sumo should have broad natural classes (skirmishers, antiheavy)
5) That Sumo should not be a better, heavier jack with more survivability.
6) That Sumo should keep its current weight and factory allegiance.
7) That Sumo should be fun.

Newton Sumo satisfies most of this, but reportedly its gravguns are fairly good against skirmishers.

Outlaw wave Sumo automatically counters antiheavy units.

It has been argued that a heatray sumo satisfies most of these, but its close-range DPS makes it step significantly on Jack's toes, and the historical heatray Sumo was pretty good at killing skirmishers by combining its range and the jump ability. The degree at which it was capable of doing this is debatable, but i think it generated sufficient dislike from people who were not noobs. I like heatray aesthetics more than i like units with non-damaging weapons, but it loses too many points on those.

A damaging Sumo weapon that is neither gravity nor heatray basically has to satisfy those parameters:

1) It cannot be effectively combined with jump to kill skirmishers with an efficiency that is higher than an arbitrary low margin, provided competent counterplay by the skirmisher player.
2) It should not have an excessively short range or have adjacency bonuses that would make its optimal use-case point-blank.
3) It should be decently effective against things that riots are good against.

It seems that it is very hard to design such a weapon because range extension by jump is immensely powerful; and any weapon whose range in combination with jump is sufficiently small to not do nasty things to skirmishers, is basically melee.

If there does not exist a solution in the space defined by those constraints, perhaps some of them could be lifted.

Maby sumo by its design is a really close relative to the jack? Both jump in order to attack. One has splash and the second one a huge ... jack? Both have enourmous hp. By current design it IS a WORSE jack. It cannot attack structures, it is even slower and more costly.
If you want it to be fun, rioty and keep its current wreght and factory allegiance and weight, have its current hp - seriously give it a death roll (its like 3rd time i am posting abaut this).