Vehicle antiheavy idea/neon

This might be silly, but I'm posting it anyway.

Dominatrix could lose its capture beam and gain a weapon which deals real damage with the catch that its DPS would be dependent on the max HP of its current target.

It could be along the lines of DPS = X + Y * max_health_of_target

X would ensure it wouldn't die to a single Flea or Glaive, but would still be small enough to prevent it from being useful against cheap stuff. Y would be large enough to make it a formidable counter to high HP units.

Thoughts?

quote: DPS would be dependent on the max HP of its current target.

I think that's a good idea for a weapon/unit but what's so bad about capture beam vehicle? Capture weapon is an interesting feature, some of the more memorable 1v1s I've played revolved around winning with domis. Seems a waste to remove good features. I wouldn't be opposed to having % hp dmg weapon on some other new unit though.

Capture weapon is stupid to use because its the only weapons in which the damage can be un-done. The more you use a domi, the less you are incentivized to use it because if the domi dies you risk undoing all the damage you have done.

...but on the other hand,

Capturing things is !FUN!.

Any % damage unit would become an extreme generalist(unless it has low range or something). I don't see how having a small X would help with this. How would you balance being able to melt reapers, but not do the same to ravagers? Anything you do to make it worse vs ravagers makes it worse vs reapers as well.

The percentile damage would be around a third as effective vs. ravager as against reaper. That seems like the least of our worries.

It's generalist, sort of. The metal worth of damage dealt per second basically scales off the cost of an opposing unit instead of inversely with hp/cost ratio. This means it would still be effective vs. anything costly, but even more so if that thing is both costly and tanky.

Scaling it properly would be difficult. If it kills reapers easily that would have an enormous effect on the matchup (would banisher/pillager do the job though?). Since it scales off cost, being able to kill a reaper effectively would also have it killing Detrminent at about 30x the efficiency it killed the reaper at. Do we really want to make a unit that broad? Any unit that can defeat reaper for cost with a flat percentile weapon would kill everything larger with ever greater efficiency, negating all escalation preemptively.

This could be circumvented partially by making the percentile damage small while adding a flat base damage. This however would make it fairly effective vs flea an other raider. Maybe if it then had the same large lock-on/reload time it'd work?

dont see why lveh need to be able to beat tanks in lategame. the claim was always that its ok that veh just rolls over tanks in early game because thats the way veh are.

i think thats stupid, but if that is the way it is, then tanks should consequently roll over veh if they make it into late game. so by definition any vehicle antiheavy needs to be at least as bad as panther at their job. domi probably still is way too useful.

(and yeah ravagers do beat reapers for cost if you pick your fights right)

idea: what about if welder gun had enough dps to beat a scorcher 1v1? this way tanks could actually expand vs vehicle.

It doesn't, it's not even close. I don't think it should either.

Tank has a playable, but weak-ish earlygame. In the midgame they compensate with a nice power spike and I quite like this dynamic.

That said it can be a bit hard to deal with multiple Reapers when playing vehicles. I don't think Reaper is overpowered in itself, but light vehicles lack reliable antiheavy and it shows.

My view is that if I want the tool for a job, within reason I should not need to facswitch to access that tool.

When I say tools in this context, I mean broad functions like 'anti heavy', 'artillery', 'skirmisher', 'force multiplier'. Functionality and efficiency of the tools may differ per fac, but really I'd expect every fac to have at least some kind of tool for each situation.

What is the lveh tool to fighting mixed Reapers & Banishers in 3+ size groups? 'Winning the game with lveh before this happens' is not a valid response.

are there any replays to back up that? it seems to me people generally avoid starting as tanks in 1v1s in high end games.

quote: What is the lveh tool to fighting mixed Reapers & Banishers in 3+ size groups? 'Winning the game with lveh before this happens' is not a valid response.

a) why is not a valid response? the response to tank weakness in early game is "well theyre good at late game".

b) its possible, ravagers make cost vs both if done right. (especially vs banishers who have about same hp as ravagers.)

quote: a) why is not a valid response? the response to tank weakness in early game is "well theyre good at late game". b) its possible, ravagers make cost vs both if done right. (especially vs banishers who have about same hp as ravagers.)

In response to A) - because ZK is built around rock-paper-scissors counter structures. Having no counter to relatively generalist units like reaper in a fac means the fac is fighting without scissors. It denies players the ability to adjust their unit compositions to fight heavies and means they just have to porc or spam ravagers - both mindless. I think that sucks.

In response to B) - I disagree pretty strongly. Scorchers/Ravagers get chopped up peicemeal without afflicting attrition against that composition, assuming both sides have porc to retreat back into (as per any real game) and both sides are competent.

there are soft counters to assaults in every fac, vehicle has at least 2: wolverine, scorcher. why is it necessary to have a harcounter? (they already have one, which is winning before enemy makes a single reaper).

the problem of not being able to adapt is much worse for tanks, which have no counter for scorcher (panther trading about even means it no a counter). its also boring to have to spam otherwise useless panthers just to avoid getting chewed up by scorchers, while getting outexpanded either way.

if youre assuming static game where both are spamming porc then making ravagers may be a bad idea in the first place, but so would be making reapers if porc has grown sufficiently thick. (even tho since ravagers are faster than reapers they can break through somewhere and just destroy base..reapers doing the same thing will likely just die before making cost)

in this case wolverine spam and or impalers would probably be the right answer, or setting welders on fire, etc. tanks will die eventually die if not repaired and forced to fight.

finally, since reapers come into play late and the problem of unstoppable reaper balls comes even later, it is very easy to just switch fac to counter them. which is fine since you already won the early game with your fac. if you would have to immediately switch a fac once you made it to counter some early game unit then probably something is wrong with that fac.