Hi, new player here so apologies if this is a dead horse already. One of the biggest barriers to entry for Zero-K, in my opinion, is the huge variety of units, all with unique names that often don't tell you much about what the unit does. All the commentary, articles, wikis, tutorials etc all mention units by name, and a new player is required to flip through the wiki just to figure out what factory it comes from and what role it plays. (PS. is there some sort of unit overview somewhere? Something that lists each factory, all its units, what their roles are, and basic stats like cost, all in one table?) One thing that might help is to add a prefix to each unit type, like F-16 Falcon etc. [Factory][Role][Name of unit] Now, I think the community already has abbreviations for these things (I saw some youtube casts with LV for rovers and HT for tanks, etc), so you could use those. Or use single letter ones since the factories almost all start with different letters. eg. Cloakbots = C Heavy Tanks = T Aircraft = A (or divided into F & B for more familiarity?) Amphbots = P Raider = R Skirmisher = S Riot = X etc. CR Scythe TX Ogre and so forth. Or we can add a number to look more military, and to distinguish between same role units in the same factory: CR-1 Glaive CR-2 Scythe ------------- We'd then do a giant search and replace across the wiki and the game, replacing instances of the raw name with the new prefix + name. In the game itself I guess the prefix could be an option to turn off. ------------- Sorry, suggestions for community projects always sound like, "hey, why don't you do all this work for free while I sit here and complain?", but I wanted to see what people thought of the idea, if something similar has been tried and rejected before, etc.
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This would be great fluff for campaign. "CR-2 Scythe was developed by Autonomous Pwnage Systems during the early reign of the dynasty of the Rustacean Kings". Bonus points for skipping numbers for prototype units or iterations: PR-1: Duck PR-2: Grebe (Discontinued) grenade-equipped amph raider PR-3: Archer Ausf.1 (ballistic water piss-stream) PR-4: Archer Ausf.2 (continuous water beam, depleting tank) PR-5: Archer Ausf.3 (continuous water beam, infinite tank) PR-6: Archer Asuf.4 (pulsed water beam, current version) Probably too confusing for actually telling people things though. You could just use technical unit names for that, e.g. "cloakheavyraid" or "vehcapture".
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I don't see people adopting such prefixes, there is a tendency to shorten names so people would just drop the prefix since the longer name already uniquely identifies a unit. In some cases there are already pre-existing abbreviations but these are often unhelpful. For example referring to units as "DDM-1 Desolator" or "BD-2 Revenant" would allow a newbie to learn the community abbreviation but not what the unit actually does. These would clash with a role designator abbreviation. I agree that official resources would ideally have some way to help learn this but here you could afford something much clearer, for example hovering your cursor over the name could have a tooltip could give the actual role, like this: Reaver. [Spoiler]Total Annihilation campaign actually used their internal names at a few points in the campaign mission intro texts. Arm mission 4 (where you first got the Zeus waifu who hung around until the last mission) had something like "a Zeus model ARMZEUS has been provided for your protection".
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They would still have to learn the new prefixes so I don't think it would be that useful. I did find it difficult to identify what different units were for at first though- perhaps a better solution would be for slightly more informative tooltips when one mouses over the units in factories. You can hold space and click for a good technical specification of what the unit does, but that's not something you want to read through in the heat of battle. What if the tooltip read something like: Glaive - raider Primary Role: destroying skirmishers, artillery and weakly defended buildings, good battle opener [to prod newbies into the early aggression playstyle that usually works best in Zero-K] Countered by: riot units Mace - riot Primary Role: destroying raiders Countered by: skirmishers, assault units. It's a bit more difficult with specials of course as they'll act in a different way that takes more explanation than one wants in a tooltip. Since one can mouse over hostile units and see what class they fall into, factory tooltips reflecting the rock-paper-scissors dynamic in Zero-K might make that information easier to use. Essentially, the rookie can see what's coming and then check his factory to see what he needs to counter. As the knowledge is being applied immediately, it's likely to be internalised faster.
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We already have the internal unit names so the prefixes would be at best redundant and at worst become a barrier to communication. For example Glaive is also known as cloakraid and can be searched on that. We even have a page on the wiki that maps all of the internal unit names. https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/index.php?title=Internal_unit_names
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Also, the prefixes for factories are basically an adaptation of faction prefixes from other RTS games, and I picked them based on the shortest number of characters that conveys each factory. Maybe I should have used "Pl" for planes and something like "SY" for ships/shipyard, but "S*" is overloaded as it is, and the primary reason for using two letters.
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quote:
They would still have to learn the new prefixes so I don't think it would be that useful. |
Yeah, I thought someone would say this. The difference is that these two bits of information are mutually reinforcing. If I don't know the prefixes but I know what a Scythe is, then seeing CR Scythe will instantly remind me what those prefixes mean. If I don't know the unit names but I know the prefixes, again, seeing CR Scythe will help me to remember what a Scythe does. I think it's much easier to remember 24 prefixes (especially since you have to know all the factories and roles eventually anyways) than purely to remember 150 unit names. quote:
We already have the internal unit names so the prefixes would be at best redundant and at worst become a barrier to communication. |
I'm not suggesting that people use the prefixes in conversation or discussion. I'm suggesting that the full prefix+name label be used in official documentation. Wiki, guides, information panels, etc. The internal unit names are even worse as a case of redundancy - they're a long, completely separate set of names that are not used in any guides or discussions at all! (jumpsumo? Only TA fans would have a clue, for example.)
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quote:
I think it's much easier to remember 24 prefixes. |
There are 11 ploppable factories and 5 basic roles (raider, riot, skirmisher, assault, artillery). Minimally, you are looking at 55 prefixes here. Practically, you are looking at exactly as many prefixes as there are units.
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The idea is that you don't have to remember each combination individually, you can remember the constitutent parts. I do feel it's kind of inelegant though.
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Literally just have a loading screen with a big cycle that goes Raiders>>Skirmishers>>Riots>>Raiders and show off the universal raider/riot/skirmisher symbol I guess you could also roughly say that Assaults and Artillery are long range and short range anti-building units, while Raiders, Riots, and Skirmishers are anti-unit units
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Such a loading screen could also teach people the positions of the various roles in factory build queues. On the OP, I am not a fan of military hardware so I think something like "CR-Reaver" would look a bit janky. We also run into issues with duplicate roles and units that don't really fit a role. What is Fencer?
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quote:
We also run into issues with duplicate roles and units that don't really fit a role. What is Fencer? |
The prefixes don't need to be unique identifiers, since they are intended to be a prefix to the unit name. So duplicate roles just get the same prefix. CR Scythe, CR Glaive. Or we can have the additional number, but that's really just for the military feel. As for Fencer, its icon already labels it "vehicle support", so it's RP Fencer or something. It depends whether we want to have a prefix for every class listed in https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/index.php?title=Unit_classes or if we just want to have a prefix for the major combat classes and then group everything else into a "miscellaneous" prefix. But certainly the most straightforward way to generate the prefix is to base it on the unit's icon which conveys the same information - [factory][class]. quote:
There are 11 ploppable factories and 5 basic roles (raider, riot, skirmisher, assault, artillery).
Minimally, you are looking at 55 prefixes here. Practically, you are looking at exactly as many prefixes as there are units. |
Hmmm, I get a bit irked by comments like this. Either you are just deliberately picking any sort of tiny hole you can come up with, or you are just replying in a kneejerk fashion without giving any thought. Or generously, you have misunderstood my proposal. Once you know that C is for cloakbot, R is for raider, and X is for riot, obviously you don't have to re-learn R and X again for a different factory, say T for Tanks. CR, CX, TR, TX, etc. So obviously the number of things to learn is 11 + 5, not 11 x 5. That's actually my entire point - on that page, how am I supposed to know what roles these units are? I'd have to open up each individual unit's page to work that out. Not even the factory's page tells me what roles its units have. These pages that list units either needs to be in a table format with the role information in columns, or, much easier, adopt my idea with the prefixes (since that can be done with a search-replace.)
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Rover-chassis MRFS, Class 1 quote:
So obviously the number of things to learn is 11 + 5, not 11 x 5. |
Oops. Right, i missed that you considered both the factory letter and role letter to be "prefixes". quote:
That's actually my entire point - on that page, how am I supposed to know what roles these units are? |
Hm, perhaps this is solved by something much simpler: prefixing the unit's name with its icon. Like this, for example:  ZK icons are a graphic representation of the same context as these prefixes - they have a chassis (underlying shape) and a role (overlaying shape), all in all about 20 shapes i think (accounting for chickens, light/heavy artillery, cloaked units which get a +, etc). The icons are also grayscale; they should mesh perfectly with fonts.
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The icons are also a good solution, as they will help people learn the icons. But it's slightly more limited in that it's probably only practical to use on the wiki and official docs. Whereas the prefixes can also be used on any text guides that people want to write.
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  AdmiralZeech I write a lot of text guides. Where am I going to publish a Zero-K text guide other than the game and the Zero-K wiki or a git repo with a markdown frontend like github and gitlab that doesn't support inline images?
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Shrug, people post tips and guides directly on the forums or reddit sometimes.
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Hmm, putting aside my proposed solution, do people agree that there is a problem? Or, "I had to memorize all the unit names, so I don't see why new players shouldn't. Git gud etc etc."
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AdmiralZeech would a loading screen explaining unit roles help with your problem? http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/25231?postID=198112
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I like the idea. Learning all the unit names is a pita, especially because I instantly tend to think of a Knight as a Zeus, Mino Reaper, Cyclops Golli, Jugglenaut Sumo... etc etc.
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