Lament of ages past?

[soap box]
i think the worst thing for zero-k is the idea that "you should not be able to win doing [that]" which seems to often drive a lot of the balance arguments.

it looks like in the grand scheme of things this concept had single handedly driven ZK into a state where the only viable units are assaults, skirmishers, and super weapons.
[/soap box]


the thing that initial drew me to ZK was its diversity in strategy.

did you want to win with absolute raider superiority and map control? you can still sort of do it?
(raiders are much weaker now, raider game feels more sluggish, several labs now do not have real raid units at all)

did you want to win using grand strategy and map spanning battles involving hundreds of units, you could do that!
(you cant any more, hammer nerf 1 year after ZK split basically made the linchpin of this strategy dead)
(its making a comeback)

did you want to with with a giant assault ball of tough units ramming into your enemy base? you can do that!
(this is actually the only thing i have seen in ZK that has gotten better)

did you want to use a single unit, and essentially turn ZK into a RPG? you could to that!
(the infinite game of NERF THE SUPER COM has made this impossible even though super comms only worked in team games and rarely made cost)

did you want to destroy your enemies with stealth and black-ops? you can still go that!
(hey look interesting strategy!)

did you want to win with absolute air superiority, you could do that!
(shadow swarms and the air game of 5 years ago was amazing to play)

did you want to tactically fight with gunships and precision kill key areas, you could do that!
(black dawns used to be strong, useful, and efficient enough that there was a BD rush start because they were good)

did you want to win with economic superiority, absolute and total domination through force of numbers? you could do that!
(you cant any more, 100% eco share is bad when 90% of your team seem to only be interested in building more storages)

did you want to morf one unit to another, raise the lowly glaive to be a mighty detriment? you could do that!
(i just remembered this actually existed, it was fucking amazing)

i don't know, shrugs there's no real point to this thread other the to complain?

list your laments of strategies past if you want? talk about if that have been slowly nerfed out of existence in favor of assaults, skirmishers and super weapons.

you're 100% right, theres only 1 "correct" way to play now and its fucking boring

funny how you understand better than GoogleFrog how this game went downhill

I miss massive singu farms being a thing. It was always fun to see giant 6+ singu farms being blown up.

I never played or saw a 1v1 involving airstart that I didn't think was a waste of time and effort, and that video hasn't changed my mind. As a player I found such games profoundly unfun on both sides of the matchup. Also from a game balancing standpoint it brings in a very large amount of blind factory RPS.

quote: The only change I don't like is how cheap terraform is now. Maps covered in spires + mex/nano in pits so units cant target them are just cancer.

I agree. I vaguely remember the game being less porcy in the past, and I attribute the change largely to terraform's current excessive viability.

its 10x cheaper as of last version, but that isn't what has made the game porc forests.

that change is probably because of a bunch of changes coming together to cause problems

quote: i think the worst thing for zero-k is the idea that "you should not be able to win doing [that]" which seems to often drive a lot of the balance arguments.

I think you are getting confused with "you should not have to do [that] to win".

What you can do in any particular game is constrained by what your opponent does. If you can do something regardless of what your opponent does then there is a problem. A lot of what you are seeing could be people getting better at the game.

• Raiders are useful and people will still win through raiders alone. I think you meant to say "some viable factories don't have real units to raid with", which is simply because more factories are viable.
• Whether you escalate to a large battle in a 1v1 depends on your opponent. Doing so is the norm in teamgames.
• People who think are is useless are in the minority. It still isn't going to win the game if you make nothing else.
• Winning with economic superiority is commonly referred to as "winning the game".

I don't deny that morph could create moments, but it had to be weighed against the technical cost, how it would eventually warp the game, and consistency. There is an old thread that you must have read. Black Dawn (Revenant) has never been that common outside cheese. It has only been buffed since a rework in 2012. Sometimes I watch it be used effectively and am surprised. See "you should not have to do [that] to win" for simply making commander morphs more powerful.

You used to be able to put a Reaver-style Strider on a tall sheer spire that cost only buildpower and have it shoot the entire map while invulnerable. That sort of stuff would not have held up to people getting better at the game.

[Fx]Drone you're steadily becoming less and less worth interacting with.

quote: The only change I don't like is how cheap terraform is now. Maps covered in spires + mex/nano in pits so units cant target them are just cancer. Unit balance seems pretty nice.

I think what you don't like is how much easier terraform is to use, and how many people have learnt to use it. Terraform has been steadily becoming more expensive and easier to counter over time. It used to cost buildpower, then cost energy as well, and has cost metal for a while.

quote: Have been trying to say it for some time in various ways - solution space is reduced, no cheese, early raid is not really dangerous. Relative static defense strength increased. Porkfest in teamgames so serious, that causes FFA popularity increase.

The solution space has decreased if you look at in a certain way. Lets say that previously you could cheese or reach the midgame and now you can only reach the midgame. This is a massive simplification. Rushes still exist and I would argue that the midgame is much richer now. The striders and demi-striders seem a lot more balanced now where previously each one either sucked or was mandatory.

Anyway, if the options were to either cheese or reach the midgame then there were more ways that a game could play out. I think it is wrong to want this is all cases because, under this model, the game could end 90% of the time with a cheese. If there were 100 ways for a game to play out and two of them were cheeses, then each cheese dominates the proportion of games that people play. I think variety is preferable over playing the same few cheeses over again. This is why I do not think "reduced solution space" is a good argument against reducing the viability of cheese and game-ending raids, even if I were to grant that the midgame has not become richer with time.

did you want to win bombing Firepluk com?
Yes! And u shoulld to do it every time!
did you want to win building nuke and then buking lobsters who dididnt build antis?
Yes!
did you want to win by building cloaker/air trans roaches to bumb out soul of lubsters? Yes! Yes! Yes!

+1 for land carrier funnels, and that's really an example of an end game solution being eliminated because "you should not be able to win by walking 70k in striders into your enemy base". i think what really pissed people off is that you could kill a det with 3 funnels, which is legit because 3 funnels straight up cost more then the lone det

widgets should be normalized or removed


why not both actually

its itchy