Cloakbot Imp

balancing this game seems to be done in some way i dont understand. some units are rarely made by the top ranks.. and yet those units never get a buff.

+ at the moment balancing seems more about creativity. Balance-patches come very fast without giving players proper time to work out counters. in other games with way more players, it took around a year or 2 to find viable counters to specific things, but i guess people here don`t have the patience.
Also, "balancing" here also contains throwing units in the mix that are clearly overpowered. Look bolas and no further. No one can tell me that a player of frogs caliber did not realise how broken that unit was when he introduced it.

Being able to safely stack imps would differentiate them in an interesting way from snitches. While immunities are generally against ZK design philosophy, I think it might be acceptable in this case.

Balance changes come from different people and from different motivations, and yes it happens rapidly.

Often changes come in response to feedback from players, when data supports the hypothesis. Sky Lobster nerf in response to the days of Lobster-K is an example of a highly demanded change to a unit that was stealing the spotlight almost every clusterpot round. Hover and Locust nerfs have been in response to their domination of certain maps in the 1v1 rotation (the speed meta). Merlin health was dunked because people were tired of losing their armies to it in FFA.

Sometimes changes happen when a unit is under/overachieving its design goals. Raptor combat speed and maneuvering changes make it work better at what it's designed to do, while being careful not to significantly change the unit's "on paper" value or matchup with Trident.

In the case of Imp, we're talking about a bomb unit which walks out of a factory with cheap area cloakers. It is the early game force multiplier from hell and is only balanced by the amount of micro needed to use it effectively. Making Imps immune to each other's stun damage would make it a redundant anti-heavy option for Cloakbots and a less efficient version of Widow in that role.

If you need to counter Detri you are solidly in The Late Game. Send in some Ultimatums and go to town. Send in 10 Phantoms and kill it in six shots. If you didn't know the Detri was coming and you don't already have an army that can kill it then you've already lost The Late Game.

Even if Imps were immune to each other's stun damage it would be cheaper to build a Spiderfac and 11 Widows than the 35 Imps it would take to stun the Detri.

When a unit fails to meet expectations, it can mean the expectations were wrong because the game was misleading. I do see that the Imp's description text suggests "it can paralyze heavy units" which is kind of misleading. This might be worth fixing.

No widget required, select all the Imps and press D key to make them all explode.

When you press D on a bomb unit the explosion is instant, no delay like most units self-destructing. It is one of the few manually triggered D-abilities in the game. Trying to do this with 35 Imps would be pretty hard, but you might manage with a handful.

I'm not sure I agree about the behavior of bombs being unexpected. You can think of the attaack command as being "take the fastest possible path to get in range of this unit to fire and then engage in fight behavior". Bombs have very little range so they are going to clluster up and run into approximately the same spot to begin an attack, at which point any behavior you gave them wouldn't matter because their range is too small to avoid detonating on each other. A widget could maybe be written to control bomb behavior differently, or perhaps they could get a D attack order that would handle their attack, but by the normal mechanics of the game I would expect exactly the current behavior. Zero-K is already much smarter about unit AI than virtually any game so you're asking quite a lot here.

am i the only one who cant read that blue^?

quote: If having them immune to their own EMP is too much, perhaps have their own EMP dmg do real hp damage to allied imps so they all blow if one goes.

I think overall that would be a nerf because it would cause a chain reaction much like Snitch. If you've ever tried to run a mass of cloaked Snitches you've probably had your Iris (and more) blown up by one Snitch setting off all the rest.

All bombs could use automatic coordination when attacking in swarms, but that would be far more intelligence than any other unit is given. Bombs just don't stack well (except maybe limpet since it doesn't friendly fire)