Future detriment refinement

New detri is pretty good, but very costly at 24k and very risky donating this metal to enemy
I think at least the following should be done:

1. make it smooth ground as it moves his legs and puts them on the ground
right now it gets stuck even on small hills which does not make any sense

2. slight movement speed increase, +10-20% it's very-very slow right now
the motivation is not to make it run away faster but a bit faster to walk across the field

3. replace pew-pew AA with a decent flak gun
"previous-design" AA is really-really weak
A bit better AA would not make it over-powered but protects a very valuable strider(game deciding) a little bit better, nothing insane

4. Give it a bigger LOS to act as armored eyes and support ally units

ordered from the most important to least, 1st is an absolute must have imo

cc GoogleFrog

Detriment being super expensive makes it compete with super weapons, which is a hard gamble to win. The price increase makes that worse.

That being said, I haven't seen it in action yet.

Its way more interesting than the old one, anyway. Nice job.

There is also a thought that at this hefty cost of 24k and astonishing feeding risk, power level of the detriment(in his local area of influence) should be directly comparable to those of DRP, not necessary in the fire power sense but as unit power in general
I also love how slow detriment is - it's kinda defining feature, it should stay this way but be a tiny-tiny bit more mobile on the battle field

For example if speed stays as painfully slow as it is right now HP/Healing speed could use a buff
Right now healing detriment is a huge issue in terms of resource sink and what is worse the healing con blob gets demolished by enemy arty and retreating detriment to safe area is a huge issue because of how slow it is(getting back is an issue too and game moves while u repair, and metal -should work-)
Teleporting could be possible but I bet it takes ages as well(teleport time is cost/weight based?)

In general super weapons don't have a lot of detriment problems(metal donation risks, healing requirements) and they reach almost whole map in an instant but they cost on the same order of magnitude...
To compensate detriment should wreck comparable to super weapons havoc in his local area of influence, than it would be fair balance for this price level of 24k

Key is to make it counterable, right now main counters are: artillery, clever ultimatums, mass gunships, and super weapons.

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More over we should not be afraid to experiment with late game, it's always possible to roll-back and 1v1 is never influenced by those anyway.
I would really-really love someone to make incremental changes to this unit and see how it plays out and how it changes clusterfluff meta-game, would be even willing to donate for this cause :)

tl;dr; at the price level of 24k detri should wreck absolute havoc comparable to DRP and be deciding *in it's local area of influence*. I.e. it's a mobile super weapon, slow as hell with -limited range- but -wrecking everything and anything- in its path -with a set of counters- unlike most real super weapons when properly built
an alternative could be to tone down detriment cost, but then... it's probably not the detriment we think about ^_^

All of the big stuff should require grid connections. I guess someone might say they all have huge ranges and tend to be built way in the back so it doesn't matter, but that is wrong.

I once saw someone build a Bertha in one of the small islands to the side in Small Supreme Battlefield. Off course, they had no grid connection there. Its rather silly that something like a Bertha can be built in a remote outpost, but Cerberus or Doomsday can't.

If I recall correctly, Starlight can kill a Detriment very fast. Apart from competing disfavorably with superweapons, Detriment also has the problem of being easily killed by them. If you built a detri and your opponent is building a superweapon, better get that giant metal ass moving, because the moment they finish your detri is dead.

Again, I imagine the jump jets will make detri a lot better at avoiding that scenario, but we will see.

Being mobile or cloak-able isn't an advantage if you're competing against something that can hit everywhere. I guess it makes assassination harder, but then having to waltz into the enemy base makes assassination much easier.

I think the only way detriment can compete is by getting finished first because its cheaper.

quote: 1. make it smooth ground as it moves his legs and puts them on the ground right now it gets stuck even on small hills which does not make any sense

An explosion on its feet when it walks was in the PR at one point. I expressed misgivings and it did not make it into the final version.

• Explosions are heard globally, removing the stealth advantage of Det compared to other superweapons.
• Enemy units are pretty good at avoiding melee with Det, so it seems like explosion damage would mostly just annoy allies.
• Explosions decloak, reducing the utility of Det.
• Walk animations are generally not written well enough to tie game mechanics to. In the case of Det, I was able to get it into a state where it would stamp its foot rapidly in place. There is no point exploiting walk animations like this in normal games because they don't do anything.
• The explosion cratered instead of smoothing, so I didn't get to test that.
• There wasn't a way to make Det stamp in place. This would make toppling a wall with Det quite finicky.

Most of these issues seem fixable with a state toggle, which I suppose would be fine for such an expensive unit. The toggle could make Det move slower, make smoothing explosions around its feed (not sure if it should deal damage too) and make Det stamp in place when not moving. It should have a forceful stampy walk animation when in stamp mode.

The missile had the smoothing role, but people in the various threads seemed to want something cooler than a smoothing missile. I thought having the missile fly around and looking like it was doing things was fairly cool. The shoulder cannon looked like it could be deployed in a direct fire mode, so now we have that.

quote: 2. slight movement speed increase, +10-20% it's very-very slow right now the motivation is not to make it run away faster but a bit faster to walk across the field

I think moving slowly is an important aspect of Det. A big consideration with Det is being appropriately cool and ponderous rather than balanaced. On the balance side I think it is good to have it be very powerful locally as it distinguishes it from other superweapons and subsuperweapons.

I think correct Det usage involves using a Djinn or Herc to transport it instead of wasting a full minute or two from the time it is done to the time it is used. Transporting it back to repair would be good too. Lobster exists.

quote: 3. replace pew-pew AA with a decent flak gun "previous-design" AA is really-really weak

I think the guns look tiny enough to be the pew lasers, and the AA exists more to be cool than to be effective.

quote: 4. Give it a bigger LOS to act as armored eyes and support ally units

I think 900 is enough. This is far above the standard maximum of 660.

I've seen this Det used twice since the update and it failed both times. That said, it failed by being sent alone deep into the strongest part of the enemy front and both were killed by Ultimatum. This seems like a poor use of Det and I don't think it should be so powerful that using it really poorly is an automatic victory. In these games the Det could have been used more conservatively to turn around any front. A Det with a bit of army and a place to be repaired seems extremely hard to stop. It is possible to safely use the jump offensively if chaff is sent there first.

I think the cost is good. I'm expecting a well-used det to win a front in several minutes, which seems worth saving 12k on. It is also less vulnerable to snipes with things like tacnukes and can deal a bit more damage locally. If Det is too easily countered by Ulti then perhaps Ulti needs a nerf, but I will note that I saw people make and waste a lot of metal on Ulti when they scouted a Det, so the Det didn't "really" cost so much.

Yeah... I still think adding a substantial energy requirement to using the superweapons would would be the most interesting way to address balance with detriments. Any non-madman would have a lot of energy on hand, but if the superweapon eats that, it could force some interesting choices (economic and defensive). You could even make the superweapons scalable with energy input ... kind of overdriven. :) Cmon you know you want to do that.

btw GoogleFrog today had a game where detriment was EMPed by silo
this is on the point of how painfully slow it is... :(
could use slight bump on movement speed

replay: https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/990043
p.s. speedmetalish map, short game

detriment retreat path is way too easy to predict because of how slow it moves

Yea, same feeling. Equal cost in berthas just obliterates detriment completely and starts to help way-way earlier than detri ever could without risking metal donation :(