Lobster capabilities need a "review"

There are a lot of units in ZK that were designed with specific weaknesses in mind(like slow movement, slow retreat) and lobster just takes and removes them., breaking all possible balance considerations and turning a good RTS game into a clown fiesta with jumping cloaked shit flyng invisible from the middle of nowhere while shooting u in the head from midair.

I'd either suggest to remove the unit completely which is not likely or do a redesign with the sole focus of removing offensive capabilities of lobster. Suggested list of changes

- Lobstered unit loses cloaking state if any(doesn't matter if it's personal cloak or cornea)
- Lobstered unit gets all his weapons blocked during the lobstering and some time after it

This would essentially render offensive lobster capabilities to near zero and turn unit into a transport / retreat device

The worst offender right now is ultimatum + cornea + lobster

It also would be interesting to do a community-wide poll on changes to this unit with several options
- nuke out of existence
- nurf into oblivion to be used exclusively as non offensive weapon(TBD)
- nurf moderately(TBD)
- keep as is and play circus-k

Lobster destroys the typing of units, namely artillery. In a recent game, Godde just threw my crab in the air and killed it with particular ease, it was a sad. How many games have I lost to lobster

I like lobsters used for amphibious invasions or hill invasions that wouldn't normally be possible. The proposed changes seem fair, but the wait period before shooting shouldn't be long. Something like 1 to 3 seconds.

I assume you are refering to this game :D
https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/996405
I could have played it better, but this game at least demonstrates that cornea + lobster + djinn + teleported ulti have some potential.
On the other hand, usually five minutes into the game, sneak attacks with lobsters involving getting behind enemy lines become almost impossible.
As of lobster throwing enemy crab somewhere where it is vulnerable, is not much different than sniping it with a snitch or other crawling bomb - if you let your opponent get close enough with such a unit, you had it coming.
However, if you wanted to prevent such use of lobster, the solution could be decreasing the radius in which units you want to throw have to be or that you'd have to have two lobsters to throw something heavier.

Hey look, I'm all in for cool and shiny ... I just don't like where zk been headed in the last time and it's headed in a circus direction far away from well defined RTS
RTS should have predictable and calculatable balance and less gimmicky stuff which outcome is based on rng-jesus and there is nothing you can do to counter/protect from it except to be lucky and favored by rng-jesus.

Let's take ultimatum for example, it's damage output is based on target width and an angle you fire at target - hard to predict and impossible to calculate ahead of time, goes against each and every other unit in zk universe.

Let's take lobster... While throwing units might be fun it's still hard to predict what exactly will happen, because well... cliffs, slopes and other weird terrain do exist and UI is not clear about what exactly is going to happen
I've seen and did too many attempts where lobster just scattered my army across top of the hill/slope which units were supposed to fly over(regarding UI)...
On top of this it adds whole new dimension of complexity into balance, totally breaking some units balance-wise and it's next to impossible balance this nonsence, because we just added a second zk on top of existing one in which -ALL- units are airborn and even those which already were airborn before lobster I bet could have some really weird alterations to their default behavior if you factor the lobstering in the equation(very confused smile goes here)...

For example today I saw Shaman abusing lobster and newtons to precisely throw jacks into the enemy base across whole map avoiding the whole frontline...
https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/996464
in this particular game this did not do any good, but I saw games on this exact map where enemy noticed too late and lost whole eco clusters due to this nonsence...
Is this how zk "supposed to be played nowdays"?

In my opinion good RTS should have no such barely predictable things... or things you can barely protect yourself from no matter what you do(cloaked lobstered ultimatum flying right into your face right over the protective flea screen, uncloaking couple of elmo in front of you and shooting right into your dumb and unsuspecting face)

Can we have a spherical screen of fleas maybe to protect from flying ultimatums? let's give fleas an ability to fly too!
All the way into the circus-k

[Spoiler]