New terraform cheating exploit

People have started cheating and exploiting terraform to make their buildings immune to attack.

If you terraform a singularity high enough, not even fleas can be ordered to attack it as they will never get line of sight to attack. It's why you don't see people terraform downwards anymore, as terraforming upwards exploits the aiming of units and makes them lose line of sight before they can attack even if they reasonably should.

Featured bug abuse that's been very frequent in games lately: https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1420209

"cheat"

Similar, if you terra a crab like +200-300 high, widows have a very hard time stunning it

The bug from my point of view:

Flea is an all terrain unit that can climb any terrain.
Singulo is on the above pictured hill.
Flea cannot reliably path to the singulo and attack it.
Flea can barely see the singulo without manual micro positioning.
Clicking on the free areas around singulo does not help.

Finding this out in the middle of a game is frustrating, I have units that should be able to attack an elevated building as they can climb any surface. Yet they can't do that due to pathfinding/aiming bugs.

The picture doesn't do it justice, I had a hard time even seeing the singulo without it showing as an untargetable ghost building, despite being right next to it with an all terrain scout.

Yes, it's not cheating. I am mad. Bonus for the pictured knight being unable to fire either, or the reaver. Even though reaver can fire at sky high air units. I don't actually see the singulo on the picture at all from in game perspective.

I don't think it's healthy for the game to have such safe ways of building eco.

Possible solution for structures: increase terraform-blocking footprint to be larger than unit-blocking footprint, so that things like Flea can at least climb onto the platform's ledge.

Note that this also makes it more expensive to wall/bury though, so is a tradeoff if you consider those strategies to be legit.

A fundamental solution is probably something like a much extended aiming code in the engine that somehow can figure out when it can make a glancing shot if a direct shot is unavailable while not tanking performance.

If one intends to do anything about this, I think changing the singu model might be the lowest in general game impact:

Basically Some free space on the edge of the singu footprint that enables
1. Let Spider to climb to the base of the singu and hit elevated singus
2. In case of buried singu, Push jump bots into the free space, which ought also be unobstructed by the singu model when viewed from an elevated position to let the bots get hit.

That must have cost a fortune to terraform. IMHO if you are going to spend that much to terra something it may as well have some advantages. Once people know that it's hard to target like this they will use silo or tremor or bombers. This is not game breaking

quote: That must have cost a fortune to terraform.

Yes, but it could have cost even more! Tall terraforming could be wider at the base, a curved slope basically.

Terraforming is awesome. Sometimes a bit extreme though.

quote: Seems like just having a max terraforming limit would fix this.

"the sky is the limit"