Long ranged commanders

I'm hardly a good sparring partner, but I hadn't ever felt comms were overpowering in the lobsterpot. So many ways to kill them.

Commanders are not too powerful. Fun flavor. When I started to play this game, I pretty much jumpbot + guardian trollcommed my way into top 10 casual ladder. Now its not much fun (or efficient!) with good commander micro anymore(maybe with recon, but I wont use that cheat jump-away-from-juggle bs chassis). Downhill for commanders started with in-built radar. To me, playing without commander at front amongst the units is much less fun and excitement.

You can gamble a lot with rushing dante or paladin or whatever similar, same goes with morphed combat commander. Big risk big gain.

Sad to see things taken away.

I actually like it when someone kills me with some fancy morphed commander. Well done.

Also, about long range, yesterday I tried engineer sniper commander, holy crap thats a lot of range and damage early in the game. Guess it wont be for long...

Why should commander be limited to riot/tank role? :o

(Ok, I came from BA where commander was just the good old commander, zk morphing was cool)

Another option:

• make blue modules tiny, say 2% or whatever makes it so you can't reach the major breakpoints. Cost appropriately.
• add purple modules for weapons, fine-tuned so that with maxed blue modules they only reach desired thresholds, and that carry an appropriate tradeoff. For example maybe Beamlaser has a fairly plain upgrade that puts it just below LLT range and no tradeoffs, while LPB gets a minimally larger upgrade that puts it above LLT but also has -35% health or whatever.
• perhaps gate the purple module behind some number of blues just to maintain slot efficiency and so that they aren't completely owled.

Metal cost? If u pay more you should get more.

I might have overdone the mockery, sorry GoogleFrog, I apologize.

quote: I'm claiming that commanders are poorly designed more than that they are OP.

Sorry, but you claimed that long-range commanders are "reasonably effective". I think we can all agree that commanders are poorly designed. But long-range coms are just noob traps. They always were. (for the last 5 years at least)

The way I see this, considering the way you are interpreting the data you made, you are approaching this from such a wrong angle that you are bound to come to wrong conclusions. Sure, a com redesign could be good, but focusing on the "long range beam commander" as the prime commander issue? Why? Nobody uses it! Dante has a similar design and that's mostly fine.

Commanders are a unique unit in the game. Starting there, the important question must be what makes the game fun, rather than what is consistent with regular units. Is it a problem that certain builds could outperform conventional units? You can build more than one grizz, and they don't provide eco.

In practice, I do not see anyone doing anything with commanders that seems like its too powerful (other players should chime in if they have other experiences).

IMO the question is more what could be done to make the comm more fun, and I would like to see more opportunities for comms in the late game. For example I often provide an iris for a dante operated by my partner in crime. I have few or no units that can hang with that. I would be delighted if my comm could shadow them into combat and do its thing, but that is currently suicide for a gaurdian. Its just not good enough at anything really, just an armored construction bot. :( A recon has the jump which is incredibly useful for saving oneself, the strike could maybe be fast enough but I don't care for the weapons. But back to a gaurdian: the ability to morph in place on the front is indeed the point, I could grow that guy as a way to keep up with and support allies who move to striders. I would prefer my comm to be there in the first skirmish and the final showdown, one small step behind the front line.

I think splitting starting commanders from modular units would be the better approach. Upgrading a strider tier unit is the cool part (like SACUs in Supreme Commander), the other jobs of the commander is to kickstart the economy buildup and stabilize the early game in the face of raider x 500. Commanders are part liability past the early game due to the penalty if they die, and mandatory high risk/high reward situations are pretty oppressive (SupCom again).

Modular units starting around 4-5k metal should be easier to balance, and can be given significantly better stats than the starting commander since counters will exist at that point of the stage, and they cannot be incrementally built up. It might be beneficial to add some variety to the highest end units too so there is some alternative to Paladin, or provide answers to a Lance ball.

quote: I think to address this, if it even needs addressed at all, you'd need an entire overhaul of the com morphin system.

The defining feature of a comm is perhaps that it is not specialized, and I don't see the appeal in having a choice of various narrow specializations. (A sniper or heavy particle beam comm, or certain dual weapon builds are a bit specialized.) Build units to do your specialized things.

I can sympathize that it takes "a million upgrades" to achieve a lot of the goals which are interesting. I basically never add range or damage because the small steps seem like a poor deal compared to the ability to run away (probably from far too many units to defeat), or compared to hitpoints to survive another lance or liko that comes out of nowhere. That said, a lot of small steps is a reasonable way to front-line morph into the comm of your dreams, in steps that have a reasonable price and completion time. For this reason, I would like certain "free" upgrades with each level that might fill a bit of the things a player doesn't really need/want to click a million times. Then there might be a small number of more impressive range or damage upgrades to choose.

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quote: mandatory high risk/high reward situations are pretty oppressive

I think its important the comms are not forced to any particular role. Staying home should be viable. (Though the extra guns on the initial frontline can be a big deal.)

quote: It might be beneficial to add some variety to the highest end units too so there is some alternative to Paladin.

I'd like to see detri brought down to be a peer of pally, morphable would be icing on that cake.

quote: However, Grizzly has a lot less DPS in practice. I commented on range to raaar and he said that continuous fire isn't a benefit since it doesn't scale, that if you make a few Grizzlies it is mitigated. But on reflection this isn't true. Grizzly overkils significantly against most targets. There is no way it is using more than 2/3rds of its damage, and I would not be surprised if it only used half its damage, on average. With this estimation, the mid cost commander has more than twice the DPS of Grizzly.

Being bursty is a double edged sword :
- makes weapons clumsy and wasteful against low weight units (depends on AOE)
BUT
- allows them to burst down enemies before they get a chance to fire back, requires less exposure within firing range to actually deal most of their damage

In terms of "raw" cost-efficiency it's kind of a neutral property unless reload time is extreme (i'd rate grizzly's as only slightly negative) : can be good or bad depending on the situation.


Basically you want to kill the medium (500ish) range reliable skirmisher/brawler commander, which already is a rare unit type in ZK. It seems the goal is keeping "the path clear" for a variety of cheap units with weak bodies up to the cheap 450ish range skirmishers but that design is flawed as they naturally counter or are countered hard depending on whether they outrange or are outranged ( assuming they're hit semi-reliably) and many such options exist, just few big tanky ones (which the game also provides hard counters for). Without commanders being able to fill that role you're stuck with cyclops, grizzly or striders, which means less variety. People will just stop using them for that role and go for the few other units that can fill it, or skip the role and play around it by either getting either shorter range faster assault/riot units or longer range fire support units.

In other words, a sense of "raw cost-effectiveness" or "power curve" matters. Compare what you get from the 2-3k commander investment into being a max-range brawler with what you'd get from a dgun assassin or a fast tanky build with area cloaker and disruptor bomb and what you'd get by making some unit composition (you can borrow survivability from area cloaker and area area shields). Also note that you can get a reliable 260 dps 390 base range weapon setup by using the engineer chassis.

quote: I would be quite happy if the ability to outrange LLT were relegated to specialised weapons with clear drawbacks, such as Rocket Launcher and Missile Launcher. This implies a hefty range module nerf. There are a few options. - Range module +7.5% -> 4% makes beam laser cap out at 435 range. This is a small number though and might make range module too specialised. - Range module could give a flat bonus rather than percentage. This would make it more useful with low ranged weapons. For example, it could give +15 range (current gives +24.75 for beam laser) to make beam laser cap out at 450. This would let riot cannon reach 405 range though, which could be concerning. 405 range isn't quite skirmisher-level, but it takes a bit of leeway to outrange something. - Some sort of hybrid, which seems terrible but may end up being a good middle ground. For example +2%,+8 would give beam laser a limit of 446, and riot cannot 394. Barely seems worth the complexity. - Reduce the maximum number of range modules. This was suggested by raaar but surely he didn't mean to do so without a buff to compensate. Still, reducing the modules alongside a full-stack nerf would make each module feel better. However, this makes long ranged commanders happen earlier in games, and it is inconsistent. I could get behind reducing all module limits to 6 though, with some buffs to compensate many of them. Even 6 of the current range modules caps beamlaser at 478 range. I would like to reduce the maximum speed commanders can reach though. - Reduce beamlaser range. I would rather not do this, I think it works well with the early game and has good interactions with riots. - Give range module some massive penalty. Perhaps it could reduce damage, but it's damage would have to go down a lot to be relevant.

lotus itself isn't very relevant here, stingers are what affordably keeps enemy commanders away. The 460/lotus range threshold is important because it reliably outranges cheap skirmishers which are fast and have high dps/cost like ronin or have crippling weapons (stun/slow) : Moderator, Placeholder and buoy are especially important. There's no reasonable commander build that can endure being stunned/slowed in a contested front line. It also allows them to trade blows with Dante, Cyclops and Scorpion to some degree.

Another important threshold is about 360, which reliably outranges most of the cheap riots with some margin for kiting and dodging enemy assault and slow projectile skirmisher fire. Without this, commander can't reasonably go into a brawl with relatively cheap high dps/cost units which populate the ZK roster and is going to trade poorly especially since they often have crippling damage.

My suggestion is reducing the max number of range mods from 8 to 4 (+30%) but increasing the base range of ALL weapons by 10%.

If you don't want people to try to skirmish with the weapons you intended for riot, you also need to take a good look at the whole set and apply buffs and nerfs to keep all of them interesting. Missiles and rockets are slightly too weak at the moment (compare hybrid damage/range modded missile/rocket with range modded beams).

Maybe different chassis could have different limits for some modules.

quote: Basically you want to kill the medium (500ish) range reliable skirmisher/brawler commander, which already is a rare unit type in ZK.

I think that the fact that this is a rare unit type in ZK is a positive reason why it shouldn't be a commander archetype.

quote: Without commanders being able to fill that role you're stuck with cyclops, grizzly or striders, which means less variety.

All of these units (among other considerations) pay the price of being an expensive useless nanoframe until they are complete, which the commander does not.