An occasional paladin rush is fine, but it feels like every other match these days is Paladin rush. No idea if anything can be done about this from a balancing perspective, or even whether anything should be done, but it would be welcome.. at least for a while. Maybe increase the cost of a strider hub..? Or add a power requirement to either the paladin or the strider hub? /shrug
+6 / -0
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This seems to happen mostly on tiny maps where everybody starts in the same place (so you don't cede much map control and there is not much map to control anyway). Accordingly, I recently removed Zed and Mecharavaged from the teams pool.
+5 / -0
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Ok so we just remove all small maps from the pool? That doesn't seem like a sensible thing to do.
+5 / -0
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quote:
Or add a power requirement |
This seems like an interesting thing to try.
+2 / -0
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Nooo, don't take the fun away from paladin rush. They are so great. Big units, im here for the big units. Bigger the better! What is next? Strider fac requires 50E, oh no!
+1 / -0
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There are quite a lot of counters to paladin rushes. The same thing happened with Krow a long time ago, and now that Krow counters are known, Krow rushes are pretty bad. I expect the same to happen to Paladin.
+0 / -0
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I think that Paladin rush is quite a bit more theoretically sound than Krow rush. Inclined to more or less agree with Sprung that when you play large teams games on tiny maps, some strategy is going to be degenerate and playing whack-a-mole trying to nerf them all is probably not going to do the game as a whole much good.
+4 / -0
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Tbh this is similar to the recent discussion about nerfing long ranged commanders. On smaller 1v1 maps it is often useful to have this one heavy (but skirmisher-like) unit tanking damage and dealing with riots. In lobpot, pala functions in a similar way. There is no easy way to counter it for cost that early in the game. You cannot kill it with raiders if its escorted with a few riots, you cannot kill it with riots, it can kite and deal damage to heavy units such as grizzlies or cyclopses. Ulti is useless if the player has enough screen and is not overly aggresive, same story with widows. The only remaining options are lances, cloaked jacks or bombers or, preferably, a pala of your own. And, I almost forgot, silo also hardly works. The moment the player controlling the pala hears the sound of shockley, he just changes direction and the missile misses. I feel like we might see more lances (and early bomber rushes) in the future. Would be epic if the team was able to assist a player spamming those lances or bombers for once, instead of just assisting in the construction of the strider. Imagine, the paladin gets built, enters the battlefield and gets immediately melted by 10 lances, because the other team was able to rush something else (that counters pala). 10 lances deal 10*3000 = 30k damage in one strike, a pala has 30k hitpoints. Both lances and a pala cost 10k metal. Bombers with enough alpha to kill a paladin would also cost something around 9k I think (but it's easier to protect a pala against bombers than against shielded/cloaked lances).
+1 / -0
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Agreed with Aquanim. The game is balanced for 1v1, sadly, and it seems that rushing a paladin is the optimal strategy on some types of maps in teams (because the enemy team constisting of numerous players cannot mount a coordinated response in time). The same story with scorpions in FFA.
+0 / -0
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Not sure if its a balanceing or knowledge issue. There are counters, theres even 1 Player counters.
+0 / -0
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Definitely agree with this, I've wanted to play a few games this week but can't be bothered to play metal-donation-K, or pala-stomped-K. I am sceptical about counters that aren't also metal-donation-K, a game style that works just as well with a metal multiplier than it does with a bunch of players not doing much. I'm such an occasional player I don't know if I carry any weight, but I think the lobpot really hurts Zero-K. Clearly, the core players who play regularly find it OK, but since it's the only way you can play teams Zero-K as an individual it's reinforcing. IMO it's a far better game at lower team sizes, and could have wider appeal if it were possible to hop into those sorts of games. Players are always going to be angry if you take away choice, the best idea I have at the moment is to have a lobby where individual players can specify their game preferences and it organises them to matches accordingly. So if 8 people preferred a small teams it would start that game for them, and the rest go in the pot. It would be interesting to see how many people would still put "lobpot" at the top of their list in such a situation. I don't think this is the same as "small teams" because the current situation is that there is never anyone in that lobby, so no chance of ever getting a game together. The other idea I had was that you had to earn credits to play in the lobpot by playing other kinds of matches. 1 match = 1 credit for a lobpot match. This is a lot more artificial but easier to implement / understand.
+1 / -0
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quote:
The game is balanced for 1v1, sadly |
I do not think this is entirely true. Certainly the balance of Paladin does not have a lot to do with 1v1. However, if the game was balanced around 16v16 on Mecharavaged it would not be balanced for any other kind of game.
+0 / -0
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A fundamental issue with all large unit rushes (whether Paladin, Krow or anything else) is that this focuses agency in the hands of a single person. All the lobs are strongly compelled to help the rush, and as a reward they get to be the starved chaff bitch providing cover at 4 metal/s for the pro, who is having all the fun driving the unit. Facplop and communism were designed to work in tandem to avoid this:
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facplop makes sure it is optimal for everybody to have capacity for production. Essentially it is a sort of communism for buildpower. Without facplop, it is optimal for all people on the same lane to assist one dude's fac since otherwise you pay for a lot of redundant buildpower.
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communism makes sure everybody gets their own share of metal to use that free buildpower. Strider rushes have now revealed that this is not sufficient to make it optimal for everybody to make their own units.
It seems that there is actually a third component required to complete that trinity: map size. There are two incentives for pros not to blackmail lobs into giving them all their metal: on a large map, you cede too much ground if everybody is clumped together trying to rush, and the pro just has not enough APM/attention to cover everything. Playing lobpot on small maps break both of these, in that with +100 metal from the start the handful of extra mexes lost just don't make enough a difference, and then the pro doesn't need to manage the whole map, just the single unit plus some chaff.
+4 / -0
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Would it be possible for there to be an explicit additional power cost to a unit that would only apply to (some?) strider units? That way it couldn't be built immediately, but wouldn't exactly impair mid/late game. Could also prevent it from being a lob trap as it kinda is now. Right now power is in a "just make sure it's full" state, so this could be an interesting way to change that up a bit.
+0 / -0
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scout vote other maps gg as said before, the real issue behind this is that lobs cant communicate or coordinate. at all. no attempts made. you'll get lobs that say nothing at all in 50 minute games and completely ignore any input or adivce from team. this is how you get games where you lose because enemy built an SL 10 seconds earlier than you, while your team has 3 half-finished detris. lobs also love having no agency in a game, they'll just afk build singus all game regardless of circumstance thinking they're helping. i get it, they don't want to lose fights (because that's "bad") and the best way to avoid losing fights (in the human mind) is by not fighting. rush takes advantage of both these features, that's why it works. i think it would profit the game more if this issue was solved by shifting the lob-culture away from these 2 points, but that requires godlike lobwrangling skills. lobs will be lobs and that's ok(?). if that can't be done you have to nerf rushes.
+0 / -0
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quote:
Accordingly, I recently removed Zed and Mecharavaged from the teams pool. |
Really? I would rather not. What if people like those maps? I like them from time to time as it is a different game style. quote:
Or add a power requirement to either the paladin or the strider hub? /shrug |
Grid power for a mobile unit isn't supported, and would be a massive nerf. But grid for Strider Hub seems like quite a neat solution. A requirement of 50 energy would nerf the rush by about 1500 metal, since innate income doesn't grid. A team of N players has to make approximately N mexes because it makes more metal than energy. But 50 energy in an established base is pretty easy to come by, even in 1v1. So the nerf would just target strider rushes. Edit: I guess technically it would be a 750 metal and 1500 energy nerf for Paladin rush. Since the team could rush out 1500 metal of energy, then reclaim it for half value. There is enough BP around to make the BP cost irrelevant. The energy cost wouldn't quite be 1500 either, as the Fusion could be completed before the Solars and provide a bit of energy.
+4 / -0
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Of course strider hub should have energy grid requirement, been wondering for years why it has not, same wondering has been towards bertha and supers. Hub should work like factory, one unit at a time, with power connected to the nanoframe somehow or something, or else can bypass the grid req with other builders. Teknikal prob.
+0 / -0
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An energy cost would also make forward bases with Strider hubs more vulnerable. Not sure whether that's good or bad though.
+0 / -0
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Before any changes are made to paladin rush this meta will be over. :_)
+0 / -0
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quote:
Accordingly, I recently removed Zed and Mecharavaged from the teams pool. |
Would a better solution be that the map pool takes into account number of players when picks a map to suggest? (I know probably this would require infra changes which are hard, just wondering though). Those map are great if there are 4-6 players, and awful if there are 28-32 players.
+7 / -0
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