Giving all Jumpbots jump

Ive seen the Idea pop up a few times, and think it would be neat for jumpbots to fill a unique mobility style with their whole factory
Issue being the balance side of things, a jumping firewalker is hard to catch, a jumping placeholder or puppy could be really scary.

How about linking the jump capabilities of jumpbots that currently dont have jump to their weapon reload?
Ive come up with 2 ways to go about this:

1. You can only jump when your weapon is reloaded, and your weapon must reload after jumping

The reload time could be shorter or longer than the normal reload time, to balance the jumps offensive and defensive use, while keeping out of combat utility in line with other jumps.
in case of puppy, who dont reload, it would be a cooldown before they fire themselves

drawback of this methode, is that jumps are rarely available in combat, due to constant firing, and coordinating a grouped jump is very hard without holding fire on all units


2. Jumping makes you reload your weapon, but jumps are not tied directly to the weapon cooldown

Akin to a self disarm, the time needed before firing after jumping can vary from unit to unit
The advantage of this methode is that jumps are always available (provided jumpjets are charged), meaning you can easily coordinate grouped defensive and utility jumps, but offensive jumps are discouraged/can be reacted too.

Drawback is that jumpbots become very hard to catch out, though this could be adjusted with relatively long jump windup animations, especially for the firewalker and moderator



What do ye guys think?

when one is deciding what factory to pick for the terrain its supposed to be jump or spider for hilly terrain, and I do quite like the idea of being able to queue from factory a jump up/down the nearest cliff from where you plopped fac. But only having a few units being able to actually follow this move order renders it a lot less usable, now some of your units are wandering a completely different route. This is my main reason for wanting jumps for all and as you say with long jump windup animations, shitty jump range, speed, reload time, etc. one could presumably make this useless for actual combat. And even if the extra utility of being able to traverse some cliffs now and then get's viewed as op one could perhaps tweak some other stat.

Perhaps jumpbots have similar or identical jump ranges and introducing ones with a very short one would be problematic UI wise?
EDIT: This was written before Googles reply

There is a precedent for bad combat jump: Detriment. Imagine something trying to jump with a 10 second channeling while not exactly having detriment hp.

There's also precedent for putting jumpers into difficult places: Terraform can make those places right where the unit already is - often used with eg Emissary.

ZK also already has something that gives all jumpfac unit jump. Except for some reason it's in Amphib factory.

Overall i'm not a great fan of jumping firewalker.

2 unsorted thoughts:

- not all shield-bots have shields, not all cloakbots cloak (ok, all amph are amphibic)

- jumpy is already quite annoying to play against and fiddly to play with

Overall I think that jumpy is a sleeper op-fac, at least in 1v1 (if not on quite large maps). Jumping puppies, mods, placeholder and firewalker sound not very sexy. But that is only given their current stats of course. So IF you would want to add jump to all of them, the rest of their stats would need to be lowered.

Now someone needs to make a forum post called, "Giving all Cloakbots Cloak" just to round it all out.