In a perfect world someone would have pressed pause and the athena player would have been told to move it the f away. That was not cool staying there man, seeing its obviously wrong.

I've seen this bug dozens of times, a flea gets inside the building with the same results, allies destroy own superweapon by shooting flea inside it. There is no honor exploiting this bug and anybody can judge you.

nanoframes could push things out of itself. as for this case, use AA with splash damge, like copperhead?

@mojj

quote: nanoframes could push things out of itself. as for this case, use AA with splash damge, like copperhead?

Does it have anything to do with the wireframe though? I haven't tested, but I would expect the shape of the Zenith is such that a flying unit can be stuck in the center of its "cannon".

Does the zenith beam do damage? I don't even know.

quote: Also I would be curious to know if impalers and racketeers could shoot at it.

No, they cannot. Only units with AvoidFriendly off can. Again, the problem here is that the enemy athena is inside a friendly unit's collision volume. Attacking it would deal friendly damage which most units will avoid. The only units that could attack it are:

- Ultimatium (defeats the purpose)
- Zenith (defeats the purpose)
- Starlight (defeats the purpose)
- Outlaw (probably the best)

Maybe a few others..

Am I missing something?

quote: Am I missing something?

What if you spire the zenith? Maybe it was spired high enough that ground AA could not target the athena.

quote: How can something hide in the hitbox in the first place? This is a bit too macro for superpositions.

Athenas are aircraft, which do not have collision (as this would create really janky behavior, or so I can guess). I've done it before with silos but that's another beast as that's foot print exploiting rather than collisionless. You can replicate this with the really good energy spire maps. Energy spires have notoriously high disparity between colvol and footprint (iirc their footprints are about 2x2, which is the equivalent of lotus). The colvol of the energy spire spreads out to be about the size of a thug's shield iirc. This means that units can hide in these colvols and get blocked by the engine's targeting (as most units have avoidFeature on).

So when you have a tall colvol like Zenith and a colissionless flyer, bad things are going to happen. Athenas don't need to check for pathing; they can fly straight through units!

This is unintended behaviour, but I don't think it warrants an external rule disallowing it. We almost never have any rules against using any combination of ingame actions to try to win (ingame actions draws the distinction between using mechanics and doing something socially, like kicking players or harassing people).

I put a high value on having no rules against doing anything you want at a game-mechanics level. It helps the creativity aspect of ZK when people feel able to experiment and find stuff without getting banned or told to arbitrarily stop. So, I expect this to get fixed, but I don't want to tell anyone to not do it in the meantime.

A big part of my reasoning is that it just doesn't seem that effective. An Athena has to make it into a superweapon, which already seems like a low-percentage proposition, and then there are a bunch of ways to kill it.

• Inferno and Blastwing can kill it with DoT fire.
• Missiles that shoot directly up tend to ignore allies. So Flail, Trident and Racketeer work (and Impaler with some fiddling).
• Outlaw works, and there are probably a few more solutions. Gunships seem to be able to knock it out.