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New Sumo

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9 years ago
Sumo's newtons are awesome and really accentuate its role as a riot unit.

However there's no reason it should stand in front of a building and be entirely useless.

Sumo needs a melee attack!
+4 / -3
Skasi
9 years ago
Headbutting?
+3 / -0
9 years ago
quote:
Sumo's newtons are awesome and really accentuate its role as a riot unit.


if that was the plan all along, then devs could have stopped changing sumo 2 years ago. heat rays did a perfectly fine job at rioting, as a matter of fact, the role was much more clearly definded then as it is now. newtons can and will grab and push all kinds of things that are not within the category of things that riots can normally beat, such as skirmishers.
+5 / -0
Skasi
9 years ago
quote:
heat rays did a perfectly fine job at rioting

No, Heat Rays turned Sumo into an anti-everything-other-than-air monster.
+0 / -0
9 years ago
i was just pointing out the obvious contradiction, if its a problem that heatrays kinda work against short ranged skirms for example, then it must be a problem that newtons are even better against skirms. they also work quite well against air. thats just a twisted logic that is applied here.
+0 / -0
Skasi
Give it teeth?

edit: Oh also, DErankKlon here is proof that old heatray Sumo was op
+1 / -0


9 years ago
Afaik the problem (or at least some of it) with heatrays was the humongous melee range dps, which stole the spotlight from jack.
+2 / -0
Sumo has had a lot of problems, but in particular is its assault ability (not its skirmisher ability), which makes it overshadow jack.

Impulse guns are a great option precisely because they are useless against statics.
+0 / -0
the problem is that they pretty much generally are useless, or at least whacky and random. also a strider unit with assault hp but no means to damage statics and only newtons / weird dgun sounds a lot like this other strider that eventually got removed entirely because nobody ever figured out how to put it to good use.

that said, im not entirely against newtons, but as more of a supplementary thing.
+0 / -0
quote:
that said, im not entirely against newtons, but as more of a supplementary thing.

I.E. diluting interesting mechanics to dumb the game down.
+1 / -0
9 years ago
Give it a dgun wich would make it roll in a certain direction destroing all things on its path but bumping off heavier buildings: solars, razors, ddms, hlts, factories, gauss and heavy units such as: striders, commanders?, goliath, reaper. It would still make them damage these units/structures but it would stop the devastating charge. However make that dgun reload very slow so it wont be too abusive!
+2 / -0
quote:
I.E. diluting interesting mechanics to dumb the game down.


what? i dont think its about dumbing the game down, its about not having a "weapon" that produces extremely random and at times just odd results as the main weapon on a unit this expensive.

if there was a unit the size of say a moderator that had this and only this purpose, it would be another thing.

i always liked these whacky things that you can do in zk, and i think most people do. just they should also be useful overall, and not just plain whacky.
+2 / -0

9 years ago
sumo is so uninteresting, we should give it disruptor lazors.
+0 / -0

9 years ago
Expensive units generally should be more specialized/weird, and not just "something that also goes pew but is harder to kill".
+0 / -0
9 years ago
you sure about that? currently most of the very heavy units are fairly multirole, and none of them are particularly weird. the juggler was weird, and thats why it was removed. probably because "its mechanic was too interesting"?

no you didnt actually say that. but you are rather selective in the application of that principle. first there is a juggler, then it gets removed presumably because too weird/useless, then you go ahead and turn sumo into the juggler, and then you say i wanna remove interesting mechanics because i dont want it to have newtons as its only regular weapon?

the better way to do this would have been to make the juggler somehow work. i dont see how this horrendously expensive self-conflicting utitliy kind of apparatus the sumo is now has any place in a competetetive game.
+2 / -0

9 years ago
The design goal is that pricey/heavy units do not obsolete cheaper/lighter units.

One possible method is to make the pricer units be specialized/weird. I think this method is fun and interesting.

One possible method it that the pricer unit is less cost efficient than the cheaper units. I think this method is boring. I think the major incentive then to build the more expensive multirole unit is that micro-managing one unit is much easier than micro-managing a mixed army of units.
+1 / -0

9 years ago
Take the guns off altogether and give it outlaw waves? Then it could weakly attack buildings, wouldn't have the silly weird-aiming stubby t-rex arms, and could slow units down for the Firewalker as AUrankAdminSaktoth requests.
+0 / -0
Outlaw waves defeat one of its supposed counter classes.

There was a lengthy discussion in #zkdev earlier today, and some design-space constraints were agreed on:

1) That Sumo should have its current hitpoints order of magnitude.
2) That Sumo should keep its fun attack jump ability.
3) That Sumo should be rioty.
4) That Sumo should have broad natural classes (skirmishers, antiheavy)
5) That Sumo should not be a better, heavier jack with more survivability.
6) That Sumo should keep its current weight and factory allegiance.
7) That Sumo should be fun.

Newton Sumo satisfies most of this, but reportedly its gravguns are fairly good against skirmishers.

Outlaw wave Sumo automatically counters antiheavy units.

It has been argued that a heatray sumo satisfies most of these, but its close-range DPS makes it step significantly on Jack's toes, and the historical heatray Sumo was pretty good at killing skirmishers by combining its range and the jump ability. The degree at which it was capable of doing this is debatable, but i think it generated sufficient dislike from people who were not noobs. I like heatray aesthetics more than i like units with non-damaging weapons, but it loses too many points on those.

A damaging Sumo weapon that is neither gravity nor heatray basically has to satisfy those parameters:

1) It cannot be effectively combined with jump to kill skirmishers with an efficiency that is higher than an arbitrary low margin, provided competent counterplay by the skirmisher player.
2) It should not have an excessively short range or have adjacency bonuses that would make its optimal use-case point-blank.
3) It should be decently effective against things that riots are good against.

It seems that it is very hard to design such a weapon because range extension by jump is immensely powerful; and any weapon whose range in combination with jump is sufficiently small to not do nasty things to skirmishers, is basically melee.

If there does not exist a solution in the space defined by those constraints, perhaps some of them could be lifted.
+3 / -0

9 years ago
quote:
It should not have an excessively short range or have adjacency bonuses that would make its optimal use-case point-blank.

Sumo's current damaging weapon is even more point-blanky than Jack's. And yet jump seems to be considered as one of the good things about Sumo. Perhaps the point-blankiness of its arm weapons isn't that important if Sumo counters and gets countered by different enough units compared to Jack?
+0 / -0
9 years ago
Maby sumo by its design is a really close relative to the jack? Both jump in order to attack. One has splash and the second one a huge ... jack? Both have enourmous hp. By current design it IS a WORSE jack. It cannot attack structures, it is even slower and more costly.
If you want it to be fun, rioty and keep its current wreght and factory allegiance and weight, have its current hp - seriously give it a death roll (its like 3rd time i am posting abaut this).
+1 / -0
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