Strider hub

I'm thinking of moving the striders from Athena to a dedicated "strider hub" (basically a nanotower that builds the striders). This would give us more room in the buildlist for new striders, and allow us to specialize the Athena (and, well, make it not a bastard hybrid of a pseudo-factory).

Thoughts?

Idea, no idea how possible it is:

You need a special nanotower to build striders.

No other form of nanolathe can assist in building striders. If you want more BP for striders, you need more of the special Strider nanotower.

This nanotower is not a ploppable factory. Because trying to balance the strider plant as a starting lab was a bad idea.

Nanohub was actually the original intended design when "t3 factory" was removed. Athena was supposed to be a temporary replacement until a model was made, but just kind of stuck around forever.

I kind of like Pxtl's idea, although it would mean a 'special rule' for BP which I don't like so much.

Nope, hate it, the strider nanohub would need massive buildpower to build striders in a timely fashion. Worst of all, once you make strider nanopower, you'll want to just keep pumping nothing but striders. Thats not how they're meant to work!! Striders are meant to support a land unit invasion, not serve as one-man armies. One of the advantages of a hub or athena is it can plop down the frame and then, when you're done, do something else (say, use athena to plop down a dante frame then send it reclaiming/sneaking into enemy base/etc). This is something a factory cant do, as its BP can only be used on units. This is half the point of having striders in a hub/athena, to encourage people to use them as intended.

(BTW people complain about athena constantly, particularly the devs- it has 9BP and is ploppable, allowing all-assist compush starts- though they arent as bad as the old 1k resource comassisst starts).

Yeah, in hindsight it's not a great idea. I just was trying to think of a way to make striders a uniquely tricky investment instead of being tacked-on to the Athena or being just another lab (which also made no sense).

If you wanted to be really extreme: striders are comm-modules to add to the comm's buildlist... and you only get a short list of striders for each module.

That's probably also a terrible idea.

Thinking it over, as weird as the athena appraoch is, it makes a certain amount of sense: having striders be built by Athena maps best to them being an "occasional" unit. A standard factory means doing silly things to make this into a viable starting lab. A special factory means a special investment which means cranking out striders to make that investment pay off.

Why not use cheaper fighters? They are built faster, fly faster and 1-shot athenas with their missile. They're more vulnerable, but I think the higher speed (kill the athena earlier, so it can't even use a single point of bp!) more than makes up for that.


I'd like to know what others think about using commanders as a strider-hub. To me adding a new unit only for striders seems like unit-clutter, which is something ZK tries to avoid

And forgot to mention for 500m cost builder 9BP isint riduculous at all. It is not that you can rush something straight in battlefield because it will end up dead.

this always happens. people complain about non existent problems and we nerf 12 units that didn't need it and buff 4 others that also don't need it.

stop changing the lovely game we all love

It's 500m, lucky. :)

I aint talking about Athena, Harvey. I'd like to see Athena more of a covert ops than it is now, but that's not what this topic is about. Removing striders from it is not at all a "nerf", it does not change any of its stats and does not affect its use in any way. (Or did you really ever see a strider being built behind enemy lines?)

Factories have 6 BP and cannot make mexes. Athenas have 9 BP and can.

I actually think the whole 'make athena to expand then more com' thing is interesting, more interesting than the 'reclaim factory to morph comm' thing. And there will always be comm-specific strategies which focus on this (And im ok with that, 1 player in a 6v6 or so going for power-morphs is OK in my mind, except that it is ubercountered by prec bomber).

And the whole 'make a strider nanoframe, then go do something else' thing is ideal. A nanohub would need to have some other kind of use, otherwise players are going to want to keep making striders (at least, moreso than with athena).

A big problem is 9 BP 1 factory assists on small maps.