A sugestion on how to make superweapons be possible to counter without spying on enemy 24/7.

Today, i was just calmly playing the game, preparing to attack the enemy. And guess what.

Everything i had got annihilated by Disco Rave Party, and i didnt knew the AI can even build this damn thing.

Superweapons in RTS games are meant to be obscenely powerfull - you waste a year worth of resources and a lot of time to make them, after all, and if you get one - it can turn the tide of battle within seconds.

However, what should really not be a thing is being impossible to tell if the enemy is making a Superweapon until you get annihilated by it. I had no idea whatsoever that the enemy was doing anything special than 100's of Striders until i suddenly got my entire base annihilated within seconds just because they decided to throw a party.

My suggestion would be to make some alert when the enemy starts building a superweapon, or at least a very expensive radar that can only detect massive units, like a Paladin, Detriment, or what i just got annihilated by - the Disco Rave Party.

Being able to know that you need to quickly prepare a strong assault and destroy the superweapon before it makes pancakes out of you would possibly make for some very fun gameplay, where the builder of the superweapon needs to prepare great defences and the attacker must try his best to counter them, until its all too late, and how it is now is just purely annoying, as far as i played this game i found no way whatsoever to be able to scout on the enemy and precisely see what he is doing.

I really hope something will be done about high chance of a sudden death from a superweapon, as it really takes away from the game, and so far i absolutely love Zero-K.

No offense, but you were not calmly playing the game and preparing to attack.

You had turtled up in the corner somewhere and were huddled behind a forest of stingers and stardusts and shields, trying to beat off endless Dante attacks. Zero-K is meant to punish turtling. It's meant to punish not scouting and it's meant to punish not raiding. If you huddle behind porc you will lose. Because you ceded map control to the enemy, they probably had 2-3 times more metal and energy than you. By that point the game is lost.

You did have a warning, btw.

The moment that multiple striders appear you know that the enemy has the metal and energy to build a superweapon and is probably doing so.

This is against AI, which is pretty chilled about teching up and raiding. Human opponents will swarm your ass so fast that your head will spin. I suggest that you expand your area of influence faster and raid the enemy yourself. If like me, you are a porc-lover, then you have to do it intelligently. You have to grab a large wedge of the map and set up defences at least at the midpoint, so that you are controlling or contesting the lions share of mexes.

If you don't like the sound of this then another suggestion is using the options to disable superweapons altogether. Nobody says that you HAVE to play with zenith or drp vs AI if you don't want to.

Hope this helps.

Best late game scout units:

Swift

If you time the speed boost(Swifts special ability) well, then there is basically no amount of AA that is going to stop you from scouting the enemy base. Select 5-10 Swifts, spread them out evenly by using line move, draw a line on the other side of the map behind the enemy base and as they are passing by the heaviest amount of Anti-Air, use the speed boost to get deep into the enemy base to scout it.


Owl

It will not be able to penetrate as deep as Swifts if the enemy have excessive amounts of Anti-Air, but it is easier to use and each plane has huge Line of Sight.
Select 3-5 Owls, choose a path to the enemy base where there is the least amount of Anti-Air, as you reach the enemy base, use line draw to spread them out and scout the base or just keep them in a pack as you scout the enemy base.

Widow

A cheap but micro intensive option. This cloaked Spider bot can climb any cliff and is only stopped by deep water.
If you watch it carefully, you should be able to avoid enemy units and get deep into the enemy base. You probably want to avoid the main reinforcement lines directly between your base and the enemy base, so I recommend going into the enemy base from the side or from behind. Sometimes the enemy clusters their buildings so much that you can't scout everything but on the plus side; if you have a nuke and time it well, you can send a nuke and then stun the Anti-Nuke(s) with the Widow(s) so that the nuke goes through.

quote: Everything i had got annihilated by Disco Rave Party, and i didnt knew the AI can even build this damn thing.

That year spent working on the AI is a gift that keeps on giving

The AI was designed to try to win :)

I've heard this idea, but it conflicts with my sense of arbitrariness too strongly. Revealing some set of powerful structures from across the map does not match my idea of the game worlds physics. It is possibly a good idea mechanically, but it does not get past my filter for consistency.

How about some sort of long range artillery that has slow firerate and the only thing it does is give vision of where it fires at? Sort of a gun version of terran scan.

We already have this> How about some sort of long range artillery that has slow firerate and the only thing it does is give vision of where it fires at? Sort of a gun version of terran scan.

Make Newtons and launch fleas =D

Ever since the boost ability was added to swifts a few years ago scouting has been super easy and practically impossible to stop as the swifts became too fast to shoot down. Personally I found it a bit too powerful as the enemy only needs to remember to scout occasionally, making secret superweapons an impossibility.