Can we rebuff coms?

Level 0 com is fine. Competing has problems.

Come are an 'owled' unit in zero-k. They can be effective, but they are prohibitively cost, and you only get one. There are many forum post between the last Commander morph changes and now. It will take a lot to compel change. Maybe design documents.

Dear commander,

You walking clunky tin can with potatoes instead of arms. You can't even use your arms, you have to turn all your torso to do anything. You are one of the slowest, less efficient units in the game. Your all upgrades suck and are a waste of metal. If you try to upgrade your modules the only thing you achieve is a bunch of shouts directed at the poor person who happens to give you orders for "trollcoming" or being "useless sink of metal". You are clunky and can't beat your weight for cost with any other unit in game. You should be the pride and defender of your faction, instead you are only walking 3 mex and 4 solar panel storage can in a box that cannot even overdrive.

Did I rebuff com enough?

quote: Did I rebuff com enough?

Worthy of a True Kin.

Commanders could really use buffs. The modules could be either cheaper or simply scale better in stats. Some of the speed maluses could be removed, or at least reduced and fire damage should scale with damage modules.

Currently commanders have the worst performance to metal ratio and losing one in battle will impact economy, which further discourages using Comms in active battle. The metal spent on commanders is always better spent on other units, whether they are factory standard or striders.

Even combat oriented guard commander can't achieve the same combination of damage, range, speed and health as Dante with same metal investment.
I swear, if commanders didn't have economy tied to them, people would gladly reclaim their own commanders after expansion to get better units for cost.

Overral, there is also a problem with the viability between different commander chassisses. Recon commander is generally the best since it has ability to jump and other than that, the commanders have only some mild differences in starting health and movement speed, and of course some small differences coming from upgrading commander. Most of the variety comes from different module options between chassisses, but since it was already stated that those are waste of metal, they aren't really used.
Leveling the commander up costs metal even without modules eventhough some of the chassisses, such as guardian don't even have level up bonus like the engineers +2 building power.

Overral, it is possible to get level 4 module with around 800 metal investment if you only take the level 2 weapon change and the level 4 weapon module, which is pretty good deal. But if you try to take any of the module updates, which give marginal 10% (if even that, with maluses negated from the buffs they are really low overral) the price hikes easily to many thousands units of metal for barely any benefit.

Also, could the 5 metal cost removed from the level 2 beam laser wapon update? since the commanders now start already with beam laser and it is 5 metal cheaper to not pick any weapon upgrade rather than selecting the beam laser at level 2.

I miss the old days only I use sniper commander.

I like the olden days com that had a skill-shot dgun, no upgrades and exploded like a nuke

commander need a very tough ground/water transport vehicle/hover transformer base. 2000 cost, add 2000 hp and could morph into 2 forms, wheels for +12 elmos/ hover +15 elmos at cost 500 at will any time.

Let me put my few cents here. I will use a comparison method too.

If anyone played SupCom 2 there was a very nice design regarding Commanders. If upgraded sufficiently they were very hard to kill and could obliterate smaller armies (of let's say up to 100 crap units or up to 20 good units or up to 1-2 weak experimentals).

This design was very interesting because it allowed aggressive play with Commanders. I think it could be used here too.

Say what??

For starters Warcraft had commanders. It was the precursor of MOBA genre because of it's hero design.
Starcraft have commanders now too albeit only in cooperation mode. Still a widely loved addition.
It shows that the strong hero figure in the army is a very good strategical concept in RTS games, that's widely used and loved.

As for irony dripping off of Your comment: my comparison made a lot more sense since Supreme Commander is a part of the same "series" as Zero-K (let's call it TA series for simplicity) while C&C, SC and WC are not. So please, less sarcasm, more constructivity.

EDIT: Since You edited Your post I will too. I do not follow rule of cool. I follow the rule of usefull. I understand people wanting stronger Commander because I also feel that right now it's just a little better builder. I feel like both having and loosing Commander should be a big deal and not just an ignorable detail. It actually adds risk-reward strategy making to using commander.

The design around weak commander, that would become strong enough as it gets updated would be that it would be worth the risk of even using the commander in frontline action. To balance the risk, there needs to be a reward. Currently the risk is so high (and there isn't any reward really,) that just keeping the commander safe in the back and letting other constructors deal with frontline building and reclaim is a meta choice.

If commander could be upgraded to actually strong unit. It would become a choice to use commander in frontline rather than a meta as there would be a reward to balance the risk.

Of course we want to avoid a scenario, where a commander is able to defeat any combination of units in equal metal investment, but the commander should at least have a fighting chance against half metal investment of units. Currently a starting commander will easily lose to single Mace or Minotaur, which is fine. But should that happen even after pouring 800 more metal into the commander? Probably not.


For example, lets say there was a design that edited the module upgrades to give X% bonus per commander level rather than being fixed increase. This way the commander would get better and better with every level as the level increases and the amount of modules increases. This could be balanced by having low multiplier per level and having increased cost per level up, which is already a part of the system.

Lets say the damage module was 4% damage increase per level rather than fixed 10%. A level 2 commander with damage increase module would be weaker than current level 2 commander, but by level 3 the increase is now 12% instead of 10. Add other damage modules between the levels 1 to 3 and the effective increase is even higher in comparison. It doesn't necessarily need to be 4% as it was just an example, could be more, could be less depending on what seems more balanced.