blitz/koda/bola/archer/venom and the advent of the riot/raiders

A long time ago, there were only 3 riot/raiders. Pyro, Blitz and Archer. And they.. weren't exactly good units. Pyro was really more of a raider, Blitz was expensive, dealt low damage and stunned friendlies on death. Archer had a water tank mechanic that made it bad. Back then, radiers dominated. Players joked that Glaive-fighting was the most fun part of the game. And I don't think I've even seen anyone complain about the raiders back then.

This was about 3 years ago. Since then, almost every update made raiders worse and introduced new units to counter them.
Since then:
Welder was made into a de-facto riot
Every constuctor was buffed againsts raiders
Commanders were buffed against radiers multiple times
Raider DPS nerfed, HP increased
Lotus DPS increased
Retreat-range bonus removed, but only for raiders
Almost all riots were buffed
Windgens, mexes were buffed

And most importantly, the riot/raiders. There's a strange pattern to these.
There's a new patch. Unit X gets introduced/majorly buffed/redesigned. Unit X is always a riot/raider. Some time later, players in 1v1 notce that unit X is very powerful and start monospamming it. Many factories don't even have a counter to the new unit X. Don't even consider making raiders against unit X. After at least a month, there's a nerf to unit X. It's feels better balanced now. But raiders are still less viable then before.

All of these were once unit X: Blitz, Kodachi, Bola, Archer. (Archer was even unit X twice!) And Venom doesn't look to be any different, @Godde is already monospamming it.

I have two questions: Why? And how much of this was intentional?

Sure, the new riot/raiders are fun to use, but I feel we've lost something in the process of making them what they are.

The situation that you have recognized is most certainly my experience of it too. That said, I'm not sure I share conclusive sentiment on the matter. I find mono-raider spam to be like... Why does the game promote this? There's very little depth. The fact that dagger can invalidate the use of all other units (barring claymore) in the same factory is just FUBAR if I'm being honest. I find it both shallow and flawed.

That said, the idea that riot/raidars are now the preventative force has left some true riot units really in the dark. I'm so underwhelmed by mace/ogre/scallop. Redback and outlaw are both still topdogs though.

I'm going to use your initial momentum to say something I just didn't have the energy to say after this patch, since I've consumed so much of it getting attention to archer and other things in the recent past. It's that venom out of the gate feels fucked OP. Someone else can fight that battle this time though.

quote: That said, the idea that riot/raidars are now the preventative force has left some true riot units really in the dark. I'm so underwhelmed by mace/ogre/scallop.

As far as I remember all three of those units have always had trouble finding a place where they were viable in general without causing real problems with cheese (scallop drops or just outright mace/ogre rush). As such I think this problem (in some form or another) predated Bolas/Kodachi/Archer.

I think I am personally happier with a world where Hover leans on Bolas than one where it leans on Mace. Jury is still out on archer vs scallop, and I don't really have a comment on Tank at all.

One could argue duck used to be raider riot with its high alpha first strike (where it launched both rockets at once...) and then just retreated.... Arguably raiders/riots will be superior to an raider or riot because fundamentally both roles are contradictory to each other (fast and raidy vs slow and crowd control). Combine both and you get a unit that is fast, has good damage with the ability to do some crow control making units which can catch it get countered.... All in the neat package of one unit simplifying production. The balance to this is often hp, cost or troll gimmicks. However, these almost nerf the unit too hard. I would argue having raider/riots is fundamentally impossible to properly balance.

I think that riot raiders can be fine, and even to a point that they are almost necessary or outright necessary for some factions to deal with certain raiders, but that the Archer and Venom have been problematic lately because they are just a little overtuned. If Venom did any of less damage, less range, less emp, or slower attack speed to give units a larger action window, it would feel a lot more fair. Right now Venom is creeping too close in similarity to Blitz with almost as much emp damage, and having an aoe on top of that and a much faster RoF makes it feel kind of nuts. I think that significantly lowering the emp and lowering the RoF a bit would be the more interesting approach, if it were me doing balance. That would help differentiate them more from blitz (lower emp damage but aoe) and give units more time to respond to being hit by venoms and rearrange themselves.

Archer was definitely overtuned for the cost and probably still doesn't need as big of an AoE as it has, or could live with having less damage. But Archer makes more sense now than before. Scallop is overcosted right now for what it does I think.

Skirmish/riot deathball is pretty much the easy mode way to play and more or less has been since I started playing the game. The only difference now is that there's faster raiders who seem to be a bit too cost effective compared to their more limited brethren. It might be that tuning riots to specifically beat down on riot/raiders harder than they can do now is necessary to give them a broader role, given how many riot raiders we have these days and their ability to do mostly the same jobs as riots can.

Lots of good points in this thread.

I have never been much of a fan of "riots" as a class, and out of all classes in Zero-K they feel like the most overtly-specialized. A classical riot is good at countering large raider swarms, and that's it.

They aren't even good at countering small raider swarms, because they're often too expensive and slow to do that effectively. This is why the early game is raiders wars, specially at low densities. You can't deploy a riot everywhere until later on and they take too long to relocate.

I very much agree that riot-hybrid units such as riot-assaults and riot-raiders tend to make their pure-riot factory mates obsolete. I pretty much never make reavers nowadays because knight. Ogres are good for dps but blitzes are a lot better at escorting things. Scorcher tends to have more uses than ripper, but I use ripper sometimes. I use redback a lot but the new venom might change that. Scallop might still be useful for its insane close-range DPS in some cases.

I'm not sure if the giant all-consuming glaive balls of times past in large team games were a good thing, but it does feel like deep raids with raiders aren't worth it in the current meta, even if you haven't yet provoked the enemy into building anti-swarm porc.

TBH I think gradually turning this new concept of raider-riot into a new class situated between raiders and assaults in weight, and phasing out riots, is something to consider in the long term.

It comes down to this would you prefer specialists in a role like raiders and riots (which need more micro, have too many independently exploitable weakness, suffer from losses more and cost more) or a generalist which only slightly underperforms in each role (often might even perform better), costs less, simplifies production and is much cleaner to use.... Yea Generalists ARE always superior to specialists in a war of scale...

quote: But the riot/raiders are strong. And they definitely are generalists, and there are a lot of them now, putting another nail in the coffin of my dream of a more dynamic Zero-K.

Maybe your perception is also due to the evolution of how much of the game a specific unit is important (on average). Probably the trend last years was to reduce the time for which raiders are most important, and increase the role of riot/raiders, but in large team games same can be said about super weapons (not sure if it is due to meta, changes or game size, but I think you see much more super-weapons now than 3 years ago).

quote: Speaking about balance, I am a supporter of typification balance - this is when all factories have all types and switching of factories is required only for aviation, but this balance still does not exist and will never be. In contrast to the typification balance, there is a balance of the weak side, which states that each factory has its own weak points, while the weak side is the lack of one or two types of units at once. What amazes me is that there are strong sides to the balance of the weak side. What surprises me is that the latter has supporters

That's a pretty interesting point though I think there has been some moves towards reducing type holes:

- The Amphbot rework (Lobster, Archer and Bulkhead) is showing good promise at reducing type gaps, Amphbot was a big culprit for having holes in its lineup and being overly dependent on Grizzly.
- The new Venom has potential of helping the Spider factory by filling the raiding and mobility hole depending on its balancing.
- Bolas was probably a good move in the same direction, even at the cost of nearly obsoleting Mace.
- Sling buffs and skirmisher Knight helped flesh out Cloak a lot.

It is a challenge to fill out factory lineups without making all the factories too generic or introducing power creep (either across the board or in a single unit as with riot/raiders), but I think there is more room to grow towards typification balance.

quote: I have two questions: Why? And how much of this was intentional?

Here are some factors.

Saktoth had this idea that each factory could had two raiders, one that is good against raiders and one that is good against structures. The most extreme version of this was attempted with the first Amphbots, where Duck launched non-homing torpedo rockets and Archer mostly dealt damage through impulse. I have my doubts about this idea, both because it didn't work with Amph and on a theoretical level. To me the fundamental issue here is that the type of attributes that make raiders good against each other also tend to make raiders good against Lotus, barring janky stuff like impulse (and we're not putting crazy impulse on half the raiders). In the end people will just spam the raider that can fight other raiders, and use them to fight Lotus whenever required. Mixing in a few anti-Lotus raiders will tend to be more trouble than it's worth.

The motivation behind the idea presented above is that having more than one viable unit for the first five minutes is more interesting than just making a single raider. I agree that having more buildable units early on would be good, at least for the average map. Having the occasional open raider spam map is fine by me. Since riots were not so good in the past it made sense to add more actual raiders to the factories that lacked them.

The more central factories have always had at least a few options in the early game.

• Rover has Scorcher and Fencer, with Dart and Ripper being reasonable earlier on more recently.
• Cloaky has Glaive and Imp, but Ronin can also be made fairly early since it is light, fast, and doesn't completely miss most raiders. Sometimes it is time to make a Scythe or Reaver.
• Shieldbot mostly relies on Bandit early, but Outlaw+Thug can often be sent out fairly early as they destroy light raiders and defenses.

Compare this to old Hover or Amph. Dagger and Duck were each significantly faster and cheaper than the rest of the core units of their factories. The cost and speed gap is awkward to cross, and it is particularly awkward if you try to cross it while a bit behind. It is really hard to make an early Mace or Scallop without losing a lot of tempo and probably losing the game. They are just too heavy, slow and vulnerable.

In short, Archer and Bolas were added to bridge the gap between Duck/Dagger and the rest of their factories. The only alternative I saw was to balance Duck/Dagger so finely that raider monospam would allow players to reach the midgame, taking the gap into account, reliably and against all factories, but without being OP. After many years of tweaking Hover I decided that Dagger could not be that finely tuned against so many factories. An additional early game unit was needed to take up the slack in matchups where Dagger struggles.

I think we may need a better word than riot/raider. What is riot/raidery about Bolas? It is just heavy. Groups of heavy raiders are going to be deceptively expensive and be better at low density attrition. Bolas has raider speed so I'd expect to see more of it if it were particularly good against raiders for cost, as I'd expect for a riot. I'd say the same about Blitz, it is just a heavy raider, with all the issues that creates.

Perhaps riot/raider means AoE? That would make sense as AoE provides some anti-swarm scaling. Kodachi is more a hit-and-run retreat-bonus raider than a riot though. If anything, I'd say Venom and Archer could be riot/raiders, simply because they are slower than the minimum raider speed and have AoE. They are designed to sit in a spot where they beat raiders and are beaten by riots. This ability to beat raiders isn't a new thing though, as I have always considered raiders on a spectrum of speeds and tried to ensure that the slower ones beat the faster ones in a straight-up fight.

Their ability to bridge the gap to the midgame and do somewhat well against raiders, riots and skirms does make them generalists. Bolas was intentionally a generalist because the rest of the factory is otherwise so specialised. Ideally they would supplement specialists, not make up entire armies, which I think is what we've seen for the most part.

The riot/raiders tend to exist for slightly different reasons, but they are all part of an effort to flesh out the factory. Tweaking of them is ongoing.