Thug is far too good for its cost. It has better shield hp per cost and regen per cost than Aspis while not costing any E to recharge. It's an assault with an hp/cost ratio of over 12! While basically preventing attrition! Knight is a decent assault and it has an HP/cost ratio of less than 7. Even Thug's lackluster DPS is still as good as Knight's per cost! A "unit" consisting of 4 Thugs, 1 Outlaw and 2 Rogues costs 1190, has decent speed, 5000 hp (ignoring the 6050hp under the shield), 64hp/s regen, is immune to raiders, has a range 530, 100dps aoe attack and is very dangerous at close range (over 300dps and a LOT of slow). It can just skirm in and out, immune to normal anti-skirm tactics (high weight and regen means no attrition and raiders can't counter, Glaives can't even catch a fleeing outlaw). As best I can tell the only things that work against Shieldballs are things that ignore the shield. Jugglenaughts pulling things out of the shield, Phantoms and Likhos firing through the shield and cloaked snitches walking through the shield. Some factories like Hover have nothing that works against them and amph requires very high risk all-in plays (e.g. lobbing a scallop+limpet ball). Even Tremor isn't a great counter as its slow speed and inability to fire backwards leaves it very vulnerable to being overrun. And even the things above have reasonably easy counters once an Aspis, Felon and circling Bandits are in the mix. In recent games with friends it's become "The side with shields wins". I get rolled with shields: http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1003566 I am annoyed at this and so pick OP-shields myself: http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1003596
+3 / -1
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My favourite dead horse is being kicked. Allow me to gleefuly offer up my own foot for the splendour. My personal favourite choice of nerf would be to the regen of the shield. Allow the unit to perform as it does now initially, but not be so attrition immune.
+0 / -0
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From your examples, I thought this was about 3v3? 1v1 I'd definitely pick shield over tanks. Playing tanks is always an uphill battle. Hover is fine on a mixed water map, but I'd rather go amph. Shields are a strong pick in 1v1, but the whole Thug thing is a bit of a one-trick pony once you get to afford proper unit combinations, which gets much easier the more players you have. On the other hand, I regularly switch to tanks for Emissary or even Tremor. I switch to cloaks for Sniper or Scythe. I switch to amphs for Lobster or Grizzly. I switch to to rovers for Impaler or Fencer. Shields are pretty meh, you can get Aspis from a morph and the only other special unit is Snitch. They better be solid if they aren't special.
+1 / -0
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I'd watch a dein vs dyth bo5 redcom
+4 / -0
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I'd upvote if it wasn't that map.
+0 / -0
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In 1v1,   izirayd believes that shield cannot fend off early Kodachi pressure in https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1001144. So it seems to be that shield is too fragile early on outside of good Snitch connections, but snowballs too hard later.
+0 / -0
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I agree with the premise that thug is too cost effective. Thug is a walking ball of free stuff. It feels like they should offer either less free stuff or be much more fragile under the shield hood, since they are a ridicullously cost effective damage sink. I personally wouldn't be too interested in playing shields vs tanks on a flat map though. IME Tank early game is close to unstoppably strong vs shields due to Kodachi being able to walk all over bandits and outrun everything else, slowing down the shield player's early game to a crawl unless there's a significant skill gap in the shield player's favor. At which point the Tank player should normally get a significant metal advantage, which they need to use decisively to prevent an overwhelming shield death ball because tanks are pretty bad at fighting those. Hilariously kodachis are really bad vs thugs because they do fairly low pure damage so they're bad against shields and they can't go underneath of the shield without killing themselves with their own AoE. It's probably one of the most asymmetrical land factory matchups in the game.
+0 / -0
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Anyway, let's 1v1. I just want to either get to choose the factory (any except shield), or get to choose the map (no weird stuff I promise). Tanks will always get pushed, because they have to build up a ball. But they can also pick off shields that didn't ball. It's really hard to give generic advice, but the most generically useful advice I can give to any Rover/Tank player is to counterattack. Your units move faster, so you can kill the enemy base faster than they can kill yours.
+1 / -0
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quote:
    DeinFreund most generically useful advice I can give to any Rover/Tank player is to counterattack |
Noted, thanks. I chickened out of a counter at one point in the game  dyth68 mentioned, to defend my comm from some radar dots instead. I probably should have plopped a Faraday and maybe split off a unit or two as backup. I don't see how Thug is justifiable based on those stats. I suppose if it shoots like a stormtrooper, but I don't feel it's nearly that bad. My main beef with shields is that they seem to get such an easy ride in terms of micro. You can have everything in one place on the active front in a nice easy ball. Whereas (say) Rover has to very carefully manage range while trying to wear down the ball, use its mobility to harass multiple locations, and when that's not viable you get to facswitch and if you're lucky you can bomb it without being turned into a metal delivery by a Felon. Half of the counters require a multi-phase attack i.e. stun/disarm then destroy*. As shields you just keep ticking off things with no attrition until you have enough of an advantage to roll over the opponent. Perhaps I'm underestimating the micro micro required to do shields well, but I think that the "solution" to shields is something that makes the shield player have to work harder to use them. * Which makes me think, maybe shields need to be forced to work in two phases as well. For example, you could make shields only deploy when static, so they have to advance in alternating lines to keep up a consistent shield wall.
+0 / -0
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There's other stuff that messes up shields as well. Cloaked Imp. Thunderbird. Silo. Ultimatum. Sling and Recluse can skirmish a ball to death. Bertha. Hell, I've had my balls nuked before. The problem is that people think shieldballs are "too good" because they don't want to put on their thinking cap to counter them. Uh, yeah, if I have 5-7k worth of metal in a ball it BETTER be good. Against nubs shieldballs ARE devastating because they dont know how to handle them. Meanwhile against good players, I find it hard to get going. Good players realise that they can't allow shieldballs to snowball, and prioritize them as targets. Just tonight I had my ball (a) cloak + Imped and then swarmed (b) Thunderbirded and then swarmed (c) Likhoed (d) Siloed with Shockley and Eos (e) Thunderbirded and Likoed. It was carnage. Granted, my micro could have been a bit better, but the other guys knew what they were doing and probably would have splattered me anyway even if I was on fire. Shields add depth and variety to the game. Let's not mess them up.
+1 / -0
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Turns out that I'm seriously rusty and made so many stupid mistakes... Likely to drop out of the top 20 soon.    Astran: None of that would change if Thug cost 200. Also, I don't think it's good game design to make it so the simple act of grouping units together makes them require specialist counters. It makes shieldballs OP for 90% of the playerbase.
+0 / -0
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quote:
It makes shieldballs OP for 90% of the playerbase. |
Plus rovers.
+0 / -0
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The problem isn't that shieldballs are uncounterable. The problem is that thug is just outrageously cost effective and doesn't require much effort to use well. It has far more effective hp/metal than any other assault even before counting the shield regen, and even their fairly poor weapon speed and dps are heavily diminished in importance by the existence of outlaw.
+1 / -0
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Watched some games. Recommending a -10% to Thug HP (nothing to its shield). Make getting past the shield a larger vulnerability, improves raiders against it after sniping that outlaw, or large aoe units like banisher, chipping through the shield (or fire they walk into, etc).
+0 / -0
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Can't say I like the idea of a meta-unit that just keeps getting stronger and shutting down its own counters the more units you put into it, eventually becoming unstoppable. Shield balls feel like an aberration within Zero-K in that they completely change the rules of the game, in particular in regards to power density. Whereas most other factories have a limit to how many units you can squeeze in an area before it starts getting really inefficient, shiedballs only get stronger and stronger. Each individual unit's position in the shield ball becomes stronger the more stacked it is. It feels like they counter the very concepts of mobile warfare, tactical positioning and other such things generally considered positive in an RTS. They punish players for trying to play in an interesting fashion and reward either reaching for cheese counters (which gradually lose effectiveness with ball size) or investing massively in attrition warfare. They also feel very snowballey in general, which last time I checked is generally considered a bad thing in an RTS. RTS games are more interesting when a comeback is always possible. Shields either lose hard or win hard, due to suffering no attrition when winning and exploding to bits when losing, there is no middle ground. And I know people will mention things like snitch likho etc but I don't consider it a good thing that these all-or-nothing solutions are how you counter shieldballs. It makes shieldballs an extremely high-risk high-reward mechanic, to the point where it can make victory or defeat feel like a gamble. Your fate may depend of whenever you remembered to include an outlaw in the shield ball, or whenever the shield ball walks right into that snitch you placed on its way. In short, I don't like shieldballs and their impact in the game, particularly large team games.
+1 / -0
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Frankly, nearly all units get better as they scale in number. Shield fac caring about this isn't an aberration, its the idea manifest. Shield likewise, still has most of the same core weaknesses with this, a licho can kill the ball suddenly, a roach or imp can suddenly ruin them all if they are not careful. Specific shield ball compositions deal with certain counters more than others, and its a real balancing game. Frankly, a game having comeback potential is nice in theory, but what you really want is for the game to end quickly when one side has actually won, and eventually the shield ball player has, and frankly before then this could all turn around on them.
+4 / -0
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