Im a bit concerned about Stardust and chicken mode. Well see how it turns out.

Great update for Tank Factory.

Cool stuff. Any more planned where drones VS skirmisher/lance/phantom AI is concerned or is there already a solution?

What psaniac wanted to say is that it would be a good idea in his opinion to nerf impalers now.

quote: What psaniac wanted to say is that it would be a good idea in his opinion to nerf impalers now.

What a great day to spam shields

quote: Fixed camera state recall and ctrl/alt+MMB rotation jitters for COFC (the advanced camera).

tyvm

So, against Stardust, it's best to sit for a couple of seconds outside of range so the stardust overheats trying to futily shoot at a slightly out-of-range unit...

This seems like annoying janky micro to me.

https://imgur.com/7aLS8QC/

This is what all cloakies look like to me after the newest patch, the whole texture is the color of the player that has built them.

quote: I'm not loving the stardust change. I was onboarding some new players and they complained that it felt like every unit had special rules, making the game require encyclopedic knowledge of obscure details of special unit features, and "stardusts can overheat" definitely fits in that category.

This is the idea of every new mechanic counting against the complexity budget, and I certainly voiced the concern a few times in testing. I didn't get much pushback for heat so I figure it might not be too complex. I made the mechanic and am still a bit surprised it ended up in the game. I half expect it to go the way of other complex and unique ideas (eg Archer tank and Ronin slowing on reload), as I like to remove unnecessary complexity, but then again things like Disarm and Slow started out small too.

The question to me isn't whether it is complex, but whether it is worth paying the price of complexity. Heat made it into the game because I think medium ranged units need a bit of attention. Part of the power of artillery and long-ranged skirmishers is that such an army can't be stopped by a few Stardusts (which may even be hastily constructed to block an army). While Stardust fulfills a useful role in making the raider game end on open maps, it was also good at stopping assaults. Knight may, in part, be a particular good assault because it can quickly stun a Stardust, limiting the damage it receives.

There aren't many ways to make Stardust worse vs assaults without making it similarly worse against raiders, at least without redesigning its weapon or dipping into armour classes. Heat exploits the fact that a Stardust vs. raider battle is generally resolved much more quickly than a Stardust vs. assault battle. The solution is simply to give Stardust less DPS in longer battles. It's a pretty ugly solution, but it's all we could think of, and I think the complexity price is worth paying, at least to see what transpires.

On complexity in general, I don't think Zero-K is uniquely complex, rather, I think we could do a lot better at easing people into the complexity. Many games would completely obscure the hidden states and modifiers that make the underlying game run. I'm thinking of C&C armour classes or the entirety of Company of Heroes style games. Zero-K attempts a level of transparency that probably backfires (sometimes) by giving people the impression that they need to understand it all to play. For example, I put a heat gauge on Stardust so people could see how it is working, or at least that something is happening, but I could have easily left it off. I doubt that new players, and possibly many others, would have noticed. I think the best onboarding reassures people that they don't need to know very much to start playing and having fun. Most of my Age of Empires 2 playtime is probably from before I knew about variable food gather rates or the hidden armour classes (the ones that don't show up on the UI).

quote: So, against Stardust, it's best to sit for a couple of seconds outside of range so the stardust overheats trying to futily shoot at a slightly out-of-range unit... This seems like annoying janky micro to me.

Do you have a test case or is this all theory? This is the first thing I thought of. First of all I discovered that the behaviour you're talking about doesn't exist. Stardust doesn't shoot at stationary units beyond its range. The I tried jinking in and out of range to abuse the aim lookahead and projectile travel time. It is of course possible to configure heat such that jinking in an out of range causes real heat rise, so I made sure not to do that.

Stardust intermittently reaches about 20% heat with a setup like this. It dissipates in about a second. The Glaives have to be pretty spread to avoid AoE from each other. The Stardust loses a lot of heat switching between targets and being confused. It could be pushed higher with a perfect widget, but then again a perfect widget could do a lot of things. The benefit is sufficiently low for me to not worry about it.

quote: I don't understand why skydust was presenting a problem for heavy tanks. Any tank can kill stardust easily...why make it worse?

Skydust was very efficient, even vs Minotaur. It had 145% more DPS/Cost than Lotus. Attacking into that sort of damage is very tricky when the defenses have a little support. It's now down to 27% more DPS/cost after about 7 seconds of firing.

quote: Cool stuff. Any more planned where drones VS skirmisher/lance/phantom AI is concerned or is there already a solution?

It is a problem. Maybe someone is working on it.

quote: This is what all cloakies look like to me after the newest patch, the whole texture is the color of the player that has built them.

As far as I know nothing changed with those models. A missing texture could be a corrupt download. Try verifying files or deleting the game archive in Zero-K/games.

I like the direction of everything I'm seeing here! Still need to nerf terraform cost though.

tiny input:
maybe imp decloak radius -> 7.9 because it is still simply worse than snitch.

(this post doesn`t require an answer)