LaserAA that can hit space/jumpers

I think that would be bad for the balance and would completely nerf all jumpers and the entire jumpbot factory.


I like flying snitches too much for the change. Plus space jacks are pretty rare.

We considered implementing AA with fire arcs, but went with target categories instead for a few reasons:

• Ideally every model would need to look like it physically could not aim downwards. It's good for behaviour to match models. Even the fire arcs of Jugglenaut and Krow were choices made by the modeller, not by anyone else telling the modeller that we'd like the units to have restricted arcs.
• Cliff interactions become weird. AA is suddenly great at shooting up the cliffs on maps like DSD. Meanwhile, AA standing on a cliff can't shoot air flying in the lowlands.
• The effective range of AA would vary per matchup vs ground and air units. Some air units fly quite low so could sneak under the cone at low range. Some ground units are quite tall, or may stand on a small hill. Basically, the overlay of where an AA unit could shoot would be spotty and vary per target.
• Vehicles and spiders tilt on terrain. A Tarantula that could only shoot upwards would still be able to act as artillery while clinging to a cliff at the right angle.

One of the main reasons I wanted to try this is to be able to hit spacenoids. I don't mean that there should be a "counter", but it should be possible to scratch them a bit at least. It currently feels a bit glitchy that certain units flying through the air can't be shot at by any AA all. It's not game-breaking by any means, just a thing that feels off for me.

I don't think it "counters" jumpbots, because you can't force them to jump. In 1v1 I doubt players would start building gremlins or toads to fend of jumpbots, it's just not reliable. Perhaps it would work on certain maps and certain situations? But wouldn't it be nice to have another tool in the bag?

I purposefully only made this change to "laser-like" AA. Thus, this change does not affect any of the missile/flak AA in any way.

quote: Ideally every model would need to look like it physically could not aim downwards

Zephyr and Razor are like that already. Gremlin and Toad might need a tweak.

quote: Cliff interactions become weird

Yeah, it's pretty weird. But it could also be fun, since it makes sense "in physics".

quote: The effective range of AA would vary per matchup vs ground and air units

Indeed, I bet a gremlin could attack a detriment for example. Which is weird.
In real life it wouldn't be weird of course, I would totally fire an anti-air weapon at a detriment. Fire anything really.

quote: Vehicles and spiders tilt on terrain

None of the "laser AA" are vehicles or spiders, but yes, this is why I had to skip applying this to Raptor.
I originally wanted to find some way to make flying objects become temporarily target-able by AA, but I guess this would need a change in the engine.

quote: An interesting mod would be to remove all the class targeting restrictions from all the weapons, and see how it goes.

Just imagine how a chainsaw would tear up the battlefield :P

quote: None of the "laser AA" are vehicles or spiders, but yes, this is why I had to skip applying this to Raptor. I originally wanted to find some way to make flying objects become temporarily target-able by AA, but I guess this would need a change in the engine.

I'd want to make all AA behave the same way. I recall there being an experiment with having AA shoot at all flying units, but the tech wasn't quite good enough to use (it involved fake units). More control over targeting is possible now, so perhaps it could be done.

I'm not even sure we'd want AA to shoot at all flying units. Ground units tend to only fly for short periods of time, so a lot of AA launched at an airborne ground unit would end up hitting it on the ground, which would be weird.

quote: I guess you'd need armor classes instead of a flying or not flying flag. (Is there already armor classes?)

Armour classes can exist but are against the design of ZK. They are actually used for AA vs. ground units, but this is more to reduce randomness and discourage people from figuring out how to reliably shoot at the ground with AA.

quote: the first thing I did was give lotus essentially infinite range. That was hilarious, totally changed how to play the game. Suddenly it was all about controlling line of sight. Terrain had a totally new meaning.

This is really cool, and could be even made less OP by having laser damage decrease with distance, like IRL
(or a bit like heatrays do, except IRL laser decrease should be a combination of distance squared due to dissipation angle and exponential due to air/dust absorption ?)

Though might need a way for players to limit range so as to not waste energy on weak long range shots ?

quote: Is the reason to avoid making AA more different from each other to keep the learning curve down?

We're getting a bit far from what I said, so I'll clarify. All AA works in exactly the same way with respect to what it can target. I'm not saying I don't want to make AA more different, I'm saying that I don't want to make them different in this dimension. The reason is consistency. Learning curve is part of it, but I think consistency is neat for other reasons. Currently you can be sure if a unit has 'Anti-Air' in its name then it has a particular targeting restriction. The targeting restrictions we have are simple, and there are few of them. It should stay this way. I just think splitting simple unified systems into complex parts tends to cost far too much relative to the benefit.