Long ranged commanders

what is wrong with turning a commander into an artillery unit? when fighting LLTs, hover has a super poor artillery. Sometimes I upgrade my commander to play this role. Its bulkier and has a much better ROF then lance; however, it still dies to raid units. If we nerf artillery commanders, we are nerfing any factory that can't use artillery well vs LLTs.

I also agree disruptor bomb stands out as extremelly useful and relatively easy to use (even without range mods) but at this point suspect that if we keep pointing it out it'll end up getting nerfed again...

quote: As somebody who opposes morphed commanders much more often than I use them, I don't find the way this typically plays out with commanders very fun. Of course this is a matter of taste.

A certain degree of unpleasantness is par for the course, the things that usually get me swearing are lances, spammed impalers and the sudden arrival of a crab. (Also snipers, but I like that nerf that made them slow after firing, I have swept up so many after that.) (Edit: Actually maybe I sort of replied to something you didn't say, oh well.)

I support nerfs if certain builds are too powerful, but also I would like to see something given back in return, to some other build. In my particular world, I would like a guardian to be a bit more survivable at higher levels, but thats just me.

I don't see the reason why put any nerf for commanders at all.
They're a unique unit, you only get 1 per player and once they're gone they're gone. You rarely ever see anyone resurrect the commander instead of reclaiming outside of PvE games and even there that's rare. This is IF the corpse doesn't get destroyed into scraps that most anti-heavy weapons or attacks do.
If the Grizzly from comparison dies it's dead ok, but you can build 50 of them and you can reclaim the corpse to speed up the building of new ones without needing to invest into resurrection unit that costs 1300 metal just to get the 1st one constructed.

There are so many viable options to shutting down commanders that using one as a combat unit is just throwing away your one unique personal unit.
Just the knowledge of which factory the enemy has forces you to invest at least twice the factory counter worth into defending from that possibility.
If the enemy team has Gunships you need enough AA to prevent a commander kidnapping.
If they have Spiders you have to get thick line of patrol units running circles around the commander to prevent a single widow stunning you for half a minute.
If they have Hovercraft you have to have shields at all times to prevent cloak lances from just assassinating you out of nowhere.
If they have Cloakbots you have to worry about Snipers the same way as cloak Lances and Scythes are a constant threat from the start of the game.
If they have Shieldbots a single Racketeer hard-counters your commander from frontline action.
If they have Airplanes you are always one bombing run away from death before you can even react, you'd need to deploy all your metal income into AA just to get enough protection to deal with their air players investment into air.
If they have Jumpbots you have to worry from start to end of the match for Puppies, Placeholders, Jacks, Skuttles and Jugglenauts.

I don't see how Commanders being able to infinitely kill LLTs due to range is an issue then I don't know what to tell you about a 1000-1500 cost metal unit being a problem when you can do the same for half the price with regular units.

TLDR: Commanders already shit, no need to poop them up more.

Sniper com was strong, they nerfed it
Bombard com was strong with arty cannons, they nerfed it
Bombard com was strong with riot canons, they nerfed it
Bombard com with lasers, they are going to nerf it either way since they do what they want.

Do you see a pattern here? Why bother with commanders in the first place?
Just remove them entirely and stop calculating/justifying their constant nerf GoogleFrog since it's your game anyways.
I am at least happy that I have the game version which I desire developed by Shaman .

It's not personal remarks, I just stated that for no reason we are focusing on nerfing stuff with "investigations" that don't make sense and I am not the only one concluding the same idea. For the other persons here who wrote isn't it a "personal" opinion as well? or do I fit in a special category that is regarded as "I hate this guy, need to find a reason to block/ban him"

No worries Aquanim, I know you hate me, and it's okay. We don't have to like everyone in this world!

quote: this is a warning

. Ok, Aquanim I agree and apologize for telling people they are sleep deprived.

I still consider it a waste of time to create tons of reports just to nerf a unit which doesn't make sense at all.

maybe we can have themed weekend, with strong commander stats, for the lulz?

skuggmodzer0 those principals sound ok. I think I would replace vulnerability with juicy target though, as they are valuable to take out but are relatively tanky.

quote: maybe we can have themed weekend, with strong commander stats, for the lulz?

Sure. Part of the idea of tweakunits was to make weekend mods easy to apply.

quote: You're underestimating how much the cost to get there matters (assuming you'd keep the 150m cost and the -1 speed penalty, which is about 2.5%). In your case i'd have to pay over 2x as much and would end up with 10% less range.

I said this:

quote: I don't see any reason to let beam laser go beyond 440 range. This corresponds to eight modules with 4% range each. If we want to flatten the ranges somewhat then a combination of 2% base range + 6 absolute range would also work. The module could be a bit cheaper to compensate.

I don't think the module would stay at 150m.

What is actually wrong with nerfing all range caps, rather than just setting an arbitrary cap on beam laser? If the specialised long range (380+ base range, like missile launcher or sniper) need more base range then couldn't they just have it?

quote: I don't think this is significant. In ZK mobile build power is dirt cheap. Welders and shieldbot builders are particularly effective at front line repairing and reclaiming. It's much better to have the commander cloak and keep the enemy guessing.

On paper yes, but it doesn't seem like it in practice. Constructors take a long time to walk to the front and are juicy targets. It is not uncommon for mobile BP at a front to mostly or entirely commanders.

quote: In a way these high impact events create tension and make the game more fun.

Yes, but there is such a thing as being too swingy, and a lack of counterplay. Take the Glaive example. Against Cyclops or Grizzly you can dodge or spread to mitigate damage, but against beam laser comm there is none of that. If Cyclops or Grizzly have riot escort then you can can try to pick off or pressure them out of the way, but when the comm is also a decent enough riot (ie beating half its cost) then there is none of that.

quote: I don't see how commanders are unique in this. ZK's unit set has several units that suppress a wide range of other units hard. It's very hard to use most early game units when getting shot at by a pair of firewalkers, or having a dante throw its incendiary rocket barrage in your general direction every 20s. Grizzly and cyclops's only major weaknesses to raiders can be fixed by adding 20% cost in cheap riots. Tank factory cries against moderators.

Firewalker is awkward and very vulnerable to snipers, bombers and raiders. Dante is a strider, so it does nothing for 3500 metal. Grizzly and Cyclops aren't only weak to raiders, and having to support them with riots is the whole point of how ZK units are designed.

Let me belabour this point as it is an important one. When someone says "Well a mix of units X and Y is more powerful than just Z" or "Well a weakness of unit X can just be covered by unit Y" my answer is "Good". This isn't a problem, it is by design. Compositions are meant to be much more powerful than individual unit types. The more unit types the better. This is to reflect how much harder it is to coordinate and maintain an army that depends on many unit types being present.

An army of one unit type is trivial to manage. Just set your factory to repeat, spam Ctrl+Z, draw some line formations, and make sure it fights what it is good against. There is very little to keep track of. But once you add even one extra unit type there is so much more to consider. Different units have different speeds, optimal fighting ranges and spreads, enemies that they prefer to fight or run away from, and want to retreat at different points. Compositions tend to lose units at different rates (consider Ogre + Minotaur), which has dynamic implications for a factory repeat queue - another thing to manage. The more defensive units of a composition can be picked off or pushed out of position, until you suddenly realise that you don't have enough riots or AA. None of this happens with a viable army of one unit, or, with a single commander. With three or four required types it gets even more complex, and army power is the payoff for this complexity.

So I don't care if it is in fact true that some combination of Grizzly and Reaver can do everything better than any commander. A commander is one unit, while Grizzly and Reaver are two unit types. The combination is supposed to be better. I only care when the statement goes the other way, that is, if there was a commander that was about as powerful as a (reasonable sounding) combination of units.

Finally, a bit of nuance. Armies aren't made of only one, two, three etc... unit types. An army might be primarily one unit type with a little bit of support from a second. In this case you could remove the second unit type and the army would mostly be fine, for a while. It depends on how much power the army loses, or vulnerability it gains, if the second unit is removed. It isn't strictly about cost ratios. So I would still consider Ripper + Fencer to be a two-type army, since the few Rippers are protecting against being overwhelmed by raiders. This is relevant to commanders because the best ones don't act completely alone. The beamlaser commander in the replays I linked had Buoy support, but to my eye the Buoys were secondary. It was the commander that was doing the heavy lifting.

Majo yes you can shut down commanders, but you can also shut down anything else. It isn't a question of whether counters exist, it's about whether counters are efficient enough to deploy. It is about momentum and pacing. Where is your opponent going to find two cloaked Lances if they have been pressuring you all game while morphing up?

Does anyone else have anything to say about this?

quote: Burst is important. Consider a bunch of Glaives running at a commander or other heavy unit. The beam laser commander kills a Glaive every 0.8 seconds. A Grizzly is lucky to kill more than two Glaives every 6 seconds. A Cyclops probably kills a Glaive every 3.5 seconds, unless they dodge. Here is some testing. Against 14 Glaives: A 7x range 1x speed beamlaser commander (2200 cost) survives with about 20% HP. A Grizzly dies and 8 Glaives survive. A Cyclops dies and 10 Glaives survive. A Scorpion (no dgun) survives with about 40% health. Things are much more complicated against skirmishers. I tried Ronin, but the commander can dodge Ronin at max range near-indefinitely. So here are results with the Ronin trying to close distance to increase accuracy, while the defender tries to dodge and retreat. A 7x range 1x speed beamlaser commander (2200 cost) survives with about 15% HP. A Grizzly dies and 10 Ronin survive. A Cyclops dies and 13 Ronin survive. A Scorpion (no dgun) dies and 7 Ronin survive.

A lot has been said about commander power in general, but my primary concern is the way that the particular commander tested above appears to outclass similarly priced demi-striders at a really common task (fighting light units). I contend that the above is violating the principal of commanders being less efficient than units, so it seems like a good basis for a targeted nerf. If commanders are much much less efficient than units at some other role then they could be buffed, but here it seems like they are more efficient so should be nerfed.

quote: A lot has been said about commander power in general, but my primary concern is the way that the particular commander tested above appears to outclass similarly priced demi-striders at a really common task (fighting light units).

How about disallowing the 2nd base laser? One line in code. That might not be quite sufficient to meet your goal, but it would take a chunk out of the effect at longer ranges, which is probably the powerful part anyway.

Feel free to add a commander christmas present somewhere else!