Long ranged commanders

Early game morph rates have already been nerfed, which should have addressed the "timing attack" problem.

quote: 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?

I didn't recommend any arbitrary cap for beam laser, instead I suggested keeping the 150m per module and just lowering the number of allowed modules for all weapons, but tweaking the attributes of weapons in general to compensate. A significant chunk of the morph cost is in the levels themselves, and 150 is the standard cost of cheap modules. The "could be a bit cheaper" reads like we'd find them providing half the benefit at 90% of the cost on the next patch notes.

That experiment you did with commander,grizzly and cyclops by themselves against a squad of cheap units is a bit disingenuous. Players who didn't morph their commanders still have the base commander, which is closer in HP to the morphed forms than it's been up to a few years ago (btw I agree with that change), and it's relatively easy to have a cheap riot or two nearby. The gap in effectiveness is smaller.

And why does it matter so much that commanders can, at some points in the game, be somewhat more efficient than other options you'd get from your factory at brawling/kiting some compositions? It's still only a moderately effective strategy in general, all things considered, which is why you don't see it done very often. And it still works best when combined with other units, not by itself. If those builds seem much more effective than many other commander options you considered people would use, maybe you should look at why those suck instead and buff the corresponding modules.

Area cloaker's excellent. Shields and Disruptor bomb and slowing weapons are good, maybe lightning too. HP and regen are decent.

Napalm warheads? niche. Hellfire grenade? Niche at best. High density plating's niche.

Drones suck. Damage mods suck. Shotgun sucks. Strike commander is generally better for combat than the guardian. Engineer's generally too slow and underwhelming. There's inconsistencies like 400 cost self-cloak reducing speed by 8 and 800 cost area cloaker not having any speed reduction.

In short, I advise against even lowering the range cap without giving various other buffs. Try harder to give stuff fair cost-effectiveness instead of leaving things you feel are "degenerate" somehow in a "crippled" state or removing them from the game entirely. Commanders have less weapons to choose from now than they had 10 years ago!

Guardian commander does have some nice break points with damage booster, for example single riot cannon plus 1x DB kills glaives in one shot. Add a second riot cannon to kill scorchers in one shot. 3 or 4 targeting boosters with the rocket launcher outrange all midrange skirmishers.

Riot cannon+dbooster plus SLAM rocket can kill a stinger in 30 seconds from outside its range while being able to defend itself reasonably well from raiders and only costs as much as a lance.

If you have more metal than sense you can trivially outrange fencers and even stingers with a rocket launcher commander.

It's a pretty good commander for bad factories like Amph in case you run into cloaks, because that's one of the few ways you can attempt to survive ronin spam for example.

quote: Guardian commander does have some nice break points with damage booster ..... It's a pretty good commander for bad factories like Amph in case you run into cloaks, because that's one of the few ways you can attempt to survive ronin spam for example.

A much more thoughtful analysis than my own. Also an excellent observation of the comm providing a bit of balance to its start factory.

My favorite weapon is flamethrower and I try to stay near obstacles to avoid a good surround, that's a fun dance. "How many of your dudes can fit inside my flame?" Helps to be 12k+ hitpoints when doing that. I take one rocket launcher when I know there will be a comm brawl, sometimes one riot, and the heatray is epic. Once in a while a jug catches a heatray comm and doesn't know what to do about it, and it can sometimes survive jacks (helps to target the closest one). One game I saw Astran with a huge dual-heatray trollcomm and an opponent that figured it needed to get jack-dropped. (More than once!) Its not my style, but I've seen the SLAM ruin spider armies, anyone to doesn't keep moving. Its all so gooood.

That said, probably half the games end with the comm at lvl 2 or 3 because there are other bills to pay.

I didn't say "burst isn't important", I said it has pros and cons and acknowledged that in the grizzly's case it does devalue the weapon A BIT relative to a 100% efficient instahit constant dps weapon. I'd roughly rate it as 80% dps efficient in general: it's worse than that if they're alone and being swarmed by some of their worst case enemies (highest dps and lowest weight), but better on other situations. Cyclops' cannon also has low projectile speed and low AOE, in ZK's terms i'd roughly rate that as 40% dps-efficient in general, but still consider the unit itself as broadly effective given the slow beam and its other attributes.

Yes, this means i'm rating the current 250 dps bursty grizzly as worth the same as a 200 dps grizzly with a constant dps weapon. Hey maybe for ZK the fair value would be 170 not 200. It's natural for different RTS with different unit sets to weigh things differently, but there's a fair scale for ZK too in there somewhere.

GF's arguments show a tendency to ban the efficient DPS case completely rather than try to give it a fair cost. To force "clumsyness" beyond 400 range. I think that reasoning is a bad design decision:
- limits unit variety : options across the range of clumsyness would still be used if given fair costs
- "clumsyness" has scaling issues : as the map gets populated and numbers grow and they're given a bit of escorting from counter-counter units, they go from failing to hit/kill the units they were supposed to counter, to wrecking the units they're not supposed to counter (as happens with rogue, lance, grizzly, cerberus, bertha)
- various inconsistencies in costs and how clumsy/inefficient units are

In case of commander range mods, cost goes up linearly but weapon value increases non-linearly with relative range (generically something like *relativeRange^2). In other words, one increases the raw cost-effectiveness of the commander as a combat unit faster by stacking range mods than any other attribute although the unit can be more easily sniped or overrun (mixing hp, regen and speed also have sinergies, but the chassis gains some naturally as it levels up...at least the strike does).

Anyway, I've made my case for allowing efficient weapons across a wider range interval and that it'd be safer to reduce the amount of range mods they can stack instead of nerfing the cost-effectiveness the mods at lower levels and that most commander weapons need higher base stats for combat commanders to be a worthy investment. I'm curious what you'll do.

quote: - limits unit variety : options across the range of clumsyness would still be used if given fair costs

To (probably) quote Orson Welles, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”

I think that Zero-K is a better game on account of having things which units cannot do, or cannot do easily and smoothly. Figuring out how to work around those gaps with clever unit compositions and unit control, in the face of an enemy trying to (a) disrupt you and (b) do the same thing, is a fundamental part of what makes the game fun.

quote: - "clumsyness" has scaling issues : as the map gets populated and numbers grow and they're given a bit of escorting from counter-counter units, they go from failing to hit/kill the units they were supposed to counter, to wrecking the units they're not supposed to counter (as happens with rogue, lance, grizzly, cerberus, bertha)

I think it is an inherent part of the game that the effective strength of units changes under different circumstances, and again I think that in general the game is improved by this phenomenon. For example, it means that there is an interesting decision to be made in terms of when to transition to a unit composition which might be weaker now but will be better in the future situation you hope to create.

There might be some reason why strength changing in particular due to "clumsyness" is bad, but I do not particularly see one.

" * Jump reload reduced by 1s for Recon and Campaign"



edit, to be more constructive: (i really dig these changes)

Well, commanders are mostly numbers. That's probably a big part of why I'm not so into them. Armies are made of many units, all with positions and firing lines and the ability to support each other, or to get in each others ways. Most units are individually simple, with complexity arising from the physics (ie position, movement, ranges; not simply Jugglenaut jank) involved. A commander is a single unit, and when it is the bulk of an army there isn't as much going on out in the "game world" part of the game. A lot of the complexity of commanders happens on the statistical level, with little or no impact on the game physics in which the statistics are applied.

By "game physics" I mean units moving around and firing projectiles. By the "statistical level" I mean the damage that is applied, and compared to health, when the projectiles hit. Units flanking each other, slow firing rockets, and spray angle are examples of "game physics". ZK has a lot of it. A "statistical level" mechanic is something like Halberd armour, or more general armour class systems that exist in a lot of other games.

A damage booster or health module doesn't directly change what a commander does in the physical sense, it just changes how fast the post-physics health numbers go down. Sure, it changes the tactics of fighting the commander, but it doesn't change which entities exist, or the actions available to any players (it just changes which actions are good). Spending metal on a commander isn't as visible (perhaps "visceral"?) as making more units - entities that add abilities and complication at the behaviour level. Things like range and speed modules technically change behaviour, but the change is pretty weak compared to units.

Perhaps damage booster could have less penalty, but it already has a pretty large buff. The penalty is somewhat counteracted by the high powered servos buff. I'd like to leave it for now and see what happens.

Recon could receive a nerfed version of high density plating if it is a problem. I would like to wait on the specialised long ranged modules now that they have less competition. Heatray seems like it will always be a bit of a specialised option. More drone range could easily make them a pain in the early game vs raiders. Perhaps there is an argument for making them scale with range and damage modules.

quote: Is there any special reason why range has to have the same limit as the other modules? you could reduce the cap to 4 and increase the base ranges of the various weapons.

No, just a general reason: the design version of Occam's Razor. All repeat modules having the same limit is significantly simpler then the limit being on a per-module basis. It would take a very compelling case to make me drop this invariant.

Shotgun seems like it is meant to kill other commanders. Remember it has a disruptor version. I'll buff it to 280 range, then the only shorter ranged weapon is flamethrower. This seems like a decently tight range.

Two reasons:

• Shooting into water would shift commander damage from none to some in that domain, which is too extreme.
• Shooting from underwater is very "expensive" in balance sense.

On the extremeness of commander abilities, a commander with torpedo would be specialised to being underwater. Morphing torpedo on land would be a massive noob trap, to an extent that shouldn't happen at level 2. It also puts too much strategic weight on morphing for my liking. What if you blind morph torpedo for a water lane, only to have the enemy pull out and leave you with assaulting the coast? Such a commander is then very obviously useless, which feels bad. A gauss weapon would be basically optimal on mixed maps, which wouldn't be very interesting.

There are solutions to the above issues. Perhaps torpedo could be a level 4 weapon on strike and assault only, so that every commander has a land-capable weapon. Perhaps fleshing out the commander weapons with gauss and sonic would make sea have enough variety. The more dire problem is where underwater weapons fit in ZK.

There are currently only three relevant units that shoot while submerged: Duck, Seawolf and Scallop (I count striders as irrelevant). The longest range among these is Scallop, at 270, but its weapon is a sidearm rather than its main purpose. Duck and Seawolf are fairly flimsy raiders with only 235 range underwater. Essentially, the to shoot while submerged a unit has to be the underwater equivalent of Scythe. Sea works this way for very good reasons, and fitting an armed underwater commander in under these constraints seems impossible.

Sea used to have more underwater weaponary. There was a heavy artillery/sniper sub and Scallop used to have skirmisher range on its torpedoes. Grizzly even had a torpedo shoot out its nose briefly. This issue that we discovered was that any sort of complete underwater army is extremely powerful. The sniper sub was the only form of long ranged attrition for Scallop, as they dodged all surface-only forms (Lance, Bertha, Envoy, Shogun etc...). So mono-Scallop was quite viable, and pretty boring. We could have either diversified underwater combat with a lot more units, which would make all the surface units obsolete (since they are vulnerable to so many more counters), or simply cut down the abilities of underwater-firing units until any reasonable fleshed out army had to contain surface units, and thus interacted with a lot more of the game.

Ignoring all upgrades except for cluster bombs and shotgun might be a little OP: https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1520737