I just wanted to make a forum thread about Impaler, not just about the balance, but also about the design of the unit. I believe Impaler should either be nerfed or completely redesigned. Here's a couple of my thoughts about the unit: Impaler is boring to use. It's too safe. You don't need to put Impalers in danger to use them. Impaler is horrible to play against. Countering it effectively if your opponent is good is nearly impossible. Impaler often snipes constructors that stand still for 5 seconds. Impaler's unit AI is flawed - if microed, it can inflict damage far more efficiently then if left alone. If Impaler could only kill metal extractors, it would still be a useful unit. Why is Impaler faster then most assault units? It has quite a lot of HP as well. Should such long range capability be available for only 700 metal? It's really difficult to deny the enemy if the unit is this cheap. Impaler's firing sound is extremely annoying, probably the worst sound in the game. In case of extreme Impaler spam, I have to move my units every time I hear that sound. It would be nice if we could see the projectile coming.
+8 / -1
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Just don't build porc and put your units on patrol and there's no issue
+1 / -0
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Give it movement speed slow while reloading like Sniper so that it can't escape, make it set-up to fire like Pillager so that it can't skirmish.
+8 / -0
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Threads like these will make getting easy CA awards with just spamming Impalers only a memory. quote:
Impaler's unit AI is flawed - if microed, it can inflict damage far more efficiently then if left alone. |
This sounds so very very wrong.
+1 / -0
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quote:
In case of extreme Impaler spam, I have to move my units every time I hear that sound. It would be nice if we could see the projectile coming. |
This should happen automatically. If a unit can avoid it (and many can) why do we need to micro? This should exclude things like crabe, slasher, etc but might fix most of the problems. Patrol only will not work on constructors reclaiming.
+2 / -0
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Impaler sucks balls and I've said it for years. OK, so I'm a porcer and that's the reason it is extra annoying to me. But even in general the unit sucks. The main reason is the absurdly long range. It's non-interactive. Death comes from the sky and that's all most units know. It fires from complete safety and hits targets in the enemy rear. Once you get a ball of them going they can one-shot even big units. I've played games where I used Impaler with cloak and some riots and all I really did was march them up and down the frontline and I got CA without even really trying. I suppose the solution is for me to use them until enough people complain and it gets nerfed. But there's little fun really in playing this way. Psaniac has noted all the main objections. They are quite difficult to deal with because they are in the middle of the enemy mass. Scything them just means that the scythes kill one or two and you lose 6 or 7 as the entire enemy army jumps on you. If the devs think that its a necessary unit - and there are arguments for it as well - then for the love o' gawd please at least make it possible to counter it somehow. Make it slower. Give it less HP. Make it so that a counter-strategy has a chance of success.
+6 / -0
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quote:
They are quite difficult to deal with because they are in the middle of the enemy mass. Scything them just means that the scythes kill one or two and you lose 6 or 7 as the entire enemy army jumps on you. |
But they make great target for lichos! Anyhow I do agree they could be made a bit easier to kill (slower, setup, lower HP, etc.).
+0 / -0
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Tbh I don't think they are such a problem. They are good for sniping lone turrets, but against units they are useless (except for when the unit is not moving - but it requires a good micro, some widow nearby for spotting, and an inattention from the target player - it takes a few hits until a commander is dead, which gives the target player time to react). Later in the game, they get simply outclassed by cerbs, merlins, porc is protected by shields (which impalers are not effective against) and cloakers (so sniping units is completely impossible). Yeah, it is a good anti-porc artillery, but once the enemy makes a pala and units to support it, and pushes, suddenly impalers are utterly obsolete. A lot of time when new players make loads and loads of impalers, I see them making little to no cost. Impalers are countered by units (and some artillery of your own to weaken enemy porc protecting the impalers).
+0 / -0
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I agree with Psaniac here. I think in they can make for less interesting play. I think the main problem in nerfing them is that they are one of the few things that counters shields effectively (without some great micro from bombs or what not). Not sure what to do about this. I tend to find shield spam pretty uninteresting as well. I think it's the mobile shields I don't like more than the stationary ones - I think the stationary ones are fine. Porc is generally a bad idea. They are good at sniping lazy coms too...
+1 / -0
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Impaler is strong against static and it seemingly strong in large game because large game tend to become stand still in the middle. So you nerf impaler, what are we gonna use to break the stalemate? However, at the same time, in a game where "stand still" is not a thing, impaler is pretty useless. It is not rare to see people with 20 impalers not doing anything significant. On the other hand, among the artillery units, emissary is pretty useless overall.
+2 / -0
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quote:
However, at the same time, in a game where "stand still" is not a thing, impaler is pretty useless. It is not rare to see people with 20 impalers not doing anything significant. |
Yeah, for some reason most impaler-spammers seem to be quite braindead when it comes to this unit. Even in standstill games, I rarely see them getting microed. Now, think of how horrible this unit would be if it was used to it`s normal potential in all of these games. It would be even worse if someone told the spammers the "secret" key-combi for multitargeting.... quote:
On the other hand, among the artillery units, emissary is pretty useless overall. |
Yes, it was nerved to it`s current state because it filled impalers role before. Think of shorter-range impaler with AoE. It`s still a nightmare for cloakies for example. It`s ironic that tremor and emissary now fall prey to impaler mostly. I think most actual artillery (so not including sling, badger and crabe) should be stationary to fire - not sure about firewalker. It could get some other (offensive) buffs in return. It is easy enough to guard your arty with riots, aa, cloaker, shields etc. It doesn`t need to be fast to retreat on top of that.
+5 / -0
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Maybe instead of making it more clumsy, we can make the other artilleries less clumsy so that they don't easily get shot by impalers.
+2 / -0
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Thats the thing. It WAS less clumsy. At that point, basically every arty-unit was as annoying as impaler is now.
+2 / -0
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what if imapler had to stand still to fire? that might lead to impal-offs xd
+0 / -0
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I haven't seen any terrible Impaler games recently, but replays would be good. The design of Impaler does have a few issues. It's end state seems to imply that everyone's units should be moving around all the time, but that would be annoying. Yet it seems like a dedicated structure artillery would have to create this incentive. I'm not a fan of Impaler standing still to fire as it has quite a long reload time. Things should stop to fire for about as long as their reload times because otherwise you get stutter-step micro, not units actually stopping while in combat. Also the weapon looks fairly separate from the wheels, so it would be a hard sell visually.
+0 / -0
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Please change the Impaler projectile launch sound. I didn't emphasize that complaint enough in my original comment, it really is the worst sound in the game. Edit: It's not just the Impaler sound, but rather the fact that having 10 Impalers shoot at once will hurt your ears. It's the very beginning of the launch sound. I don't know how it should sound, just at least make it not offensive to the senses.
+3 / -0
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Please change the Impaler projectile launch sound. Any idea about how it SHOULD sound? The problem is that there is a functional compontent to the sound in addition to the aesthetic one. The obvious alternative would be a "shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh", seemingly coming from the engines of the missile. But that would make it harder to distinguish individual shots - aka you cant tell how many there are as easily - as well as smear over all other sounds that are going on at the same time. From a purely functional perspective, sounds in zk should be as short as you can get away with. The humans hearing is coded to use the initial portion of a sound ("attack phase") as fingerprint to identify a sound. Meaning, you just need the "bl" and maybe a tiny bit of the "o" of slings "blop"-sound to know its a sling. I would like to have either its volume or its priortiy-value lowered. The absolute optimum would be if someone could write an automation that lowers the volume of that sound the more impalers firing within a certain timespan there are. The timespan could be something around 2 seconds. The reduction could fade away after 4 seconds or so. This way, whenever a kind of "first" shot is fired, you hear it full volume and you know: "ah, the 4 imaplers are.. here". But then reduction kicks in so you don`t have to be told something repeatedly that you know anyway.
+5 / -0
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quote:
From a purely functional perspective, sounds in zk should be as short as you can get away with. |
the more common a sound is, the shorter. unique / rare sounds could be longer etc
+0 / -0
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I'm surprised people think emissaries are underpowered. I think they are great, mainly because they seem okay at shooting moving targets. You can also lift them up for a duct tape cerb.
+2 / -0
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