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Knights miss a lot

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chaplol
How come Knights miss a lot? Maybe something like 5-10% seem to completely miss -- even units standing still. Is this an intentional nerf against knights? It sure as heck dissuades me from using them much.

(I'm sure I can pull up some replays if really needed, but I assume this is an already known problem.)
+1 / -0


16 months ago
It's intentional. Their lighning gun has a small-ish but constant random inaccuracy (angle deviation) factor.

Gnat has the same to a greater degree, Blitz to a much smaller. IIRC all lightning guns are supposed to do it.
+1 / -0
I can't help but remind myself that knight got 280 -> 350 range buff back in 2019 in commit "Buffed Cloakbots silly." Still has 340 range. Spray angle was introduced back in 2015-ish, and has evolved into making lightning guns better at paralyzing large collision volume units. I think that Knight is fine missing small units, because assaults at that weight class generally have projectiles, not hitscan weapons, and having hitscan to be good against small fast units as well as anti-heavy emp sounds a little too strong and generalist for me.

Edit: it's already amazing against fast light units, you almost can't swarm 5 knights.
+1 / -0
chaplol
K so, I still think Knight needs a second pass to make sure its shooting is working as expected. Had an issue with knights in https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1720388 where I could see an imp move towards my knight within vision and bury itself while outside of the knight's shooting range. Cool -- just force-target the knight to shoot the ground. Right? Wrong. As the knight approached the knight, it just refused to even acknowledge the attack command. Meaning I had to run while the imp successfully crowd controlled me.

My theory is that even after the imp got within range, some very small amount of the ground was obscuring the path of the gun, while just enough to not obscure vision path. So there's a sliver of void where vision LoS and gun LoS don't play well together.

I think this theory is shown to be true here, where the knight is force targeting the ground on a spot that's within its own vision, but just sits still:



What behavior should we expect the knight to do here? My gut says that they should path towards their target exactly like they would against a unit.

Edit: the exact moment in the the game where I was unable to target the ground was at exactly 5:00. Was initially targeting the imp directly while it was uncloaked, then it cloaked and I targeted the ground. Interestingly the target point is slightly above the map!
+0 / -0

14 months ago
quote:
weaponType = [[LightningCannon]]

This is the weapontype of Knight's lightning cannon, and it's probably important when looking into how a unit behaves with their weapon, because different engine weapon types can act differently.

In this case, however, it appears that knight will act the same as units with other weapon types, such as BeamLaser and Cannon: When a unit is given a fire-at-ground command, and the unit is standing within range of the target, the unit will not pathfind but allow the weapon to target the position. However, when the weapon is obstructed by terrain, the unit will do nothing. See Image 1 below.


Default unit AI appears to work for me, in that when an enemy unit is nearby in LOS, Knight/other units will attempt to pathfind towards that unit around obstacles until it can shoot.

In my testing, there can be a little bit of jank with that pathfinding. One time the knight had a very obvious line of fire but would not move or attack. A semi-common situation is knight barly peeks over a wall and then freezes in place, but it's ambiguous if there is a clear line of fire. But there's many places this could be starting from: Knight's aimFromWeapon position is off-center of the model positioned on the gun by the grip, meaning it moves a bit while walking and aiming. I don't know the specifics of how LightningCannon aims(There are subtle differences between weapontypes). And there's probably others, like unit AI's attempt to kite.

I'm willing to blame some archaic logic related to weapon aiming in the engine.
+0 / -0