Pacifist Challenge

Recently, I wondered how non-lethal can I make an army, and how effective it would be. So far, I have the current setup:

Starting factory: Spiders
Start the battle with spreading fleas all over the map. The fleas are strictly restricted from attacking. This lets me see the advancements of the enemy's forces, as well as enemy eco.

Build a stardust at own base to delay enemy advancements.

I will not be making a lot of assault units, so I have to rely on defenses.



Available "combat" units:
Venoms, Widows (Spider factory)
Dominatrixes (Rover factory)
Knights, imps (Cloakbot factory)
Moderators, jugglenauts (Jumpbot factory)
Racketeers (Shieldbot factory)
Gnats (Gunship factory)
Thunderbird (Plane factory)
Scorpions (Striders)

Available defense:
Newtons & Faradays, early stardust, starlight

Soon after setting up the base, the hard part comes... which is to deal with the fact that the opponent's units will be in the pacifist's base, uncontested.



The main objective is to reach a stalemate.

As a bonus objective, if there is a fail state, it is allowed to try and "escape" with all the remaining units, usually with transport.




It's fun! But it's very difficult to do anything. I am looking for some... tips, because I know this will be a very hard task to complete.

Don't forget Imp (Cloakbot) and Limpet (Amphbot) and Shockley (silo).

Also another idea is to use toughest unit to absorb damage (Halberd?)

I think you can try to compute if you can reach a stalemate: per metal spent how much you can "stun" versus "attack". Ex: would racketeers value of a unit be able to stun any unit? Then you have to consider long range arties...(which you can't stun)

yup, very opop

[Message deleted]

Venom damage is a bit of a problem. I tried Venom to ward away raiders followed by Domi spam with TB support. It did fairly well but didn't manage zero value killed. I would want to make a unit states preset to set almost every to hold fire, and get a widget for area reclaiming live units. I thought such a widget was in ZK but I couldn't find it.

I like the goal being a completely flat Value Destroyed line. At the end of the game, so fog kills still count. If something really janky is found about this approach then the rules can be patched. I forget whether Wind Generators can generate value killed by this metric.

Good point. Moving enemy units with the intent to cause damage (Juggle, Lobster, transports) should be aggression. If anything dies due to being moved like this it should count. A unit that jams itself up against a wind generator and falls into lava due to the explosion shouldn't count, unless the explosion itself kills the unit and that kill registers on the value destroyed graph.

wait, I swapped war with conquest
what have I done