Frog puts some amazing effort into his Cold Takes blog (that I know one of my friend's who is getting a board game published enjoys reading!). So, I thought I'd offer my less well thought through, less well written, and definitely uninvited opinions on some design curiousities and potentially things I wonder about tweaking.
This one I am calling The Jiggle Effect.
As I understand it, Zero-K has the general principle that units should take care of themselves. The player should make the important decisions, but units should generally take care of themselves.
At the moment, however, stationary units are very easy pickings for artillery. If you watch a battle and there are emmisaries and particularly impalers, stationary units are very easily picked off. I frequently see AA and constructors killed here - also units like commanders. This for tac nukes as well, where a player has to constantly move their units (like a shieldball or envoys) to avoid these. Patrolling seems to have odd effects, like units moving till they shoot at a unit, then stopping to kill it (if on hold fire), or chasing units if on maneuver.
The effect of this is that I spend more time than I'd like in a game telling my units to do obvious things like avoid impaler shots - essentially my intent is for my units to dodge artillery (or at least retreat), but I don't have an easy way to convey that, so have to spend time manually doing it. I'd prefer to be thinking about what my opponent is planning.
So what do I want my units to do? I want them to jiggle like their lives depended on it - it does!
I'd like my constructors to salsa, my tarantulas to cha cha, and my commander to tango. My shieldball should be doing the locomotion and my envoys synchronised swimming.
Doing so would make them much harder to hit and mean that I don't have to constantly micro them to avoid this! Losing a tarantula because I forgot to move it is 390 metal, or maybe 20s worth. Losing an envoy is like 1300 now and over a minute's worth of metal.
A Jiggle order toggle might save my poor minions lives, but I see some problems with this:
- Units constantly jiggling I think would be visually annoying.
- It would make units harder to select.
- It would potentially make artillery much weaker.
- This concept could also be applied to units moving in a straight line, or even dodging shots in combat, but we don't really want dodging of slow bullets to be a major thing. One microed flea could beat a crab.
Are there other potential solutions? Maybe?
- Something like a "dig in" effect for units not moving might mitigate it, but I don't think solves the issue (we just need to hit it eventually) and creates other problems.
- Could units detect when they are under artillery fire and only start moving then?
- Could the toggle be put in, but it cost e to make jiggling a genuine choice to balance this? Perhaps units make a tiny amount of energy and spend it while moving?
- Could artillery aiming be worse, but area of effect larger? It feels like this might solve the issue, but may remove subtlety from some units.
I don't have a firm solution here - this is half baked - and this of course doesn't break this excellent game, but I would like to do it less.
Until then, I'll be making my units listen to KC & the Sunshine Band -
