Balance thought experiment, +50% dps

quote: quote: +50% dps ?????? There is no combat unit in Zero-K that needs anywhere close to a +50% DPS markup. And Raptor is genuinely not even bad, balance-wise. Its sins lie in the realm of bad UI.

Not saying that they need such a big buff (or maybe, any), just, as a thought experiment, which units could get the +50% dps buff without becoming more than slightly OP (so it wouldn't break the game)?

Here's a list: Stardust, Raptor, Siren, Hacksaw, Faraday, Thug, Trident, Thunderbird, Ultimatum, Scorpion, Dante

Cutter DOES NOT NEED A BUFF.
The thing is a MONSTER.
Never give Charmedmage any buffs ever.

I don't think anything gets outright broken with a 50% dps buff outside of degenerate early game 1v1 situations. Even buffing a unit that's already strong just causes a meta shift.

That said, some would cause harsher shifts than others. Here are what I'd expect to be least impactful.

The Trivial Club:
Anything with zero DPS, like factories and walking bombs

The Overkill Club:
Starlight, Disco Rave Party, Lucifer, Mistral

The DPS Is Beside The Point Club:
Constable, Dirtbag, Hercules, Felon, Firefly, Badger (but not Claws), Tremor, Artemis, Scylla, all bombers except maybe Odin

And then you get into the Units That Need A Buff Club that everyone else is talking about.

quote: The DPS Is Beside The Point Club:

quote: Felon

???

Scorpion and Dante being balanced with +50% damage is an absurd thought. Scorpion in particular is already a monster held back mostly by limited DPS. With this, I'd actually bet a scorpion could probably solo a paladin.

Tremor with +50% DPS would be an absolute monster. It doesn't seem like much, but it's important to realize that the tremor does obscene dps anyway.

Single Hacksaw almost oneshotting a likho would also be absurd.

Going through more rationally:

Raiders: None of these could be buffed because they're already a menace to everything, including riots.

Riots: Absolutely not. For context, Mace would be doing almost 500 DPS. When a unit already has a ton of DPS, giving it increased DPS as a function of it's existing DPS is a recipe for disaster. Claymore might not completely break everything on its own (Because it tends to overkill targets anyway), but claymore + 1 mace would just kill everything.

Assaults: Cyclops oneshotting thugs through their shields. Knights would be king of anti-heavy. Hermit does damage on par with bandit.

Skirms/Artillery: Ranged damage units are already strong due to preventing enemy interaction. Consider lance with a 30% faster cooldown and that's a good starting point.

The only things I can think of that wouldn't break the game outright (where +50% damage is a coherent concept) are impaler (since it can't hit moving targets anyway), limpet, and moderator (which tends to deal massive slow with limited damage *anyway*), and they'd still be oppressively powerful.

Anything past this is cheesing the question with starlight, ultimatum, etc.


None of these would actually be improvements. Balance can be pretty knife edge in zk, I think.

Cutter is not especially good right now as a combat unit. It is quite serviceable as a scout.

However, the nature of Disarm on a combat unit is that the outcome of fights is generally extremely lopsided one way or the other. If Cutters can achieve full disarm on the opposing army they will win without further losses; if the Cutters can't achieve full disarm it is because they have died and not got many shots in.

So the gap between "Cutter has bad numbers and can't fight anything" and "Cutter has good numbers which allow it to dominate many matchups" is rather small.

Maybe you should stop breaking the game with your experiments?

Which actually touches on something interesting I've observed: there are a few maps with very shallow water across large portions of the map that are nevertheless land maps.

On those maps, mistrals can actually be quite brutally effective because of how much they slap the hell out of other skirmishers.