Thoughts on the water

After much waiting I think it's time to address the water in ZK once more. I want to start off with a simple question "Why do people dislike sea ZK so much?" The general response I seem to get is of course that sea ZK is unbalanced or poorly balanced which comes down to four main points of interaction. Ships v Ships, Ships v Amphibs, Ships v Hovers, and Amphibs v Hovers. In order to provide a constructive discussion I would like to focus on just one of these at a time, please do not attempt to mix this discussion to address more than one of these points at a time. Also, please refrain from derailing this thread unless you want to see the ZK sea game to stay the way it is currently (even then please don't.)

With that out of the way I would like to address the Ship v Amphib gameplay with a few main concerns that I think really break the sea game. Amphibs are currently balanced to contest the land while Ships are generally balanced to be a winning strat whenever there is water. These two balance objectives have forced the Ship v Amphib play into a slippery slope game, as such both factories need rebalances with respect to each other. I understand that Amphibs are somewhat balanced towards land; I would suggest most changes be given to the ships lab in order to mitigate these concerns.

I previously mentioned that the Ship v Amphib game results in a slippery slope game. This is mainly due to how submerged units work in practice. They have a sort of invincibility to most weapons. Please consider the following situation in a Ship v Amphib game. Player A spawns with a commander junior and creates a ship fac deciding to rush a Skeeter for scouting. Player B has decided to go Amphibs in the water and now is basically just left with spamming ducks as the only viable strategy. Player A will see the Amphib lab and begin to build Hunters early and never stop building Hunters. Player B now has no counter to Hunters and either needs to spam defenses to kill them, fac switch in the early game, or continue spamming Ducks and hope for the best. None of these outcomes are desirable for fluid gameplay mechanics indicative of ZK. Player B cannot counter Hunters with Amphibs for cost. Ducks are hopeless, Scallops are comparitively the same, Bouys just don't have the dps to chew through a Hunter or two in small numbers, Archers simply die too quickly and the Grizzly is too expensive for this early game. Player B has basically lost the game at this point unless they were initially intending to do an early fac switch or some such.


Ok now let's assume for a moment that Player A didn't immediately switch to Hunters and instead wanted to build more Skeeters for harassment. Player B can now steamroll Player A with Ducks to the point where Player A can't recover. With a commander junior Player A has nothing to even shoot back as the Ducks attack. Player A can attempt to build Urchins or Hunters at this point, but Player B could easily destroy any nanoframe in building before it can actually fire a shot.

In both of these instances the game was decided very early. The building of one specific hard counter has essentially decided the game. This brings up two main points, 1) the Hunter should not counter the entire Amphib lab, and 2) more early game sea units need to be able to engage the Duck.


Now let's think of another scenario which is a teamgame with both Players A and B. Consider for a moment that Player A has lost control of the water but successfully retreated to land. What can player B do to counter the now present Amphib horde (more likely Duck horde but I'll be technically correct here). The list of units that can be on land and fire upon submerged units is extremely small limited to 1) other Amphibs, 2) Urchins, and 3) shadows (no coms don't count as commander junior is the only baseline com that all players can use). Out of these the only one that really counters a Duck horde is the Urchin; Player A's only choice is to now turret creep back into the water. The submerged nature of Amphibs prevents any attempts at engaging an Amphib held body of water which again contributes to a slippery slope.

The last thing I want to bring up before my tl;dr statement is that most Amphib units see almost no combat in the water, this would likely change if a strong counter mechanic was made for underwater gameplay.

Tl;dr
-Hunters should not counter the entire Amphib lab early game
-Players need more early game solutions to Ducks
-Players need a surface based counter to submerged units
-Ships need a nerf or Amphibs need a water based buff to encourage use of units other than ducks

Thanks for reading (even if it was only the Tl;dr) and please discuss.

U didnt consider Hovers vs Amphs.
If player B starts with amphs, and player C starts with hovers (1v1) player C is immediately dead. Ducks would kill both fac and commander, while hovers can't kill underwater comm nor (most of the times) amphs facs.

I think hover vs amph is where you should start. Currently this matchup is broken on any map that has reasonable amount of sea.

YurGa
that kind of thinking got us into this mess... sea should not be op, it can be "powerfull" but this "power" must be balanced by something like "cost" or "speed" or "health" (how the rest of zk is ballanced)

To further on what was just said. I think it is important to ask, why this separate terrain works at all. Why is it interesting to have boats, and why is this terrain 'fun'.

Boats are restricted to sea. Therefore, they should be used when it is important to control the sea. This means they should be used when it is important to contest the sea. At this time they should have a terrain-advantage against things that can go on both sea and land, similar to how rocky terrain exists and influences bots and vehicles. This should be the extent of their advantage.

Currently, if any vehicle has that advantage, it is the hovercraft.

To counteract this, boats would need to specialize in water-to-water weapons, and those weapons would need to affect hovercraft. Those weapons exist, they are torpedoes. Making boats good against and with torpedoes, and making torpedoes affect hovercraft should then be an initial goal. Cannons and other such weapons would have the role of 'generalist' weapons, in the same way artillery or AA weapons exist on other vehicles, in the same way that Shield factory gets unshielded units or heavy tank gets their raider.

Short-range above-ground ships would be powerful specialists.
Torpedo ships would represent the bulk of ship forces and be balanced against amphibious bots and hovercraft.
Long range weapons would be balanced against land based long range weaponry.

This, of course, relies on holding the sea as being valuable. This is just a matter of map design, and could be accentuated if necessary by making tidal generators markedly superior to wind generation.

Yes, but Nota-style ships would be in ZK's strider-hub. Not part of the regular unit-spread.

The current design for Amph and Hovers is that they should be viable on some land maps. Hovers would be viable on flat maps and Amphs would be viable on small maps. They should both be viable on 'puddle' maps, these are maps which are mostly land but have some water in a reasonably important location.

Amph and Hover are probably not balanced at the moment and land has some pretty well balanced factories. So the plan is to balance Amph and Hover for these land situations and then balance Ships around Amph and Hover. Ships could be balanced around the current Amph and Hover but changes to those factories would likely invalidate the changes to Ships.

It would probably be more correct to say that we care more about land balance than sea balance. Amph and hover are both interesting as land factories, and increasingly viable these days both due to changes to the game or metagame. So we're concerned mostly with that (Though Licho disagrees).

However, there are a lot of things that can be done to amph and hover that would not change their land matchups at all: Something as drastic as torpedoes hitting hovers or ALL underwater units being required to surface to fire would not change their land matchups (And would only slightly change puddle maps, probably in the positive).

quote: until ships can sprout legs or wheels and slowly traverse land they will suck forever

They would becomme amphibs too, if they do.

I think we need another water only fac. Or even two. After that, rebalancing hovers and amphs to match water would be easier, as we would have more couters to evrything in water. And total number of water facst would rise to 5, which propably would attract more ppl to water maps.
But creating whole new fac, not even saying about two is the hardest thing I can imagine, I know it :D
May be split facs to subs and surface ships? Raider subs would look ridiculous though.

quote: Certainly, adding additional sea-only factories will not fix this.

How do u know? Maps arent the only things that make gameplay interesting. Units are to. Would u get borred faster, if u had to make cloakies only on various maps, or if u had choice of all the facs we have now, but on only single map?

Ye, adding water facs won't solve all the problems, but it certainly will improve the sea gameplay.