User:Aquanim/UnitTaxonomy

Preface

See also Unit classes.

Often ZK players think about the unit roles in terms of the RPS triangle of raider > skirmisher > riot > raider, artillery beating porc, and assaults have several definitions including "also beating porc" or "being tanky". I think this schema misses some important stuff.

• Raiders semi-routinely beat riots for cost if they get a decent surround.
• Some skirmisher vs raider matchups are quite painful for the raiders (Scalpel jumps to mind).
• Skirmishers caught a little out of position will get chewed up by riots.
• Some artillery units (notably Firewalker) are pretty underwhelming against turrets.
• Assault units aren't always eager to push into defences. Ravager would much prefer to be doing runbys. Grizzly pokes from a distance.

Below I am going to lay out what I think are some reasonable definitions for each class, according to the following scheme:

Primary characteristic: The defining property of the unit class. If you don't have this, you don't belong in this class.

Secondary characteristic: A property which is shared (to some degree) by all units of the class, as a logical consequence of applying game design principles alongside the primary characteristic.

Tertiary characteristic: A property which is shared (to some degree) by most units of the class. The units without positive tertiary characteristics are typically pretty poor at doing some of the common "jobs" assigned to this unit class. The units without negative tertiary characteristics typically have some other weakness to compensate... but they're often still quite tricky to deal with.

Unrelated characteristic: A property which you might think is characteristic of a unit class, but in fact is not.

These classes are not necessarily going to cover all units. Air is probably left out.

Raiders

Primary characteristic

• Raiders are effective primarily by virtue of their movement speed.

Secondary characteristic

• Raiders have effective weapons. Having reached a position quickly they then need to do their business quickly, before whatever they were running from catches up.
• Raiders have poor range and HP. A cheap fast unit with poor damage but long range or lots of HP would be far more annoying than fun.

Tertiary characteristic

• Most raiders are cheap.
  • Counterexample: Kodachi and Blitz are relatively expensive, and Tank really feels the lack of a good chaff option in some matchups.
• Most raiders have good DPS/cost.
  • Counterexample: Dagger has poor DPS and so Hover doesn't have the same potential to inflict a lot of economic damage with one or two raiders that other factories do.