Making ZK More Active

How long will ZK be deserted for NA players? Currently it is a sunday evening for those in North America, and 0 people are actually in-game in ZK.


I understand that it's been greenlit by STEAM but its been quite a few months now I believe; when will it come to STEAM? Is there any other way to making ZK more populated? What are the devs approach to this?


ZK is a very fun game and I'm a bit dissapointed that I have no one to play with. I realize that its mostly frequented by adults and older people who don't have a lot of free time as me (I'm just a HS student) but it is sad knowing that half the time my favorite RTS will be dead.

Improving the vs AI and Coop experiences will help bring new players in on a smoother learning curve, where nobody gets called a crustation and leaves in tears. The AI is there now, just need more interesting lobby. Unlocking harder matches etc.

[GBC]1v0ry_k1ng on that note, very easy circuit needs to be much easier.

Feel like the AI in ZK is insanely good for an RTS game. It's handled very well and it actually provides a challenge en masse to even the highest-level players.

AOE2 used to have a great AI scene, a lot of RTS games have fan made AIs, the most of them ignore fog of war, though.

AOE2 AIs were cool but even the best were much less sophisticated than our sweet ZK AIs - they were just scripts. They focused on achieving perfect macro and build timings (both of which are relatively simple for AI) since unit control, map parsing and lots of other functions were hardcoded.

To emphasise:

ZK has the 2nd most challenging and sophisticated non-cheating AI opponents in the entire RTS genre. In terms of usability they also thrash the starcraft BW AIs, which are prohibitively difficult to set up for anything besides a 1v1 vs player (requires multiple copies of Starcraft 1 be run in a virutal lan).

Not sure how relevant this is to making ZK More Active, although pulling people into a single player experience certainly cant hurt (and then the multiplayer COOP matchmaking is looming...).

ZKGBAI, what I would call the current best AI (a notch better than what you get when playing "hard" which is CircuitAI), has a 1v1 elo of around 1500. This was done as a blind test by randomly replacing MatchMaker opponents with the AI.

Think we're getting too interested in the AI here, however awesome they might be. (Spoiler: They're pretty gud)


But what are the dev's plans for making ZK more active other than the steam release? Do you guys have a time estimate for the steam release? ZK is a well-developed and interesting game so I'd expect the steam release to make the playerbase explode. I wouldn't be surprised if we had 300-500 players at all times. How will you guys deal with the server load?

I can't speak for the devs, but my personal view is that ZK still needs a lot of work on the new user experience before we start pushing hard for new users (i.e. releasing on Steam and - hopefully - having an accompanying PR campaign). It's come a long way recently, much better than it was even just a year ago, but more is still needed.

I'd break that work down into three areas:
- User interface (both in-game and lobby)
- Tutorials / guides / learn-how-to-play
- Single-player campaign

People are hard at work on all of these areas.

The game itself, including the AI, is more than ready for an official release and a PR campaign.

Smerch is better. Especially BM-30 Smerch.