Missing unit roles

I know the frustration. I prefer to use small units - the emphasis on heavies, to me, loses the beauty of ZK. Heavy games are always all-or-nothing - either you kill the heavy or the heavy does some damage, retreats, heals, and wins by attrition. For this purpose, the whole bomber game is heavy - the nuke bomber is the queen of this - it flies home with zero lost unless you've got some obscene AA investment.

But there's so much riot firepower going around that it seems like investing in anything smallish in the late game these days is suicide. You can't build up a huge force if you're taking losses every time your troops get breathed-on wrong, while your heavier foes keep snowballing.

Because of this, the skirmishy units that feel like they should be good at heavies are actually a terrible long-term investment. Your whole force of rockos or rogues or recluses, carefully protected by riots, all get obliterated by a single napalm bomber. There was no battle, no last stand - just "boom, all your crap's dead or dying".

I'm not sure what to do about that mess, but I'm not happy with that part of the game.

On the other hand, it seems like "buff/add AA" is the wrong solution. The hardcountery world of AA/Not AA isn't fun for anybody. I'd love to see one of the labs go without dedicated AA but explore having flex-AA in nearly every unit - the Banisher is a good model for this. If we're going to keep the Veh lab without dedicated AA, then how about we put flex-AA weapons on everything in the lab? The Dart, the Leveler - keep the stats the same, but their cannons are now flex-missiles.

Or swap the Samson and the Copperhead and do something similar with the Tank lab - replace the Goli's flamethrower with an AA laser, make the Welder's pew-pew into a flex-missile. Heck, be stupidly fancy and crank up the rotation speed and add burnblow to the Pillager. Probably wouldn't hit a plane to save its life, but could be hilarious against gunship-swarms.

I have an even crazier idea for a flex-AA unit in the Cloakybot lab, but I have experiments I want to do on that front first.

quote: On the other hand, it seems like "buff/add AA" is the wrong solution. The hardcountery world of AA/Not AA isn't fun for anybody. I'd love to see one of the labs go without dedicated AA but explore having flex-AA in nearly every unit - the Banisher is a good model for this. If we're going to keep the Veh lab without dedicated AA, then how about we put flex-AA weapons on everything in the lab? The Dart, the Leveler - keep the stats the same, but their cannons are now flex-missiles.

Flex-AA is a false dream. it encourages unit monoculture - spam the unit that covers all bases - and makes manufacturing a specific counter less efficent.

tarantula (anti bomber)
archangel (anti gunship)

both are capable of performing the role of the other.

@SaktothIVL - if I were giving Veh an AA unit, I wouldn't bother with a new model - I'd just convert the Samson into pure-AA (although it'd need a new script to let it fire-while-moving). Who's going to miss it?

"Usually as a veh player you just spam ravager which has too much HP for the enemy to napalm and is too cheap to prec bomb. This actually works surprisingly well but it's not really a solution."
Why not?
If you can make it into the enemy base before he can stop you, you have effectively countered whatever units he was making.

quote: Flex-AA is a false dream

Flex-aa is entire hoverfac with exception of halberd. I've seen maces rip down napalm bombers. I've seen penetrators sniping a licho. And oh what can scalpel do to gunships. All the while having the ultra-efficient long-range flail.

Maybe, instead of removing copperhead from tanks, we should move flail to cars instead.

quote: Scorcher should be able to beat any heavy that isn't a riot

Problem is, there are too many riot heavies: sumo, crabe, dante are probably more then a half the nomenclature of heavy units that appear in most games.

And scorchers take a lot of attrition, so if you fail to kill a gollie, you lose.

They still can shoot gunships with every unit except halberd!

^ yeah

The big one that tends to ruin the swarmy game is the napalm bomber. I'd look at a weight-reduction there - make the napalm bomber something that you can primarily use against targets with very weak AA or else you have to field a lot of them and lose a lot of them. Of course, a weight-reduction would have to be done carefully, since it would also mean napalm bomber rushes.

As for vehicle AA, I'd think that just re-roling the Slasher would be the way to go. The vehicle lab already has a hyper-accurate skirmisher in the Dom.

Or remove the exp requirement of morph slashers to copperheads, but increase the metal cost of the morph, it should be a bit more expensive than building copperheads directly, so the players won't try to build slashers to get copperheads quicker all the time.