Buff Artillery, nerf static area control

This did sound insane from the title but it seems fairly well grounded.

This is all assuming that they will be buffed:. A change for the pillager could be slightly increasing its fire rate so it has a chance against shields, not so as to make the tremor obsolete though. I am not sure about increasing health for artillery, it is meant to be defended at the back after all. It may be better to give artillery more specific buffs rather than generic things like increasing hp.

Generally I like the idea. It would lead to much less static, porcy, boring games.

>Make gauss deflected

no. this will make gauss turret useless, this will hugely nerf detri. I suggested how to balance gauss - more shields on its pass, less damage it deals. Lets say minimum is 25% damage after 10 full charged aegis on its pass. strength of the shield is matter, so Convict's shield will not do so much reduce in dmg. Also gauss will drain shields when passing them.

And fire is already weak, its not need to be nerfed in anyway

It's cool how you want to buff arti to be better at wearing down hardcore porc, but please take into consideration how it affects other stages of the game. It's unlikely that you can snipe a merl earlier in the game (yes, bombers, but consider smaller games), so it can and will deal terrible damage to everything stationary in the region. Yes, against stupid opponents a razor's may work out, and most units should be in a fight asap, but i think its dps is balanced atm.

brrroleg if you seriously believe the only or primary uses of fire and gauss are shield penetration then it just shows how backwards things have gotten.

Pitbull is an excellent arty-resistant turret, Detri has the DPS to rip through anything and Pyro's are still the best unit in the jump fac.

Anyway, shields behe and anni are the problems IMO.

"ZK teamgames have become very porcy and static. "

It's also a function of the number of players, simply. Difficult to raid other parts of the map outside the front line where the front line just span the entire width of the map !

I'm going to go ahead and suggest that many of you didnt think through what I wrote there.

quote: If porc is too strong, we should buff assault options, not artillery options.

hypothesis: assault options are already strong, but even the best assault options can still easily be made untennable in teamgames through cooperation between porcing allies/a lack of cooperation from attackers - players work together to defend but most are too noob to work together to attack. the solution is the unit type designed to hurt defences without needing to be attacked by them, except it is massively hardcountered and not very effective.

quote: If artillery is strong, then porcing is strong too

...no, not necesarrily. No amount of merls is going to making porcing awesome.

quote: If players can attack from behind their own defensive lines with impunity, they will build large defensive lines to defend their big artillery ball and they wont venture out from them. Then they will build shields to protect from enemy artillery, huge impenetrable shield bubbles. And the front line will never move.

shielding a whole front has a prohibitive cost and can be penetrated at any one point via EMP. forcing an opponent to spam shields is a victory, since it makes breaking through his lines elsewhere with assaults much easier and weakens his economy.


Lastly, please actually read what I suggested. Namely, what I suggested was HP buffs for various artillery units, nothing else (except a turn rate boost to pillager). The only interaction this will noteably affect is napalm bomber vs light artillery and shadow vs heavy. Currently good players dont use artillery in team-games unless they are experimenting, as it is UP.

If the problem is a failure of cooperation and noob games, I'm not sure there is anything to do. Changing the strength of artillery will effect high level and 1v1 games, where artillery on smaller maps is really fairly viable.

It is important that artillery remain snipable if it is assaulted.

Annihilator should definitely not outrange arty, the only static that should do that is the Behe

more HP would be good, in some cases better then others, pillager doesn't really need it compared to the others, mainly hammer and wolverine
they could do with a bit more health, not enough to enable them to survive phoenixes with impunity but a bit more so they don't die to a veritable sneeze would be good

spiders have no arty, this also saddens me
I have a few ideas on that but its the wrong thread

Annihilator is for the killing of heavies
Htanks, Dante, scorpion and the like
do you notice Anti artillery in its unit description? no.
thats because static weapons are NOT meant to outrange artillery, they are meant to be countered BY artillery

your statement is so ridiculous im having trouble processing how you would come to that result

I know ppl don't like this as it is a major change (did i mention it before, forgot), but, we could just get rid off all the heavy defenses. Or maybe downscale them drastically. As in cap static defenses at ~700 metal I've always found a game with "light/mediumdefenses + lots of army" more interesting than "lots of heavy defenses + little army".

In my ideal ZK you only make defenses on locations you really, really! want to defend. You should have to reconsider the cost and risks at least 5 times before starting a big turret. As it is now it is just too easy to have (big)turrets over the entire front-line. Add to that a lot of the maps are made to porc on (again, maps and team-sizes are way off in ZK)


*random XTA stuff*
XTA's model of statics is still the best imo. You could kill a turret with an almost equal investment in mobiles. The statics had a lot of range compared to the mobiles in the same price-range. They would work as area denial and a save(r) zone for an army. And, of course front-line commanders could make fighting units on the other side of the map. Which is a major advantage of cons and commanders especially because XTA is so slow.
*en of random XTA stuff*