Expensive factories and engine update

In a response to the power of Gunship starts and air switches we are experimenting with a cost increase from 600 to 1000 for factories (and the strider hub). The change is large to better reveal its effects. Your first factory is still free. Try it out and comment below.

We have recently updated the engine to 104.0.1-151-g11de57d and it seems to be working. The main change is a fix to a memory corruption issue which was likely responsible for many desyncs and crashes. Thanks to everyone for testing, hokomoko for fixing adoption issues and the engine devs for the continued updates.

Lastly, the 1v1 matchmaker pool has been modified. Read more about it here https://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/24694

Which ones are the unfavourable factory matchups that don't involve flying units? I have opinions on the subject but I don't know that anybody else shares them.

It's not just unfavorable factory matchups. People often switch factories just so they can build units that do a certain role better (the best example being Firewalker which is preferred over other arty).
If this means people are less likely to factory switch, I think it can reveal more bad/imbalanced units.

Anir if you are responding to me, I think it would be nice to have more true variety, so this change might not be bad indeed. (hard to tell)

if your factory dies in the first 4 min its tricky to recover anyway

This looks like a random wrong solution to a well-known issue. As always it has come from some inner decision circle, most people don't have invitation to, and I'm sure has never been discussed with community or at least top-5 players.

Let me remind you that in 1v1 the issue is a unit called blastwing and its combat stats. It's too fast, too cheap and if used properly at the game start, it will then deliver early crippling damage, that is almost never possible to recover from. After the BW bombing is succesfully done and Locusts or Harpys take over the sky, the defending party is always on the backfoot and has significantly lesser economy. More than anything fac cost increase hurts the defending player, who now can't afford air or GS switch of its own as a response to enemy air domination. For a gunship starter with his economy advantage extra 400 metal is a small inconvinience rather than a mid-term disadvantage that would make blastwing start less viable.

I'd even say that you could use more or less same arguments for decreasing factory cost as for increasing ones. Another words the solution is orthogonal to the problem, thus has close to zero impact.

Also you've just buffed another stupid all-in raiders rush/cheese. With new cost of the fabrics I doubt it'd be possible to recover from such rush, should your factory die.

ivand it was discussed openly in zkdev and later in an open testing room, although the zkdev discussion may have been discord-only due to a bridge bug. At least Sigero, DeinFreund, gajop, Aquanim and Licho were involved, with others commenting as well. Prior to this there were some really poorly organized threads. So, there was no secret decision circle, but I also didn't feel the need to explicitly invite everyone to a drawn out discussion when the change is hard to predict and easy to test.

In every supplied replay and game where a gunship start beat a land start I saw the gunship start switch to land within about four minutes. The land switcher was in a better position as their opponent tended to still be rebuilding after the result of the gunship start. DeinFreund said the problem was Blastwing itself but I do not know how they reached that conclusion from the games they showed me.

If this change has made things worse or had no effect then you should still be able to gunship rush. If it is map dependent then get some people together to test it on a particular map, like I did earlier today.

quote: As for this balance change I think it could possibly work. Currently this meta feels like theres like 1 or 2 particular unit in each lab everyone wants- so they end up with a vehicle lab for an impaler, a Jumpbot lab for a firewalker etc. Every game end up kind of samey.

Spot on, this was another motivation. Too much of the price of a big unit from a factory that you do not own was in the unit itself so it felt like everyone had access to everything too early in the game. Also I felt that an air factory would too easily make back its cost in forced AA.

quote: Also, +200 metal com-morph buff? :shrug:

wat?

Why not make the air factory, the gunship factory and heavy tank factory non-plopable? (but still buildable)

I am not a 1v1 player but that might even be good in teamgames. Most rushes there are krow, bd, 4 bombers to kill comm or golly, comnapping, dante. It makes ground scouting and raiders more important early game. Swifts kill any raider! Krow rushes are mostly boring as game-ender.

Where the hell did this change come from? Nobody I heard from wanted didn't anything even remotely like this. The things I heard about were factory imbalance, ronin OP, racketeer OP and cloaky OP.

What the hell is this supposed to solve? I have no idea. Fortunately, the dev post provides a very clear explanation:

quote: In a response to the power of Gunship starts and air switches we are experimenting with a cost increase from 600 to 1000 for factories (and the strider hub). The change is large to better reveal its effects. Your first factory is still free. Try it out and comment below.

...I still don't get it. This change is really shortsighted. Did anyone consider teamgames? or FFAs? This change seems to me to be 100% about 1v1s. Zero-K is supposed to be about counters. If it takes all your metal to switch into another strategy, you can instead of switching and countering get killed instead. Don't think an ally will share his factory with you - that requires teamwork and is therefore absolutely nonsensical.

Also, has anyone recently seen a ground to ground factory switch in 1v1? I haven't. Its pretty rare.

This change hurts: starting with less adaptable facs in 1v1s and teams, suprise counter strategies, making striders, interesting multi-fac unit compostion. Zero-k needs more options, not less.

The change doesn't hurt the pretty much inevitable switch to air or GS in 1v1s.