Is having "good" long range units healthy balance-wise?

With the skirmisher meta in 1v1s and the arty meta in teamgames reigning for a very long time, I had an idea.

A temporary (probably opt-in) experiment.

What if we doubled the price of ALL skirmishers, artillery and "long range support"(I mean Sniper, Nimbus, Fencer, Felon, Crabe, Grizzly)?

This is obviously a ridiculous change breaking all current balance. But it poses a question. Will all of the nerfed units be unviable? Definitely not. (But many definitely will be made useless with this change)

And could this stupid-looking change actually lead to healthier gameplay? It just might.

Now here's my thinking:
With less skirmishers there are more incentives to build riots and assaults.
Will less arty there are more incentives to build porc and units that can be out-atrittioned by arty.
But with more assaults there are less incentives to build porc. So no Stinger-pocalyse.

Eventually, with all of these units counterable by skirms and arty swarming the field, players will build the skroms and arty. But you know, as a counter. Not as an anti-everything, as they do now. Those units will be simply too valuable to lose, players will dedicate a lot more support for them.

Skirmishers and arty are by design really hard to counter. Raiders can't counter skirm+riot. Assaults can only in large numbers and if they are significantly faster then the skirmishers. Arty is even worse- you can cloak it and hide it behind the frontline and very slowly kill everything. I usually kill arty either because the enemy managed them badly, or because I used some (generally expensive) cheese strat. With assaults, you run the risk of your units dying without making cost. With heavy units you run the risk of infi/skuttle/dgun troll/some terraforming cheese. And that's fun. What's not fun is getting pounded with units which you can't get to. (Note: If you account for reclaim, arty is even more overpowered. If you kill the super-annoying arty, your enemy will get to reclaim it and the units used to kill it. If you account for ressurection... well at least nobody does ressurection)

Also the skirms and arty that will be viable will almost certainly be the currently OP ones. I would expect Ronin and Rouge and maybe Recluse to be viable. For arty, I would also expect Lance, Envoy, maybe Felon and Sniper to be viable.

Now obviously don't do this change for real. As an experiment, it would tell us which skirmishers and arty are the OP ones (since a balanced unit shouldn't be viable at 2x the cost). Also it'll if show us if the game will be better of if skirmishers and long range stuff were nerfed overall. Perhaps skirmishers should generally bad. But they should be always useful as specialists.

Or we could just nerf some skirmishers. That could work too.

quote: But uith more assaults there are less incentives to build porc

Actually, most people build artilerry to break past porc because a single Stinger can inflict some losses. Now the problem is, without artillery wearing them down, people will build Stingers because there is nothing the opponent can counter it with. It then ends up like WW1 where everyone just sits at their defensive turrets and does suicidal charges to break the other trench by rushing Assault units.

But otherwise, try it out, an experiment on a test server perhaps?

"since a balanced unit shouldn't be viable at 2x the cost"
Necessity and value are not identical concept. For example, if storage costs 2x as much, it would still be built if the player's commander dead, but that doesn't mean the storage is currently unbalanced.

You know, you could run this experiment on a test server just like I could modify some values in a config file to make it so. But you kinda need a decent amount of players to actually test this.

quote: It then ends up like WW1 where everyone just sits at their defensive turrets and does suicidal charges to break the other trench by rushing Assault units.

Well Zero-K teamgames are already the closest you can get to a WW1 simulator. The cheery "going to war" music, the eternal nearly unmovable frontline, games being won by either attrition or superior economy, the arty spam... the only thing that's missing are the trenches.

Enen if you double the cost of arty, if somebody spams Stingers enough, it should become usable.

Arty is weak? Have you tried spamming Lance or Pilliager or Sniper with some support in a teamgame? They can hit units. With enough of them you can hit anything. Hammer and Badger way be kinda weak though. But arty should be weak, because the alternative is worse.

quote: Have you tried spamming Lance or Pilliager or Sniper

These are more arty-ranged super skirmishers than just arty. Sling and Impaler are not too strong, i find. An Impaler cant even kill a repaired Stinger, and it surely cannot fight mobiles well. Even Badger is pretty crap at its arty job (but i guess it instead tries to be a cool arty ranged skirmisher instead).

Of course you could note that only a few artillery units in ZK dont have that unit-busting power these days. Well. Maybe that is the problem.

I don't think arty should be weak. I think it should be very powerful at its job - killing defenses. And narrow niche arty should be better at it than generalist arty.

quote: the only thing that's missing are the trenches

Never played those big games, but how much terraform do they see? And how effective is arty or conventional assault against those?

quote: Well Zero-K teamgames are already the closest you can get to a WW1 simulator...the only thing that's missing are the trenches

That just sounds like you are terraforming enough :P

Seriously, though, I can see the logic, especially in the strength of riot+skirm, and I'm in favour of wacky test server tests to see what non-incremental changes to game design would bring, so this sounds like something to test.

quote: I'm confused, are we in a raider meta or an artillery/skirmisher meta?

Depends on skill AFAICT. Newer players have a harder time dealing with raiders, but players who understand the counter structure and the importance of a thin but present porc line tend to get more into the skirm/arty game, since most other units get wrecked by said porc, or are in general less safe to use than the skirmishers and artillery.

raaar none of the above.
We are in the stinger meta.

The forum troll meta is evolving!

Actually, I think it's highly likely that the Stinger meta is there only because of the skirmisher meta. Stinger kills skirmishers pushing into it. And the Stinger is a lot better when supported by skirmishers - the enemy has a much harder time chasing the skirmishers or pushing into the Stinger - they die faster due to the combined forces.

So skirmisher and Stinger meta might be the same thing.