Okay, i'm not playing zk again until something is done to tank.

Grizz OP u kept sending them 1 by 1 vs 4 goli and not abusing the hill in the middle which wouldve kept them alive.

Also u wonnered this game till u make silencer lol

P.s. nothing beats eco

Sure, making more goli instead of silencer probably would have worked but fuck that.

TLDR: Anarchid spends approximately 14:00 to 21:00 using their faster army to intentionally enter battles in which the opposing army costs significantly more than their own. They then spend the last 10 minutes doing weird stuff and losing on attrition.


At around 15:10 he attacks with 850 metal in raiders (plus a heavily damaged Cyclops) into a defending force of 5250 metal. It would be ludicrous if 1/3 the cost of a Cyclops in standard ground troop could come out ahead against two Cyclopes.


Here it is again. In this case the 1000 metal in raiders actually killed a low health Cyclops before they all died. This is about as good as can be hoped for. Anarchid keeps throwing small armies into a growing force of repairing Cyclopes.


Look at what this behaviour does for attrition.


A big battle, perhaps the final one. Anarchid attacks a 9000 metal force of Cyclopes and turrets with 3000 metal in raiders and a Cyclops as backup. They also have a Grizzly but it is far out of position. The fight is effectively 5000 vs. 9000. Anarchid kills a Cyclops, at the cost of their raiders, which is a trade of 3000 for 2200. This is quite a good trade considering the initial forces. Fealthas has three Cyclops remaining so can, along with some reinforcements, push and clean up the remaining enemy forces. They pick off a Cyclops and two Grizzlies.

About 22:00 onward has Anarchid attempt weird counters (Ultimatum, Dominatrix) when they have already thoroughly lost on attrition. It is as if Anarchid thought Cyclops costs only 1000 metal and planed their earlier engagements accordingly. They got to choose when and where to fight and kept taking poor fights. I'm having a hard time drawing conclusions on Cyclops balance when such poor attempts are made to counter it.

This is perhaps a problem of intuition and slippery slope. One Cyclops is 17 Scorchers but it looks a lot smaller than 17 Scorchers. This many Scorchers would easily kill a Cyclops and many would survive, marking a win on attrition. Even taking the factory switch into account Anarchid could have had ten Scorchers and two Darts. Instead they attacked at 15:10 with a bit more than half that.

I have seen many cases of large units winning just because attempts to counter it fail to remember a basic rule of strategy: Avoid taking poor fights. Army cost is generally a decent stand-in for army power. People tend to underestimate the cost of large units, so large units tend to get fed. Perhaps models are due for a rescale, but Cyclops is about as large as reasonable without an extra movetype. Models also affect balance simply because I like to have hitvolumes match models.

Perhaps the intuition issue would be solved with a cluster detection overlay that detects armies and displays their cost. Nobody would take this fight if it was abundantly clear that the enemy force costs more than 5x their own.

Such a widget would confuse new players so I wouldn't enable it by default, if someone were to make it. However I think it would be useful for learning or experienced players to train valuation intuition.

alternatively adjust size of units to slightly more reflect their worth and make it more intuitive.
I am very on board with nerfing repair at any rate

quote: This is perhaps a problem of intuition and slippery slope.

Dunno, from the inside it felt pretty much like this:

1) Cyclops appears. I realise i have Blitzes and that they do nothing vs Cyclops. The only counter to Cyclops in Tank is More Cyclops.

2) I realise that because the enemy already has More Cyclops, and that they are actively pushing my territory, i cannot just have More Cyclops.

3) It feels that Cyclops is an assault unit that isn't very accurate against raiders and has a low rate of fire and kills only one raider at a time, so it can be very effectively taken with dart/scorcher (at about the same rate as other assaults) so i try that. Obviously it fails because all of these assumptions are wrong: Cyclops is accurate vs both Scorcher and Dart, it has AoE, and fairly good RoF. Also it has enough range to work with the square law. It can only be practically attacked at about the same cost, which makes Scorcher not really a counter if you consider that the Scorcher does have much cheaper counters.

4) Realising that, i try the weird counters, but it's too late, and also the nuke gets scouted. Game over.

I think it is uneconomical to try countering an already deployed Cyclops with Scorcher at this efficiency with a fairly even economy. You need to facswitch and produce a Cyclops worth of Scorcher while the enemy Cyclops is already pwning you, during which time, the enemy does his best to produce 2000 cost of another Cyclops, so now you're again at a disadvantage unless he overextends. So now you repeat the moves, and you have a 3:2 ratio that could already work if not for the fact that the Cyclopses have taken a third of the map from you by now.

It's just too much of a qualitative leap in a tank mirror. I don't think Cyclops is this nasty elsewhere or that it is the problem with Tank.

Also, i think that only 2 thunderbirds disarm a cyclops. Which then can be overrun by raiders like the scorchers.

Do you seriously consider changing general mechnics to fit with unit-balance?

Slow cannon could be removed. Why this sidearm actually?

Grizzly is better than cyclops so not sure why were talking about cyclops nerfs