Bertha Range

psaniac suggests reducing Bertha range. This is interesting for a few reasons.

• Bertha feels most powerful on maps where you can shoot a Bertha from one base to another.
• I observe early Berthas be countered by aggression on smaller maps, simply because the front collapses before any significant Bertha battery is constructed.
• Bertha seems to be most oppressive when players can safely make it in their base from fairly early in the game.
• I've tried making Bertha towards the center of larger maps once the center is fairly secure, and while the base shelling wins the game it feels like any equivalent expenditure would have won the game.

For reference Berthas have 6000 range, Tacnukes 3500, and Cerberus 1850. Reducing their range slightly (maybe 5400?) could move them out of the over-effective zone that they seem to inhabit on some of the popular maps. An effective Bertha would have to be constructed in a little more of a vulnerable position. I'm quite hesitant though due to Quant's Rule.

What do people think? Does anyone have a good list of maps on which Bertha is powerful?

Make them explode more violently on death so they are more likely to chain explode and cost more investment to defend them.

Justify it by saying the shells chain exploded

The shorter you decide to make its range the more it will matter to give it grid requirement, so do both.

quote: Does anyone have a good list of maps on which Bertha is powerful?

I looked at the featured map list:

Very powerful:
SapphireShores_Dry_V2.2
StormSiege_v3
LLTAComplexV2
Supreme_Lake_Dry_V5

Powerful:
Terra 2
Delta Siege Dry Reloaded vBETA4
Akilon Wastelands ZK v1
Comet Catcher Redux v3.1
Titan v3.1
Tabula-v6.1
Nuclear_Winter_v1
FrozenFortress_v2
Koom Gorge v1
Sacrifice_v1
Fields_Of_Isis
Icy Run v2
Kappa_Basin

Well, I suppose this applies only to big games.

I would personally nerf Bertha Range while buffing Cerberus range slightly. Having over 2X the range for 2X the cost is really huge considering the extra range is really impactful stat as it gives direct advantage against every unit that the bertha outranges, including missile silo which jut trashes attempts to use Cerberus.

To demonstrate how big thing 2X range is, imagine this: What if there was 7K metal costing versions of Dante that have 2X range or 2X damage. The 2X damage dealing one will work pretty much like the normal 3,5K metal Dante, but it just kills units faster, barely making ny difference against Raiders like GLaives that tend to burn up before even landing a hit in the first place. On the other hand the one with 2X range would be much better at slaughtering skirmishers and emplacements from a far as it could basically out right out-range them.

Another option would be outright dropping the Bertha DPS by lowering its fire rate. Now it would not have as huge impact, though it would still be able to hammer positions and unit blobs.

I would like to see Bertha less effective at point-blank range; its ability to defend itself from direct attacks feels a little silly.

I still feel like the energy requirement will primarily add irritation to the Bertha user's game experience without adding meaningful and practical tactical options to the other team. If you can't kill the Bertha itself, being able to shut down the grid for a meaningful length of time feels like a pipe dream. Maybe with decreased range this changes a bit.

Decreasing its range would probably not do any harm.

quote: (I tried putting Quant's rule into a search engine for an exact definition and the only relevant result was a thread on this forum. Does anyone have a link?)

I believe Quant refers to Quantum, who was a ZK dev at one time (still accessible through Discord). The concept may have analogies in other communities but the exact term probably does not.

It may be easier to think about the concept as "If units are changed to be more similar to other units the game becomes more boring, so where possible if a unit needs to be changed make it more different". This rule should be applied in conjunction with sanity checks; for instance the units with shields/cloaks all have quite different roles, so it is not a problem that they share a mechanic and their existence does not preclude the addition of other units with those mechanics, as long as they fill a previously unfilled role.

quants rule is overused at times. there was a time (maybe i remember wrong) where gf didn´t want to make rougue-missiles faster because they would be too close to ronin then.... it´s a good rule, but somehow should not be the top-thing to think of IMO. If a unit is bad for gameplay or just bad in general, it´s of no use to say "but it keeps quants rule"...

+1 for nerfing ability to defend self in close range, instead of nerfing range. In addition, cerberus could get a price decrease, cause at half the cost of bertha, it is possibly the least seen structure.

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GoogleFrog yes you are right and quant´s rule has led to a very nice roster of distinct units. I just wanted to say that one can sometimes get the impression you would dogmatically follow it...

GoogleFrog

You might not like what I am going to say but Zero-k is starting to get restricted when it comes to special tactic. We no longer have interesting stuff in this game that requires heads over micro/macro first. You constantly turn this game into a "mouse breaker" and because of that what made Zero-k unique starts to dissipate.

I just came back and instead of finding new interesting stuff to the game as it should be, I only see nerfed units and very small good changes. I can give you examples regarding what was nerfed since I left and recently rejoined:
Licho ( or what it's called now) - nerfed hard, it doesn't do dmg...it has high turn speed and so on.
Raven nerfed to hell - you can't even kill a commander with 4 of them (1200 metal)
Scythe nerfed - no longer that effective from what I saw
Thunderbird - no longer effective for its 600 metal cost and people no longer build it. It just dies to fast...
Krow - nerfed again and it's extremely useless against 2-3 razors. Remember krow costs 4500 metal...
Bertha - !pending!

Now I will remind you what you nerfed a long time ago, things that I/other players developed and explored/studied hard in order to make it a tactic:
-Space Charon skuttle - [Spoiler]
-Newtons turrets - [Spoiler]
-Newton flea space scout - [Spoiler].
-Athena nuke bomb - [Spoiler]
-Locust - [Spoiler]
-Gnats - [Spoiler]
-Aspis mobile/stationary - [Spoiler]

Ok now we want to be optimistic...here are the good changes that I saw :
Funnelweb - [Spoiler]
Lobster - [Spoiler]

The overall changes over the years from my point of view gives me clear hints that the game is in regression. I understand you want an RPS game here but this is not why most of the player base enjoy this game.[Spoiler]
Most of us have high-end PCs and we still come back to zero-k to have more of this game complexity and not taking this into consideration will be a faulty choice.

The suggestions that I gave over the years [Spoiler] are still the same I am giving you right now. Please stop nerfing stuff and expand the complexity of the game. I might even help up with this since recently I started to make some junior programming courses. If I remember correctly this is mostly LUA based programing and if somebody can give me some links on LUA tutorials applied to this game I would be grateful.

One way to balance all the things in this game and increase its complexity is to make every unit in the game modular (like commander morph is). The difference between commander morph and modular units will be the fact that in the factory you will have blueprints of previously created units. You will save and replace what blueprints you like but, an important aspect is that you can build these units in the game exactly from the factory, with the expense of more metal of course.

We will only need to balance the costs for each unit module (stun, slow, machine gun dmg, explosion dmg, high power servos, cloaking, shield, etc.) in a direct report to the weight/price the current unit has.

So what will this modular unit give you for example? Let's just the "Glaive" unit with the current price of 65 metal.

First situation: I want for example to make it have cloaking technology. This module will cost 40 additional metal making the unit cost 105 total metal when you build it. I would also want to increase its speed of 116 Elmo to 200 so it will move fast. Because it's almost double that value we will add another 40 metal to the cost making the glave cost 145 metal. [Spoiler]

Second situation: I want a teleporting Glave.[Spoiler] So it costs 65 but of course, for the additional module, you will have to pay 20-40% more metal than usual to get it.

Let's switch to other units like planes. I want for example an invisible plane, again I pay 20-40% more to make that blueprint and have the unit on the battlefield. To counter invisibility we just make a special radar that has 20-40% more price because it has cloaking ability detection.

So what can you make with this modular integrated system?
Units that have special abilities but with the increased price and even buildings/defenses.
Immagine a bertha that has high reload rate but costs 10000 metal...you won't have to spam 3-4 berthas...you just have one that shoots the hell out of the enemy.
Immagine a radar spy plane that's invisible and nobody can detect except when it comes in the range of a radar system (that has a cloaking module detection added to it).

Making everything modular in this game will remove the nerfing situation that we have right now. It will put players to balance their unit composition and blueprints. The only thing we need is to adjust the current added price rate of each module for each unit, meaning you only have to deal with simple numbers every time you see something OP :).

I will wait for the LUA programming guide in order to make a small step in working on this development if people agree.