Feedback for Release Candidate Units

[onyx crescent]

Please share your feedback and any notable replays! Demon and Shockwave in particular are new to PvP, and thoughts are greatly appreciated.

Reposting from my microblog ( https://server4.beyondallreason.info/microblog/show/26 - has images too);

The 'Expanded T2 vehicles' option has been updated and expanded, into 'Release Candidate Units', which lives under the 'Experimental' tab. This will be a melting pot & balance testbed for units being considered for main game integration. There are two additional units, one of which is brand new to the game.

• Demon is a T3 Cortex mech with dual flamethrowers, and a pair of light antiair shoulder turrets
• The Shockwave is a versatile T2 Armada mex, which wears a lot of hats. It has a medium range EMP turret with some AoE, or can go into stealth mode, cloak, and act like a T2 Twilight. Note that it has much less stopping power than an Advanced Exploiter.

The existing T2 Cortex vehicles remain in the pack, namely:

• The Printer, which acts as a hardy field engineer, and can repair and reclaim while on the move.
• Salamander is an amphibious tank, which fires dual heatrays.

[mighty thorn]

The Shockwave (...) note that it has much less stopping power than an Advanced Exploiter.
have you tried playing without EMP rework on? 🥁

[onyx crescent]

that is without rework, not least as testing them both together is tricky, two different repos!
the limitation is intentional, the turret is slow to change targets, otherwise it would be insanely OP when supported on bridges

[cursive skiff]

The Shockwave emp attack flash is like a flashbang, to bright, too sudden, too blinking.
the stelleto's sequential explosions give is smooth it out giving a soft feel where as this is painful

[onyx crescent]

shock and awe tactics!
I'll see if I can brew something less strobe, would probably mean making a whole new effect rather than using existing

[humble raptor]

Are we removing cloak fusion along with adding shockwave? Or doing something to balance yet another armada EMP unit being added to the game? I like the idea of new units, but I think of there is a purpose of testing balance along with them, should try to have some balance concept as part of the introduction.

[mighty thorn]

I don't think anything's happening to the cloak fusion 😐

[onyx crescent]

there are 3 new core options in the pack, 1 arm, if you mean overall balance?
if unit individually, I (and others) have done a lot of testing to try to ensure it isn't, but that is why playtesting matters
if the issue is EMP specifically, I'm very much working on that one elsewhere. In vanilla EMP, it's not that powerful at crowd control, intentionally, and will stun other shockwaves too, so you can't just lock down areas with them

[rugged musk]

The thing is, you can double build these on metal spots and build them in clusters of metal spots, and that increases their stopping power considerably. One of them isn't so bad, but the thing about EMP is that it doesn't care how strong your unit is, it's shutting it down. In many games I played today, it was mainly the people using them who kept saying "bro this is wack OP" every time it shut down an otherwise deadly push, which was often. It made raiding completely impossible with units that weren't EMP-resistant, ironically most of which are also Armada.

I don't buy at all that it has less stopping power than the advanced exploiter, in big clusters they can shut down t3 pushes with ease and not even take losses. Advanced exploiters at least get killed when they take down a razorback. These are like automated stilettos.

[mighty thorn]

"double build"?

[rugged musk]

You can put more than one mex on a metal spot

[mighty thorn]

oh, that should be disabled. It was for sure disabled for twilights

maybe need to ensure they use the bit of the exploiter's code that makes them disable when they're not mining

[rugged musk]

People were definitely building them next to other mexes just to keep them safe even if they didn't upgrade both mexes.

[cursive skiff]

last i checked exploiters stopped firing when not producing metal, similar behaviour should be inherited, as that is what hornet used as base

[humble raptor]

Just feelin let’s get core the love it deserves first and arm probably will still need nerf at T2 and above.. and I know you’re reworking EMP, but.. with the same balance effect for new EMP as old, just doesn’t feel too exciting yet. Really don’t want to say much more, just consider that for 2 years I’ve been looking for some love to cor and it feels so close with added units, but they’re not even in the game yet. And now we’re going to give more EMP to arm too? Just feels almost silly from over here.

[rugged musk]

Yeah, and nobody ever saw the demon get used in a game. It would be pointless to try a raiding unit when everyone was building EMP mexes.

[mighty thorn]

I mean, the "special T2 mex" slot is sort of empty on Arm side, so it's an obvious candidate for filling. I agree Cor needs love but can we not make that the point of this thread when it's not really actionable as feedback for Hornet?

[rugged musk]

I built a Demon and it looked so cool, but then the game was won and ended immediately.

[humble raptor]

What is the cortex analogue for cloaked fusion?

[mighty thorn]

Idk, y'all should make one! In another thread, maybe? 🙂

[onyx crescent]

suggestions welcome, but, pure symmetry becomes boring

[rugged musk]

Armada gets cloakable Fusions, Cor gets mexes with guns and armor. Arm didn't need EMP mexes that feel even more broken than stilettos even with EMP rework enabled.

[humble raptor]

Which is why we don’t need an armed Mex for armada t2! This all feels so obvious.

[onyx crescent]

it's intentionally not 'armed', it just has limited EMP. it's defensive/tactical

[humble raptor]

So now EMP is not a weapon? Please. I will bow out of this convo now before I ending blocking people they probably don’t actually deserve it

[rugged musk]

Yeah, there's no need for both sides to get a special mex. Especially not when it's using something as contentious as EMP, especially not when these are going to be scattered in vulnerable spots. It's hard enough to raid with stilettos on already.

[onyx crescent]

two blitzes can kill a Shockwave with micro. an advanced exploiter can deal with sumos
that's what I mean by 'weapon'

[rugged musk]

I'm telling you I saw these shut down groups of tigers and bulls. Do you want feedback or do you want to argue in bad faith?

I'll post replays when I wake up in the morning.

[mighty thorn]

Could be good to post a replay

[onyx crescent]

I didn't see you say that, replay would help please
thanks, much appreciated

[rugged musk]

It mostly happens when the raiders are already shooting something else and aren't pre aiming at the mexes. Then they can't turn their guns around in time because each shot slows down their turret speed, and then they bunch up because the units in front are shutting down, and then you have about 6 completely static targets getting cleaned up by the defenders, who in some cases are still using t1. I'll be glad to get you those replays later. It was usually at these times people with the mexes would go "wow this is op as fuck"

[onyx crescent]

I haven't put EMP rework values in the mexes specifically, they're balanced primarily on vanilla EMP, so if both were used it could get interesting yes, I was going to add that to the next rework release (today I hope)

[rugged musk]

That would explain that then, because people wanted to use both.

[mighty thorn]

EMP rework continues to be too popular, a menace to society

[onyx crescent]

unfortunately testing two new things at once is 'interesting' to 'impossible' with Git, I can pick one or other, not both! now mexes are ingame I can balance them in the new rework though

[cursive skiff]

soon we will replace weapons off mass destruction with rubber ducks and water guns, we can not have this peace

[mighty thorn]

See? All it takes is figuring out exactly why you're seeing two different things. Nobody's arguing in bad faith.

[rugged musk]

People mostly wanted to use the demon and the printer but the arm t2 emp mex comes as a package deal with that. And of course since one thing got enabled people go "hey let's turn on EMP rework!"

[mighty thorn]

Then yeah, I guess this was a quiet "known issue might be completely broken"

[rugged musk]

Well, it might have to become a priority, because I don't know if you can get people to use one without the other. I think they assume incorrectly that they'd be even more OP with EMP rework turned off. Even I thought this would be the case. Even mentioning there's an EMP unit in the pack usually gets someone voting to turn on EMP rework and it goes through unanimously.

[onyx crescent]

I was expecting some difference due to tarpitting, but not full on OP
will deal with that as soon as I can, will be today, just not instantly

[terse pulsar]

i encountered this when playing against BarbarianAI although they spammed mex's on one spot(this happened when I tweaked the resource multiplier)
it would be better to patch that and add only one mex on one metal spot

Hey you think it would be better for the T2 Mex to be a cloak field generator or a radar jammer instead of an EMP turret? would make it a little less anti-swarm and more of a support role

[onyx crescent]

they should be unable to be mass built, I'll recheck that later in case something changed it

[small steppe]

Sorry about my pre-release testing appearing to be not nearly thorough enough. This is very possible, but seems to require mexes with large buildable areas for mexes

[small steppe]

it appears this is the closest 1 con can build them together on a single mex without being blocked. can build them directly adjacent if you queue separate cons to build them. I guess what's important, though, is that whatever stops a non-extracting exploiter from firing doesn't stop a non-extracting shockwave for whatever reason. (also, i didn't even know that rule existed for exploiters until now, but it is stopping exploiters in the same skirmish it's not stopping the flashbang devices)

[onyx crescent]

but even if they're built only one should be able to fire ... could you test exploiters & advsploiters too please?
I was literally about to test this myself

[small steppe]

they're all firing in this screenshot, and advsploiters don't fire if they aren't extracting, will test normal exploiters now

[onyx crescent]

that's why I'm confused as heck, as they should use same basis as advsploiters in that way

[small steppe]

normal exploiters also working as intended

[onyx crescent]

looks like something ate the exclusivity setting, investigating atm
thanks for sanity check, as long as it's not a bug with big patches & that setting, should be fixable easily enough

[small steppe]

Also, I already forget if it's been mentioned in this thread, but was mentioned in a match last night: shockwave only has 2200 bp cost, so less than a t1 exploiter

something else i discovered: upon self-d, it leaves a wreck. Is it the only non-comm unit which does that? I assume it's not intentional

[onyx crescent]

will look into both, thanks. this was the first unit I made so may have extra quirks given the learning spiral that is unit making; it's just been stuck for ages!
I can guess origins of both of those, good spot

[cursive skiff]

hornet,
the normal exploiter doesn't fire when not extracting cause the speed variable it uses to rotate in the aim function is set to zero in the SetSpeed function of the animation if it isn't extracting metal
the advanced exploiter is a bit more complicated due to its weapon types but you have a normal turret so the t1 info should suffice
*set speed is called by the engine itself i believe

[small steppe]

due to this mention of animation speed, for the sake of a sanity check, i made sure exploiters interact correctly with the timeslow in emp rework, and i can confirm they do

[onyx crescent]

(note live Shockwaves have been edited, lobbies may need !rehost to get changes though)

[thick igloo]

First of all: Thank you Hornet! Great work and effort went into this.

Second:
The Shockwave...
Perhaps I am pointing out the obvious, when I say: a release candidate should have been play tested for a few months before being able to join this list. Another hurdle should be that it is requested broadly in the community. And last but not least: this building is too easy to use and everybody (ARMA-Player) is talking about wanting to build just MMMOOOAAARRRRR or how to implement a build limit. This is a clear indication of fucking OP.

As I said great work, great idea (the Shockwave as well) but this thing needs more rework than any human can make in just a few quick fixes.

Please share your thoughts.

[round skiff]

I played a game yesterday. I made EMP mex they made a demon and it just destroyed my EMP mex 😉

[rugged musk]

YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

On paper, with the stats as written, even though I haven't seen it in action, the Demon actually looks extremely good. It has enough vision that it's completely independent and can see out to its own max range both on the ground and in the air. It has built-in AA, it's reasonably fast, and looks a bit like a small, skinny Juggernaut.

It feels like it's designed to be used like a Marauder, but it has similar stats to the freaking Thor, which is excellent.

Compared to the Thor, it has only 20k health vs 56k health and 500 range vs 550 range, but it's also quite a bit faster (speed 63), has double the DPS of a Thor with a twin flamethrower that constantly hits everything in front of it, and costs 50% less. It also has a far lower buildpower cost, so you can spam them a lot more easily.

Overall, the Demon looks like straight-up fire. Very good looking unit.

[mighty thorn]

Right, so you're saying we need to reduce the speed, DPS and increase build time to keep it in line with Core's faction design. Noted, thank you!

😜

[rugged musk]

[mighty thorn]

Sorry, couldn't pass that one up 😄

[rugged musk]

ok, sorry for the lateness of my EMP mex replay posts, I'm trying to look through these to find where the appropriate timestamps are, so I'll post these as I find them.

I think at about the 20-24 minute mark, our team leader is the first to try the shockwaves out and thinks they're cute. Not long after, a raid with Fiends runs through and gets thoroughly stopped by a combination of shockwaves and stilettos. EMP rework is turned on. Enemy sheldons seem unbothered by it.

Later on, another raid only loses one medium tank to it, but the other units in the group turn back rather than push into it. This is quite a significant force to outright deflect, because the rest of the group was all Tigers that would have been enough to otherwise kill several t2 mexes and possibly do some damage to my base before my units got it under control. The psychological effect it has definitely defends more territory than its stats might otherwise suggest.

Something to note about the shockwave that might skew balance even further in its favor is if it misses its intended target, its EMP ball tends to keep going quite a ways past its max range, where the ball can collide with units behind its target, so microing an army to dodge its shots is often a worse idea than just getting hit.

[small steppe]

If it's not in the modoption, real-game playtesting won't happen, so there's not much in the way of working around that. Also, any t2 skirmishers or arty (even t1) make upgrading to shockwave basically a complete waste of metal by shredding it from outside its range. Just some food for thought.

[rugged musk]

Except for one thing that I did not realize before. Like the armada t1 special mex, it is stealthy and can cloak, and it costs only 20 extra energy on top of its running cost.

If you even know it's there, sure, you can shell it, but more than likely, the first time you meet a particular Shockwave, you'll bump into it without even realizing, and then you're in trouble.

[small steppe]

If you don't/can't react when it starts shooting because you didn't/couldn't scout ahead with spam, and the enemy has supporting units at the ready to capitalize, yeah you're in pretty significant trouble

[rugged musk]

At about the 22 minute mark, a player notices the EMP mex is an option and makes one. It finishes in seconds because of its low Build Power cost and it has a lot of cons assisting it.

Something I did not realize about this EMP mex is it is stealthy and can cloak. The player using it does so, and then a minute later, a bull drives up and gets EMP'd and killed off by a nearby Pit Bull. The player using it decides to build even more pit bulls around it and builds a radar jammer. A second bull drives by a bit later, and they realize it was set to Hold Fire by the cloak, so they set it to Fire at Will. A third bull drives up and is unable to shoot it before it's EMPd and killed by the pit bulls.

These are singular bulls driving into porc, so it's not all that impressive, but then it stops a gigantic pawn swarm of a player who didn't know it was there, and then a short while later at 25:30, it stuns a group of 7+ bulls before they can even finish getting up the hill to see it. It is eventually surrounded and killed by Sumos and Mausers, but this is a much bigger army than a single Advanced Exploiter could have stopped even with this kind of support.

The player using it tells the room its BP is bugged and far too low.

[small steppe]

Shockwave was substantially nerfed, including a fix to its bp cost, 12 hours ago

[rugged musk]

Just making sure I followed up on those replays I said I would post earlier.

It was used a few more times in other games I watched, but they had no impact on the game in these cases since nothing ever went near them before the game ended.

[small steppe]

They did have an impact: each one was ~1k metal wasted on porc that wasn't ever used

Don't get me wrong: the rapid nerf+bugfix was warranted. I'm just a lot more skeptical of claims that it's still op post-nerf, rather than people just not having adjusted yet

[rugged musk]

I will note a positive aspect of it, though: it synergizes brilliantly with Pit Bulls, which can also cloak, which gives Pit Bulls a reason to use the cloak. Oftentimes, people never use the cloak because none of the things it's defending can cloak, so it's kinda pointless when you want it to shoot.

Putting clusters of those around the map in FFA, for example, would be crazy good, and could mask how large your hold over territory is.

[small steppe]

In ffa i'll agree, but with odds being high of either them revealing themselves the moment anything enters their max range because they're on fire at will, spam revealing them before anything of value gets in range if they're on hold fire, or it just being a waste of e upkeep because nothing approaches to begin with, that strat can easily be a very questionable investment in other modes

[rugged musk]

in FFA, especially on Dworld, being able to stop a truckload of spam is probably going to win you the game. :3c

Unironically, there's a lot that only works in FFA, and one of those things is "I decided to make 5000 pawns and throw them all at your face"

[small steppe]

In general, yes, though absurd quantities of pawns is a strat which can work in any mode

[rugged musk]

when players make their 60th afus, they stop caring about efficiency and just make another 20 bot labs whose sole purpose is to build pawns on repeat with a rally point somewhere inside someone's base, and then something gets through and finds the last cloaked commander and they win the game. :3c

IMO having something that can effectively stop that kind of spam is probably a good thing, especially when killing players and resurrecting their dead commanders and factories makes cross-faction builds before t2 extremely likely.

[honest sigil]

Some little things, just looking at these units for the first time: Printer says +25E in the description, but only gives +15. In the Salamander's picture, the water is hard to see, so it's not as visually apparent it's an amphibious unit. Was the order of the units in the tier 3 factory always the way it shows with the Demon in there, thought they used to be ordered different. Demon is at the end and now Catapult is first, Karg 2nd, Shiva 3rd, then Jugg, Behemoth, Cata, Demon. Also, there is something buggy going on with the Printers... they start eating stuff and then just instantly consume it.

[mighty thorn]

Replays welcome, especially for that last bit

[honest sigil]

Made a new game and tried again, seems to be a bug caused by having had cheats on (but persists even after you turn them off), tried in another skirmish game without turning cheats on at all and didn't happen. Still says it has just 1 BP though, but it clearly builds with more buildpower than 1, so not sure why details say that.

[mighty thorn]

disregard any tests of the printer ran with /nocost; use /give resourcecheat instead

[honest sigil]

first game to test fast I turned cheats on, no cost on, then saw it happening when enemy was just eating my Demons super fast and then tested on my own units and was able to eat stuff super fast. Then turned cheats off and it persisted, turned cheats back on, turned no cost off, then turn cheats off again, then made another Printer that had been built normally with cheats off the whole time, and that one too was able to eat instantly

[mighty thorn]

you had nocost on while making the units that got eaten, I take it?

their energy cost, metal cost, and buildtime was thus set to 1

tldr don't use nocost while testing

[honest sigil]

doesn't seem to deactivate properly

[mighty thorn]

just don't use it

[honest sigil]

but yeah, trying with it never having been on, I can't replicate it, build power does show as 1 on Printers though, which isn't right

[mighty thorn]

that's the result of a hack

Itanthias made the printer able to eat on the move by pretty much gluing a nano on top of it - you'll note making a printer adds two units. But you still want the printer to be treated as a builder so you can issue the relevant commands, thus it shows as having 1 BP, but the actual BP is mostly in the nano on top. This is something of a known issue; it could be fixed by making an exception for it in the bottom-left unit tab widget, but there may be more elegant solutions.

[honest sigil]

never used that cheat before, infinite resource fusion, lol

[honest sigil]

Ah, that's why, yeah, I did, and that explains why turning cheats off didn't fix it, their build cost stayed at 1

[rugged musk]

yep, it sticks to units that get made with the cheat on, so it screws with unit balance and they repair instantly and get eaten instantly and a whole bunch of other things

[honest sigil]

And now I'm realizing that makes my Juno test I did a bit invalid... but it still worked somehow. I had no cost on to build a bunch of Juno, Adv Converters, and Con Turrets, but was still able to kill the converters + con turrets despite that healing advantage they would have had. Didn't realize using with that cheat was messing with so much.

Or rather, I'm surprised it didn't stop it from working, didn't invalidate it if it worked anyways, but does corrupt such types of tests, just happened to not matter for this one

Didn't use it in a real game, but the damage seems pretty potent on the Demon, particularly if it just hits everything in the flame zone, and it moves fairly fast too. Like a super fiend and with AA as well (but not quite as fast as a fiend and lower hp/metal).

[sand hornet]

@mighty thorn What happened to ur pfp omg

[rugged musk]

PUPPYYYYYYY

[sand hornet]

Ur pfp was so sexi

[onyx crescent]

I'm very aware don't worry, but please remember that was the initial playtesting release, with clipboard and nerfbat at the ready; there was no other way to get it out and testable. It's not possible to multiplayer test units unless they're in packs; all the SP testing in the world won't show up some issues, especially gameplay ones. I do want to have a separate unit testing pack for that exact reason, and as soon as I have a good handful ready for alpha testing, that should be happening! EMP Rework and a couple of other things have tarpitted the finalising of a few units, otherwise I would have already.

Thankyou Juniper, I think those bugs are already addressed live - the 'overshoot' I can look into making the shot expire, if that becomes a common case.

The mex was definitely on the high side of the line, especially with rework mechanics - and with the multibuild bug, far too spammable. As with any new unit I am pretty sure meta will soon adjust and people will realise how to expect & handle it. New unit + stealth possibilities will always lead to a compounded learning curve.

I wonder if /nocost should have a warning message on use, it's a common issue to see test results ruined by it.

[vivid cape]

is there like a list of all units that are included in this modpack (whatever u call it gg) pin the link ayo

[onyx crescent]

https://server4.beyondallreason.info/microblog/show/26

[onyx crescent]

edited it into top post; I had to make this thread before the blog, catch 22 :D

[vivid cape]

Regarding the demon:
Its performance was laughable from what i've witnessed.
Misses ticks constantly, cant kill them before the ticks run past it.
Dies to gruntspam
https://www.beyondallreason.info/replays?gameId=a8933665ecb2972d0e891a57597460e6 around 25minute north side

[agile estuary]

Just a minor observation, it's hard to tell from the icon or name that the demon is amphibious. Could we put "amphibious" in its description?

[short hawk]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/549281623577722899/1166063266829697054/spring_rcR8iL3Nki.gif?ex=6549200b&is=6536ab0b&hm=f54e612f2e8f25d6df2bbd960b150295aeff53bcede1d6d8229a66b92e006eae& GIF

[small steppe]

Unfortunately the engine is terrible with predicting movement of fast units with slow-projectile weapons (like the flames of flamethrowers)

[short hawk]

but apart from not being antispam (more to do with flamethrower "projectile speed" i think?) demon seems very strong, the stats are 20k HP, 1500 flamethrower DPS, 6k M, 90k E cost 500 LOS/weap range and 63 speed

Compared to razorback, it has 6.7k (50.4%) more HP, 401 (36.5%) more DPS, slightly better range and LOS, for 6 less speed, and 2200 (57.9%) more metal and 22000 (32.4%) more E
and the DPS can increase a bit as it seems to have slight AoE effect

if the flamy issue cant be fixed, might suck as antispam (which razors are very good for), but it would be super strong in killing juggs/ titans maybe even behemoths and definately a giant problem that can kill an afus in seconds

[agile estuary]

It's a bit weird that flames aren't good anti-spam.

[short hawk]

i think the big problem is that the tip of the flame does damage but not the trailing flames? which looks like the case in the gif posted

[mighty thorn]

Afaik all flamethrower units are pretty much reskinned pawns

[agile estuary]

Popup pawn turrets and pawns on the water

[small steppe]

I don't know the details, but for any non-laser weapon to be able to reliably aim at ticks, some sort of major adjustment to how targetting works in the engine would need to happen, and there would be a hit taken to the game's performance

[agile estuary]

Can the AOE on the flames be bumped up? Or be given homing like missiles?

[small steppe]

Aoe won't help if it flies past the target, and homing flames would look pretty wonky

[agile estuary]

How about increasing projectile speed? Or would that look wonky too?

[short hawk]

the trailing flame just needs to do damage, kinda dumb that units walking behind the flame target can not be damaged lol

[mighty thorn]

"just needs to" isn't so simple

[small steppe]

All i can say is: try trickling ticks past a fiend. Sometimes the fiend will literally aim at a 90 degree angle away from its target. The jank is really bad when it comes to projectiles hitting scouts, and increased projectile speed would probably only improve things a very small amount

[small surge]

please tweak demon so it doesnt die to low number of grunts and ticks

[agile estuary]

I was wondering if it did. Woof, that's pretty bad taht it doesn't.

[onyx crescent]

flame units are walking lies, alas

[small steppe]

A solution which may be easily doable would be to increase the size of the projectile itself, so it's less likely to completely whiff

[agile estuary]

Flames not leaving a damage trail is kinda bad though. Both the visuals and the targeting lines indicates that it would do damage to everything in a line.

[onyx crescent]

maybe aoe could fake it, or a hidden beam weapon behind the fire

[small steppe]

isn't aoe how most fire units currently fake it already? big issue with demon, it seems, is that the projectile goes sailing past the target, and no amount of aoe would fix that

[agile estuary]

Wouldn't a beam just hit the first thing it encounters? That might make things even more jank if your flame is trying to hit something behind another unit, like a starlight behind a bull.

[onyx crescent]

not if it had really high scatter
just an idea, may not work

[small steppe]

projectiles are 3-dimensional rather than just points in space, right? making it bigger would make it worse at sniping between/over units, but would make it less likely to fly past moving targets while leaving them unharmed

[onyx crescent]

true, yes. maybe a mix of both in one flame stream could work
@sharp sky , anything we can hijack from ZK to solve it?

[small steppe]

another possible hack could be to treat it like dgun is treated when it hits a comm: a series of aoes on the ground trigger in sequence until one of them lands, then it dissipates. would probably be murder on performance though

[sharp sky]

points in space

[small steppe]

heck, not sure why i thought some projectiles had width

[onyx crescent]

https://tenor.com/view/tim-curry-premiere-chardenko-red-alert3-ra3-gif-17117801

[agile estuary]

The Cortex UW gantry does not build the demon.

[coral spruce]

https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/Beyond-All-Reason/blob/b96e369ad19b3ff8df6856d0fc3313a5761d7a64/units/CorBuildings/SeaFactories/corgantuw.lua#L37

[sharp sky]

dgun is kind of 3d. but this is via lua applying a damage aura around the point projectile

[agile estuary]

How does the Legion napalm work? It leaves some AOE on the ground as far as I remember. Giving demons some napalm might make them deal better with fast units.

[zenith reef]

on paper demon looks good on action its shit

[small steppe]

legion napalm wouldn't be able to be directly copypasted onto demon, but maybe this method could be used to spawn napalm "puddles" along the path of the projectile?

[thick igloo]

Sounds great for a flamer.

If it is possible to make the projectiles stop/disappear when they hit something it would be even better. Stopping/bouncing off would even be more hilarious. Just imagine a Sumo being covered in flames.
The range would need to be limited though the lifetime of the projectiles. If the lifetime could be "a bit" random it would make a perfect flamer.

[honest sigil]

Wait, the Demon is amphibious? That might make it a good raiding unit for Core, if the flamethrower actually worked, and this unit was seeming like it might feel in the huge gap in the Tier 3 lab, but that also means it's another unit that has to pay the tax for not being just a normal land unit (Shiva - amphib, Karg - all terrain, and Catapult is situational and requires a lot of manual control to use without wrecking yourself)

Also, the idea of Arm having another EMP unit displeases me and giving them a cloakable T2 mex on top of that as well seems a bit much.

[onyx crescent]

as I said somewhere else recently, Core need a plain standard T3 land based non-taxed damage dealer, ideally not too slow either. I'm thinking maybe a big-arse tank, hard to get more core than that

re another EMP, this is more tactical & flavour than real EMP damage; it's able to wear a lot of hats, but hopefully none too strongly. I know what you mean though; EMP is a personal gripe of mine so I hope you'll believe me when I say I don't wish it to be OP!

[short hawk]

it's literally just a mex, and 3 of them in a cluster could barely stop 5 marauders, and I was intentionally hugging them, and that's without them emp rework enabled

[fresh thorn]

[Obligatory whining about the state of Cortex]

[fresh thorn]

Honestly if Shiva weren't dogshit this wouldn't be a huge issue
If Shiva were as good at direct combat as Memerauders were at raiding, Cortex wouldn't have this staggering power vacuum around the early-mid part of t3 where they just get run over by Memerauders, Razorbacks, and Thors for free

Its just such a weird dynamic because Memerauders get so much free shit. Even if they didn't have built in AA and they weren't amphibious, they would still be a souped up Pawn capable of ending the game. They would still be pretty damn good for their price point (see Turtle for a role competitor that everyone rightly agrees is garbage). Shiva gets to pay for a quarter of DPS it will never utilize and amphibious qualities that basically don't matter because if it pokes its head out of the water to fight a base, there are like 2 different easy answers to it (emp and spam)

They just don't solve the early t3 problems cortex has because they are vulnerable to the t2 ranged balls Armada has, they don't really solve spam problem, and anything of equivalent price they can catch, they get destroyed by because a quarter of their dps is missing all the time

It would be great to have a unit that can just tackle a Thor at a comparable price point, because Cortex desperately needs something in between *
"Behemoth that crushes all puny Thors before it" and "jesus christ please hold them a little longer Mammoths," but I would genuinely settle for Shivas just not being dogshit

[zenith reef]

demon is 100% good if it hit and could be used for all needs

[agile estuary]

Shivas having a bunch of their power tied up in that useless rocket doesn't do them any favors. At least if it had homing it might be better but right now they walk into their own rockets. And when they don't, they just shoot each other.

[fresh thorn]

Anyway I only bring it up in this thread because it is relevant to the discussion of what new units should be considered. I don't necessarily want to see Cortex and Armada have the exact same power spikes, I think it can be just fine if Armada is generally stronger during early t3 and Cortex is generally stronger during late t3
But right now it just feels like its too one sided one way or the other
And mind you, I do think that eventually Armada is going to need to have their late t3 options addressed... Behemoths absolutely munch any number of t3 Armada can throw at it, to the point where it becomes almost untenable I feel for them to win a true ultra late game head on fight, which I don't necessarily want to see. But its less relevant because simply put most games don't last that long because memerauders and thors are ending them way before it gets to that point kek

[small surge]

cortex t3 not having a fast unit like demon is simply too huge of a downside at stage when t3 transition is made. But demon doesn't exactly fit the "Expendable or Brute force" theme that cortex has, mainly because it cant get past a ball of grunts or ticks

Idea of the unit is very good and will fix most of the issues with cortex t3 👍 just needs some projectile upgrading

[terse pulsar]

did this against AI and yeah doing a demon spam is possible and 2 BarbarianAI lost all their titans. The trouble with demons is that they cannot fire if the enemy is facehugging them(which the AI tend to do for some reason) but hey they can kill anything with a huge healthpool.

[zenith reef]

it has damage to brute force way but is just it doesnt hit most of the time

[small surge]

yeah, its not dealing damage when its not hitting so it doesn't have damage to brute force in practice

[zenith reef]

well it actually hits big units verywell behe thor

[small surge]

Only issue is ticks/grunts/pawns or any faster units because projectile is just bad (low travel speed, no retargetting like karg's missile, no AOE)

[zenith reef]

this might sound insane but demon and shiva have kinda same issue projectile speed is too slow demons dont hit cause of it and shivas hit them self cause of it

[short hawk]

the demon is too slow imo, but I get why it's slow
the flamy boys at T2 is by far the fastest units cortex has, faster than even most T2 arm bots (except sprinters)
demon should technically have the speed between marauders and razor

if you adjust the HP point to match just slightly over/ around razor while knocking the price a bit, I think it could be viable as early breakthrough unit/ weakness exploiting game ender unit

it should have the balance of a fiend (which is strong, but usefulness dies off pretty quick once it really gets into mid - late T2) at T3

maybe like 80-85 speed, keep DPS/ nerf slightly, 10k or so HP, and like 4.5k metal? amphibious tax on a super high DPS platform with good speed and AA
fast enough so most t3 won't catch it, and ones that do would have a hard time killing it
maybe nerf the AA a bit
and knock the range down and make the flames fire more often (with less damage to keep DPS) so it hits more constantly?

feels like it could be very very strong, even more than the marauders, but u can't spam it as much so I dunno

[still burrow]

Agreeing with choice, for now I’d try to simply touch up how well the flames connect. As others pointed out as well, kinda silly how vulnerable it is to the thing it swore to destroy.

[rugged musk]

I don't really want to move it from where it is in the t3 ladder, because Cortex has needed a unit that kinda fits in mid t3 like the Thor and Razorback, and at its price point it's still fairly affordable without being too bustedly expensive, it's just that its projectile is ass and it suffers from the same problems as all Cortex t3: it can't hit anything, so spam counters it and causes too much friendly fire.

If we really need light t3 to get a boost, then maybe that boost should go to the Shiva, not turn the Demon into a different unit and leave the Shiva in such a poor state.

[short hawk]

demon feels like it should be the faster cheaper "throw at enemy" unit cuz fiend is at T2, but yeah the shiva's do need work

[rugged musk]

It kinda is a raider compared to the Juggernaut and the Behemoth, and when I think of it that way, it seems to me like it has a longer shelf life than the Marauder, which kinda stops being useful at all once Razorbacks start coming out. One aspect of the Demon that I do think shines through is that it's a brute force unit in the sense that this middleweight monstrosity is the Cortex idea of a T3 raiding unit. It's tough for its speed, it has decent range, and it melts larger targets very quickly.

Your idea sounds cool, but the thing is, I like the current concept of the Demon better. I don't really think Cor needs a fast raider like a giant Fiend, because the Fiend still exists, and since the Fiend doesn't feed thousands of metal if it dies and rarely even leaves a corpse, it's probably better at raiding than the Demon ever would be. Fiends can still do work in t3 as long as there's an opening somewhere, I do it all the time. Failed marauder rushes can be the beginning of the end, and given that this is a Cor unit, that would just be even worse for the Demon.

The Demon as it looks right now is less of a raider and more of a shock walker, something you use to break the line when you need pure flanking DPS applied to a heavy target. It pairs well with its big brother the Juggernaut, since Juggernauts are so expensive they're usually going to be overwhelmed by too many heavy targets to be worthwhile otherwise, especially versus Thors and Titans. Nothing Cortex has really hits hard enough to break thors quickly except the Demon as it is.

That's kinda why I don't want it turned into a big Fiend. The niche it fills right now is something Cortex T3 has been begging for.

[short hawk]

yeah crowd control unit like centurion and razorback, except it cant do that currently xD

[rugged musk]

It just hurts I tell ya.

[fresh thorn]

it'll get fixed
I-I'm sure (._. )

[rugged musk]

I guess I just want it to be able do the job it seems designed to do now, not be handed a different job that Cortex doesn't necessarily need to fill, that would just leave it with the exact same power vacuum it currently has.

[fresh thorn]

I really am curious about the salamander especially compared to the alligator
I was an unironic alligator enjoyer so seeing them get replaced feels kinda bad man

[mighty thorn]

Have you tested the salamanders?

[fresh thorn]

nah looking like I'm not gunna be playing till tomorrow

[agile estuary]

I had one game yesterday where I sent 1 salamander into 2 LLTs... it lost.

[mighty thorn]

Would an alligator have won that? I don't think I've ever made one

[agile estuary]

Not sure, but I'm fairly confident saying a brute would have won it. Maybe a garpike.

[sharp sky]

would a brute have won it if it had to approach from sea?

[agile estuary]

HP and most other stats feel correct on the salamander, but its damage is kind of bad. If it got like a 10% boost to its DPS it would help without making it OP.

[agile estuary]

Nope but you got garpikes at t1 and those are decent. Anyway, with some quick testing, garpikes also lose 1v2 LLTs but their performance is pretty similar to salamanders. Brutes can beat 2 LLTs with some micro but lose if you just run directly into both. Jaguar fared slightly worse than salamander.

It's probably fine. Just kinda shocking seeing a t2 unit lose to 1/2 its cost worth of LLTs.

[onyx crescent]

I would like to see the salamander without damage dropoff
it's heatray, not laser, but has a 70% effect at max range rather than 100% (lasers do 50%)

[coral spruce]

What is its intended role?

[onyx crescent]

raiding, amphib support, and early antispam
antispam amphib is a mahoosive gap in core toolkit, ticks shut down anything that can pop out of water

[agile estuary]

I think it would do well as a raider and amphib support. Anti spam... that's gonna be tough. Its damage vs units is pretty bad and so is its range, fire rate, and turn rate.

[green saddle]

does salamander do better vs spam than the tigers you're already gonna build ?

[onyx crescent]

it has laser accuracy, so will hit what it shoots. it won't crowdcontrol swarms solo but will deal with chaff
it's a little underwhelming at that role, but is certainly better than the current alternatives

[agile estuary]

Can you give it a double laser tower-like turret and let it track and hit two targets at once? If not it's probably fine tbh. I'm not sure I would build it over tigers or quakers to deal with chaff. But it works well enough as an amphibious raider.

It's hard not to compare to what the other faction gets, and jags' lightning is just so strong. Has the same accurracy as lasers, no damage drop off, and it chains to other targets on hit. Same with flames as a weapon vs lightning. Lightning is just better in every way and cortex isn't allowed to have it.

[onyx crescent]

I mean it would look full derp, but not a bad idea in theory
lightning is insane yes, fire just doesn't work the same way. I have an idea that might help with fire weapons in general, but need to make & test, and no time there

[agile estuary]

Would it look bad? The cortex flagship and cruisers have multiple lasers on them and they do fine tracking multiple targets. I think it's worth testing to see how it would look. Especially since you're already considering adding other units with multiple weapons.

[onyx crescent]

I'm envisaging something like independent double barrels rather than two turrets
will mock quickly, short on time atm though

[green saddle]

in test vs 100 grunts, 20 pounders outperforms 20 salamanders

[onyx crescent]

try test again on the other side of a sea, you'll find salas a lot better :D

[green saddle]

are they meant for pushing with tigers to kill ticks or something ? because they dont seem to perform better than existing options at defending porc or artillery

[agile estuary]

I think the idea was they fill a role similar to jaguars. Fast-ish raider that can also reliably deal with grunts/pawns/sprinters/fiends.

[green saddle]

brute seems to perform just as well for cost

[onyx crescent]

@agile estuary

[agile estuary]

Yeah. I think jags do so well just because lightning is so strong. Single target weapon types like lasers are gonna struggle.

[onyx crescent]

pawns refer to it as ole' cross-eyes

[coral spruce]

and each one can do 180 deg arc I guess?

[agile estuary]

That's kinda what I envisioned too. But what about stacking them? Or would that make the tank too tall?

[onyx crescent]

220ish probably
stacking would usually result in them both shooting the same thing

[green saddle]

this is also an amphid unit. what's its handicap, and wouldn't a dedicated land unit be better suited for anti-spam functions ?

[agile estuary]

It has no AA and it's kinda bad at turning.

[green saddle]

also, design is nice. but if two turrets next to each other, they won't be able to independantly turn 360 degrees

[agile estuary]

So how do the bulwark and double laser tower do it? They frequently fire at different targets when dealing with spam.

[green saddle]

its better at turning than a brute is. most tanks dont have aa anyways. not really a handicap compared to other land units

the thing all around is more agile than a tiger. faster turning, acceleration, and top speed

[onyx crescent]

they use very different ranges on their guns. so one of these would have to be a larger weapon, at least in range if not visually

[green saddle]

if tiger waas this nimble it would be a beast

[onyx crescent]

if doing this, probably the lower would be the larger one, and only the top would be allowed to shoot at air targets
(this is all just spitballing btw, not planning)

[green saddle]

overall it seems like a decent unit, but i wouldnt market it as anti-spam. better as a amphib raider

[coral spruce]

Oo the top one could shoot air similar to jag? or does being amphib and being aa make it too OP? 😛 Feels a bit like amphib raider support

[onyx crescent]

most tanks can shoot air
only difference is this uses lasers

[agile estuary]

Yes Coura, but this thing has fairly low damage. It's not gonna replace the tiger. I'm trying to compare it to the jag, which brings AOE and AA as utility. Its handicap is that it has no emp resist or AA like other raiders and it kinda doesn't deal well with spam. And afaik, it still has issues with the heat rays hitting corpses moreso than tanks with plasma shells.

[green saddle]

what can salamander do better than alligator ? alligator has more range and no damage dropoff. its plasma is pretty fast

[agile estuary]

Can the salamander even fire over itelf? I didn't check.

[green saddle]

no.

[onyx crescent]

that should probably be fixed before tuning other things
@fair fox , should I have a crack at it or would you want to?

[green saddle]

Alligators can shoot over themselves. Projectile speed is faster than brute, but slower than tiger. Alligators are considerably more expensive than Salamanders, though. (480m 9100e)

right now, alligators can hypothetically kite tigers to death; faster, longer range, better turning. salamander offers more dps and health for cost than alligator, but can't kite brutes and tigers anymore. (alligators also need vision for full range, so maybe tigers can win if no other units involved)

[agile estuary]

Clearly the solution is to buff poison arrows.

[onyx crescent]

parrows with AA would be a hell of a thing

[green saddle]

imo replacing alligators with salamanders doesnt seem much like an improvement, just a tradeoff. one decent unit for another

[short hawk]

is it supposed to? its a heatray weapon, i feel like it shouldnt be able to....

[small steppe]

I wouldn't be even slightly surprised if 20 pounders outperformed 30 pounders' price in basically every t2 unit vs an infantry blob

[agile estuary]

Haha no, the only thing PA really needs is about 5 or 6 more move speed and slightly better turn speed and turret turn speed.

[green saddle]

parrows with emp +rework. >_>"

@ Sol, point was salamander doesnt add much vs spam as marketed.
@ Valeria; ever see that thing turn? It's unnaturally fast.

[onyx crescent]

is there some unusual interaction then?

parrow buffing way out of my scope, but they are one of the competent core vehs, and as such probably won't be allowed nice things

[green saddle]

would just fit thematically; parrow hits u and slows u, until stunned. but ya doesnt really need buff. xD

[agile estuary]

Yeah not the place for it. But it's a sadly underutilized unit because its mobility is so bad.

[onyx crescent]

hm, concussive shells. actually is possible with rework yes, but, out of scope

[agile estuary]

How about we just try a ~10% damage buff to the sala for now? Would that make it OP?

[green saddle]

it does decent damage for a 300something metal amphib unit. range is a little low for anti-spam, imo

[onyx crescent]

hitboxes/shooting over self to be worried about first, but maybe a dps buff via damage increase or no dropoff sounds good to me - which is obviously just my opinion only

[green saddle]

it seemed like they couldn't even shoot over the low parts of the tank. i tried shooting in between tank turrets and it wouldn't work. they don't necessarily need to shoot completely over themselves, just be able to shoot in between turrets

[agile estuary]

Or a 10% range buff then. I think Sala will work well enough at the start of t2 dealing with leftover t1 units. I'm sure folks will figure out what will work best in practice, I imagine having 6 or 7 salas would likely outperform 2-3 tigers. But eventually tigers will scale better with the metal investment.

[onyx crescent]

it's related to what the game thinks 'is tank', it will be a lot better if that can be amended
there will be some cases where tanks behind can't shoot say nearby ticks in front, as bodies will still block

[green saddle]

As for damage, it just needs to be able to 1-shot a rover at max range. Maybe consider thresholds 2-3-4shot thresholds for infantry.

[terse pulsar]

hey what app did you use to make these models? feel like I want to make my own too

[onyx crescent]

that's a rabbithole and a proper answer to that will take me hours and at least 4 threads
visually, blender, but that alone basically just makes a pretty 3D picture

[terse pulsar]

Ah ok

[onyx crescent]

I can explain more elsewhere if you're really interested in the process

[terse pulsar]

Sure why not. I might learn a new thing from this

[onyx crescent]

alright, little busy atm but I'll try to draw up a chart later
have you done 3d modelling and/or programming before?

[terse pulsar]

Take your time. Im about to sleep since ots midnight here

[terse pulsar]

I used a free 3D website called tinkercad. Wanted to try blender but felt worried my pc couldnt handle the load

[hidden inlet]

I had some games with the setting enabled today where I mostly tried to use demons, if you want replays. I like them. I noticed their dps is very fast rate of fire with low individual damage per shot. It makes me wonder whether or not they suffer from the same problem as pawns/blitzes/beamers do where they don't gain any dps increase from xp because their RoF can't go any lower than what they start with. Might be worth looking if that's the case.

[onyx crescent]

a very good point

[hidden inlet]

Replay 1:
https://bar-rts.com/replays/8bcd3765f77d54dba16aa3a8f1dd2310
Replay 2:
https://bar-rts.com/replays/66e137657a1318a3b6abde5159171699
Replay 3:
https://bar-rts.com/replays/69e937654085c2d3a7d03af0e514ea55

[fair fox]

This is intentional

[small steppe]

The problem with pawn/blitzes is that they're coded as "burst-fire" with the burst delay being the same as their firerate. I don't know if demon is programmed the same way, but assuming it's not, reload speed properly scaling with xp isn't an issue

[small steppe]

I'm fairly certain the last time sala received a damage adjustment, it was for breakpoint reasons. Iirc it fired faster but wasn't 1shotting ticks at max range

This isn't to say it doesn't deserve a buff. I think basically everyone who's used them agrees they're a bit sketchy for usage outside of raids, particularly amphibious ones, just adding some potentially relevant information into the discussion

[hidden inlet]

If you have a unit whose attack behaves in a seemingly similar fashion, the reasonable thing to do would be to assume it might have a similar problem, and check, not assume it doesn't and say it isn't an issue if you don't actually know whether it is or isn't an issue. Beamers also do not use burst fire, iirc? Or do they

[small steppe]

the beamer issue is a different one exclusively applicable to lasers

but you were, in fact, correct in guessing that it shared the burst-fire coding of pawn/blitz and therefore doesn't scale with xp

but also...good luck getting enough xp on any t3 unit for the lack of a bonus to reload to actually have any effect on anything

I noticed something interesting which...might be able to be used for improving performance vs spam? Apparently, it has "groundbounce = true", which,with some other variables, seems to make its projectiles "roll" across the ground until they reacch its max range. example:

[coral spruce]

Could it or does it do AOE where it touches the ground?

[small steppe]

If there's a way to make the projectiles effectively fall to the ground almost immediately by default, and "roll"/"bounce" to their target destination, that would at least reduce the frequency of whiffs

It only aoes when it hits a unit. whether it's possible to add an aoe on each bounce, I have no idea.

[rugged musk]

I mean... is that really a fair comparison, though? That's like the one thing the pounder is allowed to be good at, so of course it's disgustingly broken at that one job.

[agile estuary]

Pointing out again that the demon isn't on the build list for the UW gantry still.

[onyx crescent]

nobody notified me of such things

[agile estuary]

I deffo posted about it in this thread 😄

Also can it have "amphibious" in the title? Nobody seems to figure out that it can go in the water.

[onyx crescent]

I might have missed it in the noise if so, apologies
it needs a better portrait tbh

tyg, will PR it

[thick igloo]

Sprung mentioned a damage aura of the projectile of a d-gun that could be a solution.

[zenith reef]

is it live?

[onyx crescent]

no and yes, I want to merge that into what I have now, but the main issue was making it not stop on first thing it hit
currently it also needs to KEEP FIRING rather than trying to stop and aim

[thick igloo]

Sounds like a problem. How does a Tremor handle it? I have seen Tremors firing while driving.
Or how do Razorbacks handle it? They never stop firing.
I ask because I really don't know it😊

[onyx crescent]

razorbacks have hitscan shots and twitch aiming

I have what I need now I think, just need to mung it in, and that's a problem for another day

[rugged musk]

I tested Demons in skirmish as they are. Against similar cost in razorbacks, they lose way too hard, but I suspect that may have something to do with their shitty weapons and poorly-working AoE, because when they're able to get the surround and actually use that AoE, they devastate similar numbers of razorbacks.

But it also seems like they're way too scared of causing friendly fire damage, because they frequently stop firing altogether when they're grouped up on opposite ends of each other, and that means they're actually terrible in melee range, counter-intuitively.

8 Razorbacks vs 5 Demons is similar cost, but if both are spread out properly, the demons only manage to kill one Razorback and barely injure the others before being wiped out. This, despite each Demon having longer range, double the DPS, and significantly more HP.

When the razorbacks are clumped up, on the other hand, the demons barely win, with 2 left alive.

Interestingly, because of how much damage they put out, they tend to turn t3 wreckage into debris, and are probably actually getting their shots blocked by the wrecks, which is a significant downside.

Update: I can confirm, at least in the version we have access to now, their shots are indeed getting blocked by wreckage even if they aim well past it. They tend to kill one unit, and then there's a slight delay before the next one is able to be damaged because it needs to destroy the wreck before it can start hitting it, but it does this so quickly it's hard to notice if you're not watching for it.

Also, their footsteps seem to instantly vaporize any wreckage, even a perfectly healthy demon wreck.

[onyx crescent]

with the one I'm messing with, nothing will stop their shots, but aoe still needs improving, unsure if I can do that without it looking jank incarnate though
I have a couple of things I want to try tomorrow, can push something after that if other people like it
unsure why I keep getting dragged into things that are not a siegebreaker or a submarine though.... really need to get them packed up & out the door for testing

[terse pulsar]

why not make the fire look like a jet engine? and give some kind of property where it behaves like a short continuous laser? or is that too hard to make

[terse pulsar]

e flamethrowers are cool. make a flame copter

[fresh thorn]

oh misread, why not
well
it apparently looks like this in some iteration
#⭐｜main message
which is pretty great

[terse pulsar]

that looks good too but i'd prefer a wider cone so that it fits the role of cortex

[terse pulsar]

this got me bugging on something. why couldn't you guys give both demon and fiend fire resistance? I've had more friendly fire with demons that it kills 3-4 of them before they attack their target. that way they can continuously attack while being packed together resulting their DPS not being wasted

[rugged musk]

Having tested their AA now, the Demon's AA is terrible. They have the same issues with being unable to fire when other demons are too close, so they tend to not even use it if they clump together.

It seems like it's been pre-nerfed so it doesn't turn into a repeat of the marauder, but it only deals 150 damage per missile, with a pitiful AoE of 8. Compare this to the Marauder's 85 per missile with an AoE of 24. It does fire more than 3 times the missiles per second with almost double the burst, so on paper it would seem to be about equal.

Unfortunately, marauders are usually in big groups, and that means their AA fires all at once in a big volley with a non-trivial amount of AoE, and it's this big volley that tends to stop attempts to kill them from the air. Unfortunately, it doesn't take many shurikens to stun demons, especially since there's never any single blast that inexplicably kills 70 of them. Stunning three of them takes about 20 Shurikens, about the same number as a single marauder. As their numbers go up, though, they start to need exponentially more shurikens to handle them all because they need more EMP, and their AA does one-shot them. Six Demons, worth 36 Marauders, need about 100 Shurikens. 36 Marauders laugh at 200 unsupported Shurikens, even 500 is no match.

Versus their main counter, the Stiletto, it depends on the aim of the air player. Against 6 demons, which is worth about 36 marauders, 20 stilettos might lose one before perma-stunning the whole pack. Mercifully, though, if you spread them out, you will need at least 20 to do it, because 5-10 of them will just get shot down and never quite get all of them. This is about the same as Marauders.

If they decide to use Abductors instead, 20 of them can perma-stun the group without taking any losses. EMP rework is off, but their passive regeneration is enough to counteract any damage they take until they get repeatedly stunned again. 20 abductors is roughly the metal cost of a single Demon.

[small steppe]

Because fire is reskinned plasma projectiles which the game doesn't differentiate from normal projectiles in any way

[mint turtle]

how does one stop printer from autoreclaiming anything?

[rugged musk]

I... don't... know...

[honest sigil]

Well, normally the wait command would do it, but if it's two units glued together of a sort, it's possible the wait command isn't translating to the construction turret part. That's something that will need to be fixed if it is the case.

[small steppe]

For what it's worth, it doesn't (or at least didn't, code may have broken at some point) autoreclaim anything rezzable

[thick igloo]

Would it be possible to give it a damage aura like a d-gun aaaand let it spawn some weaker projectiles as soon as it hits anything. These weaker projectiles could spawn with a forward and/or upwards velocity 😉
The idea is born because of the missile ships.

[small steppe]

Those extra projectiles would somehow need to spawn behind the target hit by the first projectile, which i assume would be a non-trivial task. Also, it's probably best to assume the more "cool extra effects" added to a weapon, particularly ones as rapid-fire as demon's, the more significant of a hit to performance it'll be, particularly people who don't have high-end CPUs

[short hawk]

is it just not possible to have the demon fire like 10+ d gun balls per second with appropriate damage and ball speed

[thick igloo]

Please tell me if I am totally wrong.
As a start for perhaps the proximity of a unit or the current terrain height at the position of the projektile could be a cause for the split. After that a "normal" armmship_rocket_ship could do.

customparams = {
                    cegtag = "missiletrailcorroyspecial",
                    def = "armmship_rocket_split",
                    model = "airbomb",
                    number = "6",
                    speceffect = "split",
                    splitexplosionceg = "genericshellexplosion-medium",
                    when = "yvel<0",
                },

I have no real idea about the Impact on the performance side. A tick spam seems a bit more performance hungry to me...

[thick igloo]

No need for so many d-guns. 1 or 2 could do the damage. The 10+ projectiles for the visual effects could do no damage

But please tell me if I am mistaken here.

[short hawk]

it's for the entities/ ticks that's behind the intended target but still crosses the flame path... see here

actually, fuck the flame thrower, can't we just have a double barreled rapid (weak, like decoy com) firing D gun launcher instead? like using weaker behemoth tech?

[thick igloo]

This sounds crazy!

I love it!

[small steppe]

it seems like it would be very difficult to avoid the split looking very strange and its timing feeling arbitrary

[thick igloo]

Double barreled, dual target, d gun! Fuck the spam!

[short hawk]

@onyx crescent lol

also idk, after thinking about it, should flamethrower unit be an Antispam at Long range?
flamethrower IRL isn't used to kill rapid moving things... fire isn't fast
it's supposed to deny area/ flush enemy out of static position, I think it's not even supposed to kill ticks with perfect accuracy at 500 range (unlike razorbacks, which is supposed to be like that, with twin laser mini guns)

[thick igloo]

I see. I guess the 30fps Gamespeed paired with a projectile speed of 200+ just let's the projectile pop a bit randomly. Could be worth trying and see if it is as bad as it sounds before dismissing it. But I see your point.

[small steppe]

There are various suggestions here to copy various aspects of dgun, and i'm not personally opposed to any of them as long as the aspects taken don't absolutely melt computers or break other parts of the game's code. For example, I'm fairly certain changes to comm dgun have broken behe's weapon as well as thors' emp missiles in the past

[short hawk]

lolwut

[thick igloo]

Well have never seen a man running through an area where a flamethrower is pointing at... even if he runs fast it is a BAD idea!

[short hawk]

exactly, that's a case of area denial, and things running through the flame path should be killed of course
I'm saying rapid targeting and shooting things at it's max range, with a slow moving flame

[thick igloo]

Sure thing, thanks for clarifying

[thick igloo]

My brain is stuck so hard on the damage aura. It just feels very flamer-like.

And for the impact: explosions have a speed as well, right?
Could a slow as fuck Explosion be a solution for the impact?

Sorry for throwing so many ideas at you. But I just love your work so far and so I can't stop thinking about it

[mighty thorn]

First time I'm hearing about an explosion propagation speed

[thick igloo]

Windmills vs afus chain reaction

[small steppe]

for what it's worth, targetting the ground almost entirely denies that line of flames the passage of 3 lab tick spam

[small steppe]

there's no time take for an explosion to "spread", some explosions are just programmed to happen after a set delay

[thick igloo]

Nice so it is "just" a thing of micro/widgets 😉

[small steppe]

need to basically aim at its feet so the projectiles are rolling/bouncing on the ground, so yeah

[thick igloo]

Ok, I see. Thx so a series of explosions with growing radius would feels like a growing explosion, right? Not saying that it would make sense, thouz😉

[dense trail]

10 range and 1 movespeed difference, it isn't htat much i guess

[small steppe]

alligator+salamander are really good at turning and turret rotation compared to most vehs

[small steppe]

I think it's doable, just another thing that would be pretty janky

[thick igloo]

I already had a feeling that it would be like this.

[small steppe]

I believe one of the tested versions of comupdate involved comm deaths having 3 separate explosions of different sizes to allow for fine-tuning of damage at different ranges, so i'm fairly certain at least that part is at least possible

[dense trail]

armada has no heavy amphib raiding tank i think
the turtle i guess

[short hawk]

im hearing a lot of make thors amphibious....

[coral spruce]

When watching juno's hit bases the buildings seem to take damage by radiating out slowly

[dense trail]

nooo
they are the king of flat terrain, if you make them amphib it's disgusting

[coral spruce]

please god no

[nimble cipher]

Oh God, why?

[hidden inlet]

Burn this heretic!

[hidden inlet]

Actually, on second thought, maybe not. He does have a point about the flamethrower.

[hidden inlet]

Fun fact: you can make it shoot each flamer in a different direction by aiming below. This also makes it look like it has actual rocket wings and is trying to take off. I like how it looks overall, despite it supposedly being an old model, it really fits the name "Demon", with horns, wing-stumps, big "spikes" on the back of it's elbows, the four-way clawed feet, and the fact it's actually not fat and looks relatively "athletic". Just because it's cortex doesn't mean it should automatically be fat. We already have enough fat stuff as is.

[onyx crescent]

dgun mechanics are unique in many ways, but that root behaviour is what I'm replicating

[terse pulsar]

aw nuts so if you give fiends and demons fire resistance they instead get immunity to even artillery and fatboys....
well that sucks

[onyx crescent]

I was wondering why the AA seemed a bit flat, but didn't realise it was that bad in reality
if you have time to test vs gunships & hornets, I'd find that very interesting data

[onyx crescent]

That is essentially this, which is insane
also probably instantly digs to water if angled (in)correctly
(hit wrong reply, that was regarding 'can it be double barrelled dgun instead')

[hidden inlet]

The power of the Sun at your fingertips™

[onyx crescent]

personally, I'm wondering if something smaller with a blue decal would work for that better than current flame, but will play with cosmetics much later

[hidden inlet]

I think the current flame looks great. Don't see the reason for changing it's colour. Especially to blue of all things.

I tried putting a 100 of them in a circle and had them attack the center and well... none of them want to do it. Even in a line where they should clearly be able to shoot they do nothing.

[sand hornet]

They respect Their friends

[hidden inlet]

yeah uh the spacing required to get them to fire really seems like a problem

[onyx crescent]

blue fire is hotter than yellow, conventionally. it's mixed with oxygen to fully combust, and has expectations of being slightly jettier rather than slower (which will help balance this in punchy mode I think)

[onyx crescent]

wait, is that circle of demons trying to summon a wizard?!

[sand hornet]

Its so they dont flame Their friends

[hidden inlet]

I was trying to see how much of a hit to performance it would be to have a 100 of them shoot at the same time, compared to a 100 fiends

[onyx crescent]

that is interesting and miles out of my scope here, but I'll have a look into what I think cause might be when back ingame
probably beyond what I'd be allowed to trivially fix also, would have Implications

[mighty thorn]

This has the smell of a @fair fox issue 😄

[terse pulsar]

lets hope they can finally shoot while beside their friends in the future. still feel like giving them "resistence" could be a nice touch

[hidden inlet]

I think robots fighting each other with flamethrowers aren't going to get much hotter than this tbh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0srs5jZ1qdg

[onyx crescent]

probably, I wanted to check before pinging just in case though

[onyx crescent]

yeah, past a point you can loop back into yellow territory. it's also related to sodium in the fuel, it burns yellow and tends overpower everything else. Once upon a time I 'developed' a hand-held blue/green ball of fire, which was a royal pain as any sodium impurities kicked it right back to yellow
also depends what demons are firing; a gas, liquid fuel, raw plasma jets...?

[hidden inlet]

I'd probably bet on liquid fuel

[mighty thorn]

While blue flame is a common upgrade for flame weapons in many games (C&C Generals, SC2), I think it's perfectly fine to keep this the normal orange, it looks great 🙂

[onyx crescent]

that was relating to the faux-dgun rather than the actual fire, I'm unlikely to change it as anything beyond curiosity/testing how to

[onyx crescent]

the problem with this, is I now want to give Demon's an overdrive mode where they blast themselves backwards

[hidden inlet]

Tried gunships for a bit, no micro, just A move.
Sometimes 2 out of 4 hornets survive.

[onyx crescent]

definitely feels too weak to me then, thankyou for running that

@errant magnet , thoughts on ramping demon AA up somewhat?

[hidden inlet]

I'd at the very least bump up the aoe a bit because it's practically non-existent atm. Even a thistle has 3x the aoe of this.
A THISTLE

[thick igloo]

The color of rocket exhaust is highly dependent on the amount of Carbon in it's fuel.
Oftentimes the engine bells get cooled by a thin film of a fuel rich mixture. That being the case it doesn't oxidize perfectly. So some kind of solid particles can form. Those particles are glowing yellow.
If you look at a H2 rocket like the ones on the Space shuttle (NOT the Solid rocket boosters) you will see a very weak blue flame.

All this high hydrogen fuel does not work for flamethrowers. It is fuel or diesel pumped into the air with way too much fuel and way too little oxygen. So it will burn yellow, orange red with much black smoke.

The speed of the flame is directly connected to the pressure and volume of liquid being spilled out.

[onyx crescent]

if you use a cobalt blue glass to look at fire, you can see the 'real' colour without calcium/sodium interference
https://edu.rsc.org/resources/flame-tests-using-metal-salts/1875.article some further reading for the chemically inclined

[hidden inlet]

But how big is the spatula?

[thick igloo]

Why are we looking at metal salt colors?

I thought it was about normal fuel.

There is one term in space nerd language: engine rich exhaust. It means that the engine is heavily damaged and will fail in an instant. In this case the flames get green because of the copper. But that is nothing you want happen.

[short hawk]

god fucking yes this is glorious
merge it now

[hidden inlet]

We were talking about the colour of flame, not any fuel in specific.

[coral spruce]

Fun > Realism plskthx 🙂

[thick igloo]

You are right.

[onyx crescent]

in answer to 'why is any given fire coloured X'

[onyx crescent]

you're quite right. brb, making the flames tartan

[small steppe]

learning/theorizing about tech used in sci-fi settings can be quite fun, particularly depending on the person, but yeah this definitely isn't a game, at least currently, where realism takes precedent over the rule of cool in....hardly any situation, and it should probably stay that way

[hidden inlet]

In regards to performance, the demon's flames hit quite a lot. 80 of them firing at once dropped my fps to 10, compared to 80 fiends at 40. Which is not that unexpected tbh, they have twice the range and twice the flamethrowers. And you aren't going to make 80 at once in a game. But something to keep in mind, avoid making them eat any more fps.

[onyx crescent]

this is one reason I wanted fewer flames/particles, emitted less often, but faster travel - it's spamming out a -lot- to act as it is

[short hawk]

idk, in end game its not that surprising to see so many razorbacks to stop like 10 lab worth of tick/ gruntspam and just for sheer DPS
altho i do wonder if that means having 320 fiends firing would have a similar effect

[small steppe]

many? yes. 80? not nearly

[thick igloo]

Game winning strat: let 100demons fire at the ground and get the best PC in the world 🤣

[terse pulsar]

hey can you test this out. I noticed when I mass wasp's and let them target a single enemy they overlap over one another and shoot themselves with their rockets

[small steppe]

possibly important question: would it make sense and be visually satisfying for demon to have visual effects of semi-rapidly lobbing lots of fireballs, rather than having the illusion of a stream of flames?

[short hawk]

yes

[terse pulsar]

that wouldn't make it a flamethrower but a flame cannon

[onyx crescent]

it goes full inferno

[small steppe]

If it would make sense for any unit, one called "demon" would be it. Could have a modest-sized explosion on impact for fast-moving spam it narrowly misses, and would murder performance less than most things we're looking into

[thick igloo]

I want that, too!

[onyx crescent]

you're going to make me -really- piss off whoever spent the time making a real fire effect (probably Beherith)

[hidden inlet]

I don't want a rapid firing shiva.

[small steppe]

the real fire effect is already used in numerous unit

[thick igloo]

Let D-gun be a T3 core thing!

I don't care about friendly fire!

Just DIIEEEEEEEE.

[cursive skiff]

i think effects are IceXuick
while shader magic is beherith

[small steppe]

fair

[hidden inlet]

I get the same fps as 80 demons with 155 fiends

[short hawk]

can u add this into the extra unit pack and name it "when epic behemoth and epic razorback has a child" but make it cost like 250 AFUs, i want to play with it in sandbox

[terse pulsar]

we have the behemoth since it's a d-gun turret on legs

[small steppe]

is it possible to use dgun functionality without terraindeform?

[onyx crescent]

@short hawk , only if I can later frag it out into meme tier units, extra units pack has so much nonsense in it, nobody will enable it, which is a shame as there's some sane units in there too

[onyx crescent]

that's what I'm literally doing at the moment. dgun chains explosions which is why it digs, trying to get visuals & dps without the diggery

[short hawk]

damn, my new behemoth with 5cm of dirt armor is no longer gonna be viable!

[hidden inlet]

Probably related to them not being able to fire next to each other, but they also have a really HUGE selection box. See the attack ground point? Totally away from the unit? Clicking there still selects it.

[thick igloo]

That is true and I love it.

The only thing that can easily kill a Behemoth is a Behemoth's friendly fire 😉

A D-Gun raiding unit might just be to op. But at the same time: Thors... a fast, high health, high speed, chainreacting lighting and EMP missiles Shooting platform...

[small steppe]

these red boxes are tiger projectiles "colliding" with the demon, so it's definitely got too large a hitbox

[thick igloo]

Could

craterareaofeffect = 0

Work?

[onyx crescent]

no, dguns don't work as you would expect, especially things that aren't dguns, but faking it

[cursive skiff]

definetly could use adjustments

[thick igloo]

What a pitty

[short hawk]

cant u just disable map deformation lol
whereever the demon is nearby

[onyx crescent]

yep, no idea why it's this big (nothing to do with me, before someone knocks out a 'blame Hornet' emote)

[cursive skiff]

bad news hornet, we blame damgam

[mighty thorn]

that's good, though, means the summoning circle issue is an easy fix

[onyx crescent]

as is tradition

[mighty thorn]

as is tradition

[thick igloo]

craterboost = 0,
cratermult = 0

Are very obvious candidates, too. I don't think they where overlooked, but it needs to be said once just in case 😉

[hidden inlet]

the summoning circle issue lmao

[mighty thorn]

if I have ever told a good joke it's because I'm standing on the shoulders of giants

[onyx crescent]

that was relating to the hitbox. re dgun, as I say it is not a normal weapon, it literally has postscripting work to add explosions that track the particle (which do use some of those settings in the process, yes)

[sharp sky]

damgam will relegate to drivver44 though

[thick igloo]

Thanks for the explanation.
Now all that makes a bit more sense but I couldn't say that I fully understand what's under the hood.

[small steppe]

everything with even loose ties to dgun is really, really janky to try to utilize elsewhere

[onyx crescent]

we've already pinged him about it. I can approximate the right ones but will need either him or Zecrus to rubber stamp it... would be impressive to be more wrong than the current one though

[small steppe]

replaces it with armflea colvols

[sharp sky]

eh making it bigger wouldn't be that impressive

[thick igloo]

Another observation:
When you doing a bombing run where every bomb hits.the exact same location you can digg very deep. But if the bombers have just a little spread the terrain will not move much. Perhaps that mechanic could be abused.

[dense trail]

maybe the first few fire ticks near the origin should not friendly fire
for useability

[small steppe]

even when terrain deformation isn't significant from a balance perspective, it's another thing which tanks performance as units remap their pathing

[thick igloo]

A demon could "summon"/build fiends for the LOLs.

[thick igloo]

True enough

[crude zinc]

First thoughts on printer: it needs better ai to have nano turret side arm that does work while it's moving and auto assist/reclaim when idle as well.

[small steppe]

I think any recommendations for how to improve printer's nano would be greatly appreciated

[onyx crescent]

printer is a bloody weird thing, it's two units in an armoured trenchcoat

[crude zinc]

include them in nanoturret auto patrol stuff widget? hmm probably wouldnt work.
it could be 2 units janked together with transport mechanic without transport paralysis turned on. Inner unit be unselectable like drones. Add widget or sth to make the inner unit also inherit orders apart from move orders

Like surf boards of the past when units could turn around and fire when they were transported

[hidden inlet]

it does iirc inherit orders from the main one atm, that's why it shows 1 bp on the info panel, the main case has 1 actual bp so you can target what you want with it and the turret follows

[sharp sky]

i'm not sure if there were surfboards outside of zk

[crude zinc]

oh so it works like that already?

[small steppe]

it only inherits orders once the body starts actually working on the task, so once it gets into the body's buildradius. If there were a way to make it inherit orders without printer needing to roll up next to the target, that would be a significant upgrade

[coral spruce]

It's only when the two are at odds that the fun > realism should be invoked imo

[small steppe]

the discussion at the time was "which color of flames would look the best", which i believe falls into that category

[onyx crescent]

that isn't actually hitbox caused
they all try to fire further away than they actually can

[terse pulsar]

That could become a "fun" unit as it can spawn fiends indefinitely

[onyx crescent]

if you target nearer location, without moving them, then they behave (hitboxes were batshit out of line though and a factor in some of their weirdness, no doubt)

[hidden inlet]

Oh. How come they didn't try to move closer, then?

[onyx crescent]

held back by the spirit of Johnny Cash? unclear, they think they can fire further than they actually can

[small steppe]

siegebreaker all over again?

[onyx crescent]

yep, just testing. they're trying to move to their AA range (700) and fire their 500 range flamers

[small steppe]

Well, at least it's not exclusively an issue with your units. Maybe other units with longer range aa than their ground weapons have hints in their programming as to how to circumvent the problem both for demon and siegebreaker?

since itanthias is still busy with other irl things, it seems, i'm just gonna paste this known printer issue over here for the purpose of awareness: #1100737207658098768 message

[onyx crescent]

can you think of any examples of such?
wonderingif rauders do, checking atm

[small steppe]

oh...kargs have longer range on their aa, but they also have this bug

[onyx crescent]

rauders have same issue
why am I cursed with constantly finding existing bugs & issues then having to fix them :(

[small steppe]

and jags. Jags are particularly bad because of their aa being 600 range while their lightning is 320 range

also, this only applies to commands to attack ground. They'll properly move into range if they have a land unit which they're targetting

[onyx crescent]

fight move should work also

[small steppe]

yep. literally only a bug with attack ground commands

[onyx crescent]

set target doesn't hang them, at least, but they won't move to attack it either (this is ground attack)

[coral spruce]

Hornet, what's that clipping tool?

[onyx crescent]

recbutton

[rugged musk]

That explains why they hate firing while being anywhere near each other. That's much worse than I expected.

[onyx crescent]

it's in hand, although the not firing at ground one will remain for a while

[errant magnet]

Should be fixed now. Also fixed the collision volumes, guess it wasn't updated since the model was rescaled from the 20000m version

[onyx crescent]

oho, thankyou. what was the fix for reference?
drivver was on that, I'll let him know

[livid plinth]

For 6k metal Demon needs a hp buff, gets beat by a few pyros... It also shouldn't leave ressurectable wreck like Pyro, just a heap

[errant magnet]

The unit is similar in size to a titan so I gave it that colvol, seemed to match well

[onyx crescent]

hold off on buffs until I've got fire weapons tuned please, it is poor performance atm but that could dramatically change if this works out
if I'd not been sidelined with other bugs I might have had that done tonight :(

[errant magnet]

I gave the unit predictboost = 1, so it will at least hit targets moving in a straight line

[livid plinth]

How much hp does demon have?

[zenith reef]

20k i think

[onyx crescent]

wait, that fixes the 'false range' issue?

[livid plinth]

Hmm... somehow fels weaker than 13k razor on survivability, I guess razor just melts anything near before it gets to do dmg... and for half the cost. Maybe weapon fix solves that

but yea to keep the theme of t3 pyro I think not leaving ressurectable wreck might be a nice idea, heap can still contain metal

[errant magnet]

no, adding maxrange = "500", to customparams fixes the false range issue

[onyx crescent]

I had no idea that was possible; noted, thanks
we really need a handbook
jaguars and kargs will also need that fix then

[zenith reef]

how about giving demon ability to kill underwater units? could kill titans nice underwater (currently no good conters)

[onyx crescent]

...underwater fire?
I mean, possible if it has oxidiser in the fuel I suppose

[onyx crescent]

mass sub and pray, generally
navy vs 'land things in water' another personal gripe of mine, I don't disagree it's pretty bad atm

[zenith reef]

thats my current pratice

[dense trail]

can a titan underwater dodge hits yet still fire?
i mean dodge targeted laser attacks. being partially underwater might help against plasma shots

[onyx crescent]

it will be able to hit a demon I think
at least on strait which is 95% of the question

[small steppe]

Depends how deep the water is

[zenith reef]

titans laser can shoot in water not underwater units and dodge torpedos while they move

[livid plinth]

If the weapon is above water it can shoot

[dense trail]

i mean like can the titan hide it's hit-point under water while shooting

[onyx crescent]

actually, animating underwater fire would be interesting, it'd need loads of bubbles to look not broken and unclear how to do conditional animation like that from cobs - if you can at all

[dense trail]

navy having to deal with floating units (towers) and underwater units (torpedos) at the same time is quite challenging
imagine if your static D only worked on either bots or vehicles

[zenith reef]

only thing that shows in straight

[dense trail]

if this technique doesn't have a name we should call it periscoping

[small steppe]

Still depends how deep the water is

[agile estuary]

Please don't call it periscoping.

[terse pulsar]

I wonder how come the titan doesn't use rocket pods on one of its arms so that it has a way to transform that into a torpedo tub to counter subs or underwater units. you can also give the juggernaut torpedo pods on its chest for aquatic combat too

[small steppe]

Balance.

[thick igloo]

By the love God!
NO!

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=periscoping

And don't look up swedish periscope...

[dense trail]

Lol half of English is a dirty slang on urban dictionary

[terse pulsar]

huh im suprised a single rocket pod on either the left/right hand is overpowered. they only serve to kill small swarm units or to give it some utility. Probably cuz I saw have a bandana on it's head reminded me of Rambo or Commando

[small steppe]

Titan is not in need of any buffs whatsoever

[terse pulsar]

yeah you're right what about juggernaught?

[onyx crescent]

jugg is fine, also not a release candidate

[terse pulsar]

sorry my bad. just hyped to see more candidate units be added to BAR that I can't wait. even made a suggestion thread on new units for each faction

[sly quest]

Is Demon amphibious? I feel like cortex desperately needs a mainline combat unit for early T3 that doesn’t pay a premium for being a hover/amphibious/all-terrain unit

Core already has a ton of random situational cheap T3 that are bad in brute-force land combat on flat ground

[onyx crescent]

it is. I'll make a new portrait for it to make it more obvious, it's been on my list for a while

[sly quest]

Is it meant to be amphibious as a marauder counterpart so it can be a fast raider with integrated AA? And if so can we take away the Shiva’s amphibious and buff it?

[fresh thorn]

I don't even get what being amphibious is really supposed to be "worth"
Memerauders get it for free, for all intents and purposes

[rugged musk]

I'd really prefer its amphibious ability removed or changed to not affect its price or performance, because not having a marauder isn't that big a liability, but not having a powerful mainline combat unit in t3 that isn't as slow as a tzar really sucks.

One thing I could see being cool and flavorful if it kept that ability, though, is if it was immune to lava.

Honshu has a point, though. Marauders, if anything, feel like they get a discount rather than paying any tax for it.

[sharp sky]

keep demon amphibious and make it play this audio cue when it enters sea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDggqnnNuDo

[onyx crescent]

I agree core need a non amphib/multi terrain damage dealer, I have ideas for this one already - but demon, if I can get fire working as I want, will really work well as amphib; right now anything that core can send out of the sea, meets doom via mass pawn or tick

[dense trail]

drop mammoth seems like the best solution
bombard the flak away, bait/jam the mecuries
dropping 4 mammoths isn't unreasonable

[fresh thorn]

I keep meaning to try t2 dropships with mammoths but they're just sooo awkward to use and the extra hp just doesn't look that useful, and the dropship AI is so clunky and sucky to use

[fresh thorn]

every time I play I vote to enable release candidate units
if it passes, I always forget to build them
Fuck

[small steppe]

Matches frequently develop in ways which prevent them from being relevant, so it's easy to just not consider them on the occasions in which the are the best play

[thick igloo]

I have a feeling that we might consider not bloating the amount of units unnecessarily.
Core had exactly that unit:
The Karganeth ( the version in BA 10 years ago) it was fast AND cheap (which is very important for a raiding unit to make quick use of it after teching). It was nerved... got more expensive, feels way slower and got it's AA reduced and it feels like it has less DPS per meta now. I wonder why....
And now we have the Memerauder without a Core counterpart and think about filling a space (that was deliberately opend) with a new unit.

I REALLY don't get the part that Memerauders outrun EVERY T2 Core and why it feels as given that it is normal that a T3 units can only be out run by units that die to Junos (and the T2 pawns).

Back to the release candidates.
CORE needs a fast and cheap raiding T3? It can't be the Karganeth for what ever reason... (The model got changed, but ARM spiders run like crazy, too) that is a real pitty...

But really consider making the demon way cheaper and buff the Shiva in it's abilities, make it kill a Razor so you have a problem when it steps out of the water and make it more expensive.

Sorry for the rant but this just overwhelmed me...

[fresh thorn]

raiding karg you say...

[thick igloo]

It used to be 2 legged. But I guess all terrain bots need to have spiderleggs. So it got a new model and slower.

Looking for a fast spider? 72 Speed.
https://www.beyondallreason.info/unit/armspid 😉

[honest sigil]

Which Core lab do you build the Webber out of exactly Robert? 😛

[thick igloo]

Do I have to mention, that fast units are ARM?

[terse pulsar]

e more metal music. I've been depressed without the guitar riffs

[terse pulsar]

had fun with this bot. combine it with raiders and hounds en masse and you can overwhelm base defenses

[round skiff]

do you have a replay of that ? 😄

[terse pulsar]

No and it was against the ai

[honest sigil]

game automatically saves replays of all your games, single and multiplayer, it's just the single player ones don't show up on the website as they're only saved locally

[livid plinth]

@onyx crescentWhat is the problem with fire? Any way I can help fix?

[onyx crescent]

tl:dr; making it volumetric damage without causing static AoE eg napalm, and without murdering performance
I'm trying two approaches at once, but the most effective is the least efficient (dressing up a dgun weapon as flame)
most recent bug was caused by something in ZK changing parameter orders and broke my attempt, but that's come to light now so I can continue plan B

[livid plinth]

How does pyro do it?

[onyx crescent]

'not very well'
it uses projectiles with AoE when each hits
it doesn't do real AoE in a stream, just pretends to
alternative alternatively, giving demon trivial damage but full passthrough might be viable, but that makes it weirdly good against larger units
my current faff about is based on passthrough, but manually limited one impact per unit, and then trying to have invisible explosions/damage chasing each particle, little like a dgun
relatively sure it will work, but if you have experience with weapon particles / custom explosions, insights very appreciated

[small steppe]

Currently all "fire" weapons are normal plasma weapons with aoe on impact, and pretty particle effects around them

[onyx crescent]

indeed, fire is a pretty lie

[livid plinth]

How does heatray work? Does it have damage falloff like lasers?

[small steppe]

heatray=.7x damage at max range generally as opposed to .5x damage at max range for lasers

[livid plinth]

is that the only difference from lasers?

[hidden inlet]

korg's heatray

[small steppe]

functionally, yes

Heatray would also kinda make demon functionally a reskin of razorback, rather than a unit which fills the same role in a different way. However, it's become abundantly clear that, due to how its projectiles currently work, demon can easily be countered by fairly small numbers of infantry+enough micro

[zenith reef]

i dont know how well this is "giving demon trivial damage but full passthrough might be viable, but that makes it weirdly good against larger units". but currently demon is pretty good agains slow/large units cause it can actually hit them

[small steppe]

i did some testing for hornet to compare to yesterday. I don't know what the numbers he's getting from this attempted rework are, but it's safe to assume it's disproportionate to how effective demon already is vs large targets

[onyx crescent]

that's one word for it yes. initial experiment evaporated a razorback in about maybe 4-5 times the time it took to kill a pawn
hence my delving into technical limitations for that

[zenith reef]

that does sound pretty good and bad

[small steppe]

Being able to apply damage in a 3-dimensional space as it travels, rather than sailing "past" and leaving unharmed units which are a few pixels away from the 1-dimensional projectile, or are running through the particle effect "tail" of the fire would be massively beneficial. It would simultaneously make particle effects less misleading, and improve demon's ability to perform one of its most important intended roles (i probably shouldn't have this monologue broken up into a series of disjointed messages, but oh well)

[hidden inlet]

korg's heatray actually seems to do half damage at max range, just like titan's lazor of DEEEEEEWWWWWWMMMMMM

[small steppe]

Just my personal opinion, but if possible, the damage aura would be best as being supplemental to a non-penetrating "main projectile", to make it less likely to completely "whiff" on small targets roughly inside the area where there're currently particle effects, but not directly in the 1-D projectile's path

[onyx crescent]

that gets into 'second invisible weapon' territory which adds exponential jank
basically with enough projectiles spaced well, and explosions timed to follow at diameter spacings, in theory a constant AoE in 3D space is achieved, which is where I'm trying to go

final option is spawning napalm at impact sites, which is much less ideal

[small steppe]

I'm mostly thinking about that fact that, to my understanding, if there are a line of targets single-file with a flamethrower being fired at them, the targets behind the first won't be feeling much heat until the target in from of them is no longer an obstacle, and using this logic would prevent dps vs large targets from being absurd.

[thick igloo]

That sounds like a thing.
Would it mean that a closer unit would eat more projektiles and as such suffer more damage?

Another idea:
Would it be a possibility to have the slowest beams of all time that have a huge corethickness or is it just a graphic thing?

[onyx crescent]

a beam would be one particle in effect, and likely often not match what the fire is visually doing
the other thing is fire bends the travel path at ground impact, whereas a beam cannot

might be possible to spawn invisible beams between first ground impact point and dissipation, but getting pretty hacky there, and more learning curves in undocumented territory

@livid plinth , if you have experience relevant to the latter, that could be something worth persuing as a parallel option?
in theory it might be less perf heavy than chaining explosions through the travel path

[small steppe]

I finally managed to properly dig through files and server history and can confirm i've been peddling false info on heatrays. I was looking at an incorrect variable. Of all the laser/basically-a-laser units(outside of scavs) only supporter doesn't use the default minintensity value of .5
Supporter has had .6 since, apparently, before anyone still involved in BAR can remember

[coral spruce]

Wait.. so what is the value for dmg falloff for heatrays?

[hidden inlet]

heatray is just a fancy laser

[onyx crescent]

'it depends', 0.7 -is- used in some places

[hidden inlet]

beamdecay = 0.7,
I assume this is the thing that does it for salamander

[small steppe]

salamander at max range does <70% max damage

the value i got was slightly under 60% in a test, but it's safe to assume that at the exact farthest point it can fire from, it's 50% like everything else. Razorback has beamdecay = 1, titan has beamdecay = 12, beamer has beamdecay = 0.05. These are certainly unrelated to damage dropoff.

[onyx crescent]

wait, I'm misremembering, that's visuals only
minintensity is the damage taper

in which case the only game exceptions are supporters and the disused weapon of snipers

[sly quest]

Lol, imagine the Titan had 12x beam damage at max range

[coral spruce]

... invert falloff? more damage at long range, strong until the unit is overwhelmed, then gets weaker

[onyx crescent]

god no, that just says 'spam me pls'

[sharp sky]

iykyk

[coral spruce]

damn... i'm busted

[sly quest]

I think tachyons should have reverse falloff

[small steppe]

at max range, pulsars+starlights deal half their listed damage, just like every other laser reskin (other than supporter)

[sharp sky]

just a blue heatray

[dense trail]

starlight is a frontline unit cmv
does more dmg the closer the target and explodes on death, dealing significant aoe dmg

[green saddle]

lol i was thinking about that other day, since it's a tachyon and all. faster-than-light does weird things to time and space.

[onyx crescent]

so the target dies before the weapon even fires
sounds about right for Arm tbh

[sharp sky]

only from target's pov

[green saddle]

kinda off topic consideration, but if tachyons did most dmg at max range , they could be balanced around that and have an extra weakness at short range

[hidden inlet]

they are already plenty strong at max range

[small steppe]

and they already suck vs anything which successfully gets close to them, which I would guess is why people don't realize they have damage dropoff

[dense trail]

pulsars are already borderline op

[fresh thorn]

finally got a chance to test out salamander and give it some thought vs alligator
the good: cheaper, and a smaller price point is very valuable for a raiding unit. laser weapon is okay vs spam and the lesser damage due to range doesn't matter quite as much as it does on other cortex units because the salamander is fast
the bad: less range, less hp (puts it under the 2.5k threshold for surviving 1 round of sharpshooter fire), can't fire over eachother means it's pretty much incapable of serving as a front line unit
its basically been buffed as a raider and is bad as everything else. of course it's still vulnerable to EMP but at least it can kinda fight shurikens with its laser weapon
still haven't tested a handful of them as a replacement for a grunt wall to deal with spam, theoretically 5 or so of them would probably be able to deal with spam very well but I haven't tested them in a real game so who knows

[small steppe]

for everything other than lightweight and/or amphib raiding and anti-spam, you use tigers, so it actually is somewhat able to have a role that can potentially exist on land maps unlike alligator. Theoretically, mixing it in with your tigers prevents spam from getting close enough for long enough to cause the rest of your cor vehs to do too much ff, though applicable situations for that rarely seem to pop up for me personally in matches with salamanders enabled

I know reso said a few months ago that they felt substantially stronger than alligators for raiding in his experience, while most of us were saying sala was massively undertuned based on its raw numbers, but i've heard precious few comments about its effectiveness in raids since then

[fresh thorn]

they are stronger than alligators for early game raiding because they are cheaper and laser based weaponry can shoot down shurikens, even if it takes a bit
so this lets them deal with low shuri numbers a little and thereby keep raiding
I wouldn't say it's massively undertuned so far. my instincts were screaming at me that the unit would be shit as soon as I heard the goddamn termite laser sound because termites are pure dogshit, but the reason salamander can get away with that weapon is it's fast enough to close the distance and thereby make the laser damage falloff matter less

still need to go t2 vehicles in an actual candidate unit game and see if throwing like 5 of them in front of my other tanks will handle spam

the bad parts of it doesn't strictly matter for its raiding role... generally speaking you're not going to have that massive of a salamander ball for doing drivebys, since you usually want to split raiding units up once they penetrate the defensive points so they can get as much damage done as possible

and timing wise, they're supposed to be getting work done before stilettos and snipers are out, so being vulnerable to those isn't a deal breaker

[agile estuary]

On paper they are weaker than the alligator but c'mon, nobody used the alligator. If it's usable as a raider both on land and sea, as small as a niche it may be, I think it works out for the better.

[fresh thorn]

I 100% use the alligator on maps where its worth using. Its reasonable for what it is but suffered the same issue every Cortex raider unit suffers, no free AA to instantly counter shuris
The poison arrow isn't bad either

[onyx crescent]

parrow could do with tiny buff, it's not -good- either, too sluggish

[fresh thorn]

parrow is genuinely good, just energy intensive
and the problem that it seeks to solve (front line battle tank) is kind of better handled by the tiger since it has better HP for its cost, but parrow has better damage and some aoe
its just, pricy front line tanks lose all their value once the starlights and snipers come out, so its like... meh

[onyx crescent]

it could do with slightly faster aiming, maybe touch of movement
but yes, narrow window, as with all core t2

[fresh thorn]

its just the consequence of handing armada a million ultra high spike damage units that utterly shit on pricy metal blocks
spam wars and outranging the spike damage ranged units is the only way to answer that

[fair fox]

No it’s an amphib unit that can be made with t1 tech

[onyx crescent]

ah, I forget it's in the amphib lab too
I see it mobbed with ticks soemtimes and they do absurdly well in trade value, it just doesn't track well enough, especially as it's meant to be 'pounder mark 2'

[fresh thorn]

its kind of why another thing I think needs to happen eventually is to change sharpshooter's role from a starlight that can walk backwards to an expensive glass cannon area denial unit that requires a little more setup than none at all. the armada version of cortex commandos

because there needs to be fewer ultra high spike damage units that basically negate a whole design space that exists in the game, aka anything that dwells between "cheap shitty unit you print by the trillions to go draw fire" and "expensive good unit you make to actually kill things". plus I think it'd just genuinely be a more interesting fleshed out unit

but, thread scope and all that

[fair fox]

On top of that it’s an amphib unit which is meant to have that amphib tax applied
Even if it could not be made with the t1 complex

[onyx crescent]

it's also meant to be an MBT, aiui, tiger more raidy counterpart than beefcake
just happens that people use the tigers as the MBT instead

[fresh thorn]

until people tell me wtf the "amphib tax" that memerauders are paying, I refuse to believe the amphib tax should even be a thing.

but intuitively it makes sense that a unit with more movement options should cost more
well intuitively armada and their design philosophies can suck my dick man

[fair fox]

In a number of scenarios the parrow has a few advantages going for it
It’s a shorter unit
With a higher shell arc
Lower than the tiger

[onyx crescent]

I mean, rauders are their own issue, but yeah, does feel bad

I'm a little confused what the tzar's role is meant to be overall, as it drops off in value silly fast
seems to have a very narrow window of usefulness

[fresh thorn]

again, just a consequence of starlights and sharpshooters
if those didn't exist, tzar and fatboys and shit would be useful into early t3

[small steppe]

being 1 unit that you micro the shit out of when there's not anything to directly contest them

[onyx crescent]

that seems to be it, rush & hope nobody dguns it

[small steppe]

scout spam disagrees, unless you're okay with having a bunch of hold-fire tzars in your army

[fresh thorn]

it's not hard to guarantee that tbh
walk behind it with comms, plant radars, if you're spooked by a sneaky pete send some spam forward

[fair fox]

Sharpshooters are fairly bad
Especially after their speed nerf
They have severe scaling issues

[fresh thorn]

I'm already okay with having a bunch of hold-fire catapults in my armies
the only reason I'm okay with that is because they outrange starlights and sharpshooters

[onyx crescent]

well, you can always kiki them, but the range and free unit delete is still an issue
they can be brittle as they like if it's impossible to shoot them with anything

[fair fox]

The real issue is the short t2 phases

[onyx crescent]

(note I mainly meet them from sea PoV, where they are frankly obnoxious, and you can't even attempt to spam them)

[fair fox]

Snipers and starlights have really high e cost to run
They are impossible to field before fusion without crippling your eco
On top of that if you can force starlights to retreat you auto win for about 15 seconds

[fresh thorn]

yes they are a late t2 unit we get that
they're just an absurdly good unit that forces cortex in particular to go t3 or lose
I swear only armada players could possibly complain about a cloakable 600 metal unit that vaporizes anything under 2.5k hp instantly
honestly armada bots only seems reasonable because armada vehicles is so absurdly broken (janus, blitz, consuls, starlights, etc)

[fair fox]

Btw incase this gets lost
Starlights did have a movedeff nerf a few months ago

Starlights used to be better at negotiating terrain
Now they are in line with the tzar
Edit
This was done with zecrus’s knowledge as I spotted several issues within the movedeffs themselves
There were other units that were changed

[thick igloo]

But this needs micro and it can be tricky if you have AA and spam to protect it.

[onyx crescent]

...interesting

[fair fox]

The movedeff change was done during the culling of excessive movedeffs
A few units were seen to have clipping issues that needed to go

[small steppe]

catapults are actually worth the hold-fire micro for the entirety of t3. tzars even without high-alpha units countering them...eh...they do well vs all the units you won't see past early t2

[fair fox]

I made an edit

[thick igloo]

A unit that is cheaper and can kill the "equal" counterpart before it can shoot. Shure thing.

If you have a Tzar facing towards the front and see it being shot by a Starlight. Just consider it dead.

[fair fox]

The issue with starlights that will be fixed is that the turrets do not factor in the hitbox of the unit
So it scales just like the missile trucks

[fresh thorn]

like I said, if tzars didn't have to worry about starlights and sharpshooters, they wouldn't have such a short window on their usability
but those units exist so it does
@small steppe

[onyx crescent]

they also shoot over walls and other units, not just themselves, which is really bothersome to deal with
one of the things I intentionally did with siegebreaker was balance the power with -not- making it infinitely stackable

[mighty thorn]

it scales just like the missile trucks

Several people are typing...

[thick igloo]

But this is a thing of laaaate T2 a Tzar, a very expensive and slow unit is a earliest T2 unit just because of mega high DPS super high range nonsense.

[small steppe]

tzars are useless as soon as units start coming out with model sizes that take up half their aoe. Without their aoe making them hit 4+ targets, they basically have no redeeming qualities

[fresh thorn]

you know, I almost wonder if units like the fat boy and tzar should get an alt fire mode for high angled shots kinda like the t2 popup arty turrets do
just turn em into full fledged t2 artillery units that can have indirect fire mode

[fair fox]

I will warn that there are about 400 hidden changes in bar that are being worked on to address the hiden arcane parts of bar
That will have some non impacting to semi important balance changes

[fresh thorn]

spooky

[fair fox]

So before people start advocating balance changes
I’m having to rework a non standardized area of the game that has to be tested indepentandly

[small steppe]

are the various targeting improvements mostly involving friendly fire checks in this next engine version, or did they get pushed back like the impulse fix?

[fair fox]

Entirely seperate item on my todo list
It’s about a year old now on the list

If it impacts too much I’ll slow down the whole push
Yes I’m being vague because it might not be pushed live ever

[small steppe]

Fair enough, I thought ~2 months back itanthias had worked on fixing targeting a bunch for this next engine release, remember discussions about lines of grunts not all shooting each other in the backs anymore

[thick igloo]

I still love the idea of a second fire mode with more range for the Tzar. Just for fun: let it outrange Snipers and watch ARM players complain about a unit with high range that two shots their own metal value 🤣

[fair fox]

Negotiator does that quite well
And tzar is more for breaking down turrets and grouped units

[fresh thorn]

^

[thick igloo]

And it is great at it... until it isn't...

It's the super fast drop off that is bothering me. And it's only against ARM.

[fair fox]

Snipers are in a wierd math position for me
I know a fair amount of secrets in bar that easily makes snipers extremely oppressive more so than you think

If someone tried to do Sheldon spam with ak and spybots
I know how to easily counter spybots and Sheldons with just the snipers

[sly quest]

They would have to be pretty insane to be more oppressive than I think they already are

[thick igloo]

Nice one more reason to balance it now.
Instead of saying: it could get better in an undefined amount of time.

But it is a release candidate chat. Sorry for the offtopic.

[thick igloo]

For 0-5min in a game. Until....

A sniper could stun stuff instead of just killing everything.

[sly quest]

I honestly think the Sharpshooter should be nerfed to do like 1000 damage. Starlight can keep its DPS because it has actual disadvantages like beam falloff, volatile, no kiting, e cost to fire, but snipers should be used with micro and cloaking to take out high value targets, not kill 2/3 of their cost in heavy assault units every 10 seconds

[mighty thorn]

Yeaaaaah let's keep this on topic, shall we?

[sly quest]

The demon looks cool as hell if only it could hit its targets, the printer fills a much needed role, the core starlight seems a little underpowered for not having a turret unless it does a lot more damage or is a lot cheaper than I thought, the salamander is a cool rework of a very underused unit, and the shockwave is my least favorite, do we really need more armada EMP options to shut down tank deathballs in the late T2 stage?

[dense trail]

Wait when nerfed?

[thick igloo]

All this does is making faster units slightly better against them. Looking at core T2 tanks I hope the Sala will survive 1 shot, but it won't... that could be THE "counter"of CORE for sharpshooters...

[onyx crescent]

EMP Rework helps with it a lot. if it's supported, yes it's more powerful - but the opp just put their army around an EMP bomb
it's a whole load of tactical tradeoffs

[sly quest]

Ok but when late T2 emp units shutting down ground assaults for the entire T2 stage of the game is such a problem that the entire global mechanic is being reworked I feel like it’s not really the best time to add more

[onyx crescent]

indeed, I wouldn't have made if it I wasn't also doing the EMP rework. if it becomes a real issue in game for enough people, then I can potentially swap the lobber for a faster single target paralazer
mod-specific tuning aside, by nature it is more powerful with rework off - but the blast it gives off is also much more dangerous to enemies around it

[vivid cape]

OP t2 arm mex sucks, the way it tracks the shots, at something like ticks or smth fast, they end up predicting the shot too far and shoot ur own porc that's nearby the t2 mex

And sure my placement was probably garbage, but i thought it was gonna be like a tazer zapper like jag's lightning but EMP damage instead

[onyx crescent]

the turret is slow to prevent micro allowing OP lockdown of mass blobs, it intentionally isn't good with flanks
not to say I might not have overcooked that, time will tell - but as said, EMP is OP, and the mex fills a lot of roles, it can't be too good at any one of them
making it a chain might work well for allowing 'some' AoE effect, but not full area value, not a bad idea

[terse pulsar]

I just found out about it thanks. Now i gotta find it

[terse pulsar]

Well i cant find it but i can replicate it to make it faster

[terse pulsar]

I made a few but I do not know how to post the replay here. can anyone tell me tomorrow

[neat sapphire]

In the main files of beyond all reason go to data and then demos. Demos are the saved replays

[dense trail]

oh it's 500 not 600 range
seems sorta kinda balanced. 2 of them kill a titan no problemo

[terse pulsar]

i have 2 more replays. this tactic usually works on flat open maps where you can come in multiple angles

[dense trail]

demon is like 1.7 razorbacks that can amphib
but weaker aa then equal mass marauder

[terse pulsar]

pairs well with fiends and sheldons, a good experimental killer but still squishy

[dense trail]

it's nice to have a DPS unit
to pair with mammoth or something
mamoth is tanky but it doesn't have stopping power against marauders
a dps unit can also just be opportunistic like fiends

1v1 demon baarely kills a naked pulsar (3rd pulsar shot leaves it at 3% hp)

[mighty thorn]

I had a 79min game with this enabled yesterday: https://bar-rts.com/replays/02263d65d262012440fa3f1011eaece5

• printer is basically ready for deployment except the glued on nano pollutes the idle builders tab from time to time; except for this it feels very good to use, I thought
• demon is nice as it currently is, I didn't see many issues - strong, but not overly so, fights well, loses to heavier T3
• Shockwave I didn't have the opportunity to use
• I didn't use alligators previously so I don't know their baseline power level, but salamanders don't feel like strong units - and that may be okay. But I haven't used Salas much either, yet. I retract that, I haven't seen Salamanders enough.

[dense trail]

the candidate version has alligators removed?

[onyx crescent]

it swaps them for salamanders
gators stack better, but salas are better in any sort of mob situation

[dense trail]

alligator strength is their speed AND range

they could kite t1
and even some cleanup fiends possibly

salamander has emp resist unlike alligator
seems pretty fine and decent. though raiding units generally prefer cannon weapons due to hitting stationary targets. if you hug targets for more laser dmg you can eat explosion dmg

[fresh thorn]

Regarding printers
The only real point of annoyance I noticed with them is their con turret's tendency to favor reclaiming over building when you are telling the printer to build
It gets T2 walls, which can be handy, but what can happen is this

give order to build segment of t2 wall
the segment is next to some random foliage or whatever
the printer uses its 1 BP to build the wall while the con turret soaks up all the reclaimables around it
a wall that should take like 10 seconds to throw up will now build at 1 BP until the rest of the reclaimables are vacuumed up, so now that wall you were wanting in the next minute before an enemy spergs into your Tremor line is going to take forever to build
Not sure on a fix but its pretty annoying

[mighty thorn]

A replay would help in reproducing that

[onyx crescent]

reminds of me of the webber tendency to reclaim trees rather than whatever's shooting it
unsure if there's some sort of priority/triage but maybe reclaim in general should be last thing on the list, might solve a few issues

[rugged musk]

Salamanders have 95% emp resist. With the EMP rework on, that shit does not affect them at all. You need literally almost a hundred shurikens to affect even a single Salamander in less than 10 seconds of focused fire. It's really powerful.

Salamanders' heat ray only has 70% damage falloff so the damage reduction isn't nearly as bad for them whatsoever. It barely feels like a tradeoff, but the laser being autohit against small targets is great. Finally, Cor Vehs don't have to suffer against tick swarms!

[rugged musk]

I think Salamanders just feel like a good unit. I love 'em, personally.

[small steppe]

i have reported this bug more than once. unless/until it's fixed, the workaround is place->blueprint->issue some other command->right click blueprint again, and nano will do what it's supposed to

[small steppe]

lasers don't accidentally overkill things that'll chain react anyway/sit there waiting for shots to land while on fight command, so they have that going for them as far as "get the exact amount of damage necessary dealt to the target, move on"

[dense trail]

is salamander buildable from t2 lab?
also which laser weapons have non 50% falloff?

[rugged musk]

1. Yeah.
2. The heat ray. The only weapon it has. Heat rays only have 70% falloff instead of 50%, it's what makes them special.

[dense trail]

where is that ever written lol
well if it's 70% falloff it's a great unit i guess

[rugged musk]

I've heard it said a bunch of times in here lol

[mighty thorn]

It's true I believed in Silver Sol

[dense trail]

so cortex has that and the poison arrow? the whole amphib squad

[rugged musk]

YUP
It finally feels like Cor Vehs has all the tools it's been looking for.
Salamanders are so good omg. Today I had like 50 of them thrown at me and I also threw 50 of them at the other team and they rekt face.

[dense trail]

they're durable enough, fast and anti spam
ofc they're good

[small steppe]

I had bad information. They have normal dropoff. Only supporters don't have 50% dropoff, instead capping at .6x max damage. Apologies.

[rugged musk]

You are actually kidding me.
Well, I guess it would be overpowered if they had 70% falloff then, because they're excellent amphibious tanks and I see people use them all the time now. They're like a t2 Incisor with the health of a Brute that can go underwater and drive up the no-vehicle slope on Failed Negotiations and never get EMP'd.

[fresh thorn]

quick single player skirmish showing it off. skip to 6 minutes in and watch me faff about with a 15 minute build time on a t2 wall and mex before ending the game
pretty easily reproduceable from what I've seen, just make a build order amidst some reclaimables and the con turret on the printer will prioritize reclaiming over building every time

[small steppe]

Apparently the engine doesn't even allow for a smooth drop-off of damage to anything other than 50%. Supporters just hit 60% damage at 80% of their max range like any other laser, then the game says "nope, rule says you're not allowed to drop any further" past 80% range specifically for them

[fresh thorn]

tbh I don't find it super matters in the particular case of the salamanders
they are fast enough to close the distance where they can just close to whatever it is they're trying to kill and they're quick enough that I haven't felt like its a big deal tbh
where it sucks donkey balls is termites, because they're so slow

[dense trail]

man welders and sumo suck outside chokes
280 range bruh

[rugged musk]

Yeah, when Salamanders show up in your base, the last thing you're thinking is "oh thank god the laser drop-off!" Yeah no it's more like "OMG WHARRGHTHAERAFERFGBHLHBGFHG UJ HELP SOEMBODY WHY ARENT THE SHURIKENS DOING ANYTHING "

[fresh thorn]

sumos are good enough inside chokes and as mobile anti spam that I forgive them for all their flaws
also helps that they are massively chunky, literally best HP per metal in the game iirc

[rugged musk]

What's great is Salamanders are a Surprise Motherfucker! type of unit that shows up in your base that On Reaction Tick Spam is completely ineffective against.

[small steppe]

Behes are best hp/metal, and, if memory serves, cor veh cons are 2nd place. An early implementation of printer, before it could use bp while moving, had behe's absurd hp/metal ratio. It was a fun time.

As far as "normal units" go, i believe sumos are a few percentage points ahead of brutes in hp/m, but apparently my memory isn't to be trusted
Edit: fact checked, sumos sit fairly comfortably ahead of all non-behe combat units in hp/m, even though behe is nearly doubles sumo's hp/m

[terse pulsar]

just used them in a massive amphib assault. kinda works but need to use them in suprise attacks. Should've paired them with cataphracts or shiva's

[rugged musk]

Honestly, the fact that Salamander gives Cor a unit that can support Shivas against the t1 spam that owns it now is pretty significant.

[terse pulsar]

gonna do this later assuming my AI companion does not hog all the space.

[fresh thorn]

interesting use case. I had personally figured that salamanders would have a specific timing (pre-stiletto) where it works and after that it won't really work well at all, but that's worth investigating

[small steppe]

Stilettos aren't exceptionally common in emp rework lobbies, in my experience

[fresh thorn]

I've been having a harder time finding emp rework lobbies lately 😦

[terse pulsar]

just used them with demons, and shiva's against AI. can overwhelm en masse and demons aim issue is fixed so im happy

[small steppe]

Emp rework + release candidates + hound replaced with welder in consul buildlist seems to remain the default kit in 20+ map rotation

[onyx crescent]

I usually see EMP Rework + RC + sea rework as standard lobby loadout. but you can also just start one, or vote it in, the usual reaction from new people hearing that it's "less OP EMP" is "thank fuck"

[small surge]

i personally enjoyed killing 3 razors with 1 spybot but good change 👍

[thick igloo]

Even if it would be like that it would be OK.
Look at other games: it is common that about 1/3 of the units get buffed/debuffed every 6 months or so to get the meta changing. If we get something like that, too. It would be a good thing. The problem would only be there if it would stay like that for ever.

[rugged musk]

Oh. My. Godddddddddddddddddd. Demons are so good now. @onyx crescent Good job. They don't fucking miss everything and die to spam, they melt face like they're supposed to and they're just delightful to use. Cor has good t3 now.

[onyx crescent]

ah, sorry to disappoint but that wasn't me
guessing that was the prediction tracking improving

[rugged musk]

aw well that's okay they're so good.

Something I didnt expect but was sorely needed was they actually really fuck up Karganeths and Vanguards hiding on the tops of the cliffs on All That Glitters. They need to stand back from the cliffs and not be hugging them, but they have the range to hit anything that's poking over the sides

their DPS is just absurd. They melt just about anything that's not equipped to melt them first from further away, and they're fast enough that if they break the line, they break through and start burninating the countryside.

Thors fuck them up bad, especially in groups vs groups, but that's probably fine. That's Thors, thors are more expensive and are also dgun fodder. Demons, on the other hand, have just enough agility to juke dguns and melt commanders who miss their first shot.

In a recent game whose replay I'll post, which featured a fuckload of Printers and Salamanders and Demons galore, the opposing top player was making kargs to try and push our Canyon to death, but the other eco player and I held that canyon with units and by the time the kargs were becoming a problem, my first Demon hit the field and SHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOFFFFFFFFFFFFF

once I had a few of them, they pushed back the opposing forces while our top player's Thors played defense. Eventually the rest of the team came online to the point that we started pushing their whole team back, and then two of my Demons broke through the red player's canyon porc, melted his com, melted his forward gantry, and burninated their way back to the afus farm and they popped

https://www.beyondallreason.info/replays?gameId=ae3740659fa10f5246191a1d75ee9850

[fresh thorn]

might have to update my memes

[rugged musk]

Something I've noticed about RCUs is that lobsters generally don't want you to turn them on and vote them down if you try, while mid and high rated players seem to love them to bits and always vote yes, so that's a good sign. Lobs, if I had to guess, probably vote no bc they don't know what the Release Candidate Units are and they don't like change, they like to do their one routine every game and never deviate. Noobs are generally split because they're new. The moment the lobby becomes overwhelmingly 18-20+, Release Candidates are getting turned on and people get hyped to use the new Cor units. Printers are quickly becoming iconic staples. The funny thing is, people are so used to Cortex t3 being bad that nobody made Demons until I started using them, realized "oh whoa ok that's busted," and then started making them too.

Despite the initial silliness involving the Shockwaves, I don't actually see the Shockwave being used all that often anymore...

[fresh thorn]

yeah
in all welcome lobbies I can never get the new units turned on

UGHHHHHHH ITS SO TRUEEE

[rugged musk]

YES
GOD
I CAN'T

The worst part is, the things the shivas were getting erased by in this screenshot? Grunt spam. Not even heavy grunt spam just a trickle of grunt spam.

Thankfully, Demons don't get owned by spam anymore. If a stream of Demon flame hits a group of t1 spam units, they're as good as popcorn. Demons sometimes kinda get stuck shooting t1 units behind them and running away rather than aiming into the stream in front of them because they take a while to switch target sometimes, but t1 spam doesn't seem to bother demons much at all anymore, at least not in the game I played, and once they get in range of the enemy t3,

SHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOF

Demons like to work in small groups spread out a fair distance away from each other, so if the enemy t3 advances on you, they get flanked for max damage. Clumping them up is a bad idea because they obviously won't fire through each other, but their sensitivity about that seemed a lot less terrible this time. They were very usable and I never felt like I was fighting my own units to get them to do something. Also, a group of Thors obliterate clumps of Demons in like one shot, so never have them clumped up.

Ironically, their AA was actually slightly clutch one time in this last game?? But not because enemy had Stilettos or anything, just the other team's air player liked to throw t2 bombers at us and then the stragglers caught my Demons' AA in the face and died, so that was hilarious.

Also, shields don't seem to block flamethrowers anymore! Woo-hoo!

[coral spruce]

They are a slow push unit, not a raiding unit

[onyx crescent]

siege unit, really

[fresh thorn]

they are a shit unit is what they are

[rugged musk]

They're a slow push unit that can't push anything and a siege unit that does the job worse than t2 units.

[onyx crescent]

yup, wish I could disagree

[terse pulsar]

Requesting a buff to shivas or make a new t3 siege unit

[onyx crescent]

on the list, on the list.

[green saddle]

https://tenor.com/view/spongebob-squarepants-to-do-list-long-list-gif-5580267

[fresh thorn]

For real
This game makes me want to learn to code
Fuck

[mighty thorn]

Wait, what? What change is this, again?

[onyx crescent]

this is ... one of the current WiP states of the new fire. trying to make it keep shooting rather than meditating between shots when pawns are up in its business (the only remaining flaw)

[onyx crescent]

zecrus gave demon improved prediction, to better lead moving targets

[mighty thorn]

Oh the predictboost = 1, of course. Thanks!

[thick igloo]

Burn motherfucker, burn!
Demon = DeMEME!

Loving it.

[rugged musk]

Some feedback on Printers now I finally remembered to make a whole lot of them: these are such an important unit I cannot even tell you. I finally find myself porcing things up and making flak and afus and shields in places I didn't build nanos yet, and since they're all mobile I can spread out the converters and not have them take an hour. What a necessary unit. I don't think I'll play BAR without them anymore.

I wish they could build nanos. I know they kind of are nanos, but sometimes you just need like 4 nanos next to a bot lab or something

[fresh thorn]

T2 WALLS WITHOUT NEEDING TWITCHERS
spriiing.jpg

[crude zinc]

is it fesible to make (virtual) projectiles collisions bigger/fatter to make it more lenient for near misses?

[sharp sky]

with lua you can do anything. for rare units like t3 you can probably afford to make them fat

[rugged musk]

You know, I just remembered there was a TA lore reason that flamethrowers were just reskinned plasma. It's because they weren't really flamethrowers at all, they were plasma-throwers. How plasma projectiles worked in TA was they shoved superheated plasma into a weak energy shield, and then launched that shield out of a magnetic accelerator, and when it struck something, the shield would pop, releasing all the plasma in that direction like a fiery water balloon.

A TA flamethrower needed to work even on planets with no oxygen in the atmosphere, so they were actually superheated plasma jets without the shield bit. and now you know why flamethrowers are reskinned plasma.

But I guess there could be a lore reason they aren't stopped by plasma deflectors! The two shields normally repel each other's magnetic force using the same principle that fires them in the first place, but if there's no shield around the plasma, there's no magnetic force to deflect.

[sharp sky]

was ta flamer actually reskinned plasma? it felt mechanically different (no gravity etc)

[small steppe]

Personally, one idea i feel would make sense would be splitting the current projectile into 3 parallel ones, fired roughly 1 tick's width apart, each with 1/3 of the current projectile's damage. It would simulate being a projectile with width, allow for some of the flames to go past the main target, and simultaneously reduce odds of whiffing vs spam, while (i assume) causing less of a hit to performance as well

[sharp sky]

performance is most likely not a problem at all. especially not on a t3 unit

[small steppe]

I only worry because it's a mid-t3 unit rather than late t3, and it has extremely high RoF. I'm no expert on how heavy things are on performance though, so you're probably right

[hidden inlet]

I tried a mock "stress test" on my pc, and had my performance drop to 10 fps with 155 fiends shooting the ground. It took 80 demons to do the same.
I think they're fine performance wise.

[agile estuary]

If you've got the eco to make 80 demons you're probably already having a bad time with performance.

[terse pulsar]

agreed, but since lua is different from c++ i'm gonna need either a modder here or some sort coding reference to help me make some modded units

[small steppe]

I meant performance impact if new proposed mechanics are added to the projectiles through lua, but sprung knows infinitely more about that than i do, so if he feels it'll be fine, i'll trust

[onyx crescent]

I was trying something similar. currently, they're loads of small ones that can hit many targets in a row, which with the fire rate, is pretty potent

[green saddle]

A bit off topic, but a similar change for Tremor could make it a lot more useful--if tremor kept shooting in the general direction of spam instead of stopping every time it tracks a new target. (So it's not limited to manual-aim-only for practical application)

[onyx crescent]

that could be a very good way to delete your base, but yes, in theory it's a nice idea
eg if something is behind a tremor and it's pointing at your base, it would start firing while turning

[green saddle]

Like, if it kept shooting as long as there is a possibility of hitting an enemy in the spread area, as its turret turns

[onyx crescent]

it may be possible to limit more with lua, but that's a dark art with minimal documentation (closest thing I've found to a manual is Sprung)
cob -might- be able to look at the intended firing angle and not go full cruise control if > 40 degrees, unsure

[green saddle]

Demon's descriptive text should read "Purifier Mech" ehehe.

Anywho, what is it's intended role? In my testing it seems to struggle against kargs, shivas, and razorbacks for value. karg and shiva can anti-spam just as well or better for value. demon is substantially faster than karg or shiva, but not really fast compared to most other raiding units; like, a lot more things can catch a Demon than can catch a Razorback

1 demon literally loses to 10 tigers in a ball

[neat sapphire]

It seens to be the best T1 anti spam and razorback can probably get tuned more to be a T2 killer after it is merged in.

Eh I meant shiva my mistake bit tired and at work

[onyx crescent]

with the changes I'm brewing demon will be excellent antispam
currently it's decent if manually fired

[green saddle]

karg will sill prolly be better anti-spam for cost, 'cause longer range, aoe rockets, less overkill, and rockets that find new targets

not that demon is bad at anti-spam, it's just not adding anything new and improved for Cor other than putting it on a faster chasis

[onyx crescent]

tbf speed is new for cortex
but as is, it isn't good enough at antispam for my liking, hence the faffery

[small steppe]

How were you testing? 1 demon performs comparably to 2 razors when fighting other t3, generally

[dense trail]

tigers are not bad against t3 if they don't get splashed
demon should kite backwards

[green saddle]

I just did 2 armraz vs 1 cordemont4. if the raz stay together they lose. if they spread a little they win. If they flank they win hard.

i noticed vs tigers, the tiger wreckages can reduce demon's dps a lot

even the debris, since the flames run along the ground when aiming down

[obtuse bloom]

what are the stats of the demon anyway? i just want to compare against mass fiend or marauders

[onyx crescent]

yep, new version I'm brewing fixes this

[small steppe]

try kiting. even when they're in range they're stuck dealing half damage because lasers. even if you don't, 2 razors is also significantly more expensive than 1 demon

[green saddle]

it seems like something you send in behind your tigers

[sharp sky]

what if demon was even more dante's inferno themed? scale the flamers a bit, but add a heatray and napalm rockets

[small steppe]

Or you force things to chase them into your mammoths

Having comparable stats relative to cost to a razor, no laser damage dropoff, a bit more range, and even more power density gives you an extremely potent t3 skirmisher

[green saddle]

cor t3 is already kinda in identity crises . what do we want this unit to do ?

Also it kinda looks like Cortex and (filthy) armada had some infernal offspring

[small steppe]

Be the best unit for engaging fights at 500 range, and keeping most units from getting closer or further than 500 range away

[fresh thorn]

Kinda agree with the comment on the aesthetic of the actual unit. The demon is a little sleek looking for Cortex design. I would rather see something boxy and Mechwarrior-esque, but meh

[green saddle]

true they do win while kiting. 4 shivas also beat 2 razors while kiting. demons dont seem like bad or op units, im just not sure what they bring to Cor's kit that Cor couldn't do already.

also it's kinda awkward seeing flames go further than lasers. xD

[rugged musk]

Oh noes, Cor Vehs aren't free against t1 spam and stilettos anymore! Nerf plz!

Imagine Cortex faction identity being an advantage for once, producing a jack-of-all-trades unit that's actually good for once instead of mediocre at everything and beaten by default with the arm meta units. Just imagine having to respect Cortex t2 vehicles! Imagine!

The thing is, Salas are good at many things, but they get utterly thwomped by anything that outranges them, because while they are agile and reasonably tough, they're wide targets. Sheldons totally wreck them. Tzars with units to screen for them also wreck them—hell, even just spam tzars and you win versus Salamanders. A mid-sized Mauser ball stuffs them worse than tigers, and Bulls eat them for lunch. Bulls in response to salamanders pretty much force the Cor player to go Tiger Tzar in response with a few salas on anti spam duty, or lose the numbers advantage, because if you go full salamanders, you haven't been amassing tigers for the entirety of t2.

I've started using Tzars here and there unironically because Salamanders exist and are common. Sometimes a good unit causes a healthy meta shift, and in my opinion, salamanders haven't had that much impact on the meta, but what impact they did have has been good for Cortex t2 vehicles, which was kinda the point of it.

[hidden inlet]

we already have enough boxy stuff

[onyx crescent]

the middle is too bare
doesn't need to be 'lego box threw up on it', but does need something

[dense trail]

flaemthrower is core thing seems okay to me
t3 fiend

[livid plinth]

Is it correct that demon doesn't have a heap?

According to unitdef

[onyx crescent]

pass

[fair fox]

It’s my issue
Unless it’s not needed

[fresh thorn]

it definitely does have one, I actually kind of think the death animation on it is pretty great because it's like it trips suddenly and then it dies horribly
pic related, left hand side of screen

[onyx crescent]

corpse/dead != heap

[fresh thorn]

then I guess I dunno

[rugged musk]

[livid plinth]

Intentional?

[onyx crescent]

not my monkey, but it does look like an oversight

[onyx crescent]

it's basically a tactical faceplant

[rugged musk]

It does actually seem to damage things it falls on top of, which does kill things that finish it off, so yeah!

[onyx crescent]

seems to be omission, so have at it

[green saddle]

aesthetically, Demon just seems too noisy for a cor unit. too many frills. cor units dont have to be boxes, but they generally don't have delicate-looking parts. demon has a lot of parts that are fat, then skinny, then fat again. particularly the joints, upper arms, top of head / lower horns, and little backwingthings. in general the horns seem too ornate, and kinda look like (filthy) armada zappers.

as for a unit, it seems decent. my biggest worry is that (filthy) armada is gonna want a new cool t3 unit of their own. demon has really big shoes to fill. could also be given to legion

also the feet are kinda weird. not sure if i like them or dislike them. either way, may be cool if they sank into the ground a little more

[rugged musk]

I think I agree with that. I think the Demon has a lot of like, useless-looking over-designed bits that don't seem very Cortex to me. It does come off as more of an Armada unit from some angles, but the overall body shape is probably fine.

I think what it needs is a posture change, really. Rather than standing straight up, it's hunched over, creeping along. The "horns" look more like bunny ears to me. It's too... "cute." Although cute is fine, it doesn't seem to fit the name, "Demon."

Its damage output does, though. The fact that it can kite Razorbacks and tanks to death with barely any damage taken is also amazing.

[rugged musk]

If you start from max range and kite bulls, they can't even catch you before they die because their speed is only 67 vs the demon's 65. Its speed is a powerful weapon and I think once people understand it should be used more like a Grunt against Pawns, people are gonna start using them really effectively.

In games where they're turned on, all the Cortex players start spamming them with glee and they do work on both sides. Their performance in the thiccest part of t3 is not at all a problem, so it finally feels like Cortex t3 can compete with the kind of threat Razors and Thors pose before Juggernauts start coming out. It's a very necessary unit.

It might be slightly undertuned, as others have indicated, but... it honestly doesn't feel that way when when using them. They get countered by Pulsars, sure, but so does everything big and scary.

[sly quest]

That’s the Thor right?

[rugged musk]

Interestingly enough! Demons actually have the range and speed to kite Titans, only really worrying about their big shoulder tachyons and never having to engage vs their arm cannons. It's kinda cool!

[small steppe]

Yeah, with micro, or if both sides blindly fight move, demons only need to slightly outnumber titans to win vs them, despite being a fraction of the price

[onyx crescent]

demons mostly suffer vs t1 spam, which is disappointing, my current faffs alter that but will probably need rebalancing in general

[small steppe]

There are various ways to compensate for its susceptibility to spam that's micro'd the very specific ways it doesn't handle well, but it definitely feel like a unit which thematically shouldn't be one which loses to spam under any sane circumstances

In other words, it's a very good unit, but its specialty is the polar opposite of what someone making it for the first time would be expecting it to specialize in

[green saddle]

Is the fire technically a bunch of single-target damage? Or is there splash?

[green saddle]

Both with be their 5th least expensive t3 . . . Then Cor gets Behemoths and Jugs, while (filthy) armada only gets Titans.

There will be many cries that (filthy) armada needs 7 t3 like Cortex has, that they lack a super heavy lategame T3.

[onyx crescent]

splash at contact point, not over whole line
so you can walk through/behind fire easily enough and demons derp out in some cases

[tulip cliff]

Cortex shouldn't really need a fast T3 like Armada has. That's just not in their doctrine. It's Armada's shtick to push with high mobility and direct firepower. I feel like some people just don't lean hard enough into Cortex's indirect fire superiority. Have you seen how devastating those MLRS striders are? This is also why Cortex has tactical nukes, Arbiters, T2 missile vehs, stronger LRPCs, and so on. They are meant to counter Armada's long-range spam (sharpshooters/starlight) with even longer range AoE units, then pushing with unstoppable assault forces with the highest HP.

Printer, I am ecstatic about this unit. It assists Cortex's doctrine perfectly.

Shockwave, nah. No need for a big EMP gun or cloaked T2. Honestly, you could slap a radar jammer onto it that cannot be Juno'ed, that would give Armada something unique that leans hard into their doctrine

[sharp sky]

printer looks arm. high mobility and direct buildpower

[tulip cliff]

Nah, Printer is Cortex. Having a strudy combat engineer that can roll with the tanks and support their advance with its mobile con turret is perfect

[fresh thorn]

even as a Cortex connoisseur I acknowledge that armada needs some kind of super late t3 option that's better than thors and titans
it needs to not just be "big and tough unit," I don't know what it should be. but if a game goes 50 minutes, the behemoth train will roll the armada player and they simply don't have anything that seems to stand up to it
though I'll say in fairness, I haven't seen titan trains used to fight behemoth trains, people usually stick to thors because thors are ridiculously OP for their cost

the only reason this isn't a more broadly acknowledged issue is armada is broken enough to just end the game at 20-30 minutes so the strength of late game cortex rarely becomes a factor

[coral spruce]

To add an annecdotal from lots of Isthmus games specifically - Behe train is basically unstoppable w/o equal eco Behe train or cycling through remaining Commanders

[fresh thorn]

commanders aren't even a reliable solution
supporting twitchers throwing up long ranged radars make it extremely hard in open areas to get a d gun on a behemoth

but, that said, fuck armada, so I'll take my late game OP cortex :^)

[zenith reef]

mass titan seems to work better than behe train

[coral spruce]

Dankest - metal for metal? with the things that follow Behe's I usually see the Titans lose out after a time

[tulip cliff]

Cortex doesn't have much better options vs. Behemoths either, you know. They have to pound at them the same way. They can try to cancel them out with their own Behemoths, of course, but that can wind up a stalemate

[fresh thorn]

they have to build their own behemoths
well
yeah
that's the answer, it becomes a raw eco war, whoever has more money to throw at the good units wins
I mean, both armada and cortex can also try to mass air, gunships get good enough flanking damage that it adds up fast if the air theatre is uncontested, but its never that uncontested so
but on the ground? armada just has nothing on the ground that can compete

[tulip cliff]

If you get tons of shots at it before it reaches you, then take the biggest shots possible. Pulsars, Starlights, masses of air gunships. Isolate it from support and surround it with endless swarms of Pawns. Or just use Armada mobility, go around the behemoths, and kill their infrastructure. They spent 20k metal on a thing that cannot react to flanks. Flanking damage is KING in this game. If it's assailed from all sides, double damage pulsars WILL melt that thing in time

[onyx crescent]

a cheap forwardable unjunoable jammer would be an insane buff to snipers and starlights, which are already obnoxious to core

[tulip cliff]

Who said it would be cheap, Hornet? XD It would be very expensive to run, for the sake of having a jammer immune to Juno. Think in the realm of 350 E

[onyx crescent]

non trivial early, but negligible later on. imagine those spammed over strait mid mexes, would be insane

[tulip cliff]

I don't think so. Not when you always, always know where the jammer is because it has to be sitting on a metal spot, whereas other jammers can be sprinkled everywhere. Just shoot ground on that spot

[onyx crescent]

a tremor could probably AoE it down by default, but mexes don't need to be central, exact size varies by map and can be quite wild
as for metalmaps, RIP core

[tulip cliff]

rofl you think metal hungry core would have issues on a metal rich map at all XD they'd just reduce the whole continent to a vacant lot

[onyx crescent]

they'd never know where anything was, ever. admittedly how much that would alter the 'plasma everything' doctrine is questionable

[sharp sky]

nobody cares about speedmetal balance tho

[onyx crescent]

I'd sort of file that under gamebreaking rather than balance, vision being critically important, and an unjunoable jammer breaks convention quite strongly

[agile estuary]

Not sure that I agree with Cortex not having speed and mobility in their doctrine. They have it in both T1 and T2, for bots, vehicles, hovers, AND ships. Excluding air for obvious reasons. It's weird that it's missing from T3.

But more importantly, I think game balance wins over aesthetics. And Cortex T3 was in desperate need of a general purpose, maneuverable unit.

[small steppe]

demon has less speed than its counterpart in razorback, and cor t3 as a whole is still drastically slower than arm t3, so i see it as a non-issue

[dense trail]

slow and chonky is a thing but they do need some fast units yeah\

[onyx crescent]

also, ideally non-taxed chonk.

[sly quest]

Yeah, fiend is like the quintessential Cortex unit and Demon is pretty much a T3 fiend, it totally fits faction themes

If we want to talk about T3 faction theming we should remove the Thor

[small steppe]

Thor's stats aren't very arm, but its weapons are

[onyx crescent]

now, the vanguard on the other hand...

[small steppe]

having useful spiders is 100% arm. glares with annoyance at termites in particular

[onyx crescent]

termites are woefully weak, alas
something that is basically a massive gun on legs though, feels like it took a wrong turn at the roundabout when being faction sorted

[small steppe]

starlights are pulsars on treads

[onyx crescent]

it would feel more arm if it were a pulsar tbh. but, that would be OP from several views, makes sense why it's plasma

[green saddle]

demon loses to 4 starlights, in a direct fight. almost dies to 3, gets <25%

demon loses to 6 marauders.
*in direct fight. wins with kiting
**nvm, marauders can still win with demon kiting
^demon needs basically a perfect engagement and running backwards when the marauders arrive, then it wins

[dense trail]

i mean running backwards is a good thing in general. you get wreck control.
demon just isn't tanky, but no matter how you slice it 600 range plus decent speed is good
marauders also don't scale up

[green saddle]

sure, that's granted, but my overall point is that armada has a lot of counterplay options pre 7k unit mark, many of which will be fielded already. im concerned that it won't really help cor as much as it needs to in order to justify the coming (filthy) armada demands

[dense trail]

whats 7k unit mark?

[green saddle]

*6k. fk 1min chat timer

[rugged musk]

On average, Cortex will tend to have units with lower top speed than Armada, but that doesn't mean they utterly lack any sort of fast unit, or even that they lack units which are faster in their own unit class. Tigers are faster than Bulls! The fiend is slower than the Sprinter, but that's because the sprinter is all speed and no firepower, but the fiend is a healthy amount of both.

Armada is also not new to the whole "slow unit" doctrine. Snipers are slooooooooooow. Vanguards are even slower than most of Cortex T3. Just because one faction has "this is what they specialize in" doesn't mean they can't occasionally venture outside of that specialty.

Now if Cortex was getting a unit that outsped anything Armada had in t3, that would be busted and kinda make no sense. But the Demon is only fast in comparison to other Cortex T3. It's outsped by Razorbacks and, very obviously, Marauders. For being the fastest Cortex T3, it isn't even as fast as Armada's main T3 battle mech, and the Demon vs Razorback matchup feels a lot like the Grunt vs Pawn and Incisor vs Blitz matchups. It fits incredibly well.

[dense trail]

amphib makes a lot of difference

[rugged musk]

Single units tend to lose to same cost of more numbers of units, yeah. When the numbers get bigger on both sides, that's when the unit with more health and DPS density starts winning overall.

Also, a very funny thing about Demons that's kinda overlooked is that when you use them in groups, their footsteps destroy wreckage, including their own kin's wreckage, and since Demons don't currently have a Heap but only a wreck, that means a huge push of demons that makes sure to step on their wrecks vaporizes the wreckage of all but the last one... which means you don't even feed the metal or the rez potential.

[green saddle]

Give Demon an active missile ability, like Thor. All the missile does is create a smoke cloud to disrupt line of sight for a second or two.

[rugged musk]

Demon footsteps destroying wreckage is kinda crazy strong in its own right even without that glitch, because if you win the fight and create a bunch of wreckage, they "scorch the earth" and render the dead unable to be resurrected without having to focus their fire on it.

It can work against you, though, if you needed that wreckage.

[green saddle]

https://tenor.com/view/the-rings-of-power-lord-of-the-rings-lotr-the-lord-of-the-rings-on-prime-gif-26292363

Brief smoke cloud would give army a window of opportunity to push against the tachyon porc. Also nice and imposing to have the demon emerging from the shadows, with all its minions

[tulip cliff]

Tachyon porc is countered by Catalyst/Tremor/Negotiator/Catapult

[rugged musk]

All those are soft counters though. Only the Catalyst outranges, and it's not mobile, and people keep pointing out to me "they can just close it up when you launch a missile."

[green saddle]

Pulsars outrange those. Them be slow siege-style. I'm talking for the rushdown.

*Except catalyst

[rugged musk]

Brute Force tactics really fit Cortex.

[green saddle]

Demon + smokebomb + fiends + commandos for stealth = sudden purification

https://tenor.com/view/rita-repulsa-funny-witch-bluecollar-happy-gif-12778977

Sorry. Can't help myself. It's all I think when I see it.

[rugged musk]

I actually really like this idea because it could turn into a new Cortex Thing, "smoke clouds." A sort of Cortex counterpart to Armada's use of EMP.

Smoke disrupts LoS for both sides, so they force the use of pinpointers and radar. It's a very brutalistic way of concealing their advances as opposed to more high-tech methods like cloaking, and it makes sense when their main rival is Armada, who loves its precision instruments with terrible splash. Cortex is hurt less by the smoke on average because they like big blasts that SMAAASH . They don't need as much precision! It does give both sides a good use for pinpointers, though, because not everything will automatically have line of sight anymore, and it renders t1 spam purely for vision slightly less overwhelmingly effective.

It's counterable - radar still works - but that's counterable too, mainly by Cortex, since the Commando is a small mobile jammer with its own radar!

This doesn't have to purely be a Demon thing, either, it could be something that fiends or even all flame units do when they selfD. Maybe there's a smoke mine, maybe Bedbugs die in a smoke cloud, etc.

[fresh thorn]

That would be kind of cool tbh
Honestly as Legion develops, Cortex is probably going to need a couple unique things. Legion's thing is basically railguns, napalm, and drones, and aesthetically the napalm shtick has a bit of overlap with existing Cortex flame units, even if their actual game mechanics are different

[agile estuary]

This is probably more for @onyx crescent and the devs, but does the game support temporarily setting a unit's LOS to 0 or some other super low number? Might be a cool way to introduce blindness as a status effect the same way stun exists with EMP.

[rugged musk]

I... have no idea.

[onyx crescent]

in most cases would be irrelevant as something around it would spot for it. starcraft had that issue with optical flares
I could sort of see it working as a junoish curse for an area, briefly disabling say radar etc

[agile estuary]

What about setting Range to 0 temporarily?

[rugged musk]

That could be overpowered. like, literally not-kidding-you overpowered.

[fresh thorn]

I mean conceptually it would make more sense if smoke clouds blocked LoS for units trying to see into it as well as units within it

Dunno if that function is a thing though. Can you just temporarily make a zone where LoS can't penetrate?

[onyx crescent]

dark swarm, then

[agile estuary]

Less OP than the stun from EMP. Units would still be able to run away. And secondary abilities like cloak or emp missile wouldn't be affected.

[rugged musk]

Yeah, sorta like "unit vision treats this whole area like a solid wall of rock, but it's not impassable"

[onyx crescent]

I don't know enough about that area to guess properly, but, vision is pretty fundamental and I haven't seen anything about walling it, the closest is just anti radar
range of 0 within a given cursed area would be possible, I should think

[agile estuary]

Yeah I think something that just disables weaponry either by setting range to 0 or reload to some absurd number or w/e, would be a cool status effect to play with. Way less strong than emp too so it won't cause as much rage.

[rugged musk]

I think making it too comparable to EMP might invite comparisons to EMP, though, which could emotionally be a bad idea. I'm not against it though, if it works, but I think one of the points that smoke was meant to accomplish was allow Cortex units to assault into it, rather than stopping all weapons fire in it, because in that case the stuff I said about it doesn't even apply.

It's not really supposed to be a no-fire-zone, that doesn't really make sense to me, it's meant to be a "units in this area can't use their vision to see" zone, which kind of implied it was going to be a rather large area covered with smoke. Like, an entire nuke-blast sized or Juno-sized area covered with smoke. Not a Thor-EMP-sized area covered with smoke.

[agile estuary]

Meh, I don't think so. Like in any competitive PVP game, "stun" is the ultimate type of control status effect, aside from death. Full loss of unit control and still take full damage. Compare to "blind" where you only lose attacks, or "slow" where you only lose partial control, or "stasis" where you lose full control but also take no damage. This is like video game 101 and is present in almost every competitive PVP game regardless of genre.

[rugged musk]

It doesn't have to be that strong on its own though if it enables other mechanics that normally get rendered irrelevant. Why does it have to be that powerful? It's just smoke.

It's very Cortex. It's simple, it's low-tech, it's brutalistic, and it doesn't seem to do a whole lot, but when you pair it with other tools Cortex has at its disposal, and what it typically faces when fighting Armada, suddenly its existence starts to make a bit of sense.

It doesn't have to be a Thor EMP missile. The only similarity might be that it uses the same hotkey.

[agile estuary]

What's "smoke"? What you're describing is functionally identical to blindness/disarm/dark swarm/whatever. It stops enemy units from firing but not everything else.

Anyway this is way off track. I was just spitballing ideas for secondary unit abilities that aren't "deal damage."

[rugged musk]

wh... what? I'm not talking about a starcraft mechanic...

[agile estuary]

Never mind

[green saddle]

i was thinking more like thor emp size than juno or nuke size; maybe a little bit bigger. short duration, so must be coordinated and not just blanket suppression. keep in mind it could be chained with multiple demons

it's a very powerful effect, t3 tier effect for sure,

[rugged musk]

I'm talking about, like...
smoke clouds.
You can't see through it. That's what it does.

It's not even necessarily supposed to stop things from firing if they have other means to acquire their targets. That's the point, which is the whole Commando synergy I was talking about.

[green saddle]

zerg has similar abilities. iirc, in sc2 Vipers have a blinding cloud that reduces range of units inside to melee, and in sc1 some zerg unit made a cloud that prevented shooting at units inside. high tech level, expensive and powerful abilities

[rugged musk]

Yeah, but people are comparing it to "this unit can't fire," "aha it disables weapons!" when maybe it doesn't have to do that directly.

and I do think, if it doesn't have a very large area of effect, then t1 spam counters it for free. Units can fire outside their vision if they have a spotter. It's not powerful enough if it's not a big area.

[small steppe]

Basically all utility effects conceivable are countered by spam, unless you juno-ify the effect and just make it autokill spam because you don't know how else to fix that fact

Block vision? Free opportunity for spam to get closer to enemy units/defenses before taking any casualties. Disable firing for units within? Spam walk through and is a pest on the other side of it

[green saddle]

No disabling firing for units within. (that was just a sc2 thing). Only those units don't grant vision. They can still shoot at things on radar or in vision from other units.

Spam would have to get through the other side of the smoke to see your units. Ideally you have radar and can detect + kill the spam before it gets to the other side. Demon should roast the spam pretty easily.

[fresh thorn]

Just to be as precise on this as possible, what is bring described is as follows

There is a unit with an active ability. It is themed after a smoke bomb. This ability causes the following effects within the targeted area
A) units cannot use Line of Sight to see into the area
B) units within the area have their Line of Sight reduced to 0

Radar based target acquisition still works, so if there is radar in the area, the units can still fire
Units "above" or outside the cloud still provide line of sight. So you can see around the cloud, you can see next to the cloud, you just can't see inside the cloud. You can have a scout plane flying above the smoke cloud, and it will provide radar pings to identify the units within the cloud, and it can see beyond the cloud with Line of Sight, but it cannot see within the cloud

So, I dunno, cool idea I think, and definitely feels Cortex-y. Will it be good? Depends on the size of the covered area and the spammability of this sort of ability

But honestly this should probably have its own thread to explain the details and think about whether its even a tenable mechanic to add

[small steppe]

Any non-spam unit would want to pull back if the cloud was present 99% of the time, while spam would want to pull back maybe 50% of the time. Way worse to throw valuable units into that

[rugged musk]

Right. T1 spam works so well because it provides vision and can bump into cloaked things with the sheer volume of spam, and that renders even radar irrelevant, and therefore renders pinpointers and jammers irrelevant by proxy. Even Juno becomes purely about negating tick spam and mines.

If you make the smoke stronger but smaller and it disables weapons outright, then spam is overpowered with that effect because spam just walks on through and gets to the other side with nothing able to stop it anymore.

If a smoke cloud effect is going to do anything worthwhile given that context, it has to be able to block vision in a big enough area to deal with that fact just enough that t1 spam isn't automatically guaranteed to give vision for the area it's in anymore, which lets things with shorter range approach things with longer range. If you have radar and pinpointers, you can still see where the spam is and kill it with the same weapons. You will be relying on radar a lot more when a smoke cloud blankets an area, and that means a Jammer that's immune to Juno, like what the Commando has, is a lot more effective at sneaking in a direct frontal assault.

It's very Cortex.

[green saddle]

Short duration intended. I don't want the map covered in smoke, just a tactically relevant amount for a couple/few seconds--just enough time to close in on a pulsar with coordinated timing

[small steppe]

If you have units that'll kill a pulsar in a reasonable amount of time, the pulsar's gonna only fire once or twice before dying either way. Your smoke did literally nothing

[rugged musk]

Yeah, I think this talk will need its own thread.

[small steppe]

Actually, you're helping the pulsar. It won't be dealing half damage with its first shot, so it'll literally get to do more damage than normal if you smoke your way in

[green saddle]

if it fires only once instead of twice, that's still significant. substitute in starlights or snipers or w/e

[rugged musk]

I think the idea deserves to have more potential than just "only the Demon can do this for a few seconds and it's completely inferior to the Thor EMP in every way." It's such a good and thematically-fitting concept for Cortex as a whole that it deserves its own thread so we can discuss and expand upon the idea.

I mean, if the only thing it's meant to do is it lets demons attack into an area guarded by pulsars with no spam or spotters coming out of it, just make Catalysts.

[small steppe]

It's also going on the assumption that, for some reason, only spam is targettable with radar blips. Having [high alpha unit] firing at your demon's radar blip is many orders of magnitude worse than [high alpha unit] firing at spam

[green saddle]

That's not the only purpose, was just used as a measure of time. Could be potent in many situations. Not being able to see things for an extended time in a large area would be anti-fun, though

[rugged musk]

ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh, no it's not, considering radar exists and negates it entirely.

Pulsars even already get free radar that covers their entire weapon range that can't be juno'd.

In Starcraft, it would be anti-fun, but radar is a fundamental mechanic in BAR, and it's there to provide intel when there's no vision. It just becomes completely irrelevant late game because t1 spam, and pinpointers become irrelevant too by extension, since all they do is make radar more accurate.

[small steppe]

This concept is the tactical equivalent of knowing someone is watching a long hallway with an AWP in counterstrike, throwing a smoke at your feet, then sprinting through the smoke so you can die to the awp before you can even see things again

[green saddle]

Not really at all. Would pollute this thread a lot to dismantle that ban analogy, though.

[rugged musk]

With no jammer there, it's like that but if the AWP guy had a heat sensor that could see the body outline through the smoke and still know where your head is.

[green saddle]

needs pinpointers for headshots. could explore it clouding radar vision, too.

[rugged musk]

I don't think I'd want it to do that, no. That would be anti-fun.

[onyx crescent]

meanwhile, back on topic

[dense trail]

tremor maybe, catalyst requires some good coordination
amba does not counter pulsar. its very risky to go in range for the snipe hoping you aren't seen. And later in the game t3 artillery (vanguard/catapult) completely zone out amba (they basically oneshot amba)

catapult maybe is the best answer

[fresh thorn]

catapult is actually one of the worst, unless you have complete vision control
catapults have worse range than pulsars and get one-shot by them. you can kinda aim short of the pulsar to try to nick it with the spread of missiles, but it's not reliable and it won't do much damage. fuck up once and congrats you just lost a catapult

tremors are dogshit at breaking pulsars because at the sort of range they will need to fire at, basically only 1 out of every 100 shot may even chip away at the pulsar. it'll ding up everything around it though, which is something

negotiators are one of the better answers because it has stealthy so unless you're being overwhelmed by spam you can pretty easily keep them out of the pulsar's line of fire

catalyst is the best because 2 catalyst shots instagib a pulsar, so it is very easy for a cortex player to control a large amount of space from pulsar creeping as long as they have terrain on their side to help protect the catalysts

[dense trail]

killing the crap in the general area is step 1 lol
that makes your tac nuke launchers better
oh yeah catapults are outranged, but you can shell the general rea

[terse pulsar]

Yeah tremors need to be rebuffed. Shelling is very fun but tremors on the move, i've lost more units to my tremors than my liche commiting suicide

[mighty thorn]

I'd once again like to chime in and ask that we keep this thread on topic of the four new additions

[fresh thorn]

for those of us who want to continue this line of discussion
https://discord.com/channels/549281623154229250/1169903692649091073

[tall temple]

I got a question. What does salamander replace alligator ? Alligator was already a good unit, likely the best raiding unit for T2 amphi assault. I tried both several times and I don't really see why the alligator had to be removed for inferior and slightly cheaper unit. Make it make sense ?

[tulip cliff]

"PURIFIER READY"

[crude zinc]

It's still quite unnerving that there are many moments in that clip that unit is visually engulfed in flames yet gets no damage dealt to it.

[dense trail]

i think alligator was quite good
turtle just is 🤮
maybe turtle has a niche for breaking light porc amphib

[sly quest]

Turtle could maybe get torpedoes to be the armada counterpart to the duck if the duck wasn’t so OP

[dense trail]

the duck is not OP, it's slow. it's just duckingly annoying (in a good way)

[mighty thorn]

Cool idea for another #1047081727291559986 thread 🙂

[sly quest]

The demon is cool as hell, especially now that it doesn’t lose to spam. What’s the demon bad against?

[dense trail]

it's not just the duck now it's the whole damn aquarium

[onyx crescent]

real aoe is a lot harder to make, and more expensive, this is a close second option
I have mothballed my experiment with 3d AoE if someone wants to dig it up one day

[small steppe]

Large amount of long-ranged burst, even moreso than many other t3 units, and a very specific type of micro with spam which, in a real-game environment, requires very specific circumstances

[onyx crescent]

and air, the AA isn't that great
might be worth testing/contrasting it with razorback for AA properties

[small steppe]

Basically any t3 requires aa support if there're a significant number of gunships attacking

[onyx crescent]

cast your votes now

[surreal path]

If you are changing demons looks I'd suggest making sure the exhaust pipes on his head don't look like teslas

[fresh thorn]

ill be honest
I dislike the lower right one least but its still weird somehow
left looks distinctly armada
top right looks goofy
cortex visor is good but the silhouette of the face still looks weird somehow and I can't put my finger on it

[onyx crescent]

the huge horns throw scale/framing off, probably

[fresh thorn]

wait, put my finger on it

looks like a jester cap with the silhouette of those... exhaust tubes? on the head

[onyx crescent]

well you did say you wanted it with bells on

[green saddle]

One of them looks like a grumpy cat.

Sheldons have a face sorta similar to og demon, a big red circle with some smaller yellow circles below. Not necessarily armada exclusive look. Grunt-like face could also be decent

[onyx crescent]

thoughts/opinions/death threats

[zenith reef]

how about just something like this?

[onyx crescent]

it's based on the TA krogoth, which definitely has horns

that aside, it would look very light on top without something nontrivial there, especially with those huge shoulder pads

[zenith reef]

yea idk i think without horns looks nicer

[rugged musk]

I love the idea of horns tho :/ I just don't really like the way they're currently implemented. I think it looks bare without anything on its head, its horns just need to be more angular and menacing, rather than round and jester-like.

[round skiff]

maybe instead of head-spikes go for more back-spikes?

[green saddle]

Balrog style, forward/down sweeping

Also, when it shoots its flamers, smoke exhausts out its back in semblance of wings

[green saddle]

Back spikes? . . . (filthy) armada spy!

But could look interesting. Spiky seems more of an armada thing, though. Razorback, exhibit A.

[onyx crescent]

I've already done that

[onyx crescent]

see up here ^

[green saddle]

Integrate exhaust pipes with torso instead of putting them on twigs, increase exhause pressure so smoke comes out sideways a bit.

[zenith reef]

looks nice

[hidden inlet]

I agree with this idea

or make it a figure of 8

[onyx crescent]

easier said than done
will see what breaks though

[green saddle]

view from behind? definitely looks less fragile. what i was thinking was even more inigrated with torso; but I'm not the one doing the work. ;P

Gruntface

random idea: horns could be kinda like chain-hooks. would make them a useful pseudoscience function, instead of a pure aesthetic. used to transport them in space or something, hung on racks.

[onyx crescent]

balrog horns is nice in theory, but really hard to actually do

just wasted ages on useless attempts, blender has a lot of compound things that do arcane stuff to achieve that, and it's impossible to make it all look not terrible, fix one another aspect then breaks

[errant magnet]

Latest version of Demon's continuous fire script:

[dense trail]

do flame attacks friendly fire?
looks pretty satisfiying

[errant magnet]

There will be some friendly fire, since the demon will only check if a friendly unit is at the destination target and not on the path towerds the target

[fresh thorn]

a small price to pay
for purification

[fair fox]

i think the head is too short on the xaxis the horns require quite a bit of model to exist for them to work well in my exp

[onyx crescent]

maybe yes, I can mess around with it more later
out of steam for now and there's a dozen technical wtf's plaguing me currently and none of them I want to be dealing with - or should even exist at all

[fair fox]

brain
i meant z axis
just realized that

i think this is also a unit that would benifit from having some induced asymetry
especially in the front half of the head

[onyx crescent]

I'll give it more of a muzzle later, right now I'm busy unbreaking blender/exports

also I need to wait for answers about blender plugins/exports/dark models before I know which file I can even work on

[thick igloo]

Great work!

One thing just jumped into my mind:
Could it be that the flames need to fly a bit faster?
I mean, it is supposed to be anti spam. The projectiles need to be at least 3-5 times faster than the fastest scout. And it feels a bit slower.

Razorbacks e.g. their biggest advantage is their instant hit ability (vs. ground and air).

And as long as the flame remains a dot it will never actually be able to catch evading spam nearly as good and as long as it remains so slow it will always take way too long to actually hit the target. That is why the pawns just walk past 3^^ demons. Imagine 3Razors... They could walk against that stream with full speed without any pawns passing.

Long story short:
More speed for the flames?

[onyx crescent]

tried. there's a limit to how fast they can go before it just looks broken
they're 400 atm, 500 in my latest, which is already pushing it
partly this is why I've been trying to solve the AoE, as that makes speed and thus accuracy of each, much less important

[thick igloo]

Kk, that's a pity.

Sure enough AOE would solve many things...

Another idea could be to have a ridiculous spread of the length. So the plasma shells would detonate along the way. That way the shells could angle over a unit as well (at least a tiny part of it).

[terse pulsar]

3rd visor looks good. also is it possible to adjust the demons horns? they look like bunny ears for me which doesn't scream terror or COR

[terse pulsar]

OH MAKE THE HORNS ELONGATED! it's looks round for me so making it slightly pointy makes it indimidating

[onyx crescent]

they're a bit of both really
that kind of thing, but curved down a bit more yes

[round skiff]

wait, cor is more thicc so maybe it should be this kind of demon

[terse pulsar]

how about 4 horns?

[onyx crescent]

in other news, it's looking like the continuous fire option is out for now alas, there's some weird bugs that make it effectively unplayable, despite a lot of variations

[round skiff]

here, don't have to credit me

[onyx crescent]

the fire I have currently fakes it a bit though, which with the passthrough & aoe, is close enough for the edge cases that were the issue before
you can't, it's not ingame yet
if tests today go well though, then hopefully my current version will be in before too long

[terse pulsar]

i will try that soon. been wanting to use more flames especially after I want to get payback against a behemoth squad

[round skiff]

is it possible for unit to increase the damage wich target causes when it explodes?

[onyx crescent]

...probably via lua, somehow, but only one person could tell you how

[round skiff]

because i think it would be cool gimming to the flames - it overheats so explodes more violently 😄

[onyx crescent]

unsure if you could upscale explosions by 50% or so, would imply tagging fire attacked units too

as a rule though, we don't want too many unique or new things, BAR has convention and breaking that unlearns the game for people
there's a line between adding and changing, and something unique to one unit would be probably the wrong side of it
potentially could apply to all fire weapons though, making it less of a gimmick