Zero-K v.1.13.9.0 - Shock and Awesome Jumps

This update is packed with unusual buffs. For starters, Detriment can now jump three times in a row, but every factory technically has some unit that was buffed. Most of the buffs are via a change to the stun and disarm system that will help units avoid wasting the duration of stacked stuns. We have even increased the starting resources slightly, and added more of an incentive for teammates to capture metal spots.

There are also many features, such as greatly improved Zenith meteors and better looking Jugglenaut jump. The interface has a few improvements that make morph commands and burst damages easier to handle, and a few terraform edge cases were fixed. There was also an engine update last week to test the engine as it inches towards a stable release.

Overstun

Weapons that stun or disarm now do so for an extra second when the target is already almost fully stunned. This helps low stun duration units avoid overlapping their stuns. Consider the following situation:

• A Knight fires, dealing enough damage to reach its maximum stun of 1s.
• A second Knight fires 0.3s later, when the stun is at 0.7s remaining.
• Previously, the second Knight would reach the same maximum stun of 1s, wasting 0.7s
• With this change, the second Knight is allowed to go 1s beyond the current stun on the unit, so the enemy ends up with a 1.7s stun.

The goal here is to design away stupidity (Cold Take #10). An alternative to overstun would be to add unit AI that lets the second Knight delay its shot to waste less stun time, then alternate shots from there. This AI would have tricky edge cases, make units feel unresponsive, and sometimes work against player intentions, so we are trying a mechanical approach instead.

Balance

Added one second of overstun to all sources of EMP and Disarm damage. This will be felt most by spammy units with low stun duration: Venom, Blitz, Knight, Scorpion, Cutter, Gnat, Thunderbird and Faraday.

Increased starting metal and energy from 325 to 350.

Detriment can now store jump charges and is a bit cheaper, at the cost of health and jump range.

• Cost 24k -> 21k
• Health 86k -> 76k
• Jump reload 120s -> 100s
• Jump charges 1 -> 3
• Jump range 960 -> 840 elmos

Paladin is slightly harder to repair.

• Health regeneration 20 -> 10 health/s

Knight deals more EMP damage as well as benefiting from overstun.

• EMP damage 600 -> 720

Pyro jumps faster.

• Jump speed 180 -> 198 elmo/s

Placeholder synergises better with slow projectiles.

• Wiggly Black Hole -> Not So Wiggly Black Hole

Conch is even tougher.

• Health 850 -> 1000

Bolas sonar now works properly.

• Sonar range matches sight range, like all sea units.

Scalpel is more manoeuvrable.

• Speed 63 -> 66 elmo/s
• Turn rate improved by 2.5%

Crasher is more responsive.

• Speed 111 -> 114 elmo/s
• Missile speed 700 -> 800 elmo/s
• Fixed overly trigger-happy overkill prevention.

Raven is faster and needs to turn faster to compensate.

• Speed 234 -> 246 elmo/s
• Improved rudder by 3.8%

Phoenix is slower, effectively swapping its speed with Raven, then overshooting.

• Speed 243 -> 231 elmo/s

Nimbus is more dangerous.

• Damage per shot 19.3 -> 20

Desolator is slightly more buildable.

• Cost 1600 -> 1500
• Reload time 3 -> 2.8
• Damage 1201 -> 1200

Fusion Reactor is thinner to prevent units hiding in it.

• Flattened hit volume by 12.5% along its short axis.

Features

Metal Extractors now preferentially return 125 extra metal to their creator, up from 51. Remember, this metal is shared between the players (Cold Take #20) that helped build the extractor. It is notable that metal extractors only cost 85 metal, but rewarding teammates for grabbing metal extractors quickly seems worth the expense.

Detriment jump charges are visible in the canisters on its back (thanks garfild888 for the model support). This lets the enemy see whether a Detriment can jump, and this information is important enough to put on the UI. Enemy Detriment jump change is visible on the unit icon in the mouseover tooltip, and a jump bar can be enabled under Settings/Interface/Healthbars. A visible bar by default was felt to be a bit too noisy.

Other features:

• Significantly improved the visuals and effect efficiency of Zenith meteors (thanks Thorneel).
• Improved Jugglenaut jump animation.
• Cancel Morph commands are now drawn with a stop image on top. This the command panel show the morph state of selected units. Technically Morph and Cancel Morph were always distinct commands, but at some point the visual difference was lost.
• Burst damages for many more units are now shown by the aggregate unit stats (next to the minimap). This includes Scythe, Merlin, Detriment, and most assault units.

Fixes

• Fixed the spinny thing on the Geothermal Generator (thanks garfild888).
• Fixed large jumping units sometimes walking in place after jumping.
• Dead Claws (Badger mines) no longer sometimes leave a radar dot for a few seconds.
• Fixed Advanced Geothermal morph sometimes interacting weirdly with ongoing terraform.
• Fixed much rarer edge cases of the above that could occur with any structure.
• Fixed terraform build points sometimes being visible to the enemy.
• Fixed the accidental removal of the parallel missile burst reload indicator on the health bar (eg the "2/3" for units such as Picket, Ogre, Trident).
• Fixed incorrect descriptions for overkill prevention in the Unit Behaviour menu.
• Fixed the missing ~ in front of unreliable burst on the aggregate unit stats.
• Fixed the crazy numbers in the EMP award. Eg hitting a unit at 5% health would be worth 20x the damage.
• Moved some sounds that were erroneously on the ambient channel to the battle channel.
• Fix Hercules script error when modded with extra weapons.
• Fixed hotkey labels disappearing from the command menu after viewing unconstructable units (eg if a ship factory ends up on dry land).
• Fix an Antinuke UI crash.
• Fix ingame menu crash with Turkish locale.