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ZeroK: Zero-K v1.3.12.1

There are more balance changes here than in recent versions. Effectively we have a Cloaky and Hovercraft un-nerf with a small change to Scalpel. Units should be a bit smarter with the unit AI and target priority improvements, especially Scorcher. Visible but non-damaging ground napalm has been removed in the case of Dante and Pyro. The aim is to remove all misleading fire effects.

Balance

Cloakybot has a reduction of the nerfs for some of its previously most powerful units.

  • Rocko: Health 350 -> 390 (was 450)
  • Spectre: Reload time 18 -> 17s (was 15s)

For Hovercraft we have a small nerf to Scalpel and minor buffs to Dagger and Mace. The changes are mostly to missile physics to give units a bit more time to fight or flee.

  • Dagger:
    • Cost 85 -> 80 m
    • Sight 500 -> 560 elmo
  • Scalpel:
    • AoE radius 96 -> 80 elmo
    • Unit turn rate 79 -> 73 °/s
    • Missile homing 132 -> 115 °/s
    • Missile velocity 200 -> 180 elmo/s
    • Missile duration 3.5 -> 3.1 s [?]
    • Horizontal angle of fire 43 -> 66 °
  • Mace: Speed 63 -> 66 elmo/s

Pyro death explosion now applies ground fire. This is to make its mechanics match the flame effect. Previously the explosion applied 21-30s of burning (315-450 damage) which tended to guarantee a kill against light raiders.

  • DPS: 20
  • Radius: 128 elmo [?]
  • Linger time: 13s
  • Burn time 25s -> 2s [?]
  • Initial damage: 50 (unchanged)

Duck is now slightly worse at avoiding consequences. The underwater Duck vs Duck game may also no longer be one of blindly running into each other.

  • Missile range 250 -> 240 elmo
  • Torpedo range 150 -> 120 elmo
  • Sonar 250 -> 350 elmo

Recluse has a buff to see what it takes to use Recluse:

  • Range 540 -> 570 elmo
  • Sight 594 -> 627 elmo [?]

Funnelweb lost combat regeneration for consistency [?]

Raised most units’ eye height by 10-20 elmos [?]

Terraform now has its minimum thickness more strictly enforced. No more 1-wide walls around structures. Walling mexes and fusions is now slightly more expensive.

General UI

  • COFC smooth mesh just affects scrolling again.
  • Build ETA has size and draw height menu options.
  • Menu option paths: renamed AutoGroup to Control Groups.
  • The interface for walling a structure with terraform (Ctrl + click) now gives a rectangle command[?].
  • The unit lock modoption now works on AI and accepts unit names as parameters.

Unit AI

Unit AI has been improved, mostly regarding targeting.
“Ignore” means the units still automatically shoot the target, but will not stop to kill and instead move on if they are on Fight command and there are no better targets.

  • Spectre will now avoid all mobile ground units.
  • Puppy on Fight dodges better and closes in faster.
  • Scorcher will now move close to the target when on Fight command.
  • Units with slow projectiles will now disprefer shooting at fast units and will ignore them. [?]
  • Units are less inclined to shoot at Fleas and Darts [?].
  • Penetrator, Sniper and Racketeer disprefer LLT and Defender.
  • Airborne units no longer ignore Razors.
  • Crusader will now ignore gunships.
  • Armored units are now deprioritized correctly.

XP

XP has always been very unreliable as a measure of unit performance. This has been addressed. The rank of a unit now directly reflects how many times over a unit has paid for itself.

  • Rank 1 = 1x cost
  • Rank 2 = 2x cost
  • Rank 3 = 3x cost
  • Silver Star = 4x cost
  • Gold Star = 7x cost
  • Super Gold Star = 10x cost

Details:[Spoiler]

  • Removed the last hit XP bonus. Only dealing damage gives XP now.
  • Rescaled XP gain so that it says exactly how many times the unit made cost. [?]
  • Changed nominal unit costs for a few unbuildable units to better reflect their worth. [?]
  • All multiplayer units now have XP worth equal to cost. [?]

Content creation

  • Maps can now have less than 6 metal spots.
  • Custom AIs now select their own commanders. Ones that do not, are given Strike Trainer. [?]
  • healthbar labels for features [?] are now subject to localisation.

Fixes

  • Fixed slow damage permanently increasing turn rate inertia.
  • Fixed Dante incendiary rockets using napalm visuals.
  • Fixed rank icons disappearing while spectating.

ZeroK: Zero-K 1v1 Tournament December 12th 2015

Owing to the unavailability of the normal tournament organisers, the 1v1 tournament for November hasn’t been run yet. Better late and under inexperienced management than never, right?

The tournament will be run by Aquanim on Saturday 12th December at 10AM UTC.


Signup list:

Tournament format & rules:
– Registration is open until 1 hour before the official start time of the tournament, at which time the bracket will be shuffled.
– Double elimination
– Random seeding
– First map of each round is predetermined, the following maps in the winners bracket will be selected by the loser of the previous game from the featured 1v1 map pool.
– All winners bracket games will be best of 3 (including finals). All losers bracket games will be best of 1 with the exception of the losers finals (bo3).

It is possible to substitute for players who don’t show up. If you have signed up, make sure to show up on time. Those who fail to show up will likely be subbed out by 10:30AM UTC (half an hour after tournament start).

The players coming first, second and third will receive special unique collectible awards to their player profile, and receive tournament points which will at the year’s end determine the year’s altogether best tournament player.

The initial maps for each round will be chosen from the following pool (plus some if required) when I have a better idea of how many rounds are required:

Obsidian_1.3
AlienDesert
Isle of Grief 0.2
Archers_Valley_v6
Into Battle_v3
TitanDuel
Intersection_v3
Flooded Valley v2
Iced Coffee v4.3
Calayo2

The bracket can be seen at a link which will be added below.

Sign up in the comments!

ZeroK: Tourney players replaced with robots

Due to lack of availability of all the organizers, the month’s tourney will be postponed until first week of December.

While it would be possible to hold the human tournament this weekend, convening an adequate amount of human players with an announcement on Wednesday seems impossible.

With that in mind, this Saturday will still hold a tournament, with players who are much easier to assemble: AI’s!

The machines will duke it out round-robin BO3, ranked by win count. All ties will be resolved by additional games.

The tourney will likely be hosted on SpringGrid operated by JPrankgajop in a massively parallelized fashion, and the replays will be published after the games are resolved in this case. If the grid is somehow not available, the games will be manually proceeded at 4x speed on Springie hosts.

Maps for each game will be determined randomly by the tournament host device from this list:

TitanDuel
Eye_Of_Horus_v2
Intersection_v3
Red Comet
Barren
Bandit_Plains_v1
wanderlust_V01
Victoria Crater v2.1

The initial participant list is as follows:
CAI
CircuitAI
FreundAI
Shard (as shipped with engine version 100.0)
ZKGBAI

All these will be assembled in their latest available binary form (compiled linux64) and frozen at Friday, 27th November 2015, 23:59 UTC.

Additional bots can be submitted before that time as well in compiled binary form or source, compilation of which will be attempted but not guaranteed.

The only requirement is that the bots don’t use cheats.

And thus, glory to the robots.