It’s time to open up this year’s supply of tournaments.

As has become customary for odd months, January will have an 1v1 tourney on its 31st day, at 09:00 UTC. The registration is open until Friday, January 30th 2015 23:59 UTC, and everyone is welcome to take part regardless of their skill.

Additionally, players can volunteer to substitute for anyone missing after the registration has been closed and before tourney itself starts. Substitutes will be used if the original signed-up players fail to arrive within 30 minutes of start without notice, in order of sign-up, based on this thread.

Tournament rules:
– Single elimination
– First map of each round is predetermined, the following maps will be selected by the loser of the previous game from the featured 1v1 map pool.
– Finals are best of 5, all other matches including the bronze match are best of 3.

The tournament bracket will be seeded randomly after registration closes. 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 starting maps for each round will be announced at some later date before the tournament starts, when the number of participants will be more or less known.

You can inspect the tourney bracket at http://zk.challonge.com/zkjan2015

To sign up, post this forum thread and don’t forget to show up on time. Pay attention to the timezone, and set a calendar notification that will remind you. If you are going to be late, try to warn about this in advance.

This version mainly has a weird buff for Weaver and an easier to use UI for creating turrets on spires. Hold Alt and select a build command to use it.Weaver looked pretty shoddy compared to other constructors with its high cost for little health and ut…

This version bring much needed intelligence in the realm of missile firing as well as some buffs to marginalized missile units. As such Hovercraft may now be OP but we will deal with that when we get there. Near term balance is secondary to non-frustra…

Zero-K lobby server has been moved to a different machine.
Please restart Zero-K lobby twice (to force it’s upgrade) or use address “lobby.zero-k.info” if you are using other lobby program than Zero-K

Units now deal as much damage as is stated in the detailed unit information panel (viewable by Space+Click on a unit). If a unit says it does 200 damage then it should kill a unit with 400 HP in two shots. There are a lot of cases so if you a unit that…

Balance is ongoing for the new Sumo and Banisher has been reroled to better fit the riot role. Funnelweb, Wolverine and Swift have received some nerfs to make them more extreme within their desired role without being too good.

Overdrive allocation in teamgames has been tweaked to make an economy player more immediately valuable to the team as a whole. We also have a new economy panel which should (hopefully) be the last one.

Balance

Swift:

• Health 360 -> 300

Wolverine:

• Range 800 -> 730
• Reload Time 5 -> 5.5

Panther:

• Real Damage 220 -> 190

Banisher transformed into a dedicated riot:

• Cost 780 -> 520
• Range 430 -> 340
• Damage 650 -> 440
• Reload time 4s -> 2.3s

Halved the most recent Brawler DPS nerf:

• Before: 21.5
• Recently: 15
• Now: 18.3

Sumo:

• Cost 2000 -> 1700
• Health 12.5k -> 13.5k

Funnelweb:

• Removed weapon.
• Has only one shield (to fix charge transfer and disarm problems).
• Viper (large drone) range 450 -> 350
• Firefly (small drone) range 400 -> 250

Gauss has a regeneration rate of 20 health/second when closed. This occurs even when under fire.

Units within an area cloaker now gain the default decloak radius . Exceptions are:

• Active area cloakers.
• Units with decloak radius smaller than the default.

In effect units such as Sniper and Skuttle will have much smaller decloak radius when under an area cloaker.

Invisible scouting is now a bit harder:

• Gremlin decloak radius 75 -> 140
• Flea decloak radius 75 -> 120

Singularity Reactor’s death now causes a gravitational implosion.

Slow and Disarm damage will now always apply to shields as damage with a 1/3 modifier (same behaviour as EMP).

Overdrive Allocation

• Mexes now have a fixed return of about 90 metal to the constructor. The time it takes to do this depends on the mex income.
• Halved the payback factor for energy structures. The builder of the structure already receives some benefit through the public OD pool as well.
• Maximum privatized OD share from 50% to 33%. This means that in a team with only one person producing energy they would get 33% of the OD as well as their public share.

UI

• The latest attempt at an economy panel is now the default. This one should be the last.
• Fixed selections window text clipping and image alignment.
• Space+click menu contains more information.
• Teal team colour is now reserved for the player’s own team, meaning spectators will not see one of the teams in that colour.
• Added a RoI Tracker widget to track teammmates’ return of economy investment, disabled by default.
• The widths of elements in Deluxe Player List are now configurable by character/digit count.
• Power-user widgets now have read access to additional parameters for overdrive, ground damage and floating and can skip the “Hide engine messages” filter (see next post for details).

Bugfixes

• Fixed Dante consistently interrupting its salvo.
• Fixed Doomsday Machine and Stardust being blocked by trees and wreckage (will now attempt to blast through them).
• Fixed unit rank display.
• Fixed spectators being able to control team 0’s retreat havens.
• Fixed spectators being able to place pre-game queues.
• Fixed Zenith meteors disappearing on impact.
• Fixed outdated Sumo and Urchin helptexts.
• Fixed Solar Collectors taking damage during construction being force-opened.
• Fixed a Jump UI crash when attempting to give a jump order to a mixed jumper/non-jumper selection.
• Fixed queuing jump orders for Jumpy Factory.
• Fixed Ctrl+MMB orbit rotation in COFC not working at high zoom-in levels.
• Fixed extra drone construction that happened when attempting to spawn a drone when all slots were taken.

Time for the last tournament of the year is approaching! It will start at 09:00 UTC on 2014-12-20 and registration will be open until December 19 23:59 UTC. The current time in UTC can be seen at http://utctime.org/.

Players of all skill levels are welcome and encouraged to participate.

Tournament rules:
– Teams contain two different human players
– Single elimination
– First map of each round is predetermined, the following maps will be selected by the loser of the previous game from the featured 1v1 or team game map pool.
– Finals are best of 5, all other matches including the bronze match are best of 3.

The tournament bracket will be seeded according to players’ teams Elo after registration closes. The players in the teams coming first, second and third will receive 75, 50 and 25 kudos respectively. Please note that it is likely kudos prizes will not be given out for monthly tournament results next year. Make sure to use this last chance!

The first map of each round will be:
Round 1: Intersection_v3
Round 2: Altair_crossing_v3
Round 3: Desert Needle Small 3.1
Bronze match: Into Battle_v3
Finals: Eye_Of_Horus_v2

Check out the bracket at http://zk.challonge.com/zkdec2014

Sign up in the comments!

December’s first and Parzival‘s second tourney is to be held this Saturday, at 17:00 UTC, in 2v2 Swiss format.

You can read up on the rules and sign up here.

Reef arguably had the worst model in ZK and in this version it has finally received a remodel. This comes with some gameplay changes and an impressive hanger construction system. RyMarq continues to refine sea balance and Hovercraft have received some small nerfs after a long period of feedback. Sumo now has gravity guns because it was insufficiently awesome.

In other news; work on the lobby is ongoing and benchmarks have helped create some improvements to performance on the new engine. We may be ready for another community benchmark in a few weeks in order to test the effectiveness of the changes.

Gameplay

Reef:

• New model by lordmuffe and Anarchid.
• Has less airpads, 9 -> 2.
• Has more hangers to build 4 drones simultaneously.

Mace less maneuverable:

• Range: 355 -> 345
• 25% less acceleration.
• 35% less brake rate.
• 35% less turn rate.

Dagger:

• Range: 220 -> 205

Sumo:

• Disruptor beams replaced with standard Newton gravity guns.

Surfboard:

• HP: 1100 -> 1200
• Speed: 3 -> 3.3
• Turn rate: 540 -> 590

Enforcer:

• Turn rate: 210 -> 230
• Weapon homing: 2000 -> 2100

Serpent:

• Turn rate: 220 -> 250.

Sonar Station is now long-ranged and heavier:

• Cost: 40 -> 450
• LoS: 500 -> 640
• Sonar: 600 -> 1800
• HP: 300 -> 800
• Upkeep: 0.5 -> 1.5

* Shield link transfer and Puppy goo obey Slow.
* Removed sonar from Scalpel and Advanced Radar Tower.
* Slasher is skirmished by artillery.
* Slasher has skirmish behaviour (disabled by default).

UI

* Minimap fades on zoomout with COFC.
* Added neutral unit display toggle for show all commands.
* Map Extension default texture brightness lowered, makes identifying what the extension is easier.
* Removed the redundant “unit unlocks” modoption.
* Widgets now have access to a few more unit parameters; jump, dynamic damage, morph, capture, area cloak, unit rank, teleporters, goo, missile flight time, explosion spawning, being a drone, combat slowdown, shield gun, speed boost.
* Context Menu now shows LoS.
* Improved the COFC bounds issues, especially for low FOV
* Deluxe player list: Elo rounding 50 -> 10. Fixed padding.
* Configuration of the Fog of War colour is now more sensible.
* Selection menu opacity is now configurable.
* Added a new potential resource display widget; Chili Economy Panel v2.

Bugfixes

* Skuttle, Strider Hub and Caretaker now leave wreckage.
* Fixed jumping units’ wreckage receiving excessive momentum on death.
* Fixed LUPS thrusters bug.
* Fixed context menu crash.

Misc

* Plopped factories and commanders make a teleporting sound.
* Metalmap fix for RustyDelta_Final.