Zero-K technically has "space" combat. This is true of any game where units can end up high in the sky, and where being very high up has any mechanical meaning. In our case, extreme height makes units immune to weapon fire from below. Even missiles with cylindrical range have a fuel limit that gives them a maximum reach. As a result, advances in space travel tend to be patched out, which is notable because we generally err on the side of keeping creative special tactics in the game. But over time, the "Zero-K cannot into space" rule has emerged as a result of space travel being so non-interactive. Viewing space alongside the ground also causes interface issues. Complete Annihilation saw our only fully intentional foray into space. This was the original Owl, a spy satellite (probably) added by CarRepairer. [quote]This stealthy orb can serve as a spotter for your artillery or spy on an opponent's base. It uses a lot of energy to stay in the air but is safe from nearly all units. Vulnerable to advanced fighter planes and long range missile towers.[/quote]It flew 5x higher than the highest aircraft (Nimbus), moved slower than the slowest ground unit (Jugglenaut), and had a tiny 300 elmo sight range. It cost 300 metal at a Core Gunship Plant and, as per the description, could only be shot down by the heaviest ground-based anti-air and air superiority fighters. In other words, this unit only interacted with Artemis and the missile-based Raptor equivalent of the day.
Owl did not last, and became the namesake of the term "To Owl" something. It was nerfed to the point of uselessness because the main balance designers didn't have the heart to remove it, but could see how troublesome it would be if it were at all common. If the enemy had a Plane Factory, then it is just dead, but without access to planes it required very expensive anti-air to dislodge. The hard-counters were too hard and too expensive, while there were zero soft counters. So it was soft-removed, and did not survive the transition to Zero-K. The reception of Owl set the pattern of subsequent space exploration, and the lack of direct support fostered creativity. People would have to repurpose units to achieve their space dreams, with the main culprits being the gravity shenanigans of Newton, Lobster, and Placeholder. Each of these units has been patched to curtail space travel, although Newton has received the most attention, as the oldest of the three.
Newton is a turret that uses gravity guns to attract or repel targets. Units are allowed to aim and fire at anything, provided there is some reason they would want to, so Newton can target allied units. People quickly realised that Newtons could fire units across the map, with terraformed ramps to help aim and angle the shots. These Newton Cannons were the first form of "space" travel, yet they still exist today, which seems at odds with the injunctions above. What makes the current uses of Newton "legitimate", and what else had to be patched out? Space is a problem when it dominates entire parts of the game, with little or no counterplay. Newton cannons sometimes win games, but they are hardly a source of cheap, unblockable, death from above. Most Newton cannons launch jumpjet units, but these can be seen as they float down, and shot down in the sky or intercepted. It is a fine back-pocket strategy, but can be countered without too much more investment than it costs. It is also quite important that the units barely go to space, i.e., they can be seen at a comfortable zoom level. The worst cases of space travel let units fly so high that the map is merely a tiny square in the distance.
The first dominant Newton cannon strategy was due to Skuttle, which is a troublesome unit that can cloak, jump, and explode for massive damage. The first issue (mentioned last year) was that it used to be able to jump from space to float down, cloaked, onto the enemy base. The only theoretical counter was to hover gunships above everything important, and station overwhelming firepower nearby to kill the Skuttle in the brief proximity decloak window. So we invented jumplegs to stop Skuttle jumping while mid-air. But this did not stop people raining cloaked death from above. The next issue with Skuttle turned out to be a broader issue with gunships. A gunship can be pushed by Newtons, but cannot crash, which makes it great for safe space travel. A transport with a Skuttle could be shot high into the sky, beyond the range of anti-air, and flown over the enemy base. Then the Skuttle could be dropped onto important targets below, cloaking on the way down. This prompted a few changes. The first was a general nerf to gravity guns such that only 25% of the vertical component of their force applies to gunships. The second was a targeted nerf for transports, namely that they accelerate downwards towards their desired height faster (a buff in any other situation), and they give units a small random push when dropped, to remove the precision of orbital drops.
Gunships can cause issues without the help of Skuttle. After high-flying gunships were blocked, people began experimenting with horizontal "space". Newton cannons can be designed to shoot gunships sideways off the map, beyond the range of ground anti-air. This let transports and Krows sneak around to the back of the enemy base without having to penetrate front line defenses. The tactic has far more counterplay than orbital Skuttle, but by this point out-of-bounds tactics were established as an exception to the usual protection of creativity. So we put a stop to gunship slingshots by pushing aircraft back into the map, with a buffer zone of 400 elmos, which is approximately the turning circle of the most cumbersome aircraft. Planes could be launched off the map too, and the buffer even had to be halved with the more recent addition of Odin. Another borderline, yet still ultimately removed, tactic was the Flea launcher. Fleas are cheap and very light, which makes them cheap to launch with a basic Newton cannon. The issue here was that sight ranges are cylindrical, or 2D, by default, which made Flea launchers dominate other lategame scouting options. We were happy with the spread and effectiveness of other, more nuanced, forms of scouting, so the Flea launcher was nerfed. The nerf involved dynamically reducing the sight range of launched units, to approximate a form of 3D sight range (the actual shape is a cone twice as high as the sight range). Players are still free to scout by shooting Fleas at fast, low, trajectories, but this requires a much more expensive Newton cannon.
What of Lobster and Placeholder? Both units used to be able to create self-powering floating space stations, arbitrarily high in the sky. Lobster achieved this by continually firing a large enough clump of Lobsters, since it used to be able to shoot while mid-air. Placeholder can target allies, and tends to lift its target slightly above the ground. Enough Placeholders can form a self-sustaining clump that gradually drifts upwards. The major issue here is that disappearing into the sky makes defeat almost impossible, and Zero-K prides itself on having a better draw situation than Chess. Sky bases are also good places to give ballistic weapons a height advantage, although this is a cool ability, provided it does not become unreasonable. Space Lobstervator and Placestation were removed on the same day, shortly after Lobster's defeat-avoiding ability was showcased. The fix in both cases was to make the abilities of Placeholder and Lobster decay with height. Lobster cannot boost anything more than 400 elmos above the height of the target terrain, and since then lost the ability to fire while mid-air. A Placeholder shot exploding more than 1200 elmos above the ground has no effect. This happens to be the altitude of the old Owl, although the ramp down to 1200 means that in practice the mass will float around 1000 elmos up. So units can still be maintained quite high in the sky, just not arbitrarily high.
The last, and silliest, way to go to space is due to Dirtbag. The idea is as follows: Dirtbags drop a bit of terrain when they die, so why not stack 500 or so on a single position, then detonate them? The result is a very thin, very tall, spike. This became a problem when people figured out how to glitch Crabs up this spike, which let them shoot at absurd ranges due to their ballistic trajectory. This sort of thing is a neat creative way to create instant spires for Crabs, but the spires could be so high that the rest of the map becomes a few distant pixels. We patched this out by limiting the steepness of terrain created by Dirtbags. Such spires are now limited to 800 elmos, which is still significant, but do not turn Crabs into full-map artillery. That is it for ways to go to space, apart from simple bugs, such as a bug that let players store impulse and release it all at once. That is also about it for creative tactics that have been patched out, since by and large we try to keep them in, with Newton cannons being a prime example. Space is the main exception, since it is too far removed from the terrain and interactions that make Zero-K great. The same can be said of underground units, but since that was only an ability for one chicken, I would not expect an article on mobile burrowing any time soon. Index of Cold Takes

Strategy games sometimes offer extra ways to detect the enemy, beyond the standard line of sight, with radar being a classic example found in Zero-K. Radar reveals quite a bit about player interaction, but we will also have to flesh out vision itself, since the two systems complement each other. Both systems use the same underlying mechanics, which were covered last time, although the details are not strictly necessary for understanding how the mechanics are used.
Radar is great because it achieves a lot in the design, yet is mechanically just a variant of sight. In Zero-K radar differs from sight in one way: it only reveals the approximate position of units, nothing else. The type of unit is not even revealed, although this information is remembered for previously scouted "radar dots" (to avoid fighting the UI). In terms of how the mechanics are used, the two systems could not be more different: everything has a sight range, while only a few specialist units and structures have radar. Radar can also "see" a lot further, with most radar ranges being around five times that of the average sight range. The main purpose of radar is to allow for direct interaction outside combat. By direct interaction I mean interaction with a tight feedback loop, where you and an opponent can see and respond to each other in real time. Sight alone limits players to relatively short-range interactions, which are likely to turn into fights. Various forms of dedicated scouting can allow for more out-of-combat interaction, but that risks making information too cheap. Radar admits a middle ground, one where you can respond to large scale army movements, without being overwhelmed by information or cheapening the fog of war. Of course, if you know where the enemy is, then you should be able to shoot at them (again, to avoid fighting the UI), but to expand upon the implications of then we need to take a detour into sight.
The details of sight boil down to the following question: how far should units be able to see? Our answer is, for the most part, "Just a bit further than they can shoot". This is a deliberate reversal of the situation in many other games inspired by Total Annihilation, but the idea was that it is more satisfying to fight visible units than radar dots. A more thorough justification is that vision on the enemy is tactically powerful, and that scout units mostly gate such vision behind fiddliness rather than any significant tactical or strategic decision making. This stems from the fact that scouts are cheap, can see further than the average combat unit can fire, and are fast enough for death to be a Fighting The UI problem. Mixing scouts into an army is often just optimal, since it lets everything see their targets, but giving this job to scouts mostly amounts to giving them an extra way to be stupid. So to skip this whole rigmarole, we just let units see as far as they can shoot. A notable exception to the above is artillery. Scouting targets for artillery is satisfying, as the scout has to be sent somewhere dangerous. To support this dynamic, artillery cannot see as far as it can shoot. In fact, we have a general rule that units can see 10% further than they can shoot, to a maximum of 660 range, which is is around the range of a Heavy Laser Turret. However, there are many exceptions to this rule. Some are due to technical necessity, such as the granularity of the vision grid requiring that particularly short-ranged units see a bit further. Other exceptions are deliberate design choices, such as the uniquely long sight ranges of Radar Towers, Owl, and Toad. Others, well, unarmed structures have a sight range of 273 for reasons lost to time, and the sight range of unarmed constructors appears to be essentially random.
By this point artillery seems to have two conflicting constraints: that we want to encourage spotting, and that units should be able to fire at radar dots. The solution, revealed paragraphs ago, is to make radar only reveal the approximate position of units. This is implemented via "radar wobble" - a drifting random offset of the radar dot relative to the unit's true position. Wobble discourages pot shots at dots, since they are likely to miss, so spotters have to venture out to gain vision. Radar wobble brings its own problems though, which we try to mitigate with various UI features. The main one is that radar wobble is removed for scouted structures, since structures cannot move. There is also a state toggle to tell particularly precise artillery to avoid firing at wobbly dots, although it is not enabled by default, for reasons that would require a whole extra article. What about saturation artillery? A few artillery units are far too inaccurate to care about radar wobble. In this case, shooting at radar dots is a feature. An astute reader may recall a principle that comes up in the design of cloaking, namely that it is frustrating to spend all your time telling unit to shoot at unseen enemies that you know to be present. The same issue arises with area-denial artillery, and is mostly solved by shooting at radar dots, because doing so simulates players making guesses about likely targets just outside their vision. Situations without radar, or with jammed radar, can counter this ability, but this is acceptable because the goal is to make units handle themselves in the majority of cases, just enough to alleviate the repetitiveness of always handling saturation artillery targeting manually.
By this point, it is clear that radar is central to Zero-K, and we encourage this further by making radar very cheap. Not only do commanders have free onboard radar, but the basic Radar Tower almost free. This is a great example of balancing relative to how common a unit should be, rather than by absolute usefulness. Radar Towers also perform double duty as artillery spotters, with an unusually large sight range, which incentivises players to place flimsy structures in outrageous locations, which makes for great target practice. Advanced Radar Towers have even more sight, and 250% the radar range to boot, but cost a considerable amount of metal. This makes Advanced Radar much less common, but their utility lies in viewing the enemy base, which we are less interested in encouraging. Advanced Radar also used to reduce radar wobble, however this reduces the importance of spotting for artillery, so the ability was removed. The most incongruent part of radar is the fact that radar dots have team colour. This leaks information to the enemy, yet team games rest on the idea that ownership within a team has no mechanical importance. This means that, if you know that the orange opponent has heavy tanks, then a slow orange dot is more likely to be a tank. Supreme Commander solves this with grey unidentified radar dots, and there was talk of adding such a thing to Zero-K, but I have been coming around to the idea that perhaps team colours on radar dots improves the game. At least in casual team games.
Team coloured radar dots efficiently tell your team how many opponents are present on each front, and it adds to the community feel to see who you are up against. It helps distinguish the aircraft of enemy air players, although in this case the vertical position of the dot is often sufficient. The principled stance against coloured radar dots would also advocate for removing enemy team colour entirely, turning the opposing team into an anonymous blob, which certainly feels bad for a somewhat social game. In any case, I would like to experiment with truly unidentified radar dots, but I fear the effect might be too far-reaching to measure in a short-term test. In any case, such tests will have to be postponed until the engine supports such a feature. Index of Cold Takes

Welcome back to Cold Takes for 2025. The goal this year is to post one every three weeks, but to not fight for space with patch notes. Just about every real time strategy game has fog of war. Without it, you could watch the enemy base and start countering anything they do. This dynamic can work - there are whole genres built around perfect information - but it seems ill-suited for games with incremental real-time decisions that take time to pay off. But before delving into the role of vision, it is worth taking a look at how it works.
Fog of war can be dead simple. All you need to do is draw a circle around each unit and structure, then declare everything within a circle to be visible. Plenty of games stop there, but I suspect the majority take the extra step of considering terraces and trees. A terrace sight system has clearly defined levels of terrain, with units on lower levels unable to see onto higher ones, and games often block sight with opaque static features, such as trees and buildings. And such simplicity works great, up until the simulationists get involved. Games of the TA lineage are more simulationist than your Starcrafts or Command and Conquers. That is, they care more about mechanics that match reality, or at least seem to match reality. Zero-K often downplays this aspect, but it is still a bit too simulationist to use a terrace-and-tree sight system. For one thing, we care too much about terrain to approximate the expressiveness of hills and mountains by a series of plateaus with ramps between them. This makes the simulationist route attractive, but it is hard to know where to stop without clear guidance from other design goals.
Before thinking about those goals, it is instructive to consider what fully realistic sight looks like. Such a system would involve drawing straight lines between the "eye" of each unit, and everything the unit might want to see. If the line has a clear unobstructed path, then the unit can see the target, and we can even draw lines to the edges of units to see them when they poke around corners. This is a general technique called ray tracing, and it reflects how light behaves in the real world. But would such a system work for Zero-K, what does the rest of the design have to say about it? To cut the chase, we will appeal to fight your opponent, not the UI. In short, the interface is your friend, it should not get in the way, and it should tell you everything you need to know about your forces. This includes information about what your forces can or cannot see. An interface that fulfils this promise has to be clear and simple, which is a problem for realistic sight. The crux of the matter is that you need to know what you don't know. Any old sight visualisation can tell you what you know you know. If you can see a giant robot peeking over a cliff, then the UI just has to draw the giant robot. But how do you rule out the existence of a sneaky medium-sized robot? The UI has to tell you whether you would be able to see one if it were present. The standard solution - spooky black fog - is a great representation of the unknown, but it breaks if you try to do too much with it. Fog is inherently fuzzy, so how is it going to tell you that you could spot a giant robot, but not a medium-sized one? Shifts in opacity are hard to make out to any degree of accuracy, and clearer cues such as contouring or colour coding would be quite busy. So Zero-K straight-up avoids having the visibility of a unit depend on its size.
Here is the trick to line of sight, used by many games: units never actually see each other, they only ever see parts of the terrain. The line of sight shader blurs this fact, but vision works on a grid, with the visibility of a square determined by ray traces to the middle of each square. The ray starts at the "eye" of each unit, so tall units are better at seeing over terrain, while the end hovers a fixed distance above the terrain (or the surface of the ocean). Units are visible if they are on visible terrain, which makes the potential visibility of enemy units very easy to tell the player. Zero-K sight is still a bit janky compared to simple terrace-and-tree. Smooth terrain makes it difficult to precisely predict what one of your own units will be able to see when it reaches a given location, but this is significantly better than not even knowing what it can see once it arrives. To ameliorate this further we tune the heights of the hover ray trace targets to be fairly forgiving, although in theory they represent the height of an "average" unit. So there you have it, sight detection in Zero-K is based on whether a unit of "average" height would be visible, because doing it this way allows for simple binary fog of war to tell the player everything they need to know. Except, this is only actually true for ground units. It is time to talk about the exceptions.
Projectiles, explosions, and non-landed aircraft ignore the usual sight rules, instead, using a circular sight system called air line of sight. This is a parallel sight system, but we make sure the air line of sight range of everything matches their standard line of sight range. The system is a nod to realism, since it lets you see planes without being able to see the terrain underneath. On the visuals side, it is nice to have projectiles not blip out of vision when they are fired over a ravine. Why not add air line of sight for particular giant robots? Consistency and clear thresholds; a plane is clearly a plane, but there is no clear cutoff between giant and non-giant robot. Except, that is not quite true either, as giant robots can often be seen by air line of sight. In fact, anything that has fired a weapon in the last few seconds is visible to air line of sight. This is sensible, since muzzle flares are hard to hide, but it also solves a few edge cases. Without this mechanic you would be able to position turrets behind tall cliffs, making them very hard to target, but still able to shoot at approaching units. As a bonus, a giant robot that spots your base over the edge of a cliff is likely to start shooting at you, so it is almost as if it were visible to air line of sight to begin with.
Sometimes I wonder how many people know about air line of sight. It is one of those mechanics that smooths things over in the background, making the game look good and make sense. Being unaware of it seems fine, and there is a cost to making it more visible. I know from experience that varying the opacity of fog does not look great, because air line of sight used to be drawn as a lighter form of fog. The engine default for air line of sight is 150% of sight range, but we override it to match sight range so that we can avoid needing to draw it (see above). I picked a map with good contrast for these images, but in general it is hard to make half-opacity fog of war sufficiently visible on all maps. Zero-K also has radar and sonar, but they are nothing new to someone who understands line of sight. Radar is just a form of sight, ray tracing to the same points hovering above the terrain, while sonar is a simple circular system. It turns out the engine developers did not want to implement a full acoustic wave propagation and detection system. That is it for sight. Why units would want to see each other will have to wait, but at least there is now a record of how. Index of Cold Takes

This patch has a slew of balance changes and a new game mode. Shieldball and Phoenix are the focus of the nerfs, but there are many more tweaks that ended up touching most of the factories. Some more notable ones are Bulkhead being worse at short range, and some cost reductions for the surface-only short-ranged ships. The new game mode is called Tech-K, and it is a look at what Zero-K might have looked like with tech levels. There are infinite tech levels, because anything else would be arbitrary, with each level doubling the cost of units while slightly-more-than-doubling their power. Feedback during testing ranged from "Works surprisingly well" to "Not what Zero-K is about", so give it a try. It could be fun to run it as a tournament or other event. Tech-K can be enabled in any game type via the Experimental tab in battle options, and more information is available on the wiki. The mode was partially created to motivate improvements to the dynamic unit attributes system, so there are API changes and extensions that mods will want to take into account.

Balance

• Shield radius 80 -> 90

• Speed 45 -> 42 elmo/s
• Reload time 0.133s -> 0.166s
• Shield drain per shot 75 -> 78

• Cost 600 -> 700

• Cost 230 -> 240
• Turret turn rate 180 -> 120 degrees/s
• Reduced targeting priority against gunships.

• Rearm time 13s -> 12s

• Cost 460 -> 520
• Rearm time 13s -> 18s

• Speed 212 -> 250 elmo/s

• Sight range 600 -> 660

• Build range 180 -> 210

• Range 280 -> 290

• Speed 96 -> 97.5 elmo/s

• Damage 375 -> 475

• Speed 108 -> 106.5 elmo/s

• Turn rate 82 -> 74 degrees/s

• Cost 65 -> 55

• Cost 240 -> 220

• Repair buildpower 2.5 -> 10

• Cost 220 -> 210

• Grid range 60 -> 63

Features

• Added the Tech-K game mode.
• Manually shared units now clear their command queues.
• Chainsaw no longer avoids small targets by default.
• Players can now define multiple albums adding war, peace, victory and defeat folders to sounds/music/(thanks Helwor).
• Increased the maximum configurable fade height for healthbars (thanks amnykon).
• Added an option to reduce the selection rank of rearming units (thanks amnykon).
• Added build range to space+click stats.
• Added units to buildpower in space+click stats.

Fixes

• Fixed playerlist lag indicator (thanks Shaman).
• Workaround jumping units sometimes moonwalking when they land.
• Fixed minimap mex drawing when flipping the camera (thanks christianweinz)
• Mitigate a playerlist error caused by the host of an AI leaving (thanks Shaman).
• Fixed non-default music album selection (thanks Helwor).
• Fixed Nimbus gun flare (thanks XNTEABDSC).
• Fixed Bulkhead sometimes being unable to deploy when slowed (thanks XNTEABDSC).
• Fixed the default position of replay controls on large monitors (thanks ThingsWillCalmUp).
• Fixed bad socket error handling in the lobby (thanks saurtron).

Modding

• Attributes are now added via Attributes.AddEffect(unitID, key, effect) and removed by GG.Attributes.RemoveEffect(unitID, key).
• Effects are tables of attribute types. See the list here.
• Many more types of attribute can be modified, and many edge cases have been cleaned up.
• Spring.Utilities.GetUnitCost now takes GG.att_CostMult into account.
• The old method involved editing extra attributes into the unit_attributes gadget. The old attribute are still collated by this gadget, but all the effects are applied by the new system.

• Added gadget:UnitCreatedByMechanic(unitID, parentID, mechanic, extraData). Other gadgets should do gadgetHandler:NotifyUnitCreatedByMechanic(same signature) shortly after creating a unit. This allows gadgets to handle things like the difference between morph unit creation, and carrier drones.
• Added LuaRules/Configs/ModCommands as a unified place for mods to define commands, rather than via editing tables across a handful of files. See Tech Up for an example.
• Model scale, centre offset, and tint now survive /luarules reload.
• Fixed bugs with Lance and Crab model rescaling.
• The error caused by invalid reload times is now more informative.
• The command-counting use of Spring.GetCommandQueue(unitID, 0) is going to be removed. Use Spring.GetUnitCommandCount(unitID) instead.

Zero-K pushes the limit of team games in RTS, supporting up to 16 players per side - something that sounds impossible. Your average RTS caps out at 4v4, with a few going as high as 6v6. In Zero-K players regularly play games three times this size, and while such large games are not for everyone, I suggest trying them out just for the experience. There is a real sense of scale in a game with so many players, taking so many actions, in which you can only really zoom in and understand a relatively small part. But it is surprising that such games work at all, so in this article we are going to dive into the design that makes them possible.
The weirdest part of the story is that, for the most part, support for large team games came about accidentally. The rest of the Zero-K design philosophy just happens to inherently let teams have a large number of players. From time to time we added features aimed at large games, but most of the work is done by principles covered in previous cold takes. We could have deliberately removed large teams, but the attempt would warp the rest of the design, and it is not like they are hurting other game modes. Small games, down to 1v1 and 2v2, work fine, and the way I see it, supporting more game modes is good. The bulk of the work is done by Fight your opponent, not the UI, plus the realisation that players coordinate with their team via the user interface. Essentially, cooperation within a team should be free of artificial limitations or hoops to jump through, in much the same way as any other action in the game. Zero-K contains simple examples of cooperation UI, such as the nuke indicator that tells players where an allied nuke is expected to land, but not fighting the UI goes deeper than that.
Zero-K is the game that designs the stupidity out of units and uses designs weapons using unattainable ideals, and we take the same approach to cooperation. Like units, players have abilities that influence the game, and we consider it a failure if the mechanics of the game force players down the route of boring and arduous use of the UI. So while most games would happily add a nuke indicator, few would go the extra step of excising fundamentally anti-cooperative mechanics to the extent that we do. We inherited key player abilities, namely the ability to freely share units and resources, from Total Annihilation. This is a fairly standard function for RTS games, but the implications are far-reaching, and Zero-K has a penchant for taking ideas to the extreme and biting the resulting bullets. The issue with sharing is that sharing UIs are invariably some of the worst found in RTS. They tend to resemble big spreadsheets of fiddly buttons or sliders, which is not what we want in an RTS. So contact with this UI should be minimised, which relegates sharing to an almost "theoretical" ability, one that the game is designed around, but which players should rarely manually invoke. This generalises to the principle of the irrelevance of ownership: [quote]Nothing in the mechanics of the game world is permitted to depend on the details of ownership within a team, because then players would be incentivised to touch the unit sharing UI to gain an advantage.[/quote] Few games use this principle, since it is automatically violated by player-specific upgrades. Even within the TA-lineage, Supreme Commander lets units of the same player shoot through each other, but not through allies. Even Zero-K violates the principle, since unidentified radar dots reveal team colour, which can let the enemy guess the identity of unseen units. This is something I have wanted to be able to turn off, but it requires engine work, and to walk back the extremism a bit, dot colour may well improve the game. The principle of irrelevance of ownership sounds restrictive, but it is also quite freeing, and we were not going to add global upgrades regardless. A key implication of the principle is that resource income can be distributed arbitrarily within a team, without any theoretical impact on in-world game balance. In practise this let us fiddle with income sharing to "simulate" cooperation among strangers on the internet, which is part of what allows such large team games to work. For example, income from metal extractors is shared evenly between everyone on the team, which was called communism mode in early Complete Annihilation. Communism evolved alongside the rest of the game, and quickly became integrated with overdrive, since the overdrive formula benefits from shared resources.
The theoretical justification for communism is that securing territory is a shared effort, and much harder than merely building a metal extractor, so the team shares the benefit. The practical justification was more important at the time though, since we all had experience with people arguing over metal spots in Balanced Annihilation, which could escalate to teamkilling. A secondary effect in BA was the limited map pool; players tended to play a small set of maps, where everyone understood the meta of spot ownership, in part to lessen the potential for arguments over resources. It is worth mentioning that I snuck an assumption into communism: that players want to cooperate. What if people want to keep their income to themselves? This gets at the core of the design: we assume that the team wants to cooperate, teamwork is the default. If players want to argue and destroy each other's buildings, then they might not find support for these actions in the UI. There is also a bit of a paradox here, as anyone who has played a team game with a range of skill levels can tell you: who owns what is actually very important. But instead of trying to judge the worth of each player, we opted to make a game where part of the skill is in being a good teammate, rather than rolling over the weaker members on your team as you grow your own personal empire. Communism solved the metal spot arguments and opened up the map pool, but it suffered from the free rider problem. Some players would skip building metal extractors all together, hoping that their teammates would pick up the slack. Full communism was also not great at incentivising overdrive, even when it would significantly benefit the team. So we added rebates. For example, metal extractors refund 80% of their cost to the player(s) that built them, over a few minutes, in the form of a slightly increased share of the income. Energy structures offer a similar refund of 60% from their increased metal overdrive income. The numbers have been tweaked over the years, since a higher payback percentage can lead to perceptions of selfishness by energy spammers. We even recently introduced payback for the first few Antinukes built by a team, as a social way to nerf nukes in low-cooperation situations.
Shared metal extractors also helped with the "Tabula Problem" caused by some rotationally symmetric maps. Tabula has high terrain on its North and South, that is easier to take and defend from the North-West and South-East respectively. Before communism, Tabula was typically won by the team that invaded the weak low ground from the strong high groud, before their opponent did the same on the other side of the map. The low ground just lacked the metal income required to mount a defense, without players manually sharing units or metal extractors. Tabula continued to play a bit like this since communism, the low ground still has poor terrain, but the extra income makes the defense fairer and more interesting. Income sharing alone is not enough to make large games fun. For that we need the rest of Zero-K, primarily its unit and faction design. Our large number of faction-like factories lets players carve out a distinct role and set of units within the team, and factory plop lets everyone build a factory without "wasting" resources. There was concern that the recent addition of factory plates would destroy this sense of having a role within a team, but the fear has not come to pass. If anything they seem to have improved team games by letting players take on a role they are not sure of, with the safety of being able to switch out of it cheaply.
The coordination feature that came closest to breaking the game was shared control mode, where players own and control the same set of units. The campaign has shared control, but it can also be enabled in team games via an invite system. The danger with shared unit control is that it can be powerful, but it is also quite annoying when someone else accidentally uses "your" units. This is the dreaded trade-off, power at the cost of fighting the UI, but the mode is barely used in public games. Tournament and campaign games are different, since people can communicate enough to avoid the downsides, and in these contexts it is a great feature. As with many automation-type features, it is worth asking whether cooperation has been automated away. I think we are fine on this front; teammates send messages, flank, and otherwise help each other out. People still share the occasional unit to augment fronts that really need it. Mostly we have removed the excess UI interactions, and set a baseline level of cooperation so players can expand as much as they want without worrying about "stealing" metal spots. Perhaps the greatest benefit is too the map pool, as any map can be played with any number of players, for a really wide range of experiences. This marks the end of the first series of cold takes. Twenty is a nice round number and it is time for a short break. Look forward to the next series starting in January next year. Index of Cold Takes

This week's cold take is early, unusual, and short because Ludum Dare is this weekend. Ludum Dare is a game jam: an event where individuals or teams of people make games in a short period of time. They tend to run for a few days to a whole week, depending on the jam, and teams are given a short prompt or "theme" to incorporate into the game. There are many game jams these days, I just do Ludum Dare for the schedule and because I like rating other peoples' at the end. Everyone with an interest in making games should give game jams a go. The actual event only takes a weekend, although a bit of upfront investment to find an appropriate engine goes a long way. The barrier to entry is fairly low, and I even think game jams are a great way to learn certain aspects of programming and design. A jam is a microcosm of project management, where choices made at the start of a project tend to come back to bite you at the end. This process is particularly instructive when there are only three days between the choices and their consequences. And by the end, you get a game out of it.
I especially recommend game jams to anyone working on a long-term game, such as Zero-K, because speedrunning the whole process can clarify your progress on the longer game. It also lets you experiment with new ideas and flex your creativity, which probably helps prevent feature creep. Besides, making games is a matter of practise, and as the Go master said to the game designer: "make your first fifty games quickly". I got involved in game jams through the Spring Cabal, a group of Spring developers that used Spring in several Ludum Dares between 2015 and 2018. The release pages for most of them were lost in the LD site rework, but builds can still be found in the organisation's GitHub repositories. Dominic (aka Shadowfury333) was also kind enough to document most of them on his YouTube channel.

• LD 32 - Gravitas
• LD 33 Warmup - Hunted
• LD 33 - Area 17
• LD 34 - FLove
• LD 35 - Parts Needed
• LD 43 - To The Last Drop

• Seeds of Civilisation is a bit like asteroids, but with planets and space police.
• Vivere Computatrum is a take on simple colony management, and even has a goal.
• Regular Railway is the most puzzle-like: Pipe Dream but Trains.
• Warp Trash Flotilla is absolute mayhem.
• Crocodial is about spinning a wheel of spells as fast as possible, but you are the wheel.
• Compact Domain is another puzzle game, this time pretending to be a city builder.
• Euclid's Elementals can be hard to get into, but the payoff is you get to feel like a wizard.
• To The Last Drop lets you be an "evil" wizard, and shows off what you can do with Spring.

The diversification of bombers over the past year has been great, but it also highlighted some problems with a few mobile anti-air units. This patch tries to carefully resolve these deficiencies, and to shift things slightly away from Phoenix and towards Magpie. The two bombers finally agree on rearm time. This update coincides with an AI update and the addition of around two dozen new maps. Try them out, perhaps against the new AI, and give feedback on your favourites. If instead you prefer 1v1, check out Fight Club later today (Saturday) at 1900 UTC, and on every first and third Saturday for the rest of the year.

Balance

• Cost 130 -> 120

• Damage 260 -> 270

• Range 800 -> 820
• Missile spends 16.7% less time flying straight up.

• Rearm time 15s -> 13s

• Rearm time 10s -> 13s

Maps

• Wanderlust 2.1
• Rustcrown Canyon 1.3
• The Rock Jungle 2.1
• Crystallized Plains 1.1
• Hide and Seek 2.2.3
• Hellas Basin v1.4
• Flats and Forests v2.2
• Aurelia v4
• Moonshine Run v1.0.1
• The Tartar Steppe v1.1
• Pinch Point 1.03
• Canis River v1.4
• Salt Reef 1.1
• Ancient Bastion Remake 0.5
• World In Flames v1.8
• Kings Assault v1.3
• Great Divide V1
• Sinkhole Network v1.1
• Scylla and Charybdis 1.1
• Tau12
• Crescent_Bay_V2
• Jade Empress 1.41
• Esker Creek 1.3
• Hades Ponds 1.1
• Isidis crack 1.1
• Feast of Hades 1.0.1
• Hera Planum 0.91
• The Ditch Remake 0.5

Features

• Updated the skirmish AI.
• Experiment with new lighting on some energy structures.
• Added focal depth hotkeys for the depth of field widget.
• Added team selection to the cheat sheet (top left with cheats enabled).
• The startbox editor can now apply box transforms and save them directly to files.

Fixes

• The skirmish AI no longer crashes if it somehow gains and then loses a factory plate.
• Minor fixes for French translations.
• Fixed some tips for planet Blackmire.
• Fix tiny movement stutter when line-moving over wreckage.
• Fix a graphs bug that would sometimes overcount army losses.
• Fix spec team change when selecting unseen enemies.
• Fix a rare teleport bug
• Fix (ie remove) fog effect on a few maps.
• Fixed structures with move commands giving up on them before finishing their morph.

Zero-K maps set surprisingly few hard restrictions on unit movement. Instead, many of them mainly use terrain to influence the value of locations, as well as how easy they are to reach and defend. There is also plenty of space for huge cliffs and vast seas, but what really sets our terrain apart is the subtle effect of each hill and valley. This is before even considering how explosions and terraforming change the terrain during the game. Terraforming elevates terrain, but it requires a strong foundation of important and nuanced terrain to make any sense. So for now it is time to look at how Zero-K uses terrain.
Maps can be decomposed into three main parts.

• Shape: How high the terrain is at each point on the map.
• Texture: The colour, reflectivity, and graphical roughness painted onto the terrain.
• Resources: The metal spots, geothermal vents, and reclaimable rocks and trees.

Cloaking is awesome. At least, some types of cloaking. Depending on who you ask. Let me start again. Cloaking is polarising. Some love it, some hate it, and being on the receiving end of an invisible strike can feel pretty terrible. To complicate things further, the specific mechanics of cloaking vary wildly between games. Sometimes cloaked units are near-immune to damage and can fight with impunity, while cloaking in another game might be dispelled by the slightest touch. But where it gets really interesting is how a single set of cloaking mechanics can be used in different ways, within the same game. Zero-K has a lot of cloaking, which equates to a lot of ways for it to go wrong. In addition to personal cloak, cloaking fields were added early in Complete Annihilation as a way to differentiate Arm from Core, and we have been nerfing them ever since. Over time, we started thinking about cloaking in terms of two distinct use cases.

• Tactical Cloak: The enemy knows where your units are, but has trouble engaging them.
• Strategic Cloak: The sneaky sort of cloak, where the enemy is unaware that you have units in the area.

it is finally time to talk about weapons, starting with how they are fired. The weapon design space is huge, thanks to projectile physics, and we put it to good use. But such freedom is a double-edged sword, since much of the full design space contains frustrating or incomprehensible mechanics. There are interesting games in this space, but Zero-K is first and foremost a strategy game, which means it needs to be stable and predictable enough to reward planning. So, to combat the full freedom of physics, we installed a few guard rails around weapon design; a loose set of rules that, if followed, limit how badly a weapon can break the game. There are rules for many aspects of weapon design, but those around aiming and firing are some of the most important. The rules consider the following three aspects of our design goals.

• Intelligence - Aiming and firing are just abilities, and units should be good at using their abilities.
• Predictability - Players should be able to learn how units aim and what causes them to fire.
• Verisimilitude - Weapons should feel like they can be used in ways that make sense within the observable fiction of the game world, rather than just being a bundle of arbitrary mechanics.

• Change where the weapon is aiming.
• Fire the weapon.

Verisimilitude: That's ridiculous! The missile can demonstrably hit units beyond its arbitrary "range". Fencer should be firing in more situations, at everything that it can physically hit. Intelligence: Hmm... sounds exploitable, we don't want to fire at things barely within physical range. Borderline targets could (and should) just step back and let the missile run out of fuel before impact. Predictability: We could just only let missiles fire at structures, not units. Those are sure to stay still. Verisimilitude: That's super arbitrary! Intelligence: How about we use the target's max speed, accounting for slow and EMP, hill climbing, facing, angular velocity.... Performance: uhh... Predictability: And how is anyone meant to know which combination of factors will or will not result in a Fencer firing a missile?

• Imagine the ideal form of the weapon, packed full of verisimilitude. A Glaive holds a gun in its hands. It can actuate its arms in any direction and pull the trigger at any time. It is a real robot.
• Next consider the proper use of the weapon. Should Glaives spend their time shooting wildly into the sky? Probably not, unless an enemy is flying overhead.
• Then impose as many behavioural or mechanical limitations as you like, provided that you only cull the stupid or pointless ways that the ideal weapon might have been used. These should help the unit avoid being stupid. Shooting into the sky is almost always pointless, so Glaives only do it when there is an enemy flying overhead.
• Finally, add a small set of standard limitations, such as range rings. Consistency is key here, since the goal is predictability, and arbitrary limitations hurt verisimilitude the most.

• Weapons that can only shoot at aicraft. Units with these weapons have "Anti-Air" in their two-word role description.
• All other weapons. These weapons shoot at aircraft if they have a decent chance of hitting. Melee weapons can and do hit planes, when the wielder is thrown high enough.

This week we're back to Sprung's series on unit improvement mechanics missing from Zero-K. After Mighty Morphing, it's time to tackle veterancy. This one still exists, well, sort of. Already in Zero-K's oldest ancestor, Total Annihilation, units could gain veterancy via kills. The TA interface was fairly cryptic as to what exactly this meant: it provided no further information beyond adding the single word "Veteran" when mousing over units with at least 5 kills. Those of us who spent days shelling enemy bases with Big Berthas often noticed the improved accuracy. With a lot of effort it was possible to discover a minor increase in health as well. Frontline combat units were out of luck though, with veterancy being quite hard to obtain and having barely noticeable effects.
Zero-K is not constrained by the TA engine though, it runs on Spring (now Recoil), which expanded upon veterancy from early in its development. So by the time Complete Annihilation came around, veterancy did three things:

• Increase the health of the unit.
• Reduce the reload time of the unit's weapons.
• Reduce the inaccuracy of the unit's weapons.

Revenant was brought back from the dead just over a year ago, but it lurked in the background until the appearance of combat engineers. Killing these newly-popular commanders in two shots let people really explore what Revenant could do, and most of it looked fine, so the Revenant nerfs focus on early game power. One thing that ended up not being fine was Revenant spires, so its missiles now explode after a short time rather than fall to the ground. With Revenant moving towards a healthy place, it is time to revive another tricky unit. Scallop is the candidate this time and it is a dangerous unit to buff, so the changes are aimed squarely at it being a better riot. It now 2-shots individual Ducks and can stand toe-to-toe with similar riots. On paper it is still worse than Reaver, but knowing Scallop it will break the game anyway, so look forward to it. The last release was a bit too recent for many features to roll in. A notable fix is for aircraft wing trails, and a notable feature is the random selection of custom music albums, as well as the ability to play mp3s.

Balance

• Range 264 -> 285
• Aim speed increased by 50%
• Reload time 0.8s -> 0.96s
• Damage 23*9 -> 28*9
• Maximum burst increased by 21.7%, DPS increased by 0.7%
• Spray angle increased by 20%
• Area of effect 32 -> 64
• Reduced area of effect damage falloff

• Speed 135 -> 130.5
• Reload 9s -> 10s
• Damage 220 -> 210
• Missile burn time 5s -> 2.8s
• Missiles blow up when they run out of fuel

Features

• Increased Buoy and Bulkhead auto-float depth to match their requirements.
• Added overkill prevention for Scallop shotgun.
• Renamed Scallop Flechette to Heavy Shotgun to match other shotguns.
• Added an option to choose music albums randomly (thanks Helwor).
• Custom music tracks now can now be mp3s.
• Made Trinity reload time match its animation.
• Tweakdef errors now appear in the infolog.
• Applied forced 60 fps vsync for ATI compatibility, and renamed the vsync option.

Fixes

• Fixed giant Tank Foundry model radius, which could disrupt jumping units.
• Fixed aircraft wing trail emit points shifting around incorrectly based on unit velocity.
• Fixed spectator panel positions when they are loaded while not in full view mode (thanks Helwor).
• Fixed set AI start position game options.
• Fixed final value alignment in graphs that go negative.
• A few campaign fixes (A unit pic, Solar, and Brutal on Old Kam, thanks Mach565).

Every game has to start somehow, and strategy games start with players acting before they know what their opponent is up to. I call this phase the setup, and in it, players tend to build up their base and deploy some forces, all without any outside interference. To be clear, the setup is everything that happens before contact with the enemy, or in other words, before you can make decisions in response to your opponent. Under this definition, giving player a free scout can make the setup relatively short. Games with more of an economic focus tend to have relatively long buildup periods, but mitigate it with the aforementioned scout. Total Annihilation-style games are on the more economic end of the spectrum, but lack this mitigating factor. They start players with a lone slow commander, which often has to build up some economy before it can afford to make a factory and a scout. This makes for a long setup, which was disliked by the Complete Annihilation developers, so we set out to shorten it. Before looking at solutions, we should first dig into what we were trying to solve, and ideally tease out the problematic bits. We also need to know how to measure success, which motivates the following question: just how long is the setup in any given game? The answer is a bit fuzzy due to the nature of "outside interference". Consider a 1v1 in modern Zero-K, technically you could plop an Airplane Plant and immediately send a Swift across the map, all in about 20 seconds. Both sides now have a good idea of what the other is up to, so they have left the setup.
But hold up, what about when a Swift doesn't fly over your base 20 seconds into the game? In this case, your opponent did not plop air and yeet a Swift, which is technically information. So, have you left the setup? No, because I want to get more out of this definition than that. The key is that Airplane Plant into Swift reveal is a terrible opening, so almost nothing is learnt by not observing it. In general, negative observations should be treated in terms of degrees of certainty. Seeing nothing for 30 seconds is fairly normal, so reveals essentially nothing. Seeing nothing for three minutes is much more concerning, and might warrant some blind anti-cheese measures. Likewise, if people invariably put a turret in a particular position, then scouting that turret means nothing. In short, the setup is about as long as it takes to narrow down the other side's behaviour from "they could be doing almost anything". As for what people spend this phase doing, it boils down to the following.

• Deciding what they want to have at the end of the setup.
• Executing that decision as optimally as possible.

Likho has a new model by brunocb, giving it a proper singularity bomb. This update also has many fixes and a few balance changes. Some of the fixes are due to an engine update, such as a decades-old bug that caused reverse-built units to sometimes try to slide off the map. On the balance front, Bulkhead now has a bit more range than Stinger, Duck is a bit better, and Disco Rave Party spins faster.

Balance

• Speed 90 -> 93 elmo/s (no longer matches Bandit)
• Missile range 235 -> 232 (matches Bandit)
• Missile turn rate increased by 16% so it reliably hits Dart.

• Stays deployed while mid-air
• Range 600 -> 640
• Sight range 660 -> 700

• Health 680 -> 660

• Base turn rate increased by 25%
• Maximum fire rate increased by 6.7%
• Spin-up rate increased by 18%
• Increased minimum turn rate by 25%
• Can turn without spinning down so far, as a result of the above.

Features

• Added new Likho model (thanks brunocb).
• Added optional radar colour in LOS and fog stripes, under Settings/Interface/Map/Radar Color.
• Added animation-stun to most striders. They no longer return to a netural stance while stunned.
• Guarding units can now be automatically set to lower selection rank under Settings/Interface/Selection/Filtering (thanks Amnykon).
• Improved overdrive payback tooltip.
• Added metal shared, energy excesses, and energy shared graphs.
• Mods can now include their own modoptions files.
• Reordering factory queues no longer forgets Alt-insert.
• Cloaked units no longer try to shoot at unseen mexes.
• Free-For-All games are now not counted for ranking immediately, rather than being discounted when the server restarts (thanks Shaman).

Fixes

• Fixed rally points of factories with structures right in front of them.
• Fixed overlob prevention vs. jumpjets.
• Fixed a shadow bug caused by UI scaling.
• Slowed Detriment can no longer be stolen by transports.
• Fixed defense range circles for ballistic projectiles (thanks Helwor).
• Fixed Djinn deployment when told to stop while stopping.
• Fixed being able to click twice to start a skirmish game.
• Fixed reverse-built nanoframes sometimes sliding off the map (thanks marcushutchings).
• Fixed queuing dense line moves (recent engine bug, thanks marcushutchings).
• Fixed structure ground decals persisting after death (recent engine bug, thanks marcushutchings).
• Fixed an issue with action registering (thanks Helwor).
• Made UnitLeftRadar more consistent (thanks Helwor).
• Terraform construction can no longer catch fire.
• East-facing morphs no longer result in West-facing units.
• Fixed lingering noammo icon on wreck tooltips.

Zero-K has nukes. This should come as no surprise, since otherwise the genre police would revoke our sci-fi license. Even a few fantasy games have nukes, but wherever they are found, they all work basically the same way:

• Climb to the upper reaches of the tech tree.
• Build a nuclear missile silo.
• Build a nuclear missile.
• Launch it at the enemy base.
• The enemy is now down one base.

• Multiple types of nukes and anti-nuke, possibly varying slightly between factions.
• Mobile anti-nukes, commonly found on capital ships or as vulnerable utility vehicles.
• Stockpileable anti-nuke missiles that must be produced before the anti-nuke can fire.

• Dirtbag
• Jack
• Raven
• Athena
• Funnelweb

Players coming from other strategy games often find classic conventions broken and common systems missing. The three focused on improving units - morphing, veterancy, and research - are largely absent from ZK. Today is the first of a series of guest articles by Sprung that will talk about them. First, let's talk about the unit improvement system that still exists vestigially in ZK: morphing. Morphing is often called upgrading, but I won't use that term to avoid confusion since it can also mean research. Very generally, morphing lets you improve or modify a single unit, as opposed to upgrading all existing and future units of that type, like research does. This can be as little as paying three seconds of time to deploy a Terran siege tank; or as drastic as changing two Protoss Templar into an Archon. Of course you can have morphing as a major part of faction identity and aesthetics, but let's talk gameplay. When to have morph instead of just letting players build things normally?
An easy answer is that sometimes you already decided not to let players build more of the unit. In ZK you only get one commander, and there's a limited number of geothermal spots. Accordingly, they are the only two cases where morphing is just a straightforward upgrade. The astute reader may have noticed that metal spots are also a limited resource, and indeed mexes used to morph into Moho mines for a short period before overdrive was instated. Here morphing lets you decide to get more mileage while working within the limit. A nice example from another game would be the Chinese Overlord tank from C&C Generals. It has a soft limit by virtue of simply being too expensive to field many of them, but you can add extra weaponry on top for even more firepower. Allocating skill points for WC3 heroes can also be thought of as a form of morphing, and it's no accident that allocating modules for ZK commanders looks so similar.
The flip side of a unit limit is flexibility. RTS is, among other things, about making the correct units to adjust to a quickly changing battlefield. The flexibility of morphing lets players continue making choices about their unit composition in face of a limit. Warcraft heroes, Generals Overlords, and ZK Commanders all present multiple morph choices for this reason. Similarly, in Dawn of War earlygame, forcing the player to choose between Flamers or Bolters for their first tactical marine squad, blindly, would not be good design. Morphing some marines to equip weapons lets players make that choice later, while still having a squad on the field to capture points, scout, and do other tasks that don't yet involve picking a specific unit composition. Then, when you scout Orks? Brother, get the Flamer. The Heavy Flamer. Back to ZK though, since we don't really put any pressure on the player in the form of unit limits, there is barely any need for the flexibility. Ramping economy means that even the most expensive units can become somewhat affordable over time, and by that point you have all the flexibility in the world anyway. Would it hurt to have a little extra? The problem with flexibility is that it creates a sort of Schrdinger's unit that occupies multiple spots in design space at once, to be resolved into one of them when observing the enemy. The danger ZK sees here is that a monospammed unit could become a composition thanks to its own flexible morphs. Everything becomes much simpler when you can do Just-In-Time reinforcements of the correct type without having to do lame nerd stuff like "logistics" or "foresight". No travel time from the factory. Less risk of overbuilding a variant. Of course these can be adjusted via other stats, but that would all come with a reduction in flexibility.
What about "inflexible" morphs, where there isn't really a composition to talk about and you just want to add more stats? Say, why doesn't a factory have a +10 Buildpower upgrade? It would be more atomic than a Caretaker, who can also do other tasks such as repair! Or, if I want to upgrade Felon battery recharge rate, I have to either get Convicts and have to pay for buildpower I didn't sign up for, or Thugs with inefficient guns thrown in. Meanwhile, a +15 shield regeneration morph would be atomic while remaining a choice! Part of the answer is that units are physical entities in the world and thus there is more interaction between them. In particular, Convict buildpower and Thug guns nudge the player into using them, which then cascades into the usual complexity of the game when the enemy has to respond in turn. The other part is emergence. Felon wasn't initially designed to work as a standalone unit and get "batteries" added; rather, it was designed to itself be added to a shieldball as a way to spend charge. Batteries are a player discovery, if an extremely obvious one.
An interesting feature of morph is that it provides its own buildpower and can have different tech requirements, which then can be used to adjust the appeal of different options. If you require a unit to be built "normally" then it competes for infrastructure (buildpower, logistics) with other units that you may rather be building. Morphing is a way to avoid this, which makes the unit more attractive, or the usual infrastructure less attractive. To put this in concrete terms: say you want to encourage mobile cloakers, because cloaking is cool. If you require people to build them from a cloaky factory, then sometimes they'd rather build a different factory as a secondary, or if they already have a cloaky factory, they'd rather build a different cloakybot. Morph lets a unit be its own little temporary factory, and the elegance of this is that much like energy requirements, it touches just the infrastructure and not the unit itself. The morphs for mobile cloaker and shield, while originally created just as a way to let them redeploy, fall under this category. We try to avoid this type of morph outside of utility units since infrastructure exists for a reason, and while it is easy to manage it should not be obsoleted.
At the beginning I mentioned Siege Mode as an example of morph. In ZK, a handful of units - for example Crab, Fencer and Emissary - have a soft siege mode where standing still gives them some sort of benefit. They deploy so fast that not doing so would mostly be a matter of not having the APM, so rather than make the players fight the UI by spamming Deploy every time they want to move, the units deploy on their own. To let this happen, there is a deliberate large gap in unit design space where nothing has a deployment mode that would be long enough not to automate, yet short enough to make you miss the automation by being commonly desirable. On the other side of this gap we have Desolator, which can deploy into an armoured form, but it takes long enough to make it a rare decision that can afford to be manual. Thus, unit intelligence, or rather avoiding situations that would create unit stupidity, is what prevents sufficiently cheap morphs from existing. A final way morph can be used is to randomly change a unit into a completely different unit, apparently for no good reason. Why does Lurker morph from Hydralisk? The answer seems less to do with any explicit unit design, and more with how it just had to be crammed somewhere given there were no empty slots on Larva build GUI. Hydra was the least awkward place to put it. Surely ZK would not do something as silly as, say, let Knight morph into Crab without an extraordinarily good reason, right?
...right? But that is a topic for another week. Index of Cold Takes

This is a small patch that was released to fix the settings deployment bug. A few other things we were working on made it in too.

• Fixed a recently introduced issue that caused particular settings to be overridden on launch.
• Units far from the epicentre of a Shockley impact are now stunned sooner, to match the explosion visual. Which units end up stunned is unchanged.
• Added a cracked ground impact scar for Quake.
• Fixed inverted track stretching for, eg, Paladin.
• Moving a block in a factory production queue no longer re-applies the multiplicative key modifiers.
• Fixed the commander selector ending up off the edge of the screen on particular scaling settings when shifting from windowed mode.
• Simplified window resolution switching code to try to make it more reliable.
• Fixed sun and water settings overrides being too persistent between maps.
• Fixed the sun on Tempest.
• Fix thumbnail and minimap images for maps containing unusual characters.
• Fixed a bug caused by map searches finding no maps.
• Fixed the player name tags widget possibly being assigned incorrectly.
• Tweaked the draw order of name tags, health bars, and overhead icons.

Zero-K units are generally quite simple, with many of them designed around a single weapon or ability. The idea is that the complexity of an army should come from how it combines unit types, rather than having any individual unit be particularly complicated. I call this the principle of atomic unit design, because it characterises units as the building blocks of armies, and simple units are, in a sense, indivisible. Simplicity is a good enough goal on its own, but atomic unit design also has an important role in fighting monospam. Monospam, i.e. spamming a single unit type, can be a contentious issue in RTS. Many players consider such a strategy "unfair" or "cheap", and games are often designed to discourage it, including Zero-K. This makes Zero-K a bit unusual within the Total Annihilation lineage, since TA had a bit of a reputation for monospam, and many successors dealt with it by culling the "excess" units. Zero-K went the other way, and found ways to balance a large unit roster without the resulting monospam. But before we get to that, we need to pin down what makes monospam powerful in the first place.
Monospam derives a lot of its power from being easy to manage. The logistics are simple. Just set your factory to repeat-build Scorchers, spam Ctrl+Z to keep them all selected, then repeatedly hit your opponent with them. The Scorchers move at the same speed and want to fight the same types of battles. But mix in more unit types, and it becomes much more complicated. Even maintaining the right mix is a challenge, since different units often die at different rates, and reinforcements take time to reach the fight. A mixed army that loses most of one type has to wait for the build ratios to be adjusted, while monospam can rely on a constant stream of appropriate reinforcements. To skew things further, mixed armies are as bad as their weakest unit across many attributes. For example, mixed armies move at the speed of their slowest unit, and are as vulnerable to attrition as their most fragile. Consider an army of tanky Minotaurs and glass cannon Ogres. Such an army is either going to lose a lot of Ogres, or it is going to avoid taking fights that Minotaurs would weather without hesitation. In many situations, half an army wants to fight while the other half wants to run away. None of this is an issue for an army of a single unit type, with uniform strengths and weaknesses. Essentially, most units synergise best with themselves. So, why do we want to discourage monospam? In short, because there is no crunch in easy decisions, and Zero-K is largely about deciding what to build and how to use it. This is much more involved when dealing with multiple unit types, both on your side and in the enemy army. And, as mentioned previously, the goal is mixed armies of combat units. Mixing battle tanks and anti-air is fine, but the tactical goals for such an army are often quite simple, depending on the type of enemy that is coming at you.
Now that we know what makes monospam powerful, how can we avoid it? The first principle is that mixed armies are 'allowed' to be much more powerful than monospam. My gut says 1.5-2x as powerful, but there is no definite value. The principle is great for guiding balance discussion though. For example, say we are thinking about how Rover might counter Fencer. Scorcher is a decent suggestion, but then some theorycrafter objects that Scorcher is solved by mixing in a few Rippers. At this point, we can invoke the principle, and say that Scorcher losing to a mix of units is fine. Forcing your opponent into a mixed army is half the battle, with the other half being to wait for them to succumb to the extra complexity. So we are free to focus on whether pure Scorcher beats pure Fencer. Likewise, the second principle for avoiding monospam is that everything needs a hardcounter. It is not enough for a unit to have bad matchups, it needs some absolutely terrible ones. This because straight-up cost-for-cost fights fail to take logistic and self-synergistic advantages into account, and such fights in a vacuum are an important part of judging counter relationships. So any unit that manages to not lose too badly against anything is a prime candidate for monospam. This is not to say that hardcounters have to feature prominently in how the game plays, they just have to be lurking in the background, threatening players with annihilation if they invest too much into one unit type.
This is where atomic unit design comes into play. A unit that does one thing well tends to have weaknesses everywhere else, so must rely on other units to cover those weaknesses. Atomic unit design is not a strict rule though, as it often fights the Rule of Cool. This is a hard fight, especially when big units are concerned, but we still try to keep the abilities of complicated units pointed towards the same purpose. Sea has struggled the most with the Rule of Cool, since ships want to have multiple weapons, and the disparate weapons of Siren are a remaining nod in that direction. The worst offender was Envoy, which used to have a depth charge that acted as inbuilt riot support against anything on or below the water. Factory abilities further dilute the idea of atomic unit design. If you count things like personal shields, jumpjets, and spider legs as abilities, then a lot of units have two abilities; one weapon and one utility ability appropriate to their factory. However, this extra complexity is well worth it, as having an ability in common strengthens the feel of factories as cohesive factions. The same could be said of, say, Zerg Burrow. Besides, a "faction ability", one shared by many units, has a much lower complexity penalty than an ability that arbitrarily exists for a single unit. Atomic unit design also applies to structures. For example, Complete Annihilation had a few types of metal extractor, including an armed metal extractor. This structure was not atomic since it had two distinct abilities, metal extraction and a laser turret, so it was removed in favour of the more interesting method of defending a metal extractor: just make a Lotus. This confers all the subtlety inherent in atomic units, A turret might be built forwards to better protect the mex, or in a more defensive position and use the mex as cover. A weak raiding party might have to choose between killing the turret or the extractor. Armed metal extractors provide none of these decisions, approaching one is the same every time, and a fight with one only has two possible outcomes.
Commanders, being the opposite of simple, are a constant thorn in the side of atomic unit design. They are upgraded a bit like a composition of units, with each module adding a single weapon or ability, but fight like a single unit. A high level commander is akin to a one-unit monospam, with all the logistic simplicity and self-synergy, so it needs strong counters. This is hard to square with the feel of commanders, but that deserves its own whole article. By now you might be wondering, is this all just Quant's Rule? Yes and no, I would say that the ideas are complementary. Atomic unit design is more of a goal than a method, while Quant's Rule is not so strict about how many strengths a unit can have. Quant's Rule guides us through day-to-day balance changes, while atomic unit design is more holistic. Waffling aside, it is mostly just useful to look at things from multiple directions, and it should not be surprising that many of the principles behind Zero-K lead to the same place. So stay tuned for the third I can't believe it's not Quant's Rule article, where I expect to cover Moonwells and the nature of greed. Index of Cold Takes

Most player actions in real time strategy boil down to giving commands. After all, these are games about telling units what to do. But there is a subtle difference between RTS and most other genres, in that players tend to act indirectly, by assigning goals to units. The game world itself is only ever affected by units as they try to achieve their goals. This takes a certain level of unit intelligence, and the stakes are high. The fantasy of commanding an army can be shattered by a single unit wandering off in a weird direction. Issuing commands also has to feel good, since it is your primary way of interacting with the game. This implies that common commands should be small and simple, like short words. In fact, commands can be thought of as the language used by players to tell their units what to do. This analogy turns unit control into a communication problem; how can the player communicate their grand plans to the fragile bundles of code that stand-in for the brains of their units? The units of Zero-K are relatively smart. Here are some examples.

• Units in almost all games know how to close range with the enemy, but Zero-K units also know how to step backwards when the enemy gets uncomfortably close.
• They can be told to hold their fire against cheap targets, and know how to stop short of firing enough missiles to kill something twice over.
• They can be told to repair or reclaim everything in an area, rather than requiring that the player point out each target individually.
• Some can be told to avoid wasting their precious reload time on wobbly radar dots, while others can be told to fire in the general direction of distant targets.
• Units even know how to spread themselves out along a line.

• Bulkhead and Fencer pack up quickly for similar reasons.
• Units cannot hurt themselves with area of effect damage, as firing safely has tradeoffs.
• Vehicles are very bad at moving in reverse, so that they do not seriously consider doing it.

The most experimental change of this patch gives Engineer Commanders the ability to build units out in the field. The goal is to make it more than the base building chassis. A much more normal change accentuates the speed of Strike Commanders by reducing the speed of the competing Recon Commander. Planes have been tweaked slightly, with the most notable change being Sparrow stealing Owl's radar jammer. Disco Rave Party has some ludicrous buffs since the newish spin-up requirement had a greater than expected impact on its power relative to Zenith. For all its weird experiments, this patch is more about tech than balance. The engine has been updated with a new decal rendering system that performs better and will let us do more with explosion scars. Unit selections are drawn much faster and many of their edge cases have been solved. A new ambient occlusion shader gives the everything a bit more sense of depth. This is on top of a bunch of fixes and polish that built up over the last few months. No Cold Take this week, because there was a lot to do for the patch.

Balance

• Use the Copy Factory Blueprint command on a friendly functional factory to select a unit.
• The unit can be switched during the game.
• A unit is automatically selected from the plopped factory.
• Set your plop selection under Settings/Unit Behaviour/Default States/Misc/Blueprint.

• Speed 43.5 -> 40.5 elmos/s
• Jump reload time 20 -> 22/22/20/20/18/16 s
• Jump speed 180 -> 135/135/142.5/150/157.5/165 elmos/s

• Reload time 1.83 -> 1.73s

• Removed 700 range radar jammer.

• Now has a 540 range radar jammer.
• Increased manoeuvrability slightly to make coverage more consistent.

• Damage per volley 1000 -> 1400

• Rearm time 8s -> 10s
• One-shot by Hacksaw as per above

• Health 1200 -> 1600

• Increased spin cap by 50%, increasing its peak rate of fire from 1 to 1.5 shots/s.
• The spin bar has been rescaled so 66% is the old maximum.
• Spin up to 66% is unchanged. It still takes 90s to reach its old spin.
• Spin from 66% to 100% takes 40s.
• Aiming is quite slow above 66%, so a fixed target is required to exceed the old spin cap.

• Accuracy improved by 20%
• Red Killer damage 3000 -> 3500 (matches Eos)
• Orange Roaster damage 300 -> 250
• Orange Roaster duration 15s -> 8s
• Orange Roaster AoE radius 320 -> 400 (larger than static shields)
• Yellow Slammer damage 800 -> 1000
• Green Stamper damage 400 -> 600
• Green Stamper smooth radius 240 -> 300
• Green Stamper smooths more per hit
• Violet Slugger damage 450 -> 500
• Violet Slugger slow damage 4500 -> 5000

• The external map border starts 400 elmos away, down from 800 elmos.
• The border is softer, so brushing it is less drastic.

Graphics

• Added new explosion crater scars to use the engine's new decal system. The new scars have better performance, stick to the ground properly, and have new features such as glow and variation by weapon type.
• Added a screen space ambient occlusion widget. Basically, it adds subtle shading to put shadows in every nook and cranny. The widget is enabled for hardware that supports deferred rendering, which is most hardware.
• Improved the walk animations of the Engineer and Recon Commanders.
• Disco Rave Party has firing dust and complains every time it tries to turn.
• Improved the look of Ogre missile explosions.
• Fixed jittery Detriment launch smoke.
• Improved Detriment and Jugglenaut stomp effects.
• Made a few effects that were simulation-limited run at >30Hz if able.
• Reaver aims more smoothly.

Interface

• Updated selection circle rendering (thanks moreginger, and Beherith for the original shader). Selections look similar, but render much faster and resolve a few graphical edge cases suffered by the previous widget. Selection visuals can be configured under Settings/Interface/Selection/Default Selections.
• Jumpleg units retain jump commands while midair so they can jump as soon as they find the ground.
• Hermit auto skirmishes from slightly further away, making it better at dealing with Redback (thanks Mach565).
• Improved replay controls (thanks moreginger).
• Improved Athena and Newton selection volumes.
• Control groups now obey selection rank.
• Added an option for control groups to ignore some ranks.
• Autogroups can now be used for buildings.
• Autogroups no longer override manual groups set during production.
• Added incomplete French and Ukrainian translations.

Maps

• Added lava to Stronghold because it looks like it wants it.
• Added boxes for Ravaged Remake v1.2

Awards

• Spoils of War requires 3.3x more reclaim.
• Slow King requires 2x more slow damage.
• Peacemaker requires 4x more disarm damage.

Modding

• Add customParams.turn_accel_factor to control the angular inertia of units.
• Add Spring.Utilities.ConcatArrays to concatenate arrays.

Fixes

• Fixed split switching spectators to players in the split room.
• Fixed load order of replays so the most recent replays show up first.
• Fixed Bellicose Islands boxes (edge gap east).
• Fixed a rare issue with the external map grid (thanks AntlerForce).
• Fixed Newton launcher auto-jump sometimes causing jumps on the launch pad.
• Fixed Envoy overkill prevention.
• Fixed command insert not working with line formations.
• Fixed jumping units sometimes using their walk animation mid-air.
• Fixed shields sometimes not activating when rapidly thrown out of the water.
• Units no longer move to clear the "entrance" of plane factories when a plane is built.
• Units that start retreating are no longer automatically deselected for spectators.
• Fixed the select damaged/healthy hotkey presets.
• Fixed Fire Once leaving Set Target applied.
• Fixed Restore not working correctly on random maps and maps with changed water level.
• Fixed Sparrow's wingtip ribbons.
• Fixed teleportation sometimes leaving tracks.
• Fixed slow and Stardust heat rounding.
• Fixed missing ghosts for some campaign-only structures.
• Fixed orbital drops of ships trying to land ships on the sea floor.

Why does Zero-K have energy? The previous article stopped just short of asking this question, but it is well worth asking. Continuing on, everything costs equal amounts of metal and energy, so it would seem simple enough to drop energy from the equation. Doing so would certainly make the economy smoother. Look at the Command and Conquer franchise, it seems to do just fine with one resource. But hold on, that is not quite right, since C&C has another resource, power, which plays much the same role as energy in Zero-K. Both resources are used to control the pace of escalation in their respective games. Energy in Zero-K is like houses in Age of Empires, or Supply Depots in Starcraft. Fundamentally, these resources act as an expandable limit on some other aspect of the game, while being fairly unlimited themselves. The big difference is that houses limit the size of your army, while energy limits your rate of production. But we can call them both supply resources, and the effect of such a reason is to make it more expensive to build something for the first time, since infrastructure is needed to support it. Or to give it a more positive spin, supply provides a discount for rebuilding something up to its previous size. Many resources fit the supply mould once you see the pattern. Consuming supply is generally a good thing, as units would prefer to do so than cost an equivalent amount of resources. Consider the Supply Depots in Starcraft, which cost 100 minerals and produce 8 supply. Now consider two variations on the Marine, if we ignore things like build times and hard supply caps, which is more powerful?

• The original Marine that costs 50 minerals and 1 supply.
• A modified Marine that costs 25 minerals and 3 supply.

• Energy and metal can be stockpiled.
• Energy is supply for the rate of production, not for the total amount you can produce.

• Cloak is best early on, when there is space to move around.
• Tough expensive units rely on repair, but can be hard to answer without a large enough force.
• Personal shields do not drain energy because Shieldbots do not need to be worse early.

Zero-K uses a flow expenditure system, which is the system of choice for games of the Total Annihilation and Command and Conquer lineages. However, we break from the rest of the TA-like games by paying particular attention to making the economy flow smoothly, in stark contrast to the unforgiving economies that tend to define the subgenre. This is because Zero-K is about fighting the enemy, not about micromanaging your base, and it also demonstrates how flow economies are not necessarily daunting.
A flow expenditure system works as follows:

• The player issues a construction order, and the construction begins.
• Resources are spent over the course of construction, such that a task which is XX% complete has consumed XX% of its cost.
• If you run out of resources, then construction rates are reduced to balance your income with your expenditure.
• When construction progress hits 100%, the construction is complete.

• The player issues a construction order.
• The order is blocked if the player has insufficient resources to pay the full cost of the unit or building.
• Otherwise, the cost is deducted from storage, and a timer starts.
• When the timer finishes, the construction is complete.

• Flow is a bit more complicated than upfront payment, especially when it is not the expected default.
• Flow has a reputation for being a lot more complicated than upfront payment.
• Putting anything approaching optimality beyond the reach of most players is often the point.

Jumping is old, going back to the early days of Complete Annihilation, which predates Zero-K. It is also a very stable mechanic, to the point where a player from 15 years ago would not see the difference just from using it. In part this is due to its simplicity: just give a unit which can jump a jump order, and it will jump to the location once it is in range. But it is also because surprisingly little has changed. So why write an article about jumping? Well, while there have been a few changes, each one reveals a further refinement in the design of Zero-K. Even more revealing are the ways that jumping has deliberately stayed the same, in the face of potential changes. So here are four mini-articles on the how, what, where, and legs(?) of jumping.

Which units jump?

• Jumping is a sudden bursts of speed, while spiders can constantly dance around cliffs. These are distinct styles so should be in different factories to let the distinctiveness flourish.
• The combined factory would be too full, and too flexible, with all the units it could contain.
• It would be tricky to find new homes for all the non-jumpers and non-spiders that we wanted to keep from the rest of the bot factories.
• Having two factions that can play very hilly maps, or areas of maps, seems much better for diversity.
• Jugglenaut and Crab would fight over the role of the factory's signature unit.

Jump physics

What are jumplegs?

Where can units jump?

• Units cannot jump onto terrain that is too steep, since they would become stuck.
• Units can jump onto structures, however, the jump ends when they hit the structure.
• Units can jump into water, provided the terrain under the water is not too steep.
• Units cannot jump out of the water, except Detriment and commanders, since they are amphibious.

Distilling some principles

• Jank Escalation - Mechanics that are central to some core set of units need to be reliable, so players can trust them. More niche mechanics, or those that show up later in the game, can have more risk involved. So jumping is reliable while Lobster is not.
• Disciplined Physics - Physics is great, but is should not be used at the expense of other considerations. Zero-K does not set out to apply the maximum level of physical simulation so usability often takes precedence, as mentioned in Physics vs. Formulas.
• Surgical Excision - Interactions that would break the game should be removed without affecting related mechanics that have not yet been shown to be broken. Doing so would hinder the creative toolbox feel of the systems. So Pyro can still jump mid-air.
• Practical Verisimilitude - Units should feel like they are free to use their abilities in ways that make sense within the game world as it is presented. But units with no restrictions can be told to do very stupid things, so applications with low utility and a high risk of misuse are restricted. So units can jump into the sea, but not onto steep terrain.

Projectiles in Zero-K are physically simulated, meaning that shots fly through the air and collide with anything that gets in the way. This is standard for games inspired by Total Annihilation, but Zero-K leans into the mechanic hard, and embraces the implications. Not content with taking only one thing to the extreme, Zero-K also has a strong aversion to armour classes and damage bonuses. We completely avoid damage formulas of the type that let pikemen deal extra damage to horsemen, or tanks take reduced damage from rifles. The goal is to create a game world that is visceral and intuitive, something that is best engaged with as a physical space, rather than as an abstract collection of numbers. Complete Annihilation steadily removed the damage formulas inherited from Balanced Annihilation, and it looks like BAR might head the same way too. These were mostly things like commanders taking extra damage from turrets, and various EMP resistances. Bonuses like these suffer from being confusing and hard to remember, especially in a futuristic setting with no historical precedent or clear notion of infantry to guide intuition. Besides, completely removing damage bonuses is just so elegant, and making it work is a fun challenge. So we saw damage bonuses as a crutch, they solved problems in BA, but we could use physics to come up with better solutions.
To stack hubris on hubris, we also wanted the units of CA to have roles. Roles in the sense of pikemen beating horsemen, which is a bit more detailed than the roles found in Total Annihilation and most of its progeny. The roles in TA tend to be big "theatre of war" style designations, with roles like "bomber", "fighter", "scout" and "artillery". These roles are about dominating air, land or sea, or about projecting force from one domain to another. Artillery even fits this description if you consider bases and open ground to be different domains. In any case, all this theatre-on-theatre action left little room for diversity within a domain. This limits the options for combat within a domain, and in particular, land armies designed to fight other land armies could end up quite similar. The generic "army unit" would change as the game escalated, but at any given point the unit selection felt slim. Armies in Zero-K should consist of multiple unit types, and it should be possible to exploit deficiencies of enemy armies, all within the ground vs. ground game. So Zero-K is designed around roles. Fast light raiders beat ranged skirmisher, which beat slow beefy riots, which beat fragile raiders. Whether these are "hard counters" or not mostly depends on how you define "hard", but I think they are mostly soft counters. Units can often beat their counters with a slight numbers advantage and a good engagement. We still have the "theatre of war" style roles, since cross-domain interactions are great too, but these counters tend to be harder. Artillery is very good against static defense, and fighters are very good against bombers. How does Zero-K have such roles, all without any bonus damages? What makes the horseman-equivalent particularly bad against the pikeman-equivalent? In many cases, the answer is physics. Game physics, not real world physics, as the goal is depth rather than realism. Physics means the way units move around the world and interact with each other. It is things like unit positions, ranges and speeds, weapon area of effect damage, and how projectiles move. This is not new, every RTS has physics, and without it they would essentially be spreadsheets. Physics is fundamentally what gives players any reason to care where anything is. Every game with time, space, and simple rules linking them together has some sort of physics.
Not only is physics used by every RTS, it is often a large part of their design and balance. Horsemen counter archers because speed physically counters range, and any arrow-resistant armour is just icing on the cake. Zero-K just takes this a step further, eschewing damage modifiers and relying more on physics instead. This is a design constraint, a rule we have set for ourselves, because it means that units need to be physically different to have different roles. Spearmen can be designed to counter horsemen with physics alone, but it becomes tricky when it is time to implement a physically similar swordsmen. There is still plenty of freedom though, since quite a bit can be done with basic stats such as speed, health, damage and range. On top of this, Zero-K uses projectile physics to a much greater extent than the average RTS. In most games, units shoot projectiles as a form of delayed damage, and to animate the act of shooting. A standard projectile will hit its target, and nothing else, unless the target does something weird (such as dying or, in some cases, teleporting). In Zero-K, each projectile is an independent entity with its own physics. Plasma cannon shots arc through the air, lasers fire in straight lines, and missiles try to track their target. If a projectile hits something, anything, then it explodes and deals its damage. The visuals are used to convey all this, rather than just being an animation to show that a unit shot. Projectile physics increases the importance of units' speed and model size. Many longer ranged weapons shoot slow or inaccurate projectiles, which gives small fast units a chance to dodge while closing in. The slow rockets of most skirmishers are tuned to hit large assaults and riot units. In turn, the even slower projectiles of assaults and artillery units give most targets a chance to dodge, with the notable exception being turrets. There is space for soft counters here. Skirmishers can still beat fast raiders, but it is more a matter of creating a blizzard of rocket fire than having individual skirmishers fire at and hit individual raiders.
The whole "Physics vs. Formulas" dichotomy is about which parts of the game are more important. It is about whether a player choosing which unit to build thinks more about how it moves and shoots, or about damage formulas that determine what it counters. Zero-K is on the side of physics because it is cool, and it seems so intuitive. Players can see whether a projectile hits a unit and extrapolate the results for other projectiles and units of a similar speed. On the other hand, formulas are invisible and can be arbitrarily complex, taking into account armour, unit type, weapon type, and upgrades. Enough of a reliance on formulas can make the physics of a battle irrelevant, which is a shame because it is the part of the game that players can interact with moment-to-moment. Exploiting a formula is more down to unit choice than unit usage. Great mechanics have more than one purpose, and physics of Zero-K has many. A big one is to fight Lanchester's square law, which essentially says that an army of twice the size is four times as powerful. All games have to grapple with this law, that is, unless they are happy with players just rolling a big ball of units around the map. The trick to fighting Lanchester's square law is that the "square" only applies in ideal situations, so to fight it we just need to move away from the ideal. Most games do this via units of inconveniently short range, to limit what can fire, and area of effect damage, as it deals more damage to dense armies - armies which are dense because everything is trying to get into range. Zero-K makes use of these approaches, but uses projectile physics to add even more. Unguided projectiles act a bit like area of effect damage, because dense forces take more hits. Consider how a large force of Ronin will fire more rockets than a smaller force, but also runs into more rockets. At least, unless the Ronin spread out, but that risks moving some too far away to shoot. This all fights Lanchester's square law, but in a dynamic way where there are tradeoffs between dealing and taking damage. A small force can hold off a large one for a while if the larger army is unwilling to take any damage. It also makes attacking from multiple angles even better, since it reduces your own density. But perhaps the most notable effect of simulating projectiles comes from allied units blocking each other.
Projectiles hit units regardless of their allegiance, and going this far with projectile physics is rare even among games inspired by TA. It means that a dense blob of units loses most of its damage to blocked lines of fire. This further encourages armies to spread out in a line. Density and facing is very important, since a good flank can leave most of an army unable to return fire, even if they are in range. High density is not all bad though, since it concentrates power and prevent units being surrounded by enemy raiders, so there is a constant tradeoff. Still, Zero-K tends to have lower density armies than the average game, which encourage spread out battles across multiple fronts. The advantages of low density even play a central role in the escalation from cheaper to more expensive units. Projectiles have a lot of parameters, which in turn allows for a large range of weapon types. To cut down on complexity, most weapons fall into one of three categories.

• Plasma cannon that fly through the air in a ballistic arc.
• Unguided rockets or homing missiles. Some are fired directly at the target, while others arc.
• Lasers and lightning that instantly hit and require a direct line of sight to fire.

Games in the Total Annihilation lineage almost always have the same two resources, metal and energy. Metal is produced by building Metal Extractors on deposits scattered around the map, while energy comes from power generators that can be built, by and large, anywhere. The more important resource is metal, simply because metal deposits, or "spots", are rarer than free space to produce energy. Metal is the limiting factor, which causes players to expand out onto the map, capture territory, and interact with the enemy. A game without metal would mostly consist of players sitting in their base, building energy. Many TA style games also have Metal Makers, economic structures that drain large amounts of energy to produce a bit of metal. Supreme Commander calls these Mass Fabricators, but mass and metal are just two names for the same thing. These structures are less efficient than metal extractors, otherwise players would have no reason to leave their base, but they allow players to scale up their economy without capturing more metal spots. The only requirement is space and resources, which makes them useful later in the game when all the metal spots are taken and defended. The early developers of Zero-K liked the idea of a growing economy, but not how it was implemented with metal makers.
Metal makers were removed from Complete Annihilation, the precursor to Zero-K, just about as soon as it forked from Balanced Annihilation. For context, the average 8v8 BA team game had a few players on each team fighting over unclaimed territory, while the rest of the team sat in the back and mostly built metal makers. The back players players were not slacking, they were necessary, because games were rarely won before metal makers became a deciding factor. Any team that ignored metal makers risked being overwhelmed by the compounding income they would eventually provide. Eventually, once a team had enough metal makers, territory no longer mattered. This did not sit well with the CA developers, as they preferred fighting and expanding to sitting in the back. Metal makers are fundamentally a way to spend resources now to be more powerful in the future. Every RTS needs something like this, some way to invest in the future. Investment can take many forms, from simply increasing income, to upgrades that increase how much power you can squeeze out of your existing income. Investment is vital because it is a dimension of the strategic triangle, with the other two dimensions being aggression and defense. Without investment, there would be no way to outproduce and overwhelm an overly defensive opponent, and there would be nothing for aggressive play to punish. So we knew that CA needed some form of investment. We tried subsisting on advanced metal extractors, another feature of the TA lineage, which are expensive income upgrades for basic metal extractors. These were a bit finicky though, and the ability to invest hits a wall when there is nothing left to upgrade, so we came up with overdrive.
Just as an aside, I recall discussion on the Planetary Annihilation forum about whether it should have metal makers. It ended up without them, and without a replacement, which might be fine, although I lost track of PA so cannot say for sure. I suspect relying on advanced metal extractors works because there is a lot more frontier to defend when playing on a planet, and PA was fairly spammy with its metal spots. So upgrades can carry the investment game, just in CA's case the maps tended to not have a ludicrous number of metal spots. Anyway, CA went with overdrive, which may have been invented by Licho. I know he at least wrote the first version of the code. The basic idea is that every metal extractor (mex for short) should also be a metal maker, because that links metal makers to territory. A complete system can then be derived by noticing and fixing a few immediate issues.

• Metal spots can be high or low yield. It would be weird for a map of low yield metal spots to allow more metal maker income than a map with fewer spots and the same total income. So the "metal maker" income of a mex is a multiple of its spot yield, rather than a fixed amount.
• The standard "drain 70 energy for +1 metal" style metal maker has the same issues as advanced mexes. In particular, economic investment hits a sudden limit when enough energy is being produced to run all your mex-metal makers. So we made mexes able to turn a variable amount of energy into metal.
• A variable input metal maker cannot have a fixed conversion ration, otherwise players would only ever need one. This would defeat the whole purpose, so we made a mex's energy to metal conversion efficiency worsen at higher rates of energy use.

This update follows the Corsair buff from last month with a wider range of ship tweaks. The largest are that Siren and Envoy are much heavier, and that Reef drones capture units. This should give smaller ships time to shine and make the larger ships more impactful. Many ship hitboxes have been fixed to better match their size and shape, some visual sizes were tweaked, and ship wakes have been improved for look and consistency. Beyond the shipyard there is an experimental Ronin buff that makes it much faster when out of combat, as well as buffs for Grizzly and Magpie. There are a few more Cloakbots buffs, foreshadowed by the matchup chart in last week's Cold Take. In terms of features, the ingame menu can be brought up over the Victory/Defeat screen in the campaign, and Comet Catcher Redux/Remake has the classic corner start boxes for 1v1.

Balance

• Cost 600 -> 900 (+50%)
• Visually 20% larger
• Physically about 18% larger
• Health 5200 -> 7800 (+50%)
• Range 270 -> 290 elmos
• Now prepares to aim at units about to enter range.
• Reload time 1.7s -> 1.066s
• Damage 280 -> 175
• Explosion radius 95 -> 100 elmos

• Cost 850 -> 1200 (+41%)
• Visually 20% larger
• Physically about 9% larger
• Health 2000 -> 2600 (+30%)
• Turn rate reduced by 7%
• Burst 1 -> 2
• Reload time 5s -> 7.3s (damage output increased by 37%)

• Physically about 20% larger
• Each drone captures at 55% the rate of Dominatrix
• A drone reloads for 5 seconds after capture
• Capture control is transferred to the Reef
• Drone health 180 -> 260
• Drone altitude 150 -> 120 elmos
• Drone weapon range 360 -> 250 elmos
• Maximum drone count is still 8.

• Visually 10% smaller
• Physically 7% larger

• Visually 15% larger
• Physically 42% larger

• Now prepares to aim at units about to enter range.

• Health 380 -> 400
• Speed 69 -> 84 elmos/s
• Reload slowdown 80% -> 66% (55.2 -> 55.4 with the base speed buff)
• Fixed the reload animation so it shoots as soon as it reloads, except when firing backwards.
• It is now slowed for the full reload, rather than speeding up for a split second at the end.

• Regen rate 15 -> 20 hp/s
• Range 265 -> 270 elmos

• Cost 140 -> 130
• Cloak cost 0.1e/0.5e -> 0e
• Decloak radius 140 -> 125 elmos
• Speed 87 -> 93 elmos/s

• Cost 2000 -> 1900
• Health 8400 -> 8700
• Turn rate increased by 5%

• Rearm time 18s -> 15s

Features

• Improved the look and consistency of most ship wakes.
• The mission Victory/Defeat screen is now displayed behind the ingame menu.
• Added N to toggle hold fire to the default hotkeys.
• Added classic corner 1v1 boxes to Comet Catcher Redux/Remake.
• Improved lighting on Izki Channel v1.0 and MiniChess_v2.
• Incidental ability sounds (such as Djinn) are now controlled by the battle volume slider.
• Added support for modded Push/Pull weapons on units with On/Off toggles.

Fixes

• Shielded Chickens now float, since shields are disabled underwater.
• Fixed Reef looking peculiar when it tries to beach itself.
• Fixed visual jitter for capture and Lobster effect lines on moving units.
• Fixed initial queue mid-queue removal.
• Fixed Battle Value Tracker rounding for numbers less than 10.
• Tweak map extension grid thickness to avoid triggering a hardware bug with GoogleFrog's screen.
• Modded tint and glow now survives reloading lua.
• Fixed some issues with shutting down the depth of field shader.
• Update json library for a bit better performance.
• Fixed a very rare healthbar bug.
• Fixed an overhead icon bug.

How many factions are there in Zero-K? I get asked this from time to time and am never quite sure how to respond. It looks like a simple question with a simple numerical, like two or seven, but it is actually quite complex. The questioner may not stick around for the full answer, and I might not have the time to give one, so what am I to do? Finally I have the solution: just link this post. Strictly speaking, Zero-K has one faction, but in many ways it has somewhere around eight to eleven. Many parts of the game are designed to satisfy most of what people want from factions, and it is these desires that lead to questions such as "how many factions are there in Zero-K?". This is why I have such trouble just answering "one", as it gives the incorrect impression that we have nothing to offer people who like games with many factions. The faction-like entities of Zero-K are the eleven factories that produce most of the units in the game. Here is a quick overview of factories.

• There are eleven factories: three for walker robots, two for vehicles, one for spiders, two for amphibious units, two for aircraft, and one for ships.
• Your first factory is built for free, instantly.
• The land and sea factories have enough variety to see players through to at least the midgame.
• The air factories are designed to support the other factories.
• Factories are expensive enough to dissuade people from building extra factories until the midgame.
• Production rate is best boosted by assisting with constructors, using construction turrets, or adding cheap parallel production plates that depend on the main factory.

Many players mention Zero-K's powerful controls when asked what they love about the game. Some even joke that we spoilt other RTS for them. By now there are a few other games with parts of the Zero-K suite of controls, but I know of none that are driven by the same underlying principle. That principle is "Fight your opponent, not the UI (user interface)", and it goes back to the early days of Complete Annihilation. It is as central to Zero-K as Quant's Rule and was possibly coined by Saktoth, an early developer who liked to cite it. A player is "fighting the UI" when they have a clear idea of what they want their units to do, but the controls make it difficult to tell their units to do it. Zero-K tries to resolve this fight, this conflict between the player and UI. This involves eliminating busywork and making simple ideas require few clicks to implement. The principle is the antithesis of things like clicking every 12s to build a worker, or routine frenzies of active ability targeting. At its most extreme, the principle advocates for a direct telepathic link between the player and game, removing all intervening interfaces. Putting aside the current state of psychic technology, other design goals prevent us from going that far. The principle is not about removing micromanagement, as the 1v1 community can attest, Zero-K can be fast and frantic. Rather, it is about giving each click as much meaning as possible. Consider line move. Spreading units out along a line requires many clicks in most games, since numerous subgroups have to be selected and told where to go, while in Zero-K a line takes one click. If an "average line" takes 10 clicks to create, then each of the clicks has 1/10th the meaning of the one click required in Zero-K. The effect of this efficiency is not that Zero-K players click 10x less, but rather that they can be 10x more expressive with their unit control. This capacity feeds back into the rest of the game. We can expect more expressiveness from players, so the the game can be that much more nuanced as a result. Basically, Zero-K made surface-level micro easier and found more interesting micro underneath.
We need a more precise definition of UI to know exactly what is being fought. This involves drawing a distinction between the game world, the abilities units use to affect the world, and the UI itself.

• The game world is everything that describes the state of the game. This include the state of the terrain, the position of all the units and their statuses, and global things such as metal storage and innate income. Fundamentally, a game is some number of players trying to manipulate the game world into a state which counts as victory.
• An ability is any action that may be taken by a unit. Jumpjets and Swift boost are abilities, but so are moving, firing, and building. Players indirectly affect the game world by having their units use abilities. Characteristics such as health and sight range are part of the game world, not abilities, because they are innate.
• The UI shows the player a summary of what their units can see, and players use the UI to tell units to use abilities. The UI is their eyes, ears and hands, players never see or touch the game world directly. The UI also has its own states and can show them to the player. For example, command queues are not abilities or part of the game world, they are owned by the UI.

The Blastwing rework continues, with most of the feedback suggesting it dealt too much damage, although a few edge cases in its behaviour have also been fixed. There is also an overdue Corsair buff and tweaks to make Disco Rave Party less fiddly. The big feature is a command to split large autohosts with many waiting players, so everyone gets a game, and the big graphics update is darker, faster, and better looking "terrain" beyond the edge of the map.

Balance

• Health 100 -> 80
• Speed reduced by 5%, which also reduces bomb toss range.
• Damage 320 -> 300 -> 280 -> 250
• Burn time 24s -> 14s -> 12s

• Health 1350 -> 1500
• Speed 81 -> 90
• Range 293 -> 300
• Spread 1500 -> 2500
• Damage increased by 18%

• Instead, DRP now turns slower at high spin. There penalty ramps up from none at 50% spin, to 3x slower at 100% spin.
• DRP now has unit AI that voluntarily reduces spin to turn faster. The AI optimises for time taken to turn then spin back up to 100%.
• Reduced maximum turn rate by 25% to compensate, and to make the optimisation work out.
• This DRP should be much easier to control since it will spin up to a high minimum, and stay there unless large turns are required. Minor shifts such as radar wobble no longer reduce spin.
• Advanced DRP users also have more options. A 90 degree order can be issued to make DRP turn ASAP, or Alt+Ctrl+Shift attack can be used to drag 1-shot orders to walk slowly through the enemy base if punctuality is not a priority.

Waiting List Split

• Anyone can do a !split when at least 40 players are waiting (so at least 8 are on the waiting list).
• The command sends 40% of the lobby to a new autohost, so everyone has a chance to play.
• The top rated players are sent to the new host, to give everyone more evenly balanced games.
• The uneven split is an experiment. Experience suggests it will create more games. Send feedback.
• Everyone needs the update for this to work smoothly, so the first day may be rough if players don't restart to get the update.

Features

• Added Battle Value Tracker, a widget that tracks kills and losses in engagements as they happen (thanks citrine). It was useful for Blastwing. Enable under Settings/Interface/Battle Value Tracker.
• Reworked the offmap terrain. It is now a dark opaque grid of uniform squares that match the resolution of the terrain, rather than a stretched texture. It also costs less performance.
• Language can be overridden locally by copying files from the repository to LuaUI/Configs/lang.
• Added minimap preview tooltip.
• Enabled https for all external zero-k.info links.
• Update Italian, Polish, and Chinese/Taiwanese translations.
• Brightened first ally blue (in a previous patch).
• Improved thermite and flamethrower effects (in a previous patch).

Fixes

• Fixed various issues with Blastwing having trouble finding a place to land.
• Fixed Blastwing overshooting when told to attack something at the base of a cliff.
• Odin can no longer fire without ammo while touching down or sitting on a rearm pad.
• Cerberus now aims even when its current muzzle position is blocked.
• Reduced Cerberus and Lucifer hitvolume sizes, to keep them within their footprints.
• Lobster throw indicator no longer highlights structures and aircraft.
• Fixed Raise tooltip values for blocking vehicles and bots, and tweaked Alt snap to match.
• Removed Odin's redundant reload bar for its shield cluster.
• Fixed invalid events in action tracking camera.
• Particularly quick double-click-drag selections no longer ignore selection rank.

"Buff strengths, nerf weaknesses." - Quantum, Lead Developer of Complete Annihilation (CA) Quantum devised the rule above early in CA history, perhaps as early as 2007, and it is still at the core of Zero-K. I don't know exactly when, or even if, Quantum said the rule in its eventual form (I wasn't there right at the beginning). However I do know that Quantum was the lead developer (he responded to the ticket "Your lead developer is a nub" on the issue tracker). In any case, the rule is responsible for keeping the 100 or so units in Zero-K unique, useful, and interesting. Quant's Rule is about game balance, and vitally it is an active rule rather than an abstract principle. It tells us what to do when a unit is to be made weaker (nerfed) or made stronger (buffed). It was devised to guard against the concern that a balanced game is a boring game. The validity of this concern is up for debate, but if you play enough RTS you will see both extremes. At one end there are games with many exciting tools which barely feature in viable strategies. At the other end there are games that seem balanced, but at the expense of any interesting unit variation. Original Total Annihilation was towards the "zany but imbalanced" side of things, with tonnes of units, but few that turned out the be viable. Many games were like this in the late 90s. You might say that viability is only a concern for hardcore competitive players, but we think it matters for anyone who really wants to puzzle out the game. In other words, to strategise. No matter the game mode, it is a bit disappointing when the unit roster effectively shrinks as your understanding grows. Some TA mods tried to address this with balance overhauls, and Complete Annihilation comes from that lineage, so the question of how to balance many units was front of mind.
Take Lance as an example of Quant's Rule in action. Earlier this year it was identified as a bit too powerful, so needed a nerf. As per Quant's Rule, its weakest aspects were the first candidates for potential changes. We kept those candidates in mind while discussing and reviewing replays, watching for ways to make them worse that would affect its overall performance, without making it feel terrible to use. Other attributes may be nerfed, but not its main strengths, so Lance was extremely unlikely to lose any of its impressive burst damage. In the end Lance was mainly nerfed on cost and reload time, which are both significant weaknesses, with minor nerfs to range and speed. Stepping back, what even is a strength or a weakness? It seems like a silly question, but consider that units are made of numbers, and no number is objectively "weak". The answer is that strength is relative, based on comparisons to other units, but here is where it gets interesting. Units can be compared within roles, across roles, across factories, or even across the entire game. There is flexibility here, and it is where unit roles and factory identity are taken into account. Were the minor range and speed nerfs for Lance appropriate? On one hand, artillery is slow and and long ranged. But on the other hand, Hovercraft are fast and Lance has below average range for heavy artillery. Which attributes are sacrosanct varies by unit and role. Consider Bandit, the Shieldbot raider. As a raider, Bandit is one of the fastest units in the game, but within raiders, Bandit is one of the slowest. The interplay of speed between raiders is vital, which causes Bandit's speed to be judged as a weakness. This means Bandit is very unlikely to receive a speed buff, just like how Lance is not going to have its damaged nerfed. As an aside, Bandit is not going to have a speed nerf either due to another rule dating back to CA. [quote]Bandit Rule: Raider speed is at least 90 elmos/second.[/quote] There is a subtlety to Quant's Rule that highlights the difference between balance and design. A designer is like an architect, with a high level idea of how units should feel and interact. The balancer is like a builder, implementing the details of a design, finding numbers that make units behave as they should. The same people often do both jobs, but the mindsets are different. Quant's Rule is a guide for those deep in the weeds of balance, where things are made much simpler by not having to simultaneously think like a full designer.
As a design principal, Quant's Rule is about giving units space to be unique. Consider the design space of units, like the plot above, but with many more dimensions for things like health and cost, as well as for fuzzier attributes like firing pattern. Then realise that this is not a static space, for if Ronin were given more range then it would shift to the right. Balance patches bestow the space with concepts of "movement" and "force". Quant's Rule is a force that pushes units away from each other, since buffing strengths and nerfing weaknesses stretches units out along each dimension. This naturally expands the space, makes units more distinct. A more conservative, or directionless, approach to balance risks units gradually drifting towards each other into a black hole of banality. Quantum presumably saw such a drift towards the average as the default, and created a rule to counteract it. As good as it might sound, remember that Quant's Rule is primarily about balance. You can interpret it as a design goal, but it works best when telling balancers which types of changes to prioritise, and which are off-limits. But sometimes, balance fails. This recently happened to Blastwing, which previously dealt most of its damage via ground fire, but just lost its ground fire and gained significant direct damage. This change would seem to violate Quant's Rule, if not for the fact it is a design change rather than a balance change. The change was a result of the balancer going back the designer, saying "Quant's Rule has been tried for years and Blastwing isn't working", and asking for a new design. It was then time to don designer mindset and teleport Blastwing to a new point in design space, because the balancer should not be expected to make long treks to more fertile designs by themselves. Almost all the units are in a good spot by now though, so these events are pretty rare. It would be hard to claim that Quant's Rule is entirely unique to Zero-K. The formulation and centrality, perhaps, but similar ideas seem to have made it into other schools of game design. From time to time I come across mechanics or patch notes that have a definite flavour of Quant's Rule, and the games that do this regularly tend to be my favourites. It is also less demanding than I have made it out to be. In the end, it is a guide, and it is invoked less frequently as we improve at holding the balance and design mindsets simultaneously. It is still great for discussion between developers though, but only if we explain it to newcomers. Good thing there is now a 1000 word post on the subject.

This update adds fancy new flame effects, a Blastwing rework (it still sets things on fire) and a thermite bomb for Odin. It also has balance changes ranging from Metal Extractor to Disco Rave Party, and a bunch of features, fixes, and performance improvements from numerous contributors.

Hot Reworks

• Cost 45 -> 55
• Increased deceleration rate by 60%
• Drops its bomb on death rather than exploding immediately.
• Direct damage 40 -> 320
• Explosion radius 144 -> 128
• Maximum unit-on-fire duration 1s -> 24s
• No longer creates area fire

• Deals damage to everything in a small area around it over 30s.
• Damage ramps up over time, from 0 damage per second to 1000.
• Typical damage 8k -> 14k
• Its trajectory is blocked by obstacles, but continues on when they are "removed".

Balance

• Seaborne depthcharge range 280 -> 300

• Relob time 12s -> 14s

• Sight range 660 -> 760

• Detriment already decloaked on launch, so this only really changes Jugglenaut.

• Missile turn rate increased by 8.7%

• Health 600 -> 560

• Cost 100 -> 95

• Cost 42k -> 45k
• Range 7000 -> 9600 (Zenith is 8800)
• Projectile gravity reduced by 44%.
• Low trajectory spread at max range: Two Inferno diameters.
• High trajectory spread: Two Trinity diameters.

Features

• Units that are on fire now look more severely on fire depending on the remaining duration of the fire.
• Added a fancy animated flame effect (thanks Anarchid and engine devs) which has been applied to all flamethrower and napalm weapon effects.
• Antinuke construction is partially paid back from team overdrive, in the same way as the existing energy construction system. The first antinuke constructed by a team gives the builders 50% of its cost back over the next several minutes, with the proportion paid back dropping by 10% per previous antinuke.
• Moved the settings from "Settings/HUD Panels/Spectator Panels" and "Settings/Interface/Spectating" to "Settings/Spectating".
• Added an automatic action finding camera for replays and live spectating (thanks fiendicus_prime). Enable it under "Settings/Spectating/Action Tracking Camera".
• Added a widget to display player names over a unit on screen (thanks fiendicus_prime). Replaces commander nametags, but has a commander-only option. Enable under "Settings/Interface/Player Name Tags".
• The units that will be thrown by selected Lobsters are highlighted when the command is selected (thanks dyth68). Can be configured under "Settings/Interface/Falling Units/Lobster".
• Fire special weapon now shows range rings for all selected units, like Force Fire (thanks dyth68).
• Commanders spawned to the same location now spawn next to each other instead (thanks Shaman).
• Added a small drag threshold for terraforming to make Ctrl+Click surrounding buildings easier.
• Added an Alt modifier to the selected units panel to select/deselect half of unit group.
• Added the secret Ctrl modifier to the selected units panel tooltip.
• Added more descriptive short descriptions for missiles built in the Missile Silo.
• Changed the default self destruct hotkey from Ctrl+D to Ctrl+K. Only affects new installs.

Modding

• The new fire effects replace the existing cegs "napalmfireball_200" and "flamer". Mods that use these cegs as a base should get the new fire effects. Use "flamer_cartoon" for old style flamethrower fire.
• Exposed weaponDefID, projectileID, attackerID, attackerDefID, attackerTeam to widget:UnitDamaged. Spectators see everything, while players only see attacker stats if the attacker is visible, and don't get weaponDefID or projectileID.
• Removed the special techniques required to give weapons zero damage.
• GG.CheckStartBox returns true if startboxes are disabled. Set the 4th argument to true to read raw boxes.
• Added "/luarules battle " to spawn preset battles. The system could be extended to ease mass preset unit spawning.

Blastwing Fixes

• Blastwings told to fly quickly after landing are no longer stuck in their landing animation.
• Blastwings now have collision, like other gunships, to prevent them stacking on one location.
• Blastwing no longer cloaks mid air if it happens to come to a complete halt.
• Blastwings are now possible to use with area cloakers, instead of constantly cloaking and recloaking under them for no reason.
• Blastwings with a Force Fire order on the ground now explode, rather than just hang around.
• Blastwings told to attack a unit now consistently approach the unit and explode, rather than sometimes hovering next to it.
• Blastwings told to attack a moving unit now update their heading more than once a second, making them able to fly at and hit notoriously mobile targets like Lance.

Other Fixes

• Starlight only deforms the map every 5th frame. It looks a little weird, but is better than people lagging out while we wait for an engine fix for the deformation performance issue.
• Fixed Paladin causing an unreasonable performance hit (thanks Porkch0p).
• More damage dealt by dead units, such as bomb damage, thermite and fire, shows up in the endgame graphs.
• Fixed spectators seeing the player-facing, hax free, unit damaged/killed midgame graphs, rather than the real ones.
• Fixed airpad exclusion orders with an even number of aircraft selected (thanks Helwor).
• Fixed giant Desolator death clone collision volume (thanks dyth68).
• Fixed bombers sometimes failing to automatically return to a pad when idle, especially after a Stop command.
• Fixed personal commander shield not having any regeneration.
• Flamethrower visuals no longer penetrate shields.
• Fixed the little generator ball effect on area shield generators not disappearing off when the unit is stunned.
• Fixed santa hat lighting.
• Fixed Storage XP.
• Fixed lighting on Small Divide Remake and LLTA Complex.
• Fixed passworded games of friends that exist when logging in sometimes not showing up in the battle list.
• Possibly fixed the occasional ghost or missing player in battle lobbies, often after returning from a game.

This is the first in a new series of design blogs about Zero-K. We aim to release one every two weeks, when there isn't a patch, and by 'we' I mean me, GoogleFrog (others might contribute later). Expect posts about Zero-K development, design, history, and whatever else comes to mind. To start us off, why is Zero-K even called Zero-K? It started around 2009 when a mod called Complete Annihilation wanted to throw off the shadow of being "just another alphabet soup mod", the term for games on the Spring Engine that traces themselves back to Total Annihilation. The mod split off from Balanced Annihilation a few years earlier, which forked off Absolute Annihilation, which was based on Uberhack and subsequently ported to Spring. For those of you aware of BAR (Beyond All Reason), it is based on Balanced Annihilation and had the working name BA Reloaded.
Zero-K was picked after much discussion, deliberation, argument, and finally, a vote. We had a site at the time, called CaGov, where developers could create polls and vote on things. We voted on things from whether taking damage should decloak (it does) and whether all bombers should be replaced with laser bombers (only Thunderbird was replaced). The simple version of the Zero-K name is that it won, beating a few other proposals, the only other of which I can remember is Robocracy. There were a few arguments in favour of Zero-K. The more narratively inclined like the idea of robots fighting pointlessly over the scraps of a universe approaching heat death, or zero degrees kevin. That paid off in the lore for the campaign over a decade later (any more would be spoilers). We also coveted 0 A.D.'s alphabetically superior position on various lists, and thought we could force the shortening 0K. That did not work out. Most of all, we wanted a unique name that would stand out and win at page rank, as search was all the rage in the late 2000s. We at least won that battle, defeating a book about cryogenics and a brand of dangerously cold single-use towelettes. The towelette company even sent us a sample after a Twitter interaction; the book still makes it to the image search preview in DuckDuckGo.
We may have been a bit too clever with the name. Zero-K stepped out of the shadow of Total Annihilation only a few years before Planetary Annihilation embraced it. Nostalgia aside, the latter is still a more descriptive name, and such names are common for strategy games. Think of all the names to do with armies or conquest. War, command, force, settle, empire, company, division, legion... the list goes on. Generic names indicate genre, which we gave up in favour of being unique. Maybe that sums up Zero-K. Arguably the best aspect of the name revealed itself years after the decision was made - puns about low temperature - which far outweighs any downside. Zero-K: Nothing is cooler.

Zero-K began its life about 15 years ago as a mod built by volunteers, and development has continued in much the same way way, except now as a full game. Admittedly we have slowed down a bit in recent years, in part due to the greater focus on polish, but also because we've already combined the best bits of RTS into a cohesive whole. Including some things that seem like gimmicks elsewhere, but really just need several years of refinement to get right. Massive online battles and tight 1v1? Done. Campaign, AI, skirmish? Done. Spider-tanks, jumpjets, ships, planes and hovercraft? Done. Terraforming, cloaking, and 3D terrain that really matters? Done. Giant robots and superweapons? Done three times over. And there isn't much to do for the controls either, as we're so far ahead of everything else already. That's just what happens when people play for over a decade and improve what they notice needs improving. Not that there isn't more to do. We release 3-4 major updates a year and don't plan on stopping. Just this month we added two new bombers and tweaked some other aircraft that needed a bit of love. In the last few months we improved the controls for Lobsters and notifications for tacnukes, in Don't Nuke Your Allies. As well as all the extra modding support of the past few years, so things can go full circle. So there is plenty to do, and we plan to do it for as long as we keep playing. [previewyoutube=pHQkctGTm_A;full][/previewyoutube]

This update introduces two new bombers to fill out the aircraft roster. One is a bit like a light Likho, and another is like a heavy Raven, but there is a lot more to each. Other planes have tweaks and buffs, such as an area reveal ability for Sparrow, and a heavier Phoenix. Some gunships even got in on the action, with the most notable being a sizeable buff for Krow. Other balance changes include a bit more health for light assaults, and better spinning for Disco Rave Party. In terms of features, bombers are well-served here as well, with selection icons for whether a bomber needs ammo, as well as smoother landing paths. There are a few extra features for modding, such as scaling and tinting, which were technically in the previous hotfix. The campaign has the new bombers, a few features, and a new Records page which displays and aggregates your best stats for each mission. How fast can the campaign be completed, and with how few units lost?

New Bombers

• Cost 220
• Health 900
• Speed 252 (between Raven and Likho)
• Rearm time 20s
• Range 550
• Damage 180 x 2
• Can hit small raiders most of the time, and most aircraft.

• Cost 1500
• Health 5200
• Speed 185 (between Raptor and most gunships)
• Rearm time 35s
• Bomb range 200
• Bomb damage, it's a disintegrator (5-shots Detriment)
• The bomb is very slow, even Detriment can dodge it.
• Special weapon fires seven shields at 550 range.
• Each shield has 3400 charge and a radius of 200.
• Shields decay at 40 charge/s, expire at zero charge, and do not link.

Aircraft Changes

• Boosts by 5x for 3 seconds.
• Destroys itself after boost.
• Reveals an area of radius 400 for 12 seconds when it dies.
• Revealed area scales up during boost, to a maximum of 640.

• Cost 360 -> 460
• Health 1060 -> 1450 (90 more than if just scaling by cost)
• Reduced turn rate slightly
• Rearm time 5s -> 8s
• Drops 15 -> 18 bombs over 0.93 -> 1.7 seconds
• Area of Effect 216 -> 320
• Damage per bomb 25 -> 40
• Burn time 10s -> 12s

• Improved brake rate by 25%.
• Pew pew lasers replaced with burst beam lasers.
• Damage increased by 22%

• Increased turn rate while firing, to counteract the effect of slowing down.
• Firing cone angle 90 degrees -> 100 degrees
• Damage increased by 4.2%

• Speed 207 -> 212
• DPS increased by 2.5%

• Health 1120 -> 1200

Balance Changes

• Reload 0.366 -> 0.433
• Damage 34 -> 42

• Health 2000 -> 2200

• Health 2400 -> 2500

• Health 1500 -> 1550
• Speed 51 -> 54

• Health 250 -> 380

• Health 1900 -> 2200
• Replaced its front laser turret with missiles.
• Missile damage 72 x 2
• Reload time 1.6 seconds
• Range 1000 (same as lasers)
• The missiles have 30% less DPS, but fire in a burst.

• Aim speed 4 -> 2.5 -> 3 degrees/s.
• Spin up time 60 -> 120 -> 90 seconds.
• Spin drop while turning is unchanged, but less spin is lost for any given turn due to the increased turn rate.

Campaign

• Magpie is unlocked on Fel Diacia (the Thunderbird mission) and Odin is unlocked on Bavhakya (the Likho mission). Anyone with these missions complete will have their units unlocked.
• Added a Records tab to the Profile menu on the campaign screen. This screen can sort and display your victories with least units lost, in the shortest time, with bonus objectives and difficulties. Unfortunately the data is not retroactive.
• Removed a few Lucifers from easier difficulties on Onsally (the Phoenix mission).
• Worked around the Dominatrix build options bug for the Rover Assembly on Ganong (the Dominatrix mission).
• Clarified Lalata main objective text (the Jugglenaut mission).

Features

• Added Units Lost to endgame graphs.
• Unit pictures for bombers now have an icon showing whether it is ready to fire.
• Aircraft now smoothly glide and stop when landing on airpads. This is technically a nerf as they take slightly longer to land.
• Improved shotgun visuals, with minor balance implications.
• Grizzly now aims smoothly and holds its gun steady as it fires.
• Tweaked the automatic handicap mode to give lower handicaps for ratings above 2000.
• Moved Raptor to the AA slot (D) of the Airplane Plant and Sparrow to secondary scout/raider (S).
• Taught the opponent AI about Magpie.

Modding

• Units can now be tinted, rescaled and made glowing via the customparams model_tint ("R G B"), model_glow ("R G B A"), and model_rescale. Colour values are from 0 to 1.
• Free units (0 metal and energy cost) no longer need to explicitly specify a non-zero buildtime (previous release).
• Added a function to effects/napalm for generating generic fireballs ala Inferno.
• Air pads now call ReammoComplete, if it is a units script, when bombers are rearmed.
• Added command AIR_MANUALFIRE for aircraft, since they cannot use the in-engine type.

Fixes

• Fixed Tremor wheels not spinning.
• Gravity guns push and pull a bit more consistently.
• Jack can no longer pretend to be a missile in enemy Missile Silos.
• Slow damage makes shields charge slower again (it broke at some point)
• Fixed bombers sometimes seeming to ignore a move command.
• Attack Move on bombers is now is now removed after they shoot, unless the bomber is set to repeat. Previously this only worked for some bombers.
• Bombers are now much better at landing on Reef. Much better. Horrific things could happen before.
• Fix sun on Mercurial and Rogues River.

Lobsters have been taught to not fire when it would be redundant, making Lobster balls much easier to manage. Overkill prevention in general has a tweak, and some APIs were extended to make modding easier. The Artefact Control game mode which saw some testing about a month ago is now live. In terms of balance, Redback has a bit of a nerf and some of the least used units - Skuttle, Phoenix and Emissary - have small buffs.

Balance

• Missile fuel time 2s -> 1.5s

• Cost 230 -> 240
• Speed 1.85 -> 1.75

• Line of sight 280 -> 330

• Body turn rate reduced 105 -> 84 degrees/second
• Gun aim rate increased 40 -> 70 degrees/second
• Resets its gun between shots (as much as possible) in case it has to move.

• Speed 8 -> 8.1
• Projectile gravity 0.7 -> 0.72

Unit AI

• This prevents it from firing when it would do absolutely nothing, provided there are no invisible enemies nearby.
• As a result, telling a tight clump of Lobsters to fire causes only two to shoot.
• This behaviour can be configured with the hidden Overkill Prevention state.
• Removed the Force Fire command by default. This can be configured via another hidden state toggle.

• Added the "Enable for Fire at Will" and "Enable for auto targeting" states. Previously it just had enabled/disabled.
• Most units default to "Enable for Fire at Will". The theory being that if you set a unit to hold fire you care more about its target dying than about overkill.
• Nothing defaults to "Enable for auto targeting", but it may be useful to try out.

Interface

• Added a minimum wind icon and number to the left column of the wind generator tooltip during placement (thanks Porkchop)
• Cleaned up some inconsistent unit highlighting and selection. Units under interface panels cannot be clicked on by default, tooltips do not appear, and units are not highlighted.
• Selecting through the panel at the bottom of the screen can be configured under Settings/HUD Panels/Selected Units Panel.
• Drag selection can still terminate over a UI panel.
• Add some translations for the commander selector.
• Updated Global Build AI with some fixes and documentation (thanks esainane).
• Added username team colour in chat and removed white outlines for dark names (thanks Birdulon)
• Local widgets are no longer disabled for spectators on rooms with local widgets disabled.
• Added Italian translations for the main menu (thanks fvasco)

Campaign

• Tweaked campaign text and replaced some Artefacts with more suitable structures (thanks Thorneel)

Maps

• Added boxes for Onyx Cauldron 2.0
• Improved lighting on Skulduggery (thanks Shaman)
• Improved water on Cull, Lost v2 and Lowland Crossing Revised v2.
• Fixed an issue with void water with new shaders on some graphics cards.

Artefact Control

• Several artefacts are spawned on each side of the map.
• Each team controls half at the start of the game.
• Artefacts have 11k health and heal at 100 hp/second.
• Artefacts respawned with switched allegeance when destroyed.
• If a team controlls all the artefacts, they win.

Modding

• buildCostMetal -> metalCost
• buildCostEnergy -> energyCost
• energyUse -> energyUpkeep
• metalUse -> metalUpkeep (vanilla ZK doesn't use this)
• maxDamage -> health
• maxVelocity -> speed

• Unit defs no longer require unitname since it must match the table key, so it is redundant.
• Unit defs are now also read from subfolders of 'units'.
• Set undefined burst rates to 0 (rather than 0.1) as it can interfere with weapon modding.
• The game exits to menu when unit defs fail to load, rather than crashing.
• Added game-side GG.UnitModelRescale(unitID, scale) from Unit Level Ups.
• Added backwards compatibility for Spring.GetUnitIsBeingBuilt.
• Fixed backwards compatibility for Spring.GetPlayerRulesParams.
• Added customparams.buggeroff_angle for factories, in radians.
• Added customparams.metal_extractor_mult to support the creation of higher tier metal extractors.
• Fixed modding away the Sniper reload move penalty breaking the script.
• Cleaned up the build icon generator gadget.
• Napalm effects now contain an example of sin (replaces taylor series).
• Improved modded energy generator tooltips.
• Mexes suport morphing.

Fixes

• Fixed commshare sometimes preventing resign or causing a crash when the game ends.
• War music no longer counts morph as violence.
• Fixed missing vote resign button.
• Marginal turret overshoot can no longer be circumvented with command insert.
• Fixed a few build icons incorrectly implying that a floating structure is built underwater.
• Fixed commander selector button image.
• Fixed backwards 'motion blur' on ejected shells.
• Fixed some large structure wreckages having much too large collision volumes.

Get ready for the next Zero-K tournament, a 1v1 tournament where dozens of commanders will fight for dozens of dollars. The format is bo1 double elimination but other details have not been fully finalised. Sign up with a comment on the thread and send any questions to Kingstad. If you are more interested in watching, then games can be spectated through the lobby or you can watch one of the commentary streams linked on Discord. Date: July 8th [Saturday] 2023 Time: (3 PM EDT | 9 PM CET | 1900 UTC) Countdown to Tournament Forum Thread A commentary stream There was also a minor update this weekend. It is mostly fixes for the previous update, but there are also a few features and balance changes.

Balance

• Increased collision shape width by 11% and length by 25%.
• Reduced turn rate by 5%.

Features

• Holding Alt while selecting units now filters out rank 3 (ie army units).
• Added a sudden death mode game option, under Map. It causes the game to end shortly after a specified time via a contracting death circle.

Fixes

• Fixed a missile impact indicator error.
• Fixed a pathfinding issue to do with construction orders on terrible terrain.
• Tactical missiles no longer have inconsistent half-prediction of enemy velocity. They now fire exactly where they are aimed.
• Fixed contrast adaptive sharpening scaling with zoom level.
• Fixed moderator tooltip colour in the lobby.
• Improved Pylon collision and selection volumes.

The 3v3 tournament finished earlier today with an excellent turnout of 19 teams. The results and videos will be posted in this thread in the coming days. The upshot for this patch is that we are free to make a few balance changes. The aim of these changes is to work on a few of the more maligned units, while nerfing some of the most prevalent strategies. This mostly means buffs for Gunships and nerfs for Lance and cloaked Snitch. The update also has some exciting features. A big one for team games is that allied nukes and missiles now automatically show where they were aimed, which should halve the number of people that panic when a nuke is fired. Another is the ability to watch any game while waiting for a different one to start without missing out on the chat, as chat from non-started lobbies is now sent ingame. Superintendent has also added a few more tracks to his alternate soundtrack.

Balance

• Speed 117 -> 108

• Speed 57 -> 54
• Decloak range 180 -> 210
• Cloaker radius 360 -> 350

• Reload time 20s -> 23s

• Health 1100 -> 1200
• Speed 48 -> 51

• Speed 60 -> 63
• Range 1120 -> 1150

• AoE 128 -> 144
• Fire DPS 25 -> 32
• Fire linger 25s -> 20s

• Cost 90 -> 85
• Health 370 -> 440

• Health 3600 -> 4200
• Missiles 8 -> 9
• Reduced missile wobbly be 6.7%

• Heat per shot 3.8 -> 3.5

• Range 780 -> 1280

Game Features

• Added predicted impact time and location for allied nukes and stockpiled missiles (thanks esainane).
• Added a new Superintendent music track.
• Hovering a unit with the mouse now highlights it slightly. This can be configured under 'Settings/Graphics/Unit Visibility'.
• Alt+N terraform preset is slightly higher to block Phantoms firing at Engineer Commander.
• Added Set Target (instead of Force Fire) on Right Click option under 'Settings/Unit Behaviour'.
• Added time and space leeway settings to make selection easier, under 'Settings/Interface/Selection'.
• Added an explanation of selection rank to 'Settings/Interface/Selection' as people find fiddling with it surprisingly useful.
• Embiggened cursor hitboxes of Grizzly, Jugglenaut, Cyclops, Shield Factory and Cloak Factory.
• Singularity Reactor size now fluctuates.
• Impaler fire sound is slightly fainter and only five can play at once.

Lobby Features

• Battles can now be watched by right clicking on them in the battle list and selecting 'Watch'.
• Chat from any lobby you are in is sent ingame if the lobby is not running.
• Added a new Superintendent track that plays when the lobby opens.
• Mention Imp burrow in the tips for the Imp campaign mission.
• Added a game option to override the names of teams for tournaments.
• Added a game option (under Experimental) called Notes that just writes text to a window at the start of the game. Use it to explain unit tweaks or other complicated set of options.

Fixes

• Preselection highlight (when hovering over units) now highlights units correctly in edge cases.
• Fixed the player count in the battle lobby status box updating slowly.
• Fixed units set to avoid radar wobble not firing at identified structure dots that left radar.
• Fixed Advanced Geo aim point (thanks dyth68).
• Fixed Mariner special build icon size.
• Healthbars and Build ETA now draw in front of unit outlines.
• Fixed an error that could occur when destroying all the units of the losing team.
• Phoenix gibs no longer include a near-complete copy of its fuselage.

This is mostly a fixes and tweaks update as the 3v3 tournament is only in two weeks. Everyone is welcome as each team must have a new player. Sign up in this thread if you are interested. There are two big balance changes: nerfs for superweapons and shields being disabled underwater. Aspis can now float, to give it some use in sea, and floating has been improved in general. The superweapon changes were motivated by some of the epic games on the large maps added in April. Starlight is much more expensive as it is the best at ending games, but games were ending a bit too early. Disco Rave Party and Zenith were differentiated by leaning into the slow aim and rate of DRP compared to the instant response of Zenith. Thanks for all the feedback in the thread on the forums. The most notable fixes are for the rare Zenith gathering bug and the Fencer/Bulkhead transition issue. There are also many backend improvements to scripting and the engine (which was updated earlier in the week), some of which are relevant to modding and listed in a section below. More Chinese translations have been contributed and a few campaign missions have been tweaked based on feedback.

Balance

• The disable is the same as any other disable. Charge drops to zero and linking does not work.
• The unit must be completely underwater. This is the same threshold at which cloak is disabled and units are no longer detectable by non-sea vision.

• Units lobbed or gravity-gunned into the sea can float immediately.
• Note: This was already the case for sea-to-sea lobs and transport throws.
• Floating units no longer sink while teleporting.
• Note: Teleporting from land to the sea will still put the unit on the sea floor.

• This reduces its effective energy drain by 1 energy per second.

• Now checks whether a friendly unit is directly in front of both barrels before firing.
• Aims a little higher for more clearance.

• Cost 36k -> 38k
• Range 8400 -> 8800
• Fixed a rare bug that would transform it into an expensive doorstop.

• Cost 40k -> 42k
• Health 12k -> 8k
• Range 7500 -> 7000
• Aim speed 4 degrees/s -> 2.5 degrees/s
• Full spin up time 1 -> 2 minutes (via reduced acceleration at high spin rates).
• Spin speed is now lost while turning, with greater losses at high spin.
• Eg a 45 turn drops spin 100% -> 58%, a 90 turn drops spin 100% -> 33%.

• Cost 45k -> 60k
• Health 7500 -> 12k
• Range 10k -> 12k

Campaign

• Allied AIs are now Hard AIs on Normal difficulty (previously they were Normal AIs).
• Replace allied Merlins with Dantes in a few missions as they are prone to friendly fire.
• Adjusted partially built superweapons to leave cost-to-complete unaffected by balance changes.
• Moved Disco Rave Party slightly closer to the enemy base to partially account for its lower range.
• The mission briefing box now expands to avoid using a scrollbar for the tips section.
• Added a hint about mex income sharing to some of the first planets with allies.
• Made the hints for the Krow mission say a bit more about how to use Krow.
• Added a hint explaining Retreat Zones to the Krow mission.
• Cut hints down to four for Kirdipan (since the window is now expanded to show all hints).
• Fixed Romolis victory condition not checking for Merlins.

Maps

• Added start boxes for Supreme Strait.
• Improved lighting on All That Glitters.
• Fixed Timna Island box names.
• Enable alternate diagonal boxes for Calayo.
• Fixed small teams boxes for Angel Crossing.
• Added boxes for Pillar of Doom.
• Improved the widget that lets people tweak and save water and lighting tweaks.

Graphics

• Aegis spin animation is now based on shield charge (thanks Mach56).
• Improved line of sight rendering with AMD graphics (many cards were using a shaderless fallback).
• Contrast adaptive sharpening weakens when zooming out to counteract the grainy effect.
• Reenabled contrast adaptive sharpening by default.
• Added a subtle bloom shader.
• Bumpmapped water is now default for Lowest graphics as the others barely work.

Interface

• Added huge nuke warning toggle ingame under Settings/Accessiblity (thanks dunno).
• Improved the "Skip pregame chat" button on the replay controls.
• Language change updates unit selection texts immediately.
• Added translation capability for Zeno.
• Updated Chinese (both simple and traditional) translations (thanks Kitty, evilblue, et al).
• Updated Polish translations.
• Tweaked unit reply volumes slightly.

Modding

• Zeno no longer counts for Turtle Shell (but would have needed to deal real damage).
• Custom submarines now detected as such for Context Menu properly (instead of as ships).
• Added LUS preprocessing which translate uses of SFX.*, COB.*, math.{pi,tau}, math.{rad.sqrt}(constant) into constants. Local optimisations for these functions or tables should be removed.
• "morphUnitCreating" is now a game rules param (was team rules param).
• Added gadget:GamePaused(playerID, isPaused) to gadget handler.
• Chicken drone morphs now done via customparams.
• Missile silo automatically works with any custom missiles you add to the buildlist.
• Custom missile silos can exist and have moddable stockpile capacity via missile_silo_capacity customparam (still needs script support).
• Removed old nuke/antinuke models.

Fixes

• Fixed Zenith occasionally failing to gather meteors.
• Fixed Fencer and Bulkhead occasionally failing to transition between states correctly.
• Fixed always-floaters that teleport to from land to sea not automatically floating.
• Fixed cloak not being disabled on units when they are reclaimed.
• Fixed area cloakers with personal cloak erroneously being charged for personal cloak.
• Fixed the live unit reclaim tooltip using the old value (50%) rather than the new one (80%).
• Fixed an error upon comshared resign (thanks Shaman).
• Fixed debris texture.
• Fixed Zeno not being autogroupable (thanks Shaman).
• Fixed a rare crash to do with terraform.
• Fixed a bug where disabling units could break a factory.
• Increased Lua memory limit.

Brace yourselves for the exhilarating Zero-K 3v3 Tournament, where battle-hardened veterans and fresh faces unite to claim victory! Gather your forces, for this is your chance to prove your mettle on the grandest stage of strategic warfare. Date: June 17th [Saturday] Time: Sunday, 18 June 2023 03:00 (1 PM EST | 7 PM CET | 1700 UTC) Forum Thread Challonge Registration Countdown to Tournament

Registration

• Playing Zero-K for less than 10 days.
• Having played fewer than 30 PvP games.

For this update we looked through the new maps from the wider Spring (now Recoil) community and featured a bunch of them. Some will play better than others, but that's what feedback is for! The update also adds translations for Chinese and Italian, and includes an engine update that was benchmarked to improve framerate by 9%. In terms of balance there are nerfs for Reaver and Lance and a cost reduction for Krow. The unit reply sounds have also been rebalanced.

New Maps

Balance

• Turn rate 1850 -> 1710
• Reload time 0.467s -> 0.5s

• Speed 57 -> 54

• Weapon velocity increased 200 -> 210

• Weapon velocity 185 -> 190

• Weapon velocity 238 -> 245

• Cost 1000 -> 1100

• Cost 4500 -> 4200

• Starlight health 10k -> 7.5k
• Disco Rave Party health 16k -> 12k
• Zenith health 12k -> 9k

Interface

• Added Chinese and Italian translations (click the flag in the top right of the screen ingame).
• Cleaned up a few unit reply sounds and rebalanced them relative to each other. Most replies are a bit quieter.
• The tab playerlist share resource buttons now take your storage into account to display how much will actually be shared.

Mapping

• Added a game-side lava gadget so that mappers can create lava maps without copying code into the map file. Maps can add lava by including the file "mapconfig/lava_config.lua". See here for the parameters and here for an example. It even supports tides.
• The startbox editing tool can now be toggled under Settings/Toolbox. This makes it hotkeyable provides space for a hotkey explaining how it works.
• Added vertex-wise undo, snap to cardinal direction, and snap to map edge to the startbox editing tool.

Fixes

• Fixed UI scale detection for screen resolutions in the 2000s (ie 2560x1440).
• Reset everyone's UI scale settings to catch people who where affected by the issue above. Set Lobby or Game Interface Scale in the main menu under Settings/Lobby and Settings/Game.
• Fixed menu volume resetting when the track changes.
• Fixed and reset the non-functional Unit Reply Volume slider.
• Improved the performance of the map list.
• Toggling "Only Featured Maps" in the lobby updates a previously opened map list correctly.

This update introduces Zeno, the 5th missile for the Missile Silo, which homes onto a target, hits it for a massive dose of slow damage, and then leaves lingering slow in the surrounding area. Another major change is an increase in general unit visibility via a few nerfs for area cloakers. As usual, there are a few months of fixes, features and, contrary to the title, performance improvements.

New Missile

• Has significant range, equal to Quake.
• Homes onto its target.
• Deals 10k slow damage to a single target.
• Interacts with shields similarly to Eos, as 10k slow damage is 3333 damage to a shield.
• Leaves a large area of lingering slow damage for 30 seconds.

Cloak Fields

• Area cloakers now apply cloak at a set rate, starting with units closest to the centre of the bubble.
• Cloak rate is in terms of mass per second, and only spent on units that are ready to cloak.
• For reference, Bandit has 90 mass, Lance about 300, Dante about 800, and Detriment about 2400.
• Cloak can still be maintained on any number of units.
• Units with personal cloak are unaffected. They don't wait to be cloaked, and don't spend cloak rate that could be used on other units. This includes units that cloak while stationary.

• Jamming range 550 -> 600
• Cloak field range 550 -> 400
• Can shift the centre of its cloak bubble up to 200 elmos away
• Has a cloak rate of 1200 mass/s

• Cloak field range 400 -> 360
• Jamming range 400 -> 360
• Has a cloak rate of 800 mass/s

• Cloak field range 350 -> 320
• Jamming range (with cloak field module) 350 -> 320
• Has a cloak rate of 800 mass/s

• Has a cloak rate of 600 mass/s

Balance

• Cost 120 -> 125

• Cost 160 -> 170

• Slowbeam damage to shields 2000 -> 666

• Fixed a weapon bug that caused its laser to not reach ground units while cruising.
• Can now transport Shogun and Reef.

• Cost 400 -> 450

Maps and Campaign

• Added Zeno to planet Nataa (the Missile Silo mission).
• Tweaked planet Mstaras (the Gunship Factory mission) to be a bit easier on difficulties below Brutal.
• Added startboxes for Angel Crossing, Calamity v1.1 and Supreme Crossing V2.
• The "Sun, Fog & Water" map tweaking tool now loads its defaults from map settings.
• Added shadow density to "Sun, Fog & Water" map tweaking tool.
• Added compatibility for more metal layout standards.
• Removed map fog by default. This is the type that was visible when zoomed out.
• Tweaked the lighting and water settings on a few maps.

Graphics and Interface

• Reordered battles in the multiplayer lobby to put empty autohosts below running games.
• Build spacing UI has more options, found under "Settings/Interface/Building Placement".
• Added a contrast adaptive sharpening shader. It can be enabled under Settings/Graphics/Effects with "Sharpening".
• Added notable death explosion to ingame unit help menu (accessed via space+click).
• Added better support for flipping the minimap, which is useful when used with a flipped camera.
• Added a widget that displays map info like a label on a painting. Disabled by default.
• Fiddled with the way line of sight adds to radar. This unlocks more ways to customise radar coverage.
• Tweaked war and peace detection to spend a bit more time playing peace music.
• Fixed slight visual misalignment when Missile Silo launches missiles.

Fixes

• Improved performance of game mechanics that handle orders.
• Fixed significant framerate drop (with certain settings) caused by many multi-weapon striders firing at once.
• Fixed kicking a spectator sometimes causing a player to resign.
• Fixed X-Ray shader issues on some hardware.
• Fixed a rare bug with jumpjet behaviour.
• Fixed a rare crash in the tab playerlist.
• Fixed missing text on shield charge bars.
• Blitz description no longer mentions its old EMP death explosion.

This patch has an engine update, some superweapon tweaks, and extra gridding. Strider Hub now requires 50 grid energy. This is targeted at rushes in big team games, as every other use of Strider Hub should not have trouble finding 50 energy. The engine update changes how graphics states are handled over multiple games, which should improve load times and performance. Bertha now requires a grid connection and is a bit better at knocking down walls. Grid for Bertha has been frequently requested for a long time, probably for thematic reasons, as finding 50 energy seems easy for most Berthas. Zenith had a large buff to knocking down walls just over a year ago, which turned out to be too much, so is slightly worse at it. Starlight aims slightly slower to give defenders a little more time.

Balance

• Requires 50 grid energy to function.

• Requires 50 grid energy to function.
• Smooth radius 96 -> 120
• Smooth effect increased 40% -> 50% (matches Zenith)
• Structure smoothing multiplier 0% -> 25%

• Smooth radius 140 -> 120
• Structure smoothing multiplier 100% -> 50%

• Pitch rate 1.2 -> 0.75 deg/s (37.5% nerf)
• Yaw rate 3.5 -> 2.5 deg/s (28.5% nerf)

• Health for Strike, Recon, Engineer 2000 -> 1600

Features

• Added the lobby option 'Equalize team commanders' under 'Start' to balance uneven custom games.
• Improved performance and load times.
• Added GameID to game rules params (widgets can read it).

Fixes

• Fixed wrecks dropped by jumping units snapping to the ground.
• Fixed commander experience not being updated correctly when upgrading.
• Fixed water visuals on some maps (water was a bit too opaque).
• Energy content no longer effects reclaim highlight colour (for mixed resource map features).
• Ctrl-Click auto morph for structures is now disabled by Shift.
• Fixed blast radius indicator for EMP blasts (Imp).
• Improved the sun on Delta Siege Dry Deluxe V3.

Commanders are more diverse and generally a bit cheaper to morph. On top of this, each chassis has more effective versions of modules that align with the speciality of the chassis. Weapon and upgrade costs have been reworked at level 4 to make more sense. Modules were tweaked to buff most types of commander, with nerfs for builds that stack range and speed, as those were a bit too strong. Repeat modules are now limited to 5 rather than 8, and many have chassis-specific buffs. Range and speed modules are more expensive, eating into the cheaper morph cost at level 4, while other modules have the same or greater effectiveness. Campaign commanders can still stack 8 repeat modules, and gain the benefit of most speciality buffs, because that just seems like fun. There are some non-commander changes too, such as nerfs for Cloakbots, buffs for Spider, and greater restrictions on gunships leaving the map.

Commanders

• A "Beam Laser" option is now available at level 2, replacing "No Weapon"
• All weapons at level 2 are now free (cost 25 -> 0)
• Level 4 base cost 650 -> 150 (now base cost always increases by 50 per level)
• Picking "No Weapon" at level 4 actually results in no weapon
• Basic weapons at level 4 cost 25 -> 350
• Advanced weapons at level cost 100 -> 400

Module Changes

• Damage boost 10% -> 15%
• Speed penalty flat 1 -> 2% of total speed

• Speed penalty flat 3 -> 2% of total speed

• Cost 150 -> 200
• Speed boost 3 -> 3.5

• Cost 150 -> 200
• Build power boost 4 -> 5

• Cost 150 -> 200
• Speed penalty flat 1 -> 3% of total speed

• Speed penalty flat 8 -> 12% of total speed

Chassis Changes

• Ablative Armour health 600 -> 750
• High Density Plating health 1600 -> 2000

• Autorepair regeneration boost 10 -> 12
• Rescaled innate regeneration 5/5/10/16/25/35 -> 5/8/12/16/20/25

• CarRepairer's Nanolathe buildpower boost 5 -> 6

• High Power Servos speed boost 3.5 -> 4
• High Power Servos reduces jump cooldown by 1 second
• CarRepairer's Nanolathe buildpower boost 5 -> 4

• Gains all the module specialisation bonuses listed above, except for buildpower.
• Gains 5 buildpower from CarRepairer's Nanolathe, to keep its numbers round,
• Now has Strike-level innate regen (up from 5 at all levels)
• Removed Strike innate jamming, as it was added accidentally.

Weapon Changes

• Range 264 -> 285
• Reload 2s -> 1.8s

• Projectiles 8 -> 9
• Spray angle increased by 20%

• Damage 750 -> 850

Balance

• Health 400 -> 380
• Moves at 80% while reloading

• Regeneration rate 20 -> 15 health/second

• Damage increased by 14.3%

Fixes

• Aircraft that go too far off the edge of the map are now "gently" pushed back in.
• Shotgun, Flamer and Heatray now gain range correctly.
• Fixed Recon's shaky aiming while walking.
• Players and AIs that fail to place a start position are now cycled through defaults, rather than selecting the first.
• Fixed a few outdated module tooltips on the campaign UI.
• Renamed "Save / Load" in Campaign to "Profile".
• Improved the AI's commander morph choices.
• Speed is now displayed with a decimal place in Space+Click menu, as many units have increments of 0.5.

We have been testing an engine update since Wednesday, and this time it seems stable enough to adopt. The update corresponds to about ten months of work and mostly involves the graphics backend. As a result, performance has improved for many people and some AMD graphics issues have been fixed, although in testing we found the current beta graphics drivers to be unreliable. Be sure to ask on the forums or Discord if you encounter issues. The engine also has a few new features, with the biggest being the ability to shrink the space factories try to clear of allied units. The update also has some new music tracks from Superintendent and the commander morph rate nerf has been reduced.

Balance

• Morph rate 5/5/7.5/7.5/10/10/10... -> 5/7.5/10/12.5/15/15/15... per level

Features

• Performance should be improved for many people.
• Allied units can loiter much closer to factories without being told to go away.
• The auto assist toggle sends constructors directly sideways, to save time.
• Added more tracks by Superintendent.
• Show Selection Rank by default.
• Improve RoI tracker and add a hotkey to toggled it.

Dirtbag cannot go to space, commanders deal a little less damage, and economy coordination is smoother. New music tracks by the player Superintendent are now available ingame in the track list under Settings/Audio. Conjurer cloak has the largest nerfs since its inception, core cloakbots have small nerfs, and the assault vehicles are tankier. Paladin is a little harder to manoeuvre and Krow has a lot more damage, but with Krow being niche for so long it is hard to say how the balance will shake out.

Balance

• Health 580 -> 560
• Damage reduced by 13%
• Dropped dirt now has a slope limit (5x normal terraform slope).
• In particular, maximum thin spike height -> 700 elmos.

• Movement speed reduced to 66% while area cloaking.
• Area cloak cost 8 -> 10
• Jamming and area cloak radius 184 -> 175
• Decloak radius while area cloaking 184 -> 220

• Health 420 -> 400
• Turn rate reduced by 15%

• Turn rate reduced by 10%
• Range 270 -> 265

• Speed 72 -> 69

• Health 1920 -> 2000
• Projectile velocity increased by 5.7%

• Health 6800 -> 7200
• Projectile velocity increased by 2%

• Manoeuvrability while bombing 25% reduction -> 25% increase
• Speed while bombing is still reduced by 25%
• Reduced cluster bomb spray angle by 6.6%
• Increased laser fire tolerance by 10%
• Laser range 383 -> 395
• Laser DPS increased by 19%

• Speed 46.5 -> 43.5
• Turn rate reduced by 10%
• Torso turn rate reduced by 10%
• Head turn rate reduced by 20%

Commanders

• Added innate jamming with 175 radius (matches Conjurer)

• Removed free battle drone on level 5.

• Morph costs 75/100/650/200/300/400/500... -> 50/100/650/200/250/300/350...
• Morph rate 10/15/20/25/30/30/30... -> 5/5/7.5/7.5/10/10/10...
• Basic weapon cost 5 -> 25

• Beam Laser DPS reduced by 4%
• Light Particle Beam DPS reduced by 8%
• Disruptor Beam DPS reduced by 6%
• Riot Cannon reload time 1.63s -> 1.8s
• Riot Cannon range 300 -> 285
• Rocket Launcher projectile velocity reduced by 6%
• Rocket Launcher area of effect 96 -> 90
• Flamethrower DPS increased by 13.6%

Team Economy

• Temporary payback for constructing mexes and energy is now proportional to the amount of resources spent on each structure, rather than only paying the owner.
• Mex payback increased 50% -> 80%.
• Energy payback increased 50% -> 60%.
• Energy maximum payback rate increased by 6%.
• Fixed a bug that caused the old mex payback to be closer to 35-40%.
• Fixed payback sent to AFK players simply disappearing.

Unit AI

• Added Lotus and running away on firing to Moderator and Scalpel.
• Ogre only shoots at nearby hidden mexes, not though at max range.
• Crab doesn't shoot at hidden mexes.
• Krow now skirmishes everything to avoid enemies walking under it.
• Tweak move clumping to be slightly more lenient for large units.

Music

• Added a work-in-progress alternate music track by Superintendent.
• It can be enabled ingame under "Settings/Audio/Track list".

Campaign

• Shifted Detriments later on Easy.
• Added an allied antinuke on Easy.
• Added a player Fusion on Easy and Normal (for some energy leeway).

• Added Ultimatum temporary unlock.
• Hampered initial enemy income on Easy by removing backline mexes and the remaining Fusions.
• Thinned out initial enemy army on Easy.

Features

• Improved Pyro firing animation.
• Ctrl+Click formation move now obeys current maximum move speed.
• Merged unit spotter widget improvements from rollmops.
• Adv Geo blast radius shows while placing Geos.
• Tweak the antinuke range lines to be slightly thinner.
• Placing a morphable structure with Ctrl held now queues the morph after completion.
• Antinuke now gains one level per nuke interception.
• The stealth tag is now supported for modding.
• Right clicking on a unit in a factory now guards the factory. This avoids accidentally repairing rather than assisting. Queuing a command after guard cancels the guard, so the common use case is preserved.
• Self destructing a large portion of your stuff now blocks the command and prints a warning, rather than automatically resigns. Note that resign is bindable for those that want it.

Fixes

• Saved 10% or so of allocated Lua memory.
• Limited the commands created by large area attacks for performance reasons.
• Reduced the complexity of Dirtbag animation at high unit counts.
• Fixed overwriting existing guard commands with Shift sometimes not removing the command.
• Fixed Caretaker guard order dropping logic.
• Fixed rare build ETA crash for spectators.
• Fixed a crash for mods that try to set fractional stun times.
• Fixed some changes to the ingame menu for player based hosting (Skirmish and Steam Coop).
• Fixed a mixup in skirmish behaviour between 2D and 3D range.
• Fixed a value in the terraform raise/lower tooltip.

The Rogue nerfs continue, Redback can now beat a Reaver, and Firewalker has its first change in years. Phantom slows to 66% speed to reload its gun (maybe the auto-loader broke?) to make them a bit easier to find, while Blitz and Pyro are a bit tougher in an attempt to bring them into the raider game. The skin swap 'easter egg' is gone, some animations are improved and some GC fiddling resulted in a performance improvement. A few new or remade maps now have start boxes, and the matchmaker map pool has been updated.

Balance

• Steps away from Lotus while reloading (with Hold Position disabled or Attack Move).
• Updates aim direction more frequently to cut down on friendly fire.

• Turn rate reduced by 10%
• Range 275 -> 270
• Projectile velocity increased by 5.5% to compensate

• Moves at 66% speed while reloading.

• Cost 125 -> 130
• Turn rate reduced by 10%

• Shield regen 14/s -> 13/s

• Damage 70 -> 80

• Health 670 -> 690

• Direct damage reduced by 15%
• Ground burn damage reduced by 5%

• Health 1250 -> 1300

• Gun turns 14% faster.
• Increased projectile velocity by 1.6%.
• Slightly lower arc.

• Lowered aim position.

• Health 300 -> 340.

Previous Changes

• Damage 345 -> 330
• Projectile velocity 190 -> 185 elmos/s

• Speed 57 -> 60 elmos/s
• Normal damage 27 -> 30
• Slow damage 81 -> 75

Map Rotation

• Reptilian Battlefield
• Altair Crossing v4
• Rainbow Comet
• Eye of Horus
• Aurelian

• Dune Patrol Redux
• Sertaleina
• Desert Rumble
• Frosty Cove
• Trojan Hills
• Shimmershore

Features

• Improved Impaler, Phantom and Tidal Generator animations.
• Added a reload animation for Phantom (to give it a reason to slow down).
• Added start boxes for Lava Highground and Pentos.
• Added start boxes for remakes of Emain Macha, Flooded Valley, and Trefoil.
• Fixed uninspired name for kamikaze award.
• Fiddled with garbage collection settings to improve performance.
• Optimised drawing for morph effects and removed some redundant tables.
• Increased thickness of antinuke coverage indicator, so it is harder to miss.

Fixes

• Removed the unintended easter egg where units would occasionally swap skins.
• Blastwing cloak now breaks when the unit is launched.
• Reduced the linger of the map erase effect.
• Fixed the worst cases of units trying to shoot at underwater Amphibious Factories.
• Fix lights on Mount Dustmore.
• Fixed Spidermonkey web not rendering.
• Fix a crash in outline shader error messages.
• Fixed part of the cloak transition effect that had been disabled for engine compatibility reasons.
• Fixed geothermal vents not reacting to terrain changes on some maps.
• Fixed underscores causing issues for abuse reports sent via the ingame playerlist.
• Fixed inconsistent colours on team endgame graphs for spectators.
• Fixed ambiguous AI team names in AI vs. AI games.
• Fixed Missile Silo missiles not being removed from control groups as soon as they are launched (technically they only die after landing).
• Fixed a rare situation where command queues could be lost by adding a keybind to set units On or Off, then using the keybind with a selection of units that do not all have an On/Off toggle.

This update has nerfs to address the abundance of Lance in teamgames and Rogue in 1v1. It also has small nerfs for Bandit and Dirtbag, buffs for some underused units, and less effective area cloaking in combat. The release is a little early to avoid being too close to the upcoming 3v3 tournament (18:00 UTC, Saturday 9th July, sign up here), so some features didn't make it. We hope to have a fixes and features patch some time in July or August, which would ideally include an engine update, Adv. Options for mods, and some dodge AI.

Balance

• Non-personal recloak delay 6s -> 8s.
• Non-personal recloak delay for proximity is still 3s.
• For comparison, personal recloak delay is 3s for actions and 1.5s for proximity. Units with personal cloak use the personal delays even when under an area cloaker.

• Health 600 -> 580

• Range 235 -> 232

• Cost 120 -> 125
• Health 540 -> 520
• Speed 57 -> 54
• Turn rate reduced by 5%

• Turn rate increased by 5%

• Reload time 3.2 -> 3.1
• Edge effectiveness increased to match Ripper
• Disabled avoid bad targets by default

• Sight range 407 -> 431

• Speed 52.5 -> 49.5 elmos/s
• Turn rate reduced by 10%
• Range 1000 -> 980
• Vertical aim speed reduced by 66%

• Range 125 -> 122

• Cost 150 -> 140
• Range 700 -> 720
• DPS increased by 3%

• Autoheal 10 -> 6 hp/s (still activates after 5 seconds)
• DPS increased by 4%.

• Range 350 -> 360

• Health 900 -> 1060

Fixes and Features

• Added Curacao flag.
• Unit marker can now be enabled for Widow.
• Scorpion and Ultimatum are now marked by unit marker each time they appear.
• GG.addUnitSlow now handles overslow.
• Made circular map API more reliable.
• Fixed a GL4 shutdown error on old hardware.

This release has a few fixes and improvements, and brings us up to date with around four months of engine work. We are keeping pace with the engine, which means each update is relatively small. This one fixes a few uncommon bugs and might improve performance slightly.

Fixes

• Icons not appearing on a quarter of the minimap for some people should be fixed (engine).
• Possibly fixed the openAL issue for Linux people (engine). Remove "UseEFX=0" to check.
• Starlight no longer sinks itself into soft maps.
• Improved auto-aiming for Starlight, Disco Rave Party, and Bertha. They now prefer to target units close to their old target, to cut down on traversal time.
• Caretakers and Strider Hub now give up on commands that are too far away. This could be caused by trying to reclaim a wreck as it flies through build range.
• Fixed godmode and global LOS buttons on the cheat panel in multiplayer.
• Fixed Widow thinking it is 50% larger than it is for the purposes of pathfinding.
• Fixed reclaim field aggregator sometimes not drawing anything.
• Improved the font sharpness of reclaim field aggregator.
• Improve the performance of the minimap.
• Added a widget (disabled by default) that highlights hovered units called Highlight Unit GL4.
• Fixed custom formation bug caused by fog of war and godmode.
• Wind touches the ground.

In this update we work through the backlog of graphics and performance improvements made possible by the engine update three months ago. Outlines and reclaim highlighting should run (and look) better, although exact results will depend on hardware. Compatibility fallbacks exist for players with particularly old hardware. Many other bits of code have also been tweaked for performance. Other fixes and features have been worked on in the meantime, the most notable being formation ranks. It can be enabled through the ingame menu, and it is a bit rough around the edges, so send feedback. In terms of balance, the 1v1 oriented changes are minimal as the pick- and win-rate stats are looking quite good. Shields have a nerf and Hover have a buff, and both sets of changes are partial reverts of buffs and nerfs from 2021. For dense teamgames, Impaler projectiles are slightly slower to cut down on their effectiveness against mobile units.

Balance

• Damage per second 8.35 (pre-August 2021) -> 8.6 (recent) -> 8.48 (new)

• Speed 58.5 -> 57
• Projectile velocity 185 (pre-August 2021) -> 192 (recent) -> 190 (new)
• Damage 340 (pre-August 2021) -> 350 (recent) -> 345 (new)

• Health 720 (pre-October 2021) -> 680 (recent) -> 700 (new)

• Health 680 (pre-October 2021) -> 650 (recent) -> 660 (new)
• Damage 660 (pre-October 2021) -> 620 (recent) -> 640 (new)

• Projectile acceleration reduced by 11%.

Interface

• Added optional front-back ordering for line formations. Set it with Formation Rank ingame under Settings/Unit Behaviour/Default States, or set it per-unit with a state toggle that can be enabled ingame under Settings/Interface/Commands.
• Added a modoption to disable resurrection.
• Tweaked the tutorial mission to be a bit more informative, and removed the Lance.
• Added selection filtering for global build command.
• Added an option to show rating in the Tab Playerlist.
• Added hardware cursor to main menu Settings/Game.

Graphics

• Replaced unit outlines with an opengl4 shader (a non-opengl4 fallback exists).
• Replaced reclaim highlight with an opengl4 shader (a non-opengl4 fallback exists).
• Improved Rogue walk animation.
• Added a unique death clone for Imp.

Modding

• Updated Stinger model, with a small compatibility change required for how it aims.
• Removed 3do model support and converted existing 3dos to s3o.
• Unhardcode mex from pregame queue widget. A customParam for this exists.
• Fixed a potential crash caused by adding morph to a variety of units (mostly cloakbots).
• Add Spring.Utilities.CMD table for custom command lookup.
• Added a warning for buildings with brake, acceleration, and turn rate tags set.
• Remove QueryNanoPiece from LUS.

Fixes

• Lance avoids hovering downwards while firing, to avoid 'accidents'.
• Removed flat rectangles that could sometimes form under killed structures.
• Commanders with skins no longer leave a ghost behind when they leave line of sight.
• Removed 'Dev' from the name of the in-use AIs.
• Fixed weird looking impact explosions for Ogre, Behemoth, and Shogun.
• Settings that exist in the main menu and ingame are now under advanced settings ingame.
• Fixed an error in the ward fire toggle related to shooting at metal spots.
• Fixed Gauss turret spamming functions.
• Automatic guard remover no longer applies to factories.
• Fixed some minor Legacy AI configuration issues.
• Fixed feature ghosting not obeying distance fade.
• Fixed Imp underwater explosion effect.
• Optimise some code in Gauss turret, units catching on fire, selection shapes, attack AoE, economy overlay, decloak range, reclaim field summary, pause screen, newton firezone, radar dot height, and geothermal highlighter.

Most people report significantly better framerate with the engine update, but there are still a few lingering bugs. This update addresses many of them and re-adds commander skins.

• Reimplemented commander skins for GL4.
• A line to the nearest matching factory is now shown even when outside plate range.
• Fixed factory plate command conditions for underwater placement.
• Fixed transported units temporarily snapping to the ground when flown over factories.
• Fixed weirdness in Ogre (and similar) weapon explosion effects.
• Fixed factory facing arrow underwater.
• Fixed path cache issue on some popular maps (such as Tangerine) that lead to desync.
• Fixed trees missing textures on some maps.
• Fixed disappearing cursors, possibly related to the first campaign mission.
• Fixed radar icons sometimes displaying at the wrong size.
• Improved detection for GL4 support.
• Fixed some crashes on hardware without GL4 support.
• Fixed a rare longstanding bug with hit detection for fast projectiles and small units.
• Fixed reclaim-blocked structure placement squares showing as red rather than yellow.
• Fixed /debuggl.

There was an engine update for Zero-K this weekend. There are a few lingering bugs as we don't have the coverage in focused testing, which are being patched as we go. The main feature is improved performance, especially for newer graphics cards, and the general promise of more performance once we use more of the capabilities of the engine. Being up-to-date with the engine is also of great benefit to other parts of development. Unfortunately, while we're trying to support as much as we can, graphics cards older than about a decade, or old laptops with integrated graphics, may run into trouble. Players with graphics bugs and performance issues should first try updating their graphics drivers, and then ask for help in #support on the server or on Discord.

This is a balance patch on three fronts. On the ground, hovercraft have worse movement and nerfs to their most generic units, while spiders have cheaper early game units. In the air, light gunships receive some much needed attention and Raven no longer dives. Superweapons now require an energy grid, are much more vulnerable to being stunned, and Zenith swapped its cost with Disco Rave Party again. Other features include more options for line formations, better unit tracking and first person control, APM stats at the end of the game, and some fixes to do with saving campaign missions.

Ground

• Speed maintenance while turning reduced from 85% to 80%. Other vehicles are still at 60%.
• Slowdown while climbing hills is now halfway between the pre- and post-v.1.9.11.0 values.

• Health 720 -> 680
• Reload time 0.333 -> 0.367
• Slow damage reduced by 1/6.

• Health 680 -> 650
• Damage 660 -> 620

• Now steps back while reloading (with Attack Move or or idle without Hold Position).

• Decloak range 160 -> 130.

• Cost 200 -> 190

• Cost 240 -> 230
• Speed 1.8 -> 1.85

• Main DPS increased 3.3% (lingering damage unchanged)

Air

• Buildpower 7.5 -> 10

• Explosion damage 80 -> 40
• Ground fire initial damage per second 18 -> 25
• Ground fire duration 20 -> 25

• Idle regeneration 5/s -> 10/s

• Health 1100 -> 1200
• Improved brake rate by 20%.
• Damage 200 -> 220.
• Improved unit AI with preemptive breaking and better riot avoidance.

• No longer dives.
• Cruise altitude 330 -> 270 to fit under area shields.
• Bomb speed reduced by 32.5%.
• The bomb now has significant homing, but it cannot fly more than about 45 degrees off vertical.

• Cruise altitude 270 -> 240.
• Increased spread slightly.

Superweapons

• Requires a connection to a grid with 400 energy.
• Cost 36k -> 40k
• Initially spins 20% speed, reaching a maximum of 100% after about a minute of firing.
• Maintains speed without firing, unless it is stunned or loses power.
• Buffed the smoothing of Green Stomper slightly.

• Requires a connection to a grid with 400 energy.
• Cost 40k -> 36k
• Range 9000 -> 8400
• Increased the effect of launch distance on meteor spread. A meteor launched while it is still high in the sky is significantly less accurate than one floating in the swarm.
• Meteors wander down from space to the swarm faster, and are generally more energetic.
• AoE 240 -> 256
• Added smoothing. The radius is small but it can move structures.
• Meteors are visually 40% larger.
• Meteor reclaim increased 10 -> 20.

• Requires a connection to a grid with 600 energy.
• Glint falls and docks whenever the laser is not firing. This includes disarm, emp and low power.
• Aim speed is now reduced by slow damage.

Singleplayer and Coop

• Added enough energy to reliably power the enemy Zeniths on planets Caderical and Pendust.
• Added barely enough energy to power the player Zenith and Disco Rave Party on planets Caderical and Zhurou.
• Added radar to assist the Disco Rave Party on planet Cipher, for difficulties Hard and Brutal.

• AIs can now build Starlight.
• AIs know how to place Pylons around their superweapons.
• Updated beginner and novice AI to use the latest build.
• Added AI builds that are compatible with the latest engine, which is still being tested.

Features

• Moved line formation settings to 'Settings/Interface/Line Formations'.
• Added an option that turns right-click drag for selected commands (as opposed to context commands) into a line formation, rather than deselecting the command. Disabled by default.
• Added an option to evenly distribute different unit types along line formations. Enabled by default.
• Added an option to merge small categories of units for the purpose of evenly spreading unit types along line formations. Defaults to 1.
• The previously hardcoded behaviour in COFC that disables unit tracking mode when the camera is rotated can be disabled under 'Settings/Camera/COFC Following'.
• Icons that smoothly draw over models as you zoom out, rather than suddenly switching, can now be enabled under 'Settings/Graphics/Unit Visibility/Icon Zoom Transition'.
• Added keep target command for Raven, since it now makes sense with its guided bomb.
• Bombers can be now be set to retain the target of cancelled attack commands in 'Settings/Unit Behaviour'. This is how other units behave, but it was disabled for bombers to reduce accidents.
• Starlight stops moving its beam when given a Stop command, rather than continuing on to its most recent target location.
• Added direct unit control support (FPS mode). It can be enabled in the lobby in game options under 'Silly'. To enable in the campaign do /cheat, open the cheat sheet on the top left bar, tick the appropriate option, and do /cheat again (to reenable victory conditions).
• Added a tab to the game over screen with command speed summaries, such as APM.
• Added splashes for units entering or exiting water at speed.

Fixes

• Fixed complete mission objectives being broken by save/load.
• Workaround for the ramps on Lovaza Jira disappearing when the game is saved and loaded.
• Fixed some bugs and jitters with COFC unit tracking mode.
• Fixed icon distance and volumes not being carried over to externally launched games.
• Fixed an issue with connecting to the lobby for a few players.
• Improved unit movement for reclaim, attack move and repair commands.
• Fixed some typos in the space+click unit guides.
• Fixed Zenith space+click guide reporting incorrect reload time.
• Fixed incorrectly reported cruise altitude in the space+click unit guides.
• Fixed units with free cloak not listing cloak as an ability in the space+click unit guides.
• Added translation for 'shields'.
• Added startboxes for Coast To Coast Remake.

This is a small update with some AI fixes, just in time to take a break over the holidays to wander through the campaign. Perhaps even invite some friends.

• Fixed Strider Hub eventually not working. The AI forgot that striders can move, so was not able to reuse open space to place additional strider nanoframes.
• Increased the placement distance between Solar and Wind Generators. This makes the AI much less likely to block its base on maps with narrow passes.
• Construction delays for Easy, Normal and Hard now reduce to about 75% their maximum after about 20 minutes. This causes the AI to ramp up slightly in the lategame.
• Reduced initial construction delay for Hard, to make it slightly harder early on.
• Fixed an inverted comparator which was causing AIs to make Solars (rather than Singus) in the late game.

The previous patch had a few changes to bring Hovercraft more into the game. It was so successful that we felt the need to make this small followup update. The reduction in while turning seemed to particularly boost Bolas as it likes to dance around at max range, so it has lost some range to compensate. Minimum turn speed was also walked back from 100% to 85% for all hovercraft (other vehicles still turn at 60% speed). Bolas is less adept at poking other raiders.

• Reduced turn rate by 5.4% (now lower than Dagger).
• Range 232 -> 225
• Damage reduced by 3%.

• Paladin gains 20 hp/s combat regeneration.
• Tweaked Kodachi overkill prevention to hold fire less frequently.
• Fix the Dvorak key layout.

The November patch is a large one, with four new maps added to the matchmaker pool, numerous balance tweaks, and many other improvements and fixes. The most notable balance changes are:

• Armour now reduces damage by a factor of 3 rather than 4. This is to increase counters to armoured turrets and Crab, and to give Halberd space to be tankier while firing.
• Hovercraft have their uniquely terrible slope climbing replaced with uniquely fast speed while turning. A bonus feels better than a penalty, and the old penalty was pretty obscure as well as limiting for map diversity.
• Limpet received its prophesied nerf now its power and general utility has been discovered.
• The ongoing small tweaks to vehicle raiders continue in an attempt to share some of the success of Rover with Hover and Tank.
• Swift no longer fires while landing. Its weapon maybe have to be buffed in the future to compensate.

Matchmaker Pool

• Added Faultline, Doldrums, Random Plateaus, Shimmershore, Trojan Hills, Mecharavaged.
• Removed Intersection, Ravaged, Crubick Plains, Frostburn, Izki Channel, Anvilwood.

• Added Faultline, Doldrums, Random Plateaus, Shimmershore, Trojan Hills, Mecharavaged.
• Removed Intersection, Ravaged, Crubick Plains, Frostburn, Aurelian.

Balance

• Halberd health 1250 -> 1600
• Crab health 4000 -> 4200
• Solar Collector health 500 -> 600

• Rather than slow to 60% while turning like other vehicles, they keep all their speed.
• They climb slopes as quickly as other vehicles, rather than climbing much slower.

• Turn rate 920 -> 1100.

• Damage 100 -> 110

• Overkill prevention fires less often at targets that are probably going to die.

• Damage 35 -> 32
• Slow damage 140 -> 128

• Cost 140 -> 145

• Cost 175 -> 170
• Range 215 -> 210

• Cost 150 -> 160
• Speed 123 -> 120
• Damage 150 -> 120
• Slow damage of 1200 unchanged.
• Overslow 5s -> 2s (matches Moderator)

• Cost 70 -> 65

• Can no longer fire while landing.
• Boost recharge rate now obeys status effects.

• Damage 1200 -> 1100
• Reload 2.7s -> 2.9s (stun uptime 74% -> 69%)

• They now have flatter collision volumes when closed.
• If they can shoot over a wall, their aim point is now adjusted so that enemies can shoot back.

• Damage 350 -> 210
• Slow damage of 2100 unchanged.
• Added 2s overslow to Violet Slugger for consistency with Limpet.

• Added 2s overslow to Violet Slugger.

Interface

• Icon type Raider/Support -> Scout/Raider.
• This will be confusing at first, but the consistency should be worth it in the long run.

• Added a generic factory plate command that turns.
• It turns into the factory plate of the nearest factory in range of the mouse.
• It exists in the grid construction menu with hotkey BV.

• "defense" -> "defence" (rather than a mismash of the two options)
• "minimun" -> "minimum"
• "stun time" -> "max stun time"

• Self-destructing a selection of units costing less than 1000 now never triggers autoresign.
• Rectangle terraform now turns red when too large.
• Added Swift boost and jumpjet cooldown to selections panel.
• Landed Swifts refund their boost.
• Add Fire Towards Enemies to the hotkey menu.

Graphics

• Improved projectile effect and muzzle flare for Buoy and Halberd.

Modding

• Dirtbag mound.
• Full interactions for sonar, radar and radar jamming (eg being disabled when disarmed).
• Phantom firing while cloaked.
• Air transports.
• Teleport beacon.
• Overshoot prevention for turrets.
• Gravity weapons being allowed to Set Target allies.
• Torpedoes not jumping out of the water when they hit the shore.

Fixes

• Fix ward fire error spam on metal maps.
• Krow and Thunderbird now decloak during bombing runs. Previously Thunderbird would only decloak when bombing via attack order.
• Clean up metal spot detection code.
• Improved base64 encoding memory usage.
• Fix Scylla firepoint offset/clipping.
• Fix special weapons not updating their image and text in some cases (eg select a Swift then a Charon).
• Fix SLAM rocket model.
• Fix stretched Dart track texture.

[previewyoutube=9ZQzgLy4Pjo;full][/previewyoutube] Here is the Zero-K news for October.

• GoogleFrog talks about the background and design philosophy of Zero-K in an interview by StealSpeaks. This is the first Zero-K developer interview, and there was a lot to cover, so expect part two in a few weeks.
• There will be a 1v1 tournament at 19:00 UTC on Saturday 23rd October. It is open to everyone. To sign up post in this thread. Here is a countdown timer for timezone conversion.

We've finally solved a minor bug that caused anti-air missiles to sometimes penetrate aircraft. While quite rare, it was causing Vandal to make unfortunate mistakes against Thunderbird. Besides the fix, there are a few buffs for Hover and Shieldbots, and nerfs for Rover and Amphbots. Badger is of particular concern as it needs adjusting after its unit AI improvement. We are also experimenting with extra initial resources, with the goal being to give players more freedom in the early game.

Balance

• Initial resources 250-> 325 metal and energy.

• Cost 90 -> 85
• Health 640 -> 600

• Max shield 1600 -> 1800
• Recharge rate 16 -> 21

• Recharge rate 9 -> 10.5

• Shorter collision volume.
• Higher angle of fire.

• Slow damage 1500 -> 1200

• Health 1650 -> 1540

• Turret speed 200 -> 320 degrees/second

• Cost 125 -> 130

• Speed 60 -> 55.5

• Sight radius 64 -> 120
• Decloak radius 50 -> 80 (consistent with 2x2 footprint units).
• Flight time 1s -> 1.7s.
• Initial projectile speed 50 -> 70
• Final projectile speed 300 -> 130
• Projectile acceleration 200 -> 50
• Turn rate reduced by 28%
• Toned down projectile lighting

• Speed 143 -> 144
• Range 210 -> 212

• Cost 185 -> 180
• Speed 95 -> 96
• Range 230 -> 232

• Speed 39 -> 36

• Added 0.8 second post-construction deploy time.

• Fixed all anti-air, Ogre and Picket projectiles sometimes passing right through aircraft.
• Reduced the size of plane hit volumes to better match their model now that the underlying issue with anti-air inconsistency resolved.

Modding

• Added modoptions to set innate income and initial resources.
• Added a modoption to randomly set initial resources.
• Added a modoption to set seeds for random maps.
• Added support for weapondefs_mod and explosiondefs_mod. Mods can define these files to act on the weapon/explosions tables as they are loaded.

This update solves a few recent issues with ground targeting. The easy fix was for Duck, which was previously able to fire torpedoes out of the sea and onto land. The trickier changes solve the unfairness of ground targeting widgets by making the interface more powerful in ways relevant to humans, while reducing its power for widgets. Other balance changes include Felon tweaks and slower transport speed for Jack. The AI has been updated to fix a bug, and all the configs are now based on the previous bleeding edge test version.

Balance and Behaviour

• Reload 0.16s -> 0.13s
• Damage 110 -> 94 (DPS 660 -> 705)
• Shield energy per shot 80 -> 75 (damage/charge 1.38 -> 1.25)

• Aim period 5 -> 3 frames.
• No longer automatically fires at walls protecting enemy mexes.
• Jinks when fighting units such as Rogue.

• Turn rate reduced by 5.4%.
• Aim speed 360 -> 480 (no scope).
• Aim period 5 -> 1 frames.

• Kodachi fires towards nearby enemies that are behind it, to avoid running into its own fire.
• Badger fires in the direction of the closest enemy, whatever the distance.

• Light units cost up to 500
• Medium units cost more than 500 and at most 1000.
• Heavy units cost more than 1000.

• Charon transports Light/Medium units at 70%/50% speed.
• Hercules transports Light/Medium/Heavy units at 75%/65%/50% speed.

Campaign and Coop

• Updated the skirmish AI to fix an idle factory bug - for real this time.
• Removed time constraints on bonus objectives for the first five planets of the campaign.

Interface

• Units can now be told to fire towards an enemy or location. To do so, issue a non-area Set Target order with the Ctrl modifier. This behaviour is paused when enemies are nearby, unless the unit is set to hold fire.
• Improved the smart nano turrets widget Auto Patrol Nanos v2. This is still disabled by default, pending more live testing.
• Improved some widget descriptions.
• Added an option to hide chat.

Modding

• Added explode on victory modoption.
• Fixed the example model scaling gadget for dae.
• Added an unused root to the piece hierarchy of Glaive, Iris, Conjurer, Gremlin, Scythe to allow for easy model scaling.
• Exposed Spring.Utilities.CommandNameByID(cmdID) and Spring.Utilities.Traceback() to widgets.

Fixes

• Saved some memory in the UI framework.
• Fixed torpedoes sometimes falling through the map.
• Fixed imaginary numbers in the ballistic projectile solver.

Back in February we reduced the starting resources and commander income, with the aim of extending the early game slightly. After six months of data and feedback we suspect balance suffered as a result, so the income change has been reverted. We also addressed another ongoing balance project - Shieldbots - with a few buffs. This patch has the usual smattering of fixes and UI improvements, with the most notable being improvements to Area Mex and fixes for the AI. Area Mex now works pregame and has a terraforming mode. To counteract the terraforming mode a few units have been given wall-defeating behaviours. The AI fix is more of an update that started as a fix, and includes tweaks to the difficulty levels. Feedback about the difficulty progression would be appreciated.

Balance

• Initial metal income 5 -> 6.
• This was done via increased commander income (3 -> 4).
• Initial stored resources is still lower than before (300 -> 250).

• DPS 83.5 -> 86 (+3%)

• Real damage 26 -> 27 (+3.5%)
• Slow damage 78 -> 81 (ratio unchanged).

• Projectile velocity 185 -> 192
• Damage 340 -> 350

• Health 1400 -> 1600
• Removed artificial 133ms aim delay.

• Speed 48 -> 45

• Cost 260 -> 270
• Speed 65 -> 60

• Health 1720 -> 1650

• Range 260 -> 265

• Heat decay 14.28% -> 16.67% per second.

Matchmaker Rotation

• Removed Jurassic Sands and Calayo.
• Removed Aurelian from 1v1 (still in Teams).
• Added Ravaged and Frostburn to 1v1 and Teams.
• Added Izki Channel to 1v1.
• Added Banana Republic to Teams.

Interface

• Added Area Mex to the pregame queue.
• Point clicking now snaps to the closest point, the same as using a metal extractor blueprint.
• Point clicked Area Mex commands have the same key modifiers for queuing adjacent energy.
• Shift-release behaviour is now consistent with structure placement (it deselects if an order has been issued).
• Added a terraform mode.

• It exists as a separate command (default hotkey Alt+W).
• By default it does not appear as a UI button.
• The basic command builds a wall after the mex is complete.
• Issue with Alt to dig a hole prior to placement instead of a wall.
• Issue with Ctrl to increase height/depth of terraform.
• Configure the height/depth in Settings/Interface/Building Placement.
• Has the same point click improvements as base Area Mex.

• Unit markers report the progress of things under construction.
• Freed up F6 and F7 for hotkey binds.
• Starlight and Disco Rave Party now have a directional placement arrow (like factories).
• Claymore has anti-bait against free units by default.
• Unit descriptions now consistently say 'Anti-Sub' for units that can reasonably fight submerged Ducks and Seawolves, and 'Undersea Fire' for units that can fire while submerged.
• Tweaked the default Alt+N terraform wall slightly higher.
• Added a Alt+M default terraform hotkey, which is like Alt+N but high enough to protect Stinger from Lance.

Modding

• Local widgets can no longer use Spring.GetVisibleProjectiles.
• Local widgets no longer receive enemy projectiles from Spring.GetProjectilesInRectangle.
• Ploppable factories now have the 'ploppable' CustomParam, rather than ploppability being determined by a config file.

Fixes

• Fixed AI factories sometimes 'breaking' lategame. This required an AI update, so post feedback about the migrated difficulty levels. Beginner and Novice are unaffected.
• Removed Economist AI as it is now bundled into Brutal.
• Fixed Quake (seismic missile) being able to crash Glint (Starlight's satellite) back to earth.
• Fixed Raven sometimes failing to dive against Aegis.
• Fixed unit AI internal commands sometimes cancelling user commands via duplicate orders.
• Fixed uneven and misnamed startboxes on Stronghold_V4.
• Fixed Conjurer wreck being indistinguishable from Gremlin.
• Fixed dying terraform anchors dealing 0.0001 damage.
• Fixed garbage being rendered with Outline Shader enabled.
• Fixed the cheat menu not appearing on its own if the Null AI had a different name.
• Fixed spectator panel numbers bobbing up and down.
• Fixed mex placement widget eating too many mouse buttons.
• Fixed some gray labels in missions with locked units.

This is a small update to the matchmaker and planet Kirdipan - the terraform mission. Kirdipan is a bit fairer with tweaks such as clear Pylon lines, Owls to scout the map, and no underwater units. The 1v1 matchmaker now looks like a single queue with two option for a wider search range (handicap and ranked). The 'Match Available' status should reliably report the game type, with '1v1' corresponding to a narrow search range game, and '1v1 Handicap'/'1v1 Wide' corresponding to the two options. Both can be ticked to accept both types of game. The standard search range has also been increased from 330 to 345.

Income multipliers can now be set for each team under Options to serve as a form of handicap. This is a commonly requested feature for coop games, but to take it a step further we're trying out a new matchmaking queue. The '1v1' queue now generates even matches up to a certain skill gap, beyond which it creates unranked games with an income boost for the lower-ranked side. To stick to even games use the new '1v1 Narrow' queue, and for the best queue times use both at once. The '1v1' queue allows a slightly wider skill gap than previously, while '1v1 Narrow' allows a slightly narrower gap. Update: There is now a '1v1 Wide' queue with the same match range as '1v1', but without the handicap.

Handicap and Matchmaking

• Per-team income multipliers can now be set under Options -> Multipliers in battle lobbies.
• Added a '1v1 Narrow' matchmaking queue that creates more evenly matched battles than the previous system.
• The '1v1' matchmaking queue can create either handicap or non-handicap games. If a match would qualify for '1v1 Narrow' then a normal match is played, otherwise the match does not affect ratings and the lower skilled player receives a small income boost.
• Added a '1v1 Wide' matchmaking queue with the same match range as '1v1' where games are always ranked and without a handicap.

Behaviour

• Added anti-structure overkill prevention for Lance, Lucifer, Ravager, Crab and Cyclops.
• Reef and Shogun try to stay at max range against all targets.

Other Tweaks

• Added NW vs. SE startboxes for Archsimkats Valley.
• Calayo is back to just being NW vs. SE.
• Tweaked metal spots on Battle for Planet XIV and DeltaSiege Island 8 Way.
• Tweaked the sun and water parameters for a few maps.
• Tweaked welcome text.
• Better support for modding a few things related to the economy (fewer files to override).

Everything should go just a bit smoother with this update. The AFK detector now has a countdown and disables construction, bringing harmony to teams. A number of unruly fonts and boxes have been brought into line, bringing harmony to the interface. The normal difficulty AI has chilled out. Singleplayer and multiplayer can be as one with skirmish and campaign autosaves during matchmaking. Most harmoniously, maps can now (effectively) be nice smooth circles rather than pointy squares.

Balance

• No longer slightly leads its target, removing a small retreat disadvantage.
• DPS increased by 7.1%

• Area cloak and jammer range 192 -> 184

• Range reduced by 1.9%
• Projectile speed reduced by 1.9%

• Speed 67.5 -> 65
• Reload time 5.5s -> 5.6s

• Speed 84 -> 87 (2.8 -> 2.9)

• Speed increased by 0.35% to a round number.
• Range 205 -> 210

• Cost 190 -> 185
• Speed increased by 0.53% to a round number.

• Range 340 -> 345

• Damage 150 -> 160

• Reload 2.8 -> 3.2
• Damage 400 -> 520
• Increased edge effectiveness.

Singleplayer

• Normal AI is now noticeably easier, with the goal of reducing the jump from Easy to Normal.
• Hard AI is slightly easier. Brutal is unchanged.
• The player has more defenses in campaign mission 2 to give them more breathing space.
• Added a few extra things to destroy in campaign missions 2 and 3.
• Singleplayer games are now automatically saved when a matchmaker match is found, for players that would like to play singleplayer while in the queue.

Unit Behaviour

• Added Anti-Bait toggles for Knight, Dagger, Cutter, Hunter, Blitz.
• Fix Bandit unit AI, it now idle flees itself and Duck.
• Urchin can no longer Force Attack the ground (both on land and underwater).
• Gauss now aims down cliffs properly.
• Units can no longer guard themselves.
• Fixed retreating Attack Move units occasionally returning with Move after being repaired.
• Fix Ronin and Rogue on Attack Move jinking too fast to aim and fire.

AFK Detection

• Renamed the lobby option toggle to "Inactive Player Unit Sharing" and added a default that enables it in PvP while disabling it for Coop.
• Increased AFK threshold from 30s to 40s.
• Added a visual warning that start at 32s of inactivity.
• Fixed typing in chat erroneously not counting towards activity.
• Shared constructors and factories are now given a Wait command, which is removed when they are shared back.

Mapping

• Maps can now define a playable area, restricting unit movement and construction. Circular maps can be created with a config file and functions for arbitrary shapes have been exposed.
• Added a circular playable area to BlackStar.
• Cleaned up metal spot inconsistencies on Pinewood Derby, Archsimkats Valley and Altair Crossing.
• Added startboxes for Stronghold, Throne, Tundra, Rysia, Battle for Planet XIV, Vernal 3-way, and Small Supreme Battlefield Dry/Islands/Original.

• Spring.Utilities.Gametype.isCompStomp() returns true if there is exactly one team that only contains humans.
• Spring.Utilities.Gametype.isTeamFFA() returns true if there are more than 2 teams and at least one of them has multiple players.

Modding

• Added warnings about LaserCannons with ranges not equal to a multiple of their speed. The next release they will get turned into erroring on load
• Script.IsEngineMinVersion returns true correctly on bleeding edge (i.e. versions X.1.Y-Z).
• Projectiles are no longer filtered for spectator widgets.
• Added a detonate command to an unused kamikaze submarine.

Fixes

• Tweaked numerous ingame and menu font sizes and button dimensions for consistency.
• Improved font management to cut down on memory usage.
• Improved the load time of the map list in the game lobby.
• Fixed map and mod downloads occasionally needing to be retried near completion.
• Made cost and time more prominent in construction tooltips.
• Right mouse button now takes precedence over Alt on the factory build queue.
• Fixed large build queues adding units uncontrollably with Alt and some rapid clicking.
• Improved Fusion, Antinuke and Trinity smoke effects and Zenith beam effect.
• Fixed Antinuke and Area of Effect visualisation being slightly off-position when targeting water.
• Fixed a bug with persistent build spacing with non-default settings.
• Fixed how the ingame abuse report window reports FFA.
• Fixed a rare commshare bug that could break team FFA.
• Fixed negative damage showing up in endgame graphs.
• Fixed Strider Hub not aiming correctly.
• Fix the Wait indicator not appearing over factories.
• Fix the Wait indicator not appearing over transferred units.

This is the first big balance patch of the year, just in time for the second tournament series of the year. Shieldbots are better early and have more tools in their arsenal, but the standard shieldball is less powerful. Hover and Tank have buffs for improved unit variety and to bring them up to the power level of Rover. Spider has a few small tweaks to make them less reliant on Venom.

Lobster Roll Series Two

Map Rotation

• Added - Crubick Plains, Aurelian, Calayo, Red Comet Remake, Fairyland, Sertaleina.
• Removed - Sparkles Reef, Prestige, Otago, Iced Coffee, Ravaged, Mechadansonia.
• Updated - Cobalt Dream, Dune Patrol Redux, Fallendell.

Bot Balance

• Health 330 -> 340
• DPS increased by 2.5%

• Speed 60 -> 61.5

• Health 580 -> 540
• Turn rate reduced by 10%.
• Projectile velocity 192 -> 185
• Damage 350 -> 340

• Speed 57.75 -> 57 (what a weird number, now same as Outlaw)
• Shield capacity 1250 -> 1200
• Shield regen 16/s -> 14/s

• Shield regen 18/s -> 16/s
• Aim time 0.3s -> 0.166s
• Reload 0.13s -> 0.16s
• Charge per shot 75 -> 80
• Damage 108.4 -> 110

• Cost 260 -> 250
• Health 1050 -> 1100
• DPS increased by 13%

• Range 880 -> 900

• Cost 350 -> 340
• Speed 51 -> 52.5

• Speed 120 -> 117

• Speed 78 -> 84
• Sight range 560 -> 600
• Reload 2s -> 1.9s
• Damage 45 -> 55

• Cost 220 -> 210
• Speed 1.71 -> 1.75
• Reload 0.5s -> 0.466s

• Decloak Radius 200 -> 160

• Reload time 1.1s -> 1.133s.

• Cost 160 -> 150
• Health 1400 -> 1500

• Cloak cost 12/4 -> 15/5 (Moving/Static)

Vehicle Balance

• Health 560 -> 530
• Setup time is 6.6% longer

• Cost 130 -> 125

• Cost 240 -> 210

• Health 1300 -> 1400
• Range 345 -> 340
• Aims 20% faster
• DPS increased by 10%

• Cost 180 -> 175
• Health 670 -> 680

• Cost 200 -> 185
• Health 1800 -> 1700
• DPS reduced by 4%

• Health 1850 -> 1950

Interface

• Added Shield Charge/Maximum to aggregate selection stats and switched some rows to improve order stability.
• Added Avoid Bad Targets toggle for Claw, Ultimatum, Scorpion and Nimbus.
• Nimbus flies a little closer to make it reliably fire at tall turrets.
• Artemis overkill prevention is more careful about wasting missiles.
• Mace skirms more unit types.

Fixes

• Fixed two bugs that caused some terraform shapes to stall at 99% completion.
• Fixed commander drone duplication upon morph.
• Crab is better at uncurling.
• Clear Factory Queue now works with factories set to Wait.
• Fixed Artemis not firing when on land of height zero.
• Landbound Urchins are better at firing into the deep ocean.
• Fixed transports having trouble unloading tall units.
• Fixed some edge cases with antinukes.
• Fixed Ravager suspension.
• Tacnuke sounds now play at higher priority.

The big feature in this update is bait prevention. Units and turrets, such as Artemis, should be significantly better now that they can more precisely obey your wishes. Felon is a beneficiary as it can be told to avoid armoured units, but it may be kept in check by another new behaviour: Most units now fire at the edge of small shields if there is nothing else in range. There are few actual balance changes to better observe the ramification of the latest advances in unit command. Apart from that there are a few features and fixes, such as the ability to click on names in the endgame stats to highlight a line, and improved map filtering.

Balance

• Cost 500 -> 400
• Sight 800 -> 1120
• Range 4000 -> 5600

Behaviour

• Disabled.
• Free - Avoid light drones, Wind, Solar, Claw (Badger mines), Dirtbag, nanoframes up to 50 metal and armoured targets (except Crab).
• Light - As above, as well as units costing less than 90, Razor, Sparrow and unidentified radar dots.
• Medium - As above, as well as units costing less than 240, except Stardust, with the addition of Raptor.
• Heavy - As above, as well as units costing less than 420.

• Siren brings its main gun into range on Attack Move.
• Most skirmishers and assaults no longer engage drones on Attack Move, however they will still fire at them if nothing else is in range.

Interface

• Individual players can now be highlighted in the endgame graphs by clicking on their name.
• Improved the filter box of the map list.
• Renamed 'Map Selection' to 'Set Map Bans' in the Matchmaker Tab.
• Selecting Puppy, Athena, Caretaker and Strider Hub enables the reclaim highlight overlay.
• Unit info screens now show movement type.
• Clarified Reaver and Hercules helptext.

Fixes

• Greased Tremor rotary drive.
• Fixed Crab curling?
• Fixed Adamantine Mountain team names.
• Fixed newly constructed units sometimes not following factory waypoints.
• Fixed overkill prevention sometimes knowing too much about unidentified radar dots.
• Fixed trouble toggling Puppy Goo.
• Fixed some parts of long terraform queues being cancelled prematurely.
• Removed Leaper Chickens from planets Sapphire and Vis Ragstrom.

This is a balance patch, with changes to raiders, artillery, turrets, cloaking and drones. Each of the medium turrets has been nerfed, with a large nerf for Stinger, a fancy nerf for Stardust, and small nerfs for Faraday and Gauss. Most of the raiders with high burst damage have less range, as they may have been buffed a bit too much by the aiming improvements of last year. Some of the more oppressive artillery is a little worse, area cloaking is harder to use in general combat, and commander drones should be less annoying to fight. Other changes include an excellent new walk animation for Outlaw and some behaviour fixes for Attack-Move.

Units

• Land range 240 -> 235
• Projectile velocity increased by 10%
• Projectile turn rate increased by 39%

• Range 245 -> 240
• Health 750 -> 740

• Range 212 -> 205

• Health 1260 -> 1300
• Projectile speed increased by about 50% (both on land and sea)
• Range 300 -> 280 (both on land and sea)

• Damage 150 -> 140

• Mine damage 200 -> 170.

Turrets

• Gains 3.8% heat per shot.
• Loses 14.3% per second.
• Slow scales up to 50% at max heat.
• Starts with 100% heat.

• Cost 250 -> 260

• Reload 2s -> 2.1s

• Cost 420 -> 450
• Health 2475 -> 2250

Mechanics

• Income +6 metal, +8 energy -> +5 metal, +8 energy (-1 metal income for commanders).
• Initial resources 300 metal and energy -> 250 metal and energy.

• Iris radius 440 -> 400.
• Increased recloak time for area cloaking 5s -> 6s.
• Default decloak radius for area cloaking is now 12*footprint + 56, instead of 75. This means most units have a decloak radius of 80, 92 or 104.
• Imp and Snitch have their decloak radius increased 75 -> 80. Other units with personal cloak are unaffected by the decloak radius change.

• Cost 300 -> 200
• Range 180 -> 150
• Cruise Alt 100 -> 85
• Guardian progression 1/1/2/2/3/3 -> 1/1/2/2/2/3

• Cost 500 -> 350
• Range 240 -> 200
• Cruise Alt 100 -> 95
• Guardian progression 0/0/0/1/1/2 -> 0/0/0/0/1/1

Behaviour

• Moving now consistently grants immunity to being kidnapped by enemy transports.
• Units on Attack-Move now periodically reset their target. This ensures that they don't end up chasing retreating enemies through enemy lines.
• Improved Emissary movement packing.
• The Alt+N default terraform hotkey makes slightly higher walls.
• Added a Caretaker deathclone, it blocks movement like most deathclones.
• Made it a little easier to shoot Lotus and Stinger from the bottom of cliffs.
• Tactical AI is off by default for Emissary.

Visuals

• Improved Outlaw walk animation.
• Increased Bulkhead icon size slightly.
• Added checkbox options for unit halos, platters, selection halos, and selection shapes.
• Teamplatter widgets use the same base scaling as selection shapes.
• Map dimension and type are now shown below the map in the lobby.

Fixes

• Fixed EMP breaking factories.
• Fixed Archer unit AI sometimes closing range inappropriately.
• Fixed Puppy Gather settings under Unit Behaviour not being applied.
• Damaging or killing drones no longer counts towards endgame stats.
• Reduced the permeability of the side walls of Shielbot Factory, Cloakbot Factory and Hovercraft Platform.
• Fixed camera state recall and ctrl/alt+MMB rotation jitters for COFC (the advanced camera).
• Fixed build spacing widget crash on rapid camera rotation.
• Disabling a selection widget no longer enables the basic selection squares if any other selection widget is enabled.
• Fixed Area Mex with Space, and no other modifiers, held.
• Fixed map terraform masking not applying to smoothing.

Tanks have been oppressive lately, with their ability to exert a lot of early pressure. Bakuhatsu suggested a slower Kodachi and organised some testing, which went fairly well, so we're going with this large yet simple change. In other news, playing new mods is now as simple as a single button on the mod page, Dirtbag is the guinea pig for a new animation system, bombers are a bit easier to control, and various lingering bugs have been fixed.

Balance

• Speed 117 -> 108

Features

• Bombers are smarter about rearming. They now temporarily skip to their next Move command after bombing, ignoring intervening Attack commands. This makes queuing a safe retreat after bombing a group of units much easier.
• Added a 'Play This Mod' button to mod pages on the site. See Future Wars for an example.
• Improved Dirtbag walk animation.
• Added Disarm Award.
• Added some Portuguese translations.
• Updated Russian translations.

Interface

• Save channel topic to avoid re-displaying it multiple times a session.
• Added a filter field for the map list.
• Added a toggle for excess metal flash under 'Settings/HUD Panels/Economy Panel'.
• Added a toggle for Attrition Counter under 'Settings/HUD Panels/Extras' so it can be bound to a hotkey.
• Added free stockpile to '/luarules nocost'.
• Added a few tip window settings under 'Settings/HUD Panels/Unit Stats Help Window' - useful for tutorial videos.

Fixes

• Fixed a premature victory bug on Planet Tempest (as well as a few other missions).
• Fix terraform mex placement UI.
• Fixed airpads not working slower under slow/emp/disarm.
• Fixed a few poorly configured projectile lights.
• Fixed Slow Award damage calculation against commanders.
• Fixed team names on Adamantine Mountian.
• Fixes for the WIP Caretaker AI. It can be tested by enabling the widget 'Auto Patrol Nanos v2'.

Here are a few fixes to round out the year. Seawolf behaves better around coasts, Metal Extractor placement is smoother, and a lingering graphics bug has been resolved. This is probably the last patch of the year so I'd like to thank the community for helping each other through an otherwise difficult year.

Fixes with multiple dot points

• Minimum depth 5 -> 15.
• Seawolf now has a higher aim point and fire point. This solves various weapon blocking bugs that could occur around coastlines.

• If you click where a mex can be placed, the mex is placed, otherwise the click is ignored.
• Previously, whether the click was used depended on the ghost under the mouse cursor.
• This caused issues such as being unable to click on a blocked location near a free metal spot to place a mex.

Fixes with one dot point each

• Writing a report description is now mandatory.
• Replaced the 'Clan List' button in the Profile tab with 'Contact Admins' as this seems more useful.
• Fixed reclaim failing to be highlighted during start position selection.
• Filtered out the low quality part of the construction unit reply.
• Fixed the problems stemming from the outline shader update, possibly even correctly. This fixes the non-default widgets that were missed by the previous patch, such as Bloom and Blob Shader.
• Modding in extra shields is now a bit easier.

• Traditional real time strategy with physically simulated units and projectiles.
  
• 100+ varied units with abilities including terrain manipulation, cloaking and jumpjets.
  
• 70+ mission galaxy-spanning campaign to be enjoyed solo or co-op with friends.
  
• Challenging, (non-cheating) skirmish AI and survival mode.
  
• Multiplayer 1v1 - 16v16, FFA, coop. ladders, replays, spectators and tournaments.
  
• PlanetWars - A multiplayer online campaign planned to start in May.
  
• Really free, no paid advantages, no unfair multiplayer.

Fully Utilized Physics

• Use small nimble units to dodge slow moving projectiles.
  
• Hide behind hills that block weapon fire, line of sight and radar.
  
• Toss units across the map with gravity guns.
  
• Transport a battleship to a hilltop - for greater views and gun range.

Manipulate the Terrain

• Wreck the battlefield with craters that bog down enemy tanks.
  
• Dig canals to bring your navy inland for a submarine-in-a-desert strike.
  
• Build ramps, bridges, entire fortress if you wish.
  
• Burn your portrait into continental crust using the planetary energy chisel.

Singleplayer Campaign and Challenging AI

• Explore the galaxy and discover technologies in our singleplayer campaign.
  
• Face a challenging AI that is neither brain-dead nor a clairvoyant cheater.
  
• Have some coop fun with friends, surviving waves of chicken-monsters.
  
• Cloaking? Resurrection? Tough choices customizing your commander.

Casual and Competitive Multiplayer

• Enjoying epic scale combat? Join our 16v16 team battles!
  
• Looking for a common goal? Fight AIs or waves of chicken-monsters.
  
• Prefer dancing on a razor's edge? Play 1v1 in ladder and tournaments.
  
• Comebacks, betrayals, emotions always running high in FFA.
  
• Want to fight for a bigger cause? Join PlanetWars, a competitive online campaign with web-game strategic elements, diplomacy and backstabbing (currently on hiatus pending an overhaul).

Power to the People

• Do what you want. No limits to camera, queue or level of control.
  
• Paint a shape, any shape, and units will move to assume your formation.
  
• Construction priorities let your builders work more efficiently.
  
• Don't want to be tied down managing every unit movement? Order units to smartly kite, strafe or zig zag bullets.

Plenty of Stuff to Explore (and Explode)

• Learn to use all of our 100+ units and play on hundreds of maps.
  
• Invent the next mad team-tactics to shock enemies and make allies laugh.
  
• Combine cloaking, teleports, shields, jumpjets, EMP, napalm, gravity guns, black hole launchers, mind control and self-replication.
  
• Tiny flea swarm that clings to walls?
  
• Jumping "cans" with steam-spike?
  
• Buoys that hide under water to ambush ships?
  
• Mechs that spew fire and enjoy being tossed from air transports?
  
• Carrier with cute helicopters?
  
• Jumping Jugglenaut with dual wielding gravity guns?
  
• Meet them in Zero-K!

• OS: Ubuntu 13.04 or equivalent
• Processor: 2.0 GHz dual core CPU with SSE (Intel Core 2 Duo or equivalent)Memory: 4 GB RAM
• Memory: 4 GB RAM
• Graphics: 512 MB graphics card with OpenGL 3 support (GeForce 8800 or equivalent)
• Storage: 6 GB available spaceAdditional Notes: 64bit only. Big Picture mode is not supported

• OS: Ubuntu 17.10 or equivalent
• Processor: 3.0 GHz quad core CPU (Intel Core i5 or equivalent)Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: 2048 MB graphics card with OpenGL 3 support (high GT 500 series or equivalent)Network: Broadband Internet connection
• Storage: 8 GB available spaceAdditional Notes: 64bit only. Big Picture mode is not supported