On the Dante Rework

I've already said this much and more on the Discord, which I hope is not being ignored for 1 or 2 forum posts.

It feels very frustrating that Dante of all units (as far as I can tell what the average community member might have considered balanced, unproblematic, and fun to use and play against in the right contexts) got MAJORLY reworked into an entirely different unit based, presumably, almost entirely on a forum conversation between 2 people and walled garden testing with mods.

I really liked Dante (I liked that it punished mass skirmisher balls, especially Scalpel and Moderator+Placeholder which generally don't have a good variety of healthy counters), I really don't like Dante now (it's now SCARED of the units it previously countered), and I think buffing it to be truly viable with its new direction (trying to live up to the Assault/Riot label) is MOST LIKELY GOING TO result in it being toxic with surprise deployments via Iris, Lobster, and Hercules -- it'll essentially become like Krow, but insane and unmanageable in its own different contexts.

I think the old design had plenty of room to receive balance retuning (such as lower rocket afterburn than 38 whole seconds, and slightly less range variance on the rockets, and slightly more health). I also think that there is also plenty of room to make wildly new units from scratch instead of gutting and repurposing something like Dante. Its label could just be changed to "Fire Combat Strider" or "Heavy Weapons Strider." ...Maintaining its emergent role in the game isn't disgraceful.

I'd prefer to see the community as a whole more explicitly involved in a change this big before it happens. Forcing the changes to live without gathering input first feels like it threatens to leave the old design behind completely if no one ACTIVELY says hey what the hell? before it's too late. So, at risk of being annoying to anyone who wants to go forward with these extreme changes and new direction, I'm saying, hey what the hell?

quote: Forcing the changes to live without gathering input first feels like it threatens to leave the old design behind completely if no one ACTIVELY says hey what the hell?

Exaggeration. I'm not sure how much testing Stiofan did with his mod before making the writeup where he proposed the changes. But he definitely (1) made a fully working version (2) did test it and gathered community feedback from willing players, before even making that post where GoogleFrog joined the discussion.

Maybe you could argue it wasn't tested enough, and perhaps also that there hasn't been enough discussion about what role Dante should (now) have in the first place (so as to best apply Quantz's Rule to it).

But as a reasonably average player who has played more against Dante than with it, and who playtested some of Stiofan's experiments, I felt the whole thing and the pace at which it moved has been really great. That said, I'm glad most changes don't hit as many stats at the same time on a unit as this one.

But it felt like a breath of fresh air that made Dante enjoyable for me to actually use in lobpot (and lose with it while still enjoying the experience overall).

I will make a pretty detailed explanation of my position as soon as I have an hour spare, but here is the quick version:

New Dante is good in what it does. Just what it does is not necessarily useful in high density games. I assume the changes make sense in smaller game sizes.
So, I am specifically talking about TAW-style clusterfucks here:
Dante was used so often in there because it's specific role was one you could not get with a different unit. Kind of a medium-range spam counter.
The point is that if I am in a situation where I would need to build a 3500m riot, then I am guaranteed to fight a lot of skirmishers and artillery as well. The added health is nice, but even Paladin is mostly so sturdy because things have to be cautios about it's long range weaponry.

While I definitely believe that a lot of thought and testing was done and I DON'T EVEN DISAGREE with certain changes, first and foremost burn time reduction, here is my critique:
StiofanKingofAwoo, if you sat down with the previous version of the game and you had to change something, would you think buffing skirmisher spam and lances would come to your mind or would be a good idea? I kind of doubt that...

So, what would be an alternative solution? Honestly, in my opinion the best solution would be to design a new unit that fills in the gap and does something functionally similar to dantes old d-gun, but without the bs like the burn time. Since the siegebot stuff is worked on atm anyway, I think that this is a convenient timing to make such a unit as well.

Alternatively, the easiest solution would be to meddle with the d-gun again, but I have like 5 possible ideas for that alone, so I will save that for a later post. (Also, probably the most boring approach to this.)

Lastly, a more general feedback:

StiofanKingofAwoo:
First, I think I need to make clear that my intention is not to get a simple reversion of the changes you made. I am more looking for a solution that fulfills yours and GFs ideas about Dante, but also adresses my and @Ixzines complaints, because I - obviously - think they are pretty valid.
From reading RefumbleStriders, your thinking is very understandable (nachvollziehbar) and makes sense, but I think your approach to balance is a bit to "unit-I-want-to-change-centric".
A basic rule of thumb in design is "form follows function", not the other way around. It is completely fine to have changes like you did, but it is even better if you also think about how to compensate players for what they lose / what functionalilty or mechanics they lose.
Second, there is one thing I completely disaree with:

quote: Making dante go to the enemy to do it's damage looks like a design that would create more interesting interactions.

This is ofc subjective, but to me this feels precisely the other way around. A unit that is kind of confused about if it is a riot, a skirm or an artillery unit, that wants to be tanky but isn't is way more interesting than what we have now. Especially since you practically scrapped the list of units that dante can interact with in the first place quite a bit. And about:

quote: Dante becomes both speedier and tankier, to get into combat, survive it a little and get out again.

That describes quite precisely what Krow does. Making a unit functionally more similar to an already existing unit at the cost of something otherwise unique seems like it violates the design-goals of Quant'z rule. At least to me, the new iteration of Dante feels honestly quite bland and boring compared to before. While I know that this is a subjective opinion, I am saying this because in my eyes, I don't think you got the effect you intended.

Later!

Okay, after I talked with Stiofan, I think I need to clarify something:

I now understand what you mean with Dante being "interesting/exiting". Me saying it's boring means "conceptually boring", while you were talking about Dantes gameplay. I am not so much the type for this playstyle, but I totally get you there.

quote: It would be indeed nice if "simple revert and retry" was at least generaly an option for adjusting balance-changes.

Here I think it is useful to distinguish between number-tweaks style of balance changes and outright unit redesigns. As far as I recall, partial reverts of number-tweaks are not uncommon.

Unit redesigns, on the other hand, are generally aimed at fixing a design problem, and so continuing to search out new areas of the design space is more appealing than returning to where there is a known problem. Of course, this line of argument is not very convincing unless one agrees that there was a difficult-to-reconcile design problem in the first place. In the case of Dante I am getting the impression that there is some disagreement on that point.

I haven't played with new Dante at all yet so I don't really have an opinion on it. Old Dante being a glorified high-HP manual-fire Firewalker was a weird thing to be in Dante's slot but I felt it was pretty fun to wield and to fight against so the new design has a pretty high bar to clear. On the occasions where I have had a more active hand in Zero-K design I was careful to pick bars to clear that were very low.

quote: Should a dante beat slightly more than its cost in ravagers? minotaurs? glaives? Some quick testing on a sandbox makes it seem it can lose all of these unless it uses its manual fire weapon well.

idk the answer but I will tell you that it's easier to keep 3500 metal in a dante alive so you can repair it than it is any of the other things you mentioned.