The level of control this game provides is so fucking incredible. It hurts my brain.
I like it because it almost seems like a fictional representation of a videogame in which people can come up with new, never-before-seen strategies on the fly, which is generally not possible in actual videogames because their ruleset is not flexible or esoteric enough
āTHE CIRCLE CATAPULT GAMBITā what
itās the promise of archon finally realized
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So I dunno how useful this will be to the larger discussion ITT but I am getting strong Total Annihilation vibes from what Iām seeing/reading.
Let me start by saying that prior to TA Iād only ever played Age of Empires, and Iāve never played Warcraft, Starcraft, Command & Conquer or any of the big names. I probably spent more time reading the manual for Myth: The Fallen Lords then actually playing it.
Anyway, I do not know if TA truly did anything all that different from its contemporaries but I got into it deeply, and I loved that it did things like environmental hazards. Some maps had bodies of āwaterā that were actually acid! You could have an entire navy, constantly degrading for the entire length of a match. Some maps were entirely metal, and you could build metal harvesters anywhere. Geothermal vents, if found early on, were a huge boon compared to the solar collectors that were typical in the early to mid game.
Your commander unit was extremely powerful, and if its destruction wasnāt set to be a win-condition, it was sometimes a viable tactic to just roll your commander in during the early game to wreck your opponentās shit if you thought you had enough of an economy lead. On the flipside the game also made turtling pretty easy and this was usually my strategy, I damn near played the game like tower defense until I could build enough long-range artillery or nukes to try to destroy the enemy from afar (but this was generally much more viable on smaller maps).
The game was also the first encounter I ever had with DLC, as units were made available post-release. I still have those files sitting on a floppy disk thatās stuffed into a CD case that has a bunch of my old PC game CD-ROMs on it. Speaking of, great soundtrack on those discs
Since TA the only RTS Iāve ever gotten into at all is Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War. Not sure what that says about my tastes. I was interested in that RTS Sega published years ago but never jumped on it because I realized Iād never play it against anyone on Xbox360 and my computer of the time wouldnāt have been able to run it. For a long time I wanted to play that Grey Goo game but again, probably just missed the boat. Right now the only thing I can think of thatās on my radar is Drone Swarm but I have no idea when that damn thingās going to come out.
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Wow, I am really bad at multitasking. All the units and buildings and choices are very learnable for me, I think. Iām struggling with like basic RTS competency right now. Moving units around makes my econ go to shit and vice versa.
Whatās the best way to set a waypoint from a factory? My negligence always makes it so they form a giant ball somewhere on the map; Iād like if theyād at least form a line or an arc or something.
You can set a patrol path with P key to at least have your units be moving around from your factory waypoint. Itās not the worst thing to have some blobs of units that havenāt been integrated into your army yet, especially if they are in a semi useful position like guarding your base.
Get in the habit of whenever you finish a task, zoom out to assess the full scope of the battlefield before you decide what needs your attention next. Itās easy to get tunnel vision in this game. Remember that you donāt need to watch everything thatās happening. If some units die because you were managing your economy, thatās OK. The gain from managing the economy probably outweighs the benefit of micromanaging those few units.
When your first starting out, make simple plans. Win by using your army like a blunt instrument. Try setting your Cloakbot factory queue to 1 Glaive, 1 Ronin, 1 Reaver and put it on endless build mode. Then when a blob of units starts to form at the factory way point, send them into combat. Now you can spend less mental effort thinking about what units to build and focus instead on metal and energy. Make 1 fabricator build a giant queue of energy production so you donāt have to think about it anymore. Make another fabricator queue 10 Metal extractors so you donāt have to think about it for a while. I hope this helps a little. The real answer is to keep gaining familiarity and comfort with the systems until it feels less strenuous to execute your strategy.
Keep trying to always use a hotkey to perform an action. Build the muscle memory so that it becomes second nature.
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Zero-k is back, because it never left, because Zero-k is forever.
Who amongst you will play this beautiful game?
I jumped back in and found I didnāt have any trouble remembering the controls or how to play. I would really love to do some select button weekend skirmishes where everyone flails uncontrollably at their keyboard until a victor is chosen, which is the correct way to play.
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i play semi frequently with my friend but we only play coop
its nice because its an easier environment to learn whats an incredibly complicated game without having to do pvp and its still fun to smash robots against each other. my friend will never learn how to do the economy but weāve had amazing hour long matches against the AI where the bloodbath only ends because ive invested all my power into the deathbeam weapon that carves up the terrain or iāve spent all my time building a stupid giant ramp while my friend and another AI hold off the swarm so i can launch the boxes full of dirt into their base and make their units pathfind like shit. you get punished so hard by real people for building static defenses in depth so itās nice to be able to dick around with some of that stuff in pve too. never played TA or supcom against people very much for similar reasons
also long live tangerine that map fucking rips
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also also the best zero-k feature is secretly the way it archives all the matches youāve played on the website so i get to look back on me and my friends juvenile obsession with former sir tech employee cleve blakemore from 7 months ago with pride
(this map si really fun if you make terraforming cheap in the game settings cuz you can turn it into this weird mouse trap thing where you block off paths between the plateaus with physical barriers that have to be flown over or dismantled, and then you turn the plateaus into fortresses to dictate the flow of combatā¦ YET ANOTHER THING YOU CANT DO IN ANOTHER RTS THATS LIKE WUHHHH??? HOLY SHIT!!)
zero-k is also the only game iāve ever played in this style that lets you turn any map into a naval map with water level settings that let you flood any map
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Iām most interested in the pvp small teams. The beauty of Zero-k is that it nails the wacky stuff but it also outshines every other RTS in meaningful competition by situating itself as being more concerned with strategic thinking. If youāve never experienced a close human 3v3 where you mind-meld with your teammates, itās really fantastic!
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Itās super common to feel anxiety about going online pvp with such a complex game. Itās important to remember that youāre not bad at zero-k, EVERYONE is terrible at Zero-k.
If youāre lurking this thread and considering trying the game, it helped me to adopt the mentality of a mad scientist trying out new things rather than a serious competitor trying to win matches
The game really sings in pvp
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I just played the tutorial because of this thread. I kept sending my units somewhere and then trying to select different units but instead accidentally interrupting the first set with new orders to go to a spot I didnāt want them to go. This might be a sign that I will be bad at the game.
I havenāt really played any RTS games since Starcraft, which I used to play a lot but never got particularly good at. Well, I guess I did play some of Starcraft 2 but I must not have found it as compelling because I never finished the campaign and never even tried multiplayer.
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This thread got referenced recently, and I realized it would be a great idea to link to the developers ongoing collection of essays about the design of Zero-K here. These are great reads even if you donāt play RTS.
https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Cold_Takes
- Cold Take #1 - Why Zero-K (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #2 - Quantās Rule (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #3 - Fight your opponent, not the UI (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #4 - Factories as Factions (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #5 - Making Metal (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #6 - Physics vs. Formulas (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #7 - Jumpjets and Jumplegs (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #8 - Smoothly Flowing Economy (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #9 - Energy as Supply (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #10 - The Smartest Unit in Zero-K (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #11 - The Atomic Solution to Monospam (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #12 - Mighty Morphing (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #13 - Pro-Simplicity, Anti-Nuke (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #14 - Free Factories For All (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #15 - Experiences With Veterancy (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #16 - Aim and Fire (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #17 - Tactical and Strategic Cloaking (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #18 - Terrain Matters (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #19 - Game Jams (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #20 - Teamwork By Default (Original post on Steam.)
- Cold Take #21 - To See What You Can See
- Cold Take #22 - Radar and the Limits of Vision
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Found a channel casting replays of Zero-K.
A good match that demonstrates how map terrain, unit counters, positioning and factory selection all in combination create the strategic foundation of the game.
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Image from a huge 24 player match happening right now.
Iām back into Zero-K and climbing the ladder. Iāve got a friend who Iām doing doubles with sometimes. I got back into fighting shape a lot faster than I expected. If youāre interested in the game, now is a good time to onboard over discord.
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In this same match someone has built a gravity ramp to launch the walking bomb units into the enemy shields.
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