From what I saw playing recently it looks like marauders only break games when they make coordinated attacks on the human base -- one lone marauder doesn't seem to be much more devastating than before. This has me concerned that it's not just the range increase that is a problem, but also that more than one zap can hit a structure at a time now. That's a harder problem to fix since there's not a whole that lot that I'm willing to change that will specifically weaken a group of marauders without disproportionately weakening single marauders.
Things I
don't want to change:
- The range of the initial zap. This has been fine tuned, I like where it is, and I don't see any reason to change it.
- The base damage of the zap. The viability of the zap versus a single human has been playtested extensively and I don't think it should change.
- Anything other than the zap. Everything was more less fine before we fixed the zap so I think it would create more problems to try to fix this new problem by changing turrets or the marauder itself or much of anything else. Teslas could maybe still use a boost of some kind but that wouldn't help humans at stage 2.
I'd like to fix the zap with one or more of the following:
- Changing range of the zap chains.
- Making the damage of the chains attenuate over distance.
- Changing the maximum number of chain targets.
- Reducing the damage of the chains (but not the initial zap)
I like the idea of the chain damage decreasing with distance because it makes placing human structures less of a fail/succeed proposition -- you no longer have to know exactly how far apart to place things so that a zap can't get them all; it's enough to remember that farther apart = less zap damage -- but I don't think it's doable without changing too many things for the worse. The problem is that this would be a
major damage nerf, and though I'd be okay with chain damage coming down a little, I think
halving it (on average) would be far too much. We could compensate for this, however, by leaving the chain range high (maybe even increasing it further) and/or also increasing the maximum number of targets, but I don't think I or anyone else would like what this would turn the zap into: basically you'd only have to hit one target to automatically damage
every possible target. I think that'd be annoying and tactically shallow.
The most obvious solution is to simply reduce the range of the chain zaps to approximate their previous range. Then you have the question of whether to calculate this by volume or area -- I suspect that vertical placement rarely matters, so a radius of 130 would approximate the area of base of the old 230x230 box (whereas a radius of 143 would approximate its volume). Right now I'm leaning towards just changing this range because it's the simplest solution and least likely to break new things, but I'm not sure if it will make group attacks bearable enough.
If it turns out the zap just needs to be weakened overall I would be willing to reduce the damage of the chains. This would make indiscriminate zapping less effective than focusing on a single target, which I think is slightly more common with marauders bouncing around the human base as a group than with a lone marauder picking away at a weak point in the perimeter defenses.
Summary: I'm leaning towards changing only the range of the chain zaps for now. Maybe after that the damage of the chains should also come down. I don't think making chain damage attenuate with distance is workable.
