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Before Thanatos and before veteran snipers, the Titans were the best unit in the game. They've got good armor, tons of hit points, great speed, good AoE, and decent DPS. They've gotten outclassed on DPS and AoE since then, but it used to be that 15 Titans was a good investment. They could clear a map with minimal oversight, and unlike snipers if one went off on its own, you could usually get it back to the group before it died. You could use them like mobile executors, crush a wave on one side of the map, and then move them across the map to defend another side before the breakthroughs got too out of control to handle.
Very few zeds have armor, and none of the current zeds have significant armor, so right now that's not really a problem. I do agree that the snipers current one shot one kill design though really messes up the meta, as there aren't infected you could add with the existing mechanics that would change the meta. Higher armor zeds would just make snipers better. More ranged zeds would just make snipers better. I think the snipers put the devs in a design dead end that bothers me.
But, now, Thanatos are so much cheaper than Titans that I never even research Titans any more. Making them work now would probably mean tweaking the economics. Titans are provably useful, they've just lost out to power creep.
I like the one-shot kill idea and especially since it is not perfectly functional for the tougher Infected, it's just that there is indeed no drawback.
It's difficult to tweak, but there may be a few ideas :
1) Give them a minimum range below which they switch to a weak ranged attack (like a handgun) ;
2) Give them a one-shot kill on anything but a Chubby with a much longer load time (3 seconds, 2 seconds as Veteran) which amkes them vulnerable to getting swarmed;
3) Make it so they have to "setup" to take shots, like get in a tower or immobilize themselves to shoot.
4) Make them a rare unit, say only 1 available per 100 colonists, but let them one shot everything once every 3 seconds at a very long range (like 12). Makes sense since not everyone can become a sniper.
I think the first or fourth ideas are the easiest as everything else would be gimmicky.
1) Snipers need a hit point and armor nerf, say 90 hit points and 1 armor. That makes them less tanky. Trouble is, their offense is so good that their defense hardly matters. They rarely get hit when you use them in a large enough group. It would matter sometimes on map 4, but it would otherwise not change the meta much. On its own, you'd still build a sniper ball. Incidently, the easiest way to tell if something is OP is if you could nerf it and it would still be the best unit.
2) Snipers could be moved to the stone workshop. Trouble is, you generally don't start making them until about then anyway, because before that you are food constrained and have to prioritize getting your economy up anyway.
3) Snipers could survive a damage nerf, say dropping them to 60 damage per shot rather than 100. The only problem then is some of the higher difficulties might become impossible to win without other changes. One counter to this might be to introduce a 'headshot' mechanic where 10% of all attacks did double damage, and then make the sniper 'headshot' specialists that did headshots 20% of the time. Overall DPS would go down, but not so much that it would make maps unwinnable. What it would do is open up design space for new zeds that snipers had problems with.
4) Veteran snipers could survive a rate of fire nerf, say to AS .75 or something. Unfortunately, this wouldn't change the meta much on its own, as long range and high damage per shot would still dominate against the existing infected.
5) New infected mechanics that punish slow rates of fire could be introduced. For example, new classes of special infected with 'dodge' as an ability would punish slow rates of fire much more than high rates of fire. Missing 25% of your shots matters much more to a sniper ball than a soldier ball, and doesn't impact AoE at all (although you could have the same mechanic reduce AoE damage by the same percentage). Likewise, a special infected with 'knockback' as a special ability, especially if countered by armor usage, would impact slow rates of fire much more than high rates of fire particularly if you tweaked the AS of the infected to be faster than the AS of snipers but slower than the AS of other types of units.
i was surprised how tanky snipers are .. seems like they can take more hits than soldiers.. they should be wimpy like archers.. maybe even more so...
archers should get a melee attack.. cause what archer doesn't carry a dagger? still can't take many hits, but 1vs1 on melee, the archer should pull out a dagger.. that'd be super sweet
soldiers should be tankiest with even more aggro than they get now.. people bag on them but my 1 soldier is always useful pulling mobs out of a group (to him).. let him be the tank..
that's my 2c anyway.. ymmv
I really cannot find a satisfactory solution other than that or somehow limit the amount of Snipers you can have at any one point in the game, which then means they need to be worth their weight in gold.
I think you are partly right. The problem then is that snipers and soldiers don't play well together, so you'd need a new sniper tier soldier unit (let's call it a 'Reaper') that had the same speed as a sniper but made up for the sniper's deficiencies. You could then create a new soldier tier sniper unit that was a less competent but faster moving sniper (let's call it a 'Hunter').
That's what I'm toying with as what I'd like too see in the long run. The other thing I'd like to see is both a strict upgrade to the soldier (more hit points) and a new tier 3 tech tree ('War College' same tier as 'Foundry') where you had optional unit upgrades to research (among other sorts of military focused upgrades, plus new tier 3 units). Then, among other balancing features, I'd like to see the soldier and titan be the most upgradeable units with the greatest return on the upgrade path.
The last thing we need is power creep. Make some small tweaks. Give Azn a few days to figure out whether he can still beat the game. That's about it.
The goal is to give everything a niche - not make every strategy equally viable. If every strategy is equally viable, then your choices don't matter. You can do whatever you think of first, and it wouldn't be wrong. Right now the problem isn't that there is a most efficient unit. The problem is that half the units don't even have a niche.
The titans should wind up like a chain gun and absolutely decimate for a period of time with a long cool down. That could encourage some interesting tactics and make several of them worth it if you can alternate who fires what, when. At this point, you're only using those units if you either don't know what you're doing or looking for creative ways around the meta.
I think Thanos are pretty good as is. Veteran Snipers are a bit OP. Nerfing them a bit might encourage some Sniper/Soldier combos. Titans need a major buff IMO. I'd really like to use them and Lucifers--but the final wave overwhelms Luc's and Titan's aren't worth the resources.
Make Venoms have a range reduction of 2-3 tiles, make a new infected that is single target and has the range of Venoms. Now you have Venoms be the AoE suicide type zombies while the other special acts as the "sniper" for the infected. You'd still probably want a handful of Snipers for Defense to counter the "sniper" infected and specials in general ... but it wouldn't be like "omg you totally need Snipers to win!".
As for the other units...
Titans - Research Cost needs to be dropped to ~3k range. Maybe lower their actual Gold cost a little too? IMO the major reason why people steer clear of them is their absurd upfront cost just to get them. I mean, Titans are great units but stupid expensive.
Lucifers - I honestly think making their Move Speed the same as a Soldier would make them see a lot more use. They are too slow to use offensively and their "line" attacks make them situational at best for defense. Otherwise changing their AoE to a 3 tile wide "cone" should do the trick. Lucifers are actually really good for tanking and deal great DPS ... they are just so slow and situational that they aren't worth it IMO.
Soldiers - IMO, drop their Gold Cost to 120 or even 100. Now they become a choice between getting fast but squishy Rangers or Stronger but louder Soldiers. Alternatively increase their fire-rate. Honestly I can't come up with good ideas for Soldier, he's in a weird place balance wise. He isn't good but he isn't bad either.
Shock Towers - I seriously think their Power Cost needs to be nerfed to 15. Making them a 1:1 to Mill ratio is totally crazy. Yeah they are good but between Venoms sniping them and their long "recharge" times ... only getting 1 per Mill is just too much lol.
TLDR:
...But that's just my opinion. Maybe it's my StarCraft bias but I feel all units should be viable and "overpowered" in their own way. So, IMO, tactics like only Soldiers and Thanatos or Rangers and Lucifers should be "winners" up to ~300% difficulty lol.
Titans could be given a buff but be capped by a support structure (say a "Titan Bay" that allows 5 Titans to be built per bay). I also like the idea of making Titans like the Red Alert 2 IFV, if you load a unit into the vehicle, the attack changes. This could end up very OP though (picture 20 Thanotitans).
Anyway, trying to force a unit to be useful by gimping other units doesn't appeal tbh.
I sort of agree. Those are definitely the two things that most distort the meta. I just prefer to deal with them as separate problems. One thing I do feel is that we need more variety of specials, including some that are walker and runner tier (think of executives as being a sort of runner tier special). But there is already enough topics going on in the thread.
I could support that. And maybe drop their oil keep down to 1 as well.
I think the natural meta is to divide the units up by speed, so you have ranger tier speed, soldier tier speed, and sniper tier speed. Units of the same speed tend to work well together. You can't really mix soldiers in with snipers because the soldiers have a tendency to race away from the snipers. The problem with the Lucifer being a soldier tier weapon is that the Lucy doesn't play well with others. They burn whatever else they are with.
I agree they definitely need a cone rather than a line. I don't know that it needs to be that wide, but the line means that the Lucy's don't even work well with each other. Massed Lucy's are fairly useless.
So in addition to the cone, I think they should do triple damage to VoD buildings and take half damage from acid (like venom spit). They probably also need a DPS buff. They already have a cool healing buff and decent armor, combine that with soldier level speed and a few other tweaks and they might have occasional use. I think a tier 3 gate - iron gate - that they could shoot through might also create a niche for them.
I think that they should get a 20 hit point buff. They have decent armor, and they make decent tanks. I've used them a few times either as a rush or from that mayor that gives you 3 of them and being tanky has its uses their for a while if you can't get snipers going. My other thought is that there should be a second tier three research building - "War College" - that focuses on military upgrades and there should be a path to upgrade your soldiers from a tier 1 to a tier 2 unit. Like say an "assault rifle" research upgrade that gives them +1 range and +2 damage per shot would actually be a huge improvement in their meta. I have some other ideas along those lines, where basically military upgrades improve soldiers more than they improve other units. It would open up a strategy where you could build heavy on soldiers with the expectation of upgrading them later in the game to the point they could deal with specials better. They are already the best unit against runner tier infected, they just need a boost to deal with special tier.
They are really niche I admit, maybe because the Thanatos does the same job but better. I still find myself building 1 or 2 on a map occasionally, but its never a situation where I feel I just need shock towers.
On thing to keep in mind though is that this game will never have or need a StarCraft like meta. StarCraft is based on a 'rock-paper-scissors' style balance where if you see your enemy is making 'rock', then you can counter by going 'paper', and so forth. The infected don't do that, and there really isn't a need to do that in survival mode. Maybe in campaign mode you could skew the infected population on particular missions so that it was rich in a particular infected that hard countered one unit, but which could be countered by another. That might be cool, though we've seen nothing to indicate the developers are thinking that way. I hope they do start thinking that way, because while infected diversity isn't of huge importance to making survival mode 'deep', it will make the campaign mode much deeper.
I guess one way you could do that in survival mode is have themed maps where there thing was 'this map has some special more often than usual'. But again, so far the devs haven't shown they are thinking like that.