Absolute Annihilation: Spring 1.46

[Caydr]

-Added missile tdf tag trajectoryHeight, this sets in how high an arc the missile will move toward the target,0 = straight, 1=45 degree above, can be anything>=0, default 0

Whoa, when was that added?

[BigSteve]

"Anyone see the logical conclusion? A plasma battery is virtually useless versus ships. Even if you had 5 or 10 of them, they wouldn't stand up to a few cruisers, let alone any of the nastier things.

By multiplying the damage of plasma guns by 3, this at least brings them closer to being in the same league as ships. You can now build coastal defense guns and have them actually... defend your coast and stuff. This, in combination with the longer range on depth charge launchers and WORKING torpedo planes should give a shrewd player the chance to get back into the water they've been forced out of. "


I believe thou haveth a pointeth...Sounds good to me :)

[espylaub]

By multiplying the damage of plasma guns by 3, this at least brings them closer to being in the same league as ships. You can now build coastal defense guns and have them actually... defend your coast and stuff. This, in combination with the longer range on depth charge launchers and WORKING torpedo planes should give a shrewd player the chance to get back into the water they've been forced out of.

Good idea that. Won't help against a single missile ship (or will it?), but just the idea of coastal batteries that aren't just decoration is nice.

What are the Dragon's Maw and that other dragon's thing?

Looking forward to 1.47. Thanks for all your work Caydr.

[Konane]

Dragon's maw and claw are popup short range defense turrets that look like dragon's teeth when closed. Nice to see them back, just hope they will be properly balanced.

Plasma guns damage modifier vs. ships seems a good idea as well.

[Caydr]

Claw and Maw are NOT anti-swarm units by any means - don't believe what everyone seems to think. They are units with slightly higher damage per second than LLTs but with a shorter range. They have about 20% more HP but also close up (making themselves almsot picture-perfect dragons teeth) giving them an extremely good amour value. They are intended as:

1) ambush units - build them in the middle of a line of DT. Enemy units walk by and get shot at.

2) defense against someone using a lot of artillery early-game. He can shoot at them all he likes, but they'll barely take any damage unless they're open and shooting.

Honestly, they're not the most useful unit ever, but they're not useless either. They don't hurt the balance in any way and have been in AA for years now (speaking of the OTA version)

When destroyed, they leave a corpse which is an actual dragons teeth segment.

[Soulless1]

When destroyed, they leave a corpse which is an actual dragons teeth segment.

aaw cool, that's an awesome finishing touch there


btw, if the commander is going to be the only unit that can rez, is he going to do so fairly quickly compared to the normal rezkbots? Cos obviously you can't get multiple commanders

[FireCrack]

-Added missile tdf tag trajectoryHeight, this sets in how high an arc the missile will move toward the target,0 = straight, 1=45 degree above, can be anything>=0, default 0

Whoa, when was that added?

.63b1

[Caydr]

He should rez at approximately 2 times the speed of a rector/necro.

-Added missile tdf tag trajectoryHeight, this sets in how high an arc the missile will move toward the target,0 = straight, 1=45 degree above, can be anything>=0, default 0

Whoa, when was that added?

.63b1

In that case, I'll add it to Mercury/Screamer. Any other units you think it'd be useful on?

[NOiZE]

The Arm corvette doesn't leave a wreck

The Core corvette's wreck is floating


Can you put all wreckage tdf's into one tdf


L2 Jammer ranges should be even smaller IMO

[Pxtl]

By multiplying the damage of plasma guns by 3, this at least brings them closer to being in the same league as ships. You can now build coastal defense guns and have them actually... defend your coast and stuff. This, in combination with the longer range on depth charge launchers and WORKING torpedo planes should give a shrewd player the chance to get back into the water they've been forced out of.

Good idea that. Won't help against a single missile ship (or will it?), but just the idea of coastal batteries that aren't just decoration is nice.

What are the Dragon's Maw and that other dragon's thing?

Looking forward to 1.47. Thanks for all your work Caydr.

Dragon's doodads are short-ranged turrets that masquerade as dragon's teeth.

Sad that anti-ship gun thing had to be done as such a hack. I can see why though - in OTA and even with CC, land was a better metal source, so even though ships were stronger, land-based players would have a good enough economy to overwhelm the boats by force of arms (or nukes and berthas). In AA the underwater economy is almost as strong as the land-based one, so boats can clobber the land without sacrificing their income - plus many water maps have beefy tidal generators. It seems the only way to bring back that concept would be to remove the underwater moho mine/maker and amp the price on floating makers. Of course, that would also make all-water maps tedious and painful, so that approach sucks.

Damn, I can't think of a good way to solve this besides the "guardian as anti-boat-doodad". Maybe a super-shoreline-depthcharge launcher is necessary? Idunno.

[FireCrack]

He should rez at approximately 2 times the speed of a rector/necro.

Whoa, when was that added?

.63b1

In that case, I'll add it to Mercury/Screamer. Any other units you think it'd be useful on?

There might be some cases where the anti-bomber turrets have problems firing over things, though I am not sure.

I cant think of much anything else that would need it..

[Archangel of Death]

Hmm, I wonder how well it would work if we made all AA turrets fire with an arc? Would probably want less of an arc on shorter range turrets, don't want them overshooting their targets all the time. Just an idea to investigate.

[Caydr]

In case nobody's noticed, building transport hovers probably crashes 147a. I just realized I never included their revised scripts.

[Cabbage]

Please please please don't add make rezzing coms starndard, make sure it is a mod like hovercommanders or tech forge etc

[Soulless1]

Whoa, when was that added?

.63b1

In that case, I'll add it to Mercury/Screamer. Any other units you think it'd be useful on?

Banisher would be cool with a *little* bit of this - would make it more of a long ranged missile destroyer and less of a close range assault tank (since I suspect it would get a small minimum range from this), but would enable it to shoot over relatively low-profiled units and features right in front of it.

If that would be too much pro and not enough con, you could always stop it shooting at aircraft...but that's an 'if' I'll leave you guys to decide on.

[Caydr]

Home stretch now, I've only gotta do buildpics for the new units. Looks like I'm going to have to hold off on the anti-air kbots... again. Who saw that one coming?

Final changelog:

1.46 --> 1.48

Mercury/Screamer missiles now fire on an angle to help them clear other
structures and/or landscape features
Reduced Banisher firing rate 10% (6.5->7.15, increased damage 10%
(700->770), reducing tracking 25% (32000->24750)
Reduced Catalyst range by 200 (3200->3000)
Firing rate of all high-arc plasma guns increased by 20%
Core corvette wreck removed
L2 jamming tower jamming radius reduced 15%
Dragon's Claw and Dragon's Maw added back in as stationary units with
stealth, no movement capabilities, and hidden health information
Minor texture enhancement for Valkrie air transport
New model for Core heavy air transport
Hovercraft transports can now only grab owned/allied units, carrying
capacity increased to 20 (8)
Transport boats' carrying capacity increased to 40 (12)
Heavy air transports generally buffed quite a lot
Level 2 jamming structures' area of effect reduced by 1/3, operating
costs increased to 125
Arm "Eraser", Core "Deleter" mobile radar jammer running costs increased
to 75 (10), radii of jamming reduced 33%
Commanders no longer gain experience very fast
Removed extra audio, reducing filesize
Removed Valkrie (not the core transport)
Renamed armor category "ALLUNITS" to be, much more accurately, "ELSE"
Removed units which no longer exist from armor categories (armrb,
armtanker, cortanker, commando, armmine4, armempm, cormine4, cortronm,
armmedpc, cormpgun, armmark, spotter, watcher, armjam, corspec, blotter,
concealer, ahermes, armbeac, armfmine4, armnanob, armscorp, armtick,
cahudhri, corbeac, corbuild, corfmine4, cornanob, corscorp, corsquid,
cortruck, prec, tawf003, armscram)
Commander HP reduced to OTA stats (4000->3000), movement speed reduced by
0.13 (1.38->1.25), explosion size reduced by 1/3 (xxx->xxx), edge
effectiveness reduced to 0.25 (0.6), cloaking cost when stationary
reduced to 200 (600), cloaking cost while moving reduced to 1000 (1200)
Disintegrator and Decoy Disintegrator range reduced by 6% (250->235), shot
velocity increased by 33% (225->300)
Disintegrator damage increased to 99999 (50000)
Fixed Arm Epoch and Core Black Hydra flaghips' firing arcs, they should
all work properly now
Fusion reactor explosion size increased
Special reduced damage vs. commanders for certain extremely powerful
weapons adjusted to retain the standard minimum number of hits to kill
Razorback range reduced 25 units (500->475), damage increased 5%
Level 1 artillery weapon area of effect increased to 112 (80), weapon
range increased by 10 units
"Castro" operating cost reduced by 5 (30->25), hit points increased by
800% (120->960)
Merl, Diplomat movement speeds reduced by 30%, health increased 50%
Gantry energy/metal costs doubled, buildtime increased 50%
Hammer/Thud range reduced 10 units (390->380), weapon velocity increased
10% (260->286)
Rocko/Storm range increased 5 units (470->475), weapon velocity reduced
5% (200->190), weapon damage increased 5% (140->147)
Plasma weapons' high trajectory mode damage increased 10%, impulsefactor
increased to 2 (1)
Targeting Facility energy/metal cost reduced 60%, buildtime reduced 55%,
operating costs reduced to 150 (250)
All construction kbots' HP reduced by 10%, all construction vehicles' HP
increased by 20%
Custom team death messages added
Arm "Detonator" and "Aegis" weapon EMP effect extended to 20 seconds (was
10) via new "paralyzetime" tag, increased area of effect by 25%
Increased Spy Self-D paralyzetime to 45 seconds
Increased Dragonfly paralyzetime to 20 seconds and greatly increased its
potency at the cost of a reduced firing rate
Increased Stiletto, Twilight paralyzetime to 15 seconds
Decreased EMP Spider, Bladewing paralyzetime to 7 seconds
Core "Catalyst" reverted to tactical nuke weapon, range reduced to 3200
(4500)
Advanced Solar energy cost reduced 1000, buildtime reduced 1000, metal
cost reduced 50
Combat auto-healing now goes as follows:
LLTs: 2 HP per second (an OTA change that never got brought over)
Beamer, HLLT: 3 HP per second (same)
Commanders: 5 HP per second
Bulldog: 10 HP per second
Sumo: 15 HP per second
Goliath: 20 HP per second
Maverick: 35 HP per second
Can: combat repair removed
Maverick HP reduced 250 units
Energy to metal conversion ratio is now 100:1 for regular land MMs, 90:1
for floating MMs, 80:1 for moho, 70:1 for underwater moho
Reduced the costs for underwater metal extractors so they're closer in
line with land-based metal extractors
Destroyer HP reduced by 10%, Cruiser HP increased by 10%, Battleship HP
increased by 15%, Flagship HP increased by 25%
Destroyer depth charge damage increased by 25%, rate of fire increased
10%, AoE increased 100%
Three new armor categories: FLAKBOATS, JAMMERBOATS, OTHERBOATS
Plasma batteries now do 3x damage against ships
Added ARMDF, ARMFAST, HLLT, TAWF001, Archon, Adept, Advanced Energy
Storage, Advanced Metal Storage, Dragons Claw, Dragons Maw added to the
proper armor types
Submarine torpedo damage vs. other submarines fixed
Community-made "Hover Commanders" mutator added as (H)
Slightly improved L1 fighter handling, strongly improved L2 fighter
handling, massively improved seaplane fighter handling
Finally got around to fixing the texture collision on Arm HLT
(remodelled and retextured the "guns" section)
Increased storage capacity of L1 metal/energy storage to 3000/6000
respectively (2000/5000)
Increased turret and aiming height for LLT, HLT, Beamer, HLLT
Old "Underwater Advanced <Energy/Metal> Storage" added back in, but as
structures which are built both on land and underwater; metal storage
is 10000, energy storage is 20000
Added new Core scout unit, "Leejen"; Charges into battle only to realize
it's unarmed... Serves as a good recon unit
Annihilator HP increased 400 units (2800->3200)
Buildpics for Adv. Storage buildings, DClaw, DMaw, Seahook, Leejen
Total unit count is now 387

[Dwarden]

if i can comment after last Annihilator HP reduction it became so fragile that even 2 Annihilators could turn to be waste of time to build as defence...
as most expensive direct hit beam structure at Arm man would await it can alive more than just some hits ...

so imho 15% was quite big drop considering it's just single slow reload beam defence strucure , please reconsider HP increase

btw Caydr can you please return the popup-able L1 DT based towers as we can now use "no ghosted buildings" option while hosting ... ?

and not sure if this TAS or AA bug but while using snipers i noticed they sometime refuse to shoot at direct in clear LOS range ...

thanks in advance

p.s. if there are "any" addition to l3 units then
Defiler looks really good for core
and for arm either bigweele or tiger as semi `counter` ...

[NOiZE]

Looks nice caydr!

[BigSteve]

Yeah not too shabby mr Caydr.. however there is one thing missing... and its a big one...
Where is the hardcoded +100 handicap for user: BigSteve... I thought you were gonna... oh... nevermind... sob sob

sniffle...

:)

[Caydr]

if i can comment after last Annihilator HP reduction it became so fragile that even 2 Annihilators could turn to be waste of time to build as defence...
as most expensive direct hit beam structure at Arm man would await it can alive more than just some hits ...

so imho 15% was quite big drop considering it's just single slow reload beam defence strucure , please reconsider HP increase

Increased Annihilator HP by 400 (2800->3200)