dox accel and brake

This is an issue that has been annoying me for a while and I strongly think these should be reduced, or all projectile speeds increased drastically.

No unit should be able to dodge damage completely. That kind of mechanic makes them literally invincible and uncounterable, increasing their value far far above their metal cost.

Imagine if you had a unit that could not be killed, what metal cost would you set on it? Can you even set a metal cost on it? If you want to make a unit live longer, you increase it's health or give it some damage type armour. You don't make it be able to dodge with brain dead spam clicking in random directions - that is like the worst form of micro possible since it doesn't scale with skill, nor does it take any.

Hey Look! Something we completely and utterly agree on!

um no, we agree on it for different reasons. coincedence really.

Decreasing turn speed just a little bit more so they can't shoot as much while wiggling could have a similar effect to reducing the acceleration and brake speeds, and might "feel nicer".

Don't ruin the moment!

The issue is that they can't be shot and there is nothing the player can do to manually correct for this. Wiggling dox infront of tanks while your own tanks kill theirs is another dumb situation that really shouldn't be happening.

I wouldn't care about accel/brake if weapons were hitscan, but we can't really put that into pa.

*Basically, accel brake gives the engine some delta movement, which is used to predict ballistic weapons. You will always be able to trick the engine, even with slower turn rate. High movement speed cap and small model hitbox has something to do with this too though i guess.

fully agree, we don't need a unit that can be micro'd like that. As long as the max speed stays up it should not have a big effect on the mobility advantage of the dox.

Full ack. Just don't forget the boom bots while at it, they share similar properties.

No, both is necessary.

Turn speed alone, without nerfing deceleration, would only enforce a steady forward movement during the stutter step exploit, but it's not fixing the problems this exploit causes in the procedural aiming algorithms.

At the same time, only nerfing acceleration, but not turn speed, would only make the stutter step maneuver more complex (you would need to command arcs rather than toggling positions), but it wouldn't eliminate the exploit, so any "augmented client" can still abuse the exploit.

Only if both turn speed acceleration are tuned to reasonable values, then there is a chance of getting rid of that exploit.

I'm surprised that it written elodea, this imbalance is most useful for him. Power of dox proportional micro player. As a result, balance of dox becomes impossible for all. Need to add them accel and brake time or accelerate bolo projectile velocity.

I agree with you both, but there are some things to keep in mind:
-it isn't immortality, you eventually get hit, nobody has used a dox to survive longer than a solo minute under fire.
-doesn't work with large groups as the projectiles hit something.
-only works on 1 area of attention per player, 1 player can't micro all dox all time.
-some players like just a little micro.

my suggestions:
-make it an auto stance, where units detect a shot fired at them and change direction right as fired
-increase bullet speed. Make a tank with tank cost dox weapon 100 range 16 speed and half a tank health.

This way, dox can dodge some units but explicitly not anti infy ones.

A lot of my mods often use the "skitter" as a "anti infantry buggy", as described above, cost slightly less than a tank, only 3.1 dox worth of health, 100 range, dox weapon x2 damage, 16 speed. Dox literally fall apart to it, but tanks destroy skitters epically. Then, grenadiers also only cost 80, and they also give skitters hard time per numbers, but tanks do a little better against grenadiers. Generally, grenadiers do better than dox at both, but aren't as massable or fast or have AA.

Oh my, so many wrong assumptions in so few lines.
Dox doesn't need to be "immortal", it only needs to survive long enough for the enemy to go down first. Besides, this is not only about dodging projectiles, it's also about occupying the target lock.
So yes, it actually DOES work with large groups as well, as long as you use only a few Dox as decoys. Unless the defending player MANUALLY overrides the targeting: Game Over.
And the stuff about one player not being able to micro on multiple fronts? Actually not true either. Not since "someone" discovered that you could use notifications to get ingame coordinates which can be used to issue the stutter-step exploit programatically, ONCE.

Eh, fixing a broken mechanic by making it the default behavior isn't such a good idea. You are just forcing the player to counter that behavior in different ways, also requiring micro, even though on the defender side which is actually WORSE.
Besides, what you suggest would require life updates to the path finding system - which is off limits for so many reasons... Unless of course you think that this behavior should only be applied to stationary units - which is more than just weird and makes this very situational and only benefits you if you plan to use Dox as TOWER replacements.

There's no reason not to make that default behavior in the first place. There are units like long range arty which require some time of flight so they can't hit moving targets, as well as weapon types like the tac missiles which require time of flight for their dedicated counter measures to work properly, but then again note that latter ones actually have homing properties in return.

But even then, nerfing that Dox movement behavior to reasonable values is essential. For some weapons, a slower projectile is just necessary for purely cosmetic reasons, such as the Uber canon and alike. And you still don't want Dox or similar units to be able to dodge these from point blank range, for obvious reasons.

So you are telling me, modders can do it, but the game can't do it... Yeah, arguement won for me, just make it a stance.

Besides that, to completely remove it from the game (and accomplish pissing of the people that liked bot micro), There are only a handful of options:
-All projectiles track mildly enough to curve to comphensate for direction changing
-Dox be given a really clunky "Lester the Unlikely" type of movement, where changing directions cause them to slowly change their course or slow to a stop clunkily. Now moving dox direction doesn't save them, it instead ultra-dooms them even if moving them wasn't intended to dodge with them, like bombers when they stop over dox or AA and how that is a kiss of death.
-All projectiles have a faster travel speed

Really, giving some units hitscan rapidfire weapons like dox and a tank unit as well, at least gives an option to shut down dox. Or, giving the tank that exists a range 75 dox-weapon secondary weapon would also counter it a bit. All without making "absolutely everything" either hitscan or tracking.

It would also lower the dox-dodging-ability by slowing dox down, but that is sort of their niche. Honestly, I could care less, but others would care.

Modders can, but they should not. For the same reason the server cant. Real time goal updates at that frequency mean constant recalculations of the potential field which incurs a hell of a cost. In theory not *that* bad since for immobile units, no potential field is involved, only possible collision and push event. But not for moving units, it doesn't work like that for them at all. The game can't just discard anything it knows about path finding just to make them dodge a bullet, otherwise it would completely break the pathing.

It's a lucky coincidence that the stutter step exploit isn't even more costlier than it is right now, mostly since the potential field is only computed for the close surroundings when unit position and target are close by, so the fact that the server does lots of entirely pointless computations is levered by the fact that users can only command so many Dox manually and that the locations are limited by mouse movement.

Actually.... I think we would only need to remove that predictive movement. I mean that instant movement units do when given a goal, but before the potential field has been built so they move straight towards their goal for a while. Because without that, Dox would suddenly get a nifty little latency in between two commands which would eliminate that stutter step exploit for good. Maybe even introduce a forced 100-200ms latency, just to make sure that the server is not spammed with meaningless movement commands.

What's up with do acceleration being 720m/s/s anyway? That's below a second, why even have acceleration in the game at all when barely any units utilize it?

That Dox could challenge a Bugatti Veyron, just to put things into relation.

EDIT: You fooled me.... Acceleration is "only" 200m/s² wth a top speed of 20m/s, which means that beast accelerates to top speed in 1/10th of a second. 720°/s is the turn speed, which means that thing does about 120RPM. Well, given that there are only 10 frames per second, the Dox virtually has NO ACCELERATION at all, in one frame it's at rest, the next frame it's at full speed.

But you know what? The Slammer actually has very similar properties. Same 120RPM spintop engine and that magic 10:1 relation between acceleration and top speed. I wonder why the "Slammer dance" isn't a word yet.

Even the Ant and the Inferno have that weird 10:1 relation for acceleration.

At that point, I have to ask the obvious question: What exactly is BROKEN in the engine? Why do apparently all ground units need this weird instant-acceleration like you would propulse a paper craft with a stick of TNT? (Also explains why even Vanguards move so "paper-like". They simply have no mass or momentum at all.)

Too much, and units act inhibited. Too little, and well, we currently have too little.

Dox should keep it, again it is their signature and birthright, otherwise let's remove dox from the game, and slammers, and grenadiers, just move AA to bot-only and not vehicle, and then we have bots now.

Now, vehicles, that is a good question, why not turn their acceleration down to 2 or 5? Especially the vanguard, you could actually increase the vanguard's speed by 1 if you just lower it's acceleration to 1 or 0.5 if only 0.5 would work...

Oh dang, sorry 720m/s/s is their turn rate, still 200m/s/s is waaay to fast.

You can have units have slow acceleration, most units in my mod to introduce more micro to PA (just a fun little project) have acceleration around 3m/s/s give or take a few m/s/s. They just haven't opted into it for- who knows?

0.5 is actually terribly slow; you don't want that, it'd look very silly- trust me.

I did this in my mod, and it works very nicely.

Then again, I also make like 40 other changes too.