[WIP][Server] Imperial Legion (Faction)

Both the T1 (Ennet) and T2 (Panzerwerfer) vehicle artillery units hover. Descriptions should now be updated.
Stoke goes under water, which means it can't be used to cross lava.

@graushwein thanks for the testing data and also nice work with the issue reporting

Out of curiosity did you try the havoc against the levellers?

ABOOOSEEEEE

MOD ABOOOSEEE!!!!!!

Nope

10 Havoc vs 15 Leveler = 3.3 Havoc left (I didn't expect that, given the Havoc's low HP)

After looking back at the results I realized that the Havoc and Earthshaker may be too good because they both do AOE damage and outperformed vanilla's single target high damage units... when both sides used the same metal amounts.

More testing is needed to confirm.

It's a hard problem i'm not sure exactly how to solve. If you make something balanced against leveller, it is op against everything else, just like leveller.

And if you make it balanced with units with exception of leveller, then it dies to leveller.

Havoc was an attempt to bridge that gap by shooting pseudo aoe in terms of an x number of units instead of an x radius. So like it can kill 5 levellers every y seconds, or 5 dox every y seconds if you know what i mean. I'm not sure if its working or not to achieve that goal though.

Uber pls.

Okay, I just did some testing. I tried to guess at a good HP buffer and damage per metal combo for each side.
10 Vanguard + 25 Leveler vs 10 Earthshaker + 13 Havoc = .4 Havoc left

That is good enough for me. (So yeah, very good balancing. So far I'm finding the sides to be very close in balance, even though their units are very different.)

The other thing I've noticed is more a topic for discussion, the Purger (leaping Boombot costs 100 metal, which seems like a lot at first).

For Vanilla Boombots all you need is a few Dox or flame tanks to counter them. To counter normal Booms, you either have to do AOE at any range (which Vanilla doesn't have much ranged AoE and IL have everywhere) or have rapid fire like Dox or Slammers. If you're doing AoE, then it has to have a fast travel time because Booms are so fast, which vanilla doesn't have but IL (again) have a lot. The Purger is different in a big way. The Purger's jump range is almost exactly at the range where all Vanilla fast projectiles start to shoot. This means that the majority of the time the purger will jump just before it can get hit with most weapons. It becomes invincible when it jumps. Not only does it cause the enemy to waste shots, but more importantly it isn't something that Vanilla can counter without spending much more metal than the Purgers are worth.

The only Vanilla units that works against them is 15+ Levelers or Slammers IN A TIGHT GROUPING. What happens is the first Purgers are shot at by an excessive amount of firepower, which destroys the front Purgers and continues past the wreckage to accidentally hit the Purgers behind. This happy accident often continues and results in vanilla still having units. BUT, if they are not in a tight formation (with uniform weapons of sufficient range), like how groups are mixed in all games, or there is terrain that causes them to juke back and forth (like round buildings), then the Purgers just wreck face. Effectively, this makes the T1 Purger unable to be effectively countered with anything T1 (as long as the target units are in front). I believe this is why I've been finding that putting 2-3 Necromancers in an army causes the army to outperform an enemy army with 10-15% more metal.

I'd be happy for someone to prove me wrong, because I really like the purger. Am I totally wrong, or do the Purgers need a tweak to have a shorter jump range or something?

Interesting stuff. I'm curious if the purger could be targeted by AA whilst jumping?

I was under the impression that a Purger can still be shot down mid jump. Is this not the case anymore?

Yes I know I'm a dev, but not kept up to date with every balance change.

Nope, the purger works by spawning a shell projectile that shoots towards the enemy. The projectile has the boombot model so it looks like it's leaping. The only way to target projectiles is with anti-entity beam weapons with specific property to attack this particular projectile e.g. gil-e shooting tactical missiles only.

I tried to alleviate the uncounterable aspect by making it more a boombot that is good against dox and unit swarms instead of big tanky units, but as graushwein points out i don't think it's working too well. Will definitely need more attention

Yeah I was under the impression that kiwi's initial implementation allowed for any unit to shoot down the purger (well the projectile spawned by it anyway).

It can be shot down, but all units will need to act like a pseudo-shield.

Thinking about it, maybe the way to balance these isn't to make it easier to shoot down... Instead what if they had a death weapon that damages nearby friendlies?

@nicb1 As I´ve already suggested. Will you take a look at the build bar images colour? After what i´ve seen t2 and t1 are not enough different colour-wise to identify as easily as vanilla. There are a couple of the images that don´t have the correct colour either, it think it is the janissary and the miniman, both have your actual t1 colour.
This is just a suggestion, but if you make it more noticeable sure it will be easier to play with.

keep up with the awesome work

That's @KillerKiwiJuice's thing.

All in due time...
There's work going on a lot of things.
Build Bar images is one of the last things on the list.
Cause you need almost all other things finished before you can make a buildbar image.
Strategic Icons, Model, Textures
And those are still being worked on.

Please elaborate. I'm not sure what you mean.

Extrapolating that out, it seems that it could be overly complicated and hard to balance correctly. The units need to have low hit points, but do a high amount of damage on impact. So if you had a death explosion that hit friendlies, it would have to be such small damage that it would take a few to start a cascade in a group of them. That low amount of damage would barely harm most of your other friendly units. So that means that you have to have 1 large explosion when they impact on the target and another very small low damage/radius explosion when they are destroyed themselves.

I think there is probably a simpler solution.
1. Reduce the jump range by 25% increments until it feels right.
2. Give them a delay time before jumping. What I mean by this, is that when they reach jump distance they take a few tenths of a second to crouch (vulnerable period) before leaping.

One or both of the above would allow them to be countered by Dox and Slammers, but flame tanks would still be unable to counter them. Perhaps the fact that they are twice as expensive as vanilla Booms would make it okay that flame tanks cannot counter Purgers?