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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1681 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 28, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Just wanted to highlight the essays written by the Zero-K devs about RTS game design. Surprisingly thoughtful and interesting stuff:

https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Cold_Takes/11_-_The_Atomic_Solution_to_Monospam

https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Cold_Takes/16_-_Aim_and_Fire

One of the most important corollaries of the process is that weapon behaviour cannot depend on the existence of a target. This is known as the No Void Ray rule, as it was developed back when Starcraft 2 had a unit that gained damage the longer it fired. The unit was redesigned in the first expansion, probably because shooting your own stuff is allowed in Starcraft, but incentivising players to do it looked a bit silly. In any case, Void Ray would not even make it into Zero-K, since there would be nothing stopping it shooting into the sky when idle. Maintaining its damage bonus is smart, so we could not in good conscience prevent it from doing so. This would make the mechanic pointless, so we would avoid adding it in the first place.

Huh, I always thought the void ray change was because it was overpowered, not because it was awkward within the context of the lore.

Worth noting that SC2 still has the viper (caster type unit) which converts health (of other units / buildings) to energy, and you'll often see Zerg hatcheries on nearly 0 health in end game scenarios because it's used as a battery for the vipers, especially in PvZ.

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