Flea has free cloak.

[carrepairer]

Also tick and roach?

[Google Frog]

It's burrow.

[Saktoth]

I think he is talking more from the gameplay front than the fluff front (WAIT... this is Car...)

Okay, well, i think if this is a PROBLEM its from the gameplay front rather than the fluff front.

IE, hiding away some fleas for the ENTIRE GAME.

[Google Frog]

Well I think it's fine.

[CarRepairer]

Yes Saktoth, I know.

Can it be easily fixed? Difference between this and my burrow is my burrow was using lua morphing to burrow which in conjunction with doesnotcount would make burrowed units all die. If this fix is not easily doable, I could whip up some lua for it. AFter all it's not burrowing if it's got wavy translucency anyway, so it might as well cost a bit of E.

[Saktoth]

The wavy translucency is just to show that the unit is invisible.

Having an icon represent where the unit is breaks immersion.

But yeah, flea/roach/tick should not count.

[carrepairer]

Ultimately we should strive for graphical effects to indicate stuff properly. jK's awesome cloak effects do not apply to a unit that simply dug a small hole. It makes no sense and would confuse people who assume this effect represents a cloak device that uses energy, whereas these 100 fleas are using 0 energy.

Anyway I just wanted to know if it were easy to fix (not sure if cloakcost applies when using a cob-cloak), I'll just try it myself if I get no answer. Thank you.

[licho]

Add it to does not count. If you add energy cost make sure its very low.

[Google Frog]

Replying to carrepairer:

Ultimately we should strive for graphical effects to indicate stuff properly. jK's awesome cloak effects do not apply to a unit that simply dug a small hole. It makes no sense and would confuse people who assume this effect represents a cloak device that uses energy, whereas these 100 fleas are using 0 energy. Anyway I just wanted to know if it were easy to fix (not sure if cloakcost applies when using a cob-cloak), I'll just try it myself if I get no answer. Thank you.

The cloaky effect does not mean a unit that is cloaked and drains energy. It just means a unit the enemy cannot see. We are using identical cloaking effects for every unit in the game yet cloak cost varies widely. It is very easy to check a tooltip and it only needs to be checked once, the people who don't check tooltips probably don't care about how much cloak is costing anyway. Don't fix anything to do with the effect, it's fine as is.

[CarRepairer]

I strongly disagree with you that the graphical effect of wavy distortion of light waves represents anything you can't see. It's representative of a science fiction cloaking device, not a half burrowed unit. jK did a great job making it look like cloaking in the movies. When a small animal buries itself in the sand, it doesn't get translucent and distort light waves.

Either the flea cloaks, or it burrows. If it cloaks, it should use the cloaking effect and E. If it burrows, it should not use the effect and not use E. Flea should use E for gameplay reasons anyway so we can both agree it should have the effect and move on.

Free cloak sucks for finding invisible fleas later. Hell, I used this tactic in Starcraft. When someone was a jerk and backstabbed me (unfairly, unlike the kind of backstabbing we have in CA), I'd drag the game on for a half hour.. burrowing my drones, then when the coast is clear, undigging them, building something, stopping, burrowing them back, repeat with a drone on the other side of the map. Yeah that was a flaw but so was the ability to backstab someone on your team since they didn't distinguish between permanent and temporary alliances until Warcraft 3 came out.

[licho]

Does any understand what is he complaining about? I still dont understand it.

[CarRepairer]

I'm not complaining anymore. Fixed!

[Saktoth]

It will take 2.7 hours for a flea to decloak if you have full energy.

I am playing out this scenario as we speak. :D

8 minutes and i got bored.

[Google Frog]

There are 2 good gameplay reasons to make it not cost cloak imo. Firstly it's uncontrollable cloak which means that if you stop the fleas they will drain E which is annoying to keep track of. Secondly they're not good currently and have to be placed early on. Decloak due to E stall is very likely at one point in the game which means it's the end of those carefully placed fleas/ticks/roaches.

All Car seems to be arguing for is fluff and finding them at the end of the game. I think little endgame helpers should be less important than ingame gameplay and Sak showed that they take too long to decloak anyway.

[carrepairer]

Free cloak with vision is cheesy. Even Starcraft had this (zergs, observers) but there was at least a penalty - very small unit limit means choose your units wisely.

With flea being an ultimate spam-and-forget unit for spying, who needs infiltrator? I think at this point flea's abilities are totally better than its cost.

And yes, I forgot about the recent 1000 default storage. My mistake.

Again, cloak graphics properly representing cloaking is not "fluff" just because you call it that. By your definition, anything beyond dot wars is fluff. If pyro's flamethrower looked like a laser it wouldn't affect gameplay, does that mean wanting its flamethrower to look like flames is "fluff"? Graphics need to make sense for gameplay reasons, because new players won't know what's going on if the graphics are nonsensical.

[SirMaverick]

With flea being an ultimate spam-and-forget unit for spying, who needs infiltrator? I think at this point flea's abilities are totally better than its cost.

You can't use flea to explore new area (e.g. the enemy base) - with the infiltrator you can.

[Google Frog]

Free cloak with vision is cheesy. Even Starcraft had this (zergs, observers) but there was at least a penalty - very small unit limit means choose your units wisely.

What? Fleas cost resources.

With flea being an ultimate spam-and-forget unit for spying, who needs infiltrator? I think at this point flea's abilities are totally better than its cost.

You're wrong. It has uses but really it sucks. People expand too fast for a deploy-able camera to have much use.

Again, cloak graphics properly representing cloaking is not "fluff" just because you call it that. By your definition, anything beyond dot wars is fluff. If pyro's flamethrower looked like a laser it wouldn't affect gameplay, does that mean wanting its flamethrower to look like flames is "fluff"? Graphics need to make sense for gameplay reasons, because new players won't know what's going on if the graphics are nonsensical.

Pyro's flamethrower isn't fluff. It's graphics representing the weapon type and giving the player useful information. You need to separate fluff and graphical representation. Currently the graphical representation of 'your enemy can't see this' is the wavy cloaky effect. I doubt that people associate it with E drain and even then I doubt if they care.

[CarRepairer]

Replying to Google Frog:

Currently the graphical representation of 'your enemy can't see this' is the wavy cloaky effect. I doubt that people associate it with E drain and even then I doubt if they care.

You even just called it the wavy cloaky effect... it is not the effect of a burrowing, it's a cloak. Right now the flea has a cloaking device whether or not it costs 0e or 1e. And e-drain is important since you reopened this thread.

[CarRepairer]

Replying to Google Frog:

Free cloak with vision is cheesy. Even Starcraft had this (zergs, observers) but there was at least a penalty - very small unit limit means choose your units wisely.

What? Fleas cost resources.

Those resources are practically 0, and only a one time cost (if its cloak were free). In starcraft, the unit limit is a penalty that lasts the entire time the unit is alive. Also it's easier to detect hidden units in starcraft without having to comb the map with units like we do, as they have detection units.

[Google Frog]

Replying to CarRepairer:

Replying to Google Frog:

Free cloak with vision is cheesy. Even Starcraft had this (zergs, observers) but there was at least a penalty - very small unit limit means choose your units wisely.

What? Fleas cost resources.

Those resources are practically 0, and only a one time cost (if its cloak were free). In starcraft, the unit limit is a penalty that lasts the entire time the unit is alive. Also it's easier to detect hidden units in starcraft without having to comb the map with units like we do, as they have detection units.

What I'm saying is that they suck enough to have only a 1 time cost. Also I don't think that endgame stuff matters at all, the kind of people who hide single fleas with no chance to win will be annoying in different ways. Also we have does not count.

[CarRepairer]

Replying to Google Frog:

Also we have does not count.

That's a whole different story. I thought you were against doing that kind of stuff. Doesnotcount for fleas would be controvercial but that would work.

[CarRepairer]

It will be fixed when flea is added to doesnotcount but that hasn't happened yet so this should stay open. Our game is broken as long as people can hide fleas in big maps and prolong games for others.

[Google Frog]

Our game is broken as long as there are trolls.

[CarRepairer]

I disagree that this should be closed. This is a huge problem that will be exploited one day by people and we won't always have moderators around to control it with /cheat.

[SirMaverick]

Spam fleas and search the enemy fleas.

[SirMaverick]

Specs mostly help to find last cloaked units, too.

[CarRepairer]

Spam fleas and search the enemy fleas.

Except that this will get old after a while if you have to do it every game. Imagine if CA had a large playerbase and you couldn't track down all the griefing trolls who extend the game every single time. Luckily it's perfectly solvable on our end.

Specs mostly help to find last cloaked units, too.

And when there aren't specs, then what? Once again, I know there will always be trolls. But when we can prevent a problem, we should. We can prevent this one.

[SirMaverick]

We can prevent this one.

Our game is broken as long as there are trolls.