Designed to be Arm's heavy duty line breaker, T2 Shock Assault Kbot delivers some serious bang for the buck in a highly mobile hull. Its dual plasma bolt guns are most effective against all lightly armored ground targets and can keep up high rate of fire for short perioids of time, but have limited range and penetrative power. In addition, it is equipped with EMP grenade launchers that can be used to disable high priority targets before closing in for the kill. On the other hand, the cost of all this firepower is that the unit is not exactly the most durable or armored one around.
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Very nice looking model and if EMP launchers are like the old spider-bot paralyze then this thing is gonna be pretty deadly! You’re putting the EMP on special “D” key, yeah?
Also, just a bit curious about what has been the greatest challenge in TA Zero’s development. Has it been modelling a certain unit, scripting a certain unit or perhaps making void shields work?
Yes, grenades will most likely be used only at special command.
Some unit models have indeed proven to be bothersome to make, although there is nothing complex about them. It is just a massive workload to make models and wrecks for hundreds of units. Making void shields was one of the most easiest things around; they’re nowhere as complex as one could think. Close combat did take some research and testing to get work, but it wasn’t complex to implement either. Most challenging things so far have been fixing anti-air unit primary weapon lockdowns and getting some multi weapon units (those accursed ships!) to work reliably, both of which required crazy amount of trial and error from several modders. Wotan did at the end figure out the way to get most AA units work reliably, but for some of them I had to come up with something else.
Yeah, in terms of most time spent on a single unit issue, the Arm Patriot and Core Proteus take the cake. Aside from that and the anti-air lockdown issue, there was also a dilemma regarding torpedoes and hovercraft that for a while seemed unsolvable, but we figured it out eventually. Getting the AI to perform well is also a constant battle requiring a lot of creative tricks, some of which haven’t even been implemented yet in Alpha 3, so expect the AI to be even better in the future.