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Nerf Kennel Costs
Decreases kennel mass cost by 20% Decreases drone rebuild mass and energy costs by 60% Decrease drone rebuild time by 33.33% Increases drone elevation from 2 to 3 (replacement of #4198)
Looking at other drone costs, the Kennel drone definitely needed to be cheaper. 90% is a huge decrease though--what's the thought process behind making it cost half as much as an air scout?
Even with a 20% kennel mass cost nerf and a 90% drone rebuild cost nerf, kennels are still a rather mass inefficient source of build power compared to the player's other options like engineers and factories. The drones are very weak, small and vulnerable. They easily die to both air and aa. Rebuilding them for a high cost makes an already mass inefficient unit even more mass inefficient. Rebuilding the drones for a low cost makes kennels more viable without being overpowered. With 6 max health, a drone has less health than a mercy, less than 5% the health of a t1 engineer, and is one-shot by basically anything that can hit it. However, increasing the health a sufficient amount to balance that didn't seem reasonable enough to me compared to decreasing the drone rebuild cost so significantly. The drones should be fragile, but they should be cheap to rebuild (note that the drones still take a while to rebuild as I didn't change the build time cost).
For perspective, the other recent PR that rebalances kennels (#4193) actually reduces drone rebuild mass and energy costs by 94% and gives them 100 health... Drone rebuild costs are just so ridiculous at present that my PR is actually the more conservative one.
@Penguin5 Could you decrease the buff to the Kennel drones please? I would keep it at 1kE and 100 mass for now. Also decrease the BT to 500. Could you also look into increase their elevation a bit? It's an idea to make them less vulnerable to random AoE. Increasing their hp to 50 should also be a small QoL buff while not going over board.
Looks good, have you tested how big of an effect the elevation change has?
I did basic testing of it. It can be changed further if you prefer. I changed the elevation value in the bp from 2 to 3. Here's how it looks:
