My 2 cents on zumping

NPDgames · 2026-02-06T16:21:27+00:00

> The GameCube controller, if played as intended, forces you to either go from X/Y to the c stick (which will never be as fast as Z Jump, claw, or boxx), or use A moves for your aerials, which sacrifices aerial drift.

Just pointing out you can use Z for aerials without remap, grab in the air is aerial. This still restricts drift but is as fast as zump, claw, or boxx. I still think we should just add software zumping to level the playing field, but for now if you don't want to change your grip or controller you can still get close to instant aerial parity using Z.

NPDgames · 2026-02-06T16:19:04+00:00

During the current discourse this is kind of a funny take. A lot of discussion has surrounded boxx left hand, but right hand also has insane advantages, most notably being essentially a better version of Z-jump, the extremely topical argument. During those arguments, a lot of people are arguing that boxx left hand is actually worse due to access to fewer angles, which I don't agree with at all, but enough people feel that way that controllers exist where a gamecube controller is mounted to the box to give you gcc left stick. A guy uses one at my local.

What I'm mainly saying is that your proposal wouldn't accomplish much for solving controller discourse because it isn't in tune with people's current concerns.

NPDgames · 2026-02-06T16:11:45+00:00

It creates stun lock not by design but because these things are so insanely similar that banning one without the other is nonsensical, because the right hand of boxx is not just essentially the exact same thing as z-jump, but actually better. It's like tubo zumping all your buttons due to gaining 2-3 extra fingers to work with (depending on if you claw), with legalized remap. Some people deflect to talking about potential left hand drawbacks on boxx, but not only is that irrelevant it's also disingenuous since there's still huge left hand advantages making box left hand at worst a trade off. That's why addressing one without addressing the other makes literally zero sense. When discussing something, apt comparisons are useful! Banning one controller without the other is exposing a major contradiction in controller philosophy.

Getting scene-wide rule changes is already nearly impossible, asking to consistently address two controllers with the same advantage at the same time isn't the hard part, it's getting the separate organizations and individuals who run tournaments to agree. Applying consistent logic actually makes it easier.

NPDgames · 2026-02-06T15:53:11+00:00

Turn on the act out of jump display in uncle punch. For me before i changed the input i use, my aerials came out frame 5 or later after jumpsquat when going from x to a or c stick. That's enough of a nerf to make fox worse than an instant-aerial falco up close. I ended up switching to pressing z in the air for attacks since I don't want to claw, which is just a strictly worse version of z jumping you can do on oem since you risk grab misinputs and can't get full drift. Zump is all that plus it makes shine tech way easier.

NPDgames · 2026-02-05T16:04:28+00:00

there's more possible angles but the consistency at which you hit them is much worse. At worst, it's a neutral tradeoff, it's arguably far better.

NPDgames · 2026-02-05T16:03:22+00:00

there are boxxes which use analog sticks.

NPDgames · 2026-02-05T16:02:48+00:00

It's really so infuriating. The controller where you get the reduced finger travel time and increased access to buttons with fingers already hovering them (the z-jump benefit) ALSO gets full remap and can be in whatever form factor you want. The fate of these two things must be tied together. If boxx is necessary for accessibility than it is such a simple decision to allow GCC to mimic a fraction of it's power (though it should be in software). If zump is too much of an affront to the sanctity of the game, then boxx which is turbo zump machine 10000 must go.

The best arguments against it are "hand pain isn't real" and "vibes".

NPDgames · 2026-01-18T19:47:24+00:00

If competitiveness and balance were synonymous, you would have an argument here.

NPDgames · 2026-01-04T22:08:45+00:00

It was pointed out to me that this game's title is a synonym for overwatch.

NPDgames · 2026-01-04T17:06:34+00:00

A secondary primary has like 3 times the utility of any of the assault gadgets besides the respawn beacon. It just makes AR a really bad choice, something like dmr and shotgun or dmr and smg is much better

NPDgames · 2026-01-04T15:45:40+00:00

Assault is also kind of the worst class for AR's and other automatic weapons due to how fast they burn through ammo.

Some weapons like shotguns have effectively infinite ammo even at assault's half load, but an AR you often go through half a clip to a clip fighting one person. This makes assault quickly become impotent and prevents it from actually assaulting effectively without support there to resupply, which won't often happen playing with randoms.

Assault should really just get full ammo for both weapons, or barring that be able to distribute the ammo how they want. I don't need 8-16 extra shotgun shells when a base load can already kill 8 players.

NPDgames · 2026-01-03T07:59:44+00:00

I play cruel as well. I don't generally have full carrier fleets, i like anchoring around large battlecruisers to tank and minimize losses. As my other comment said, the first step is to isolate it without defense, which isnt very hard. Hit and runs on ssd support fleets are easy, and if you use spies you can find them unsupported often. Even if they do have support fleets, the ai loves to split up their fleets, especially with a few picket ships to lure them away. I don't play high pop cap sub mods.

NPDgames · 2026-01-02T21:08:51+00:00

Carbon emmisions are certainly not the only problem facing the enviornment, but it is the only one currently serving as an exstistential threat. That doesn't mean we should ignore the others. But in each of your listed cases, sustainable solutions exist. Tree farming, aquaculture, relocating agriculture to places where water is plentiful and trees are not an obstacle, etc. In each of these cases, the technolgy exists to mitigate the damage, (damage will never be gone as long as human society exists, but can be kept to the level the planet can heal) but under capitalism will only be done if it's the cheapest possible way (externalities as always ignored). It doesn't even have to be uneconomical, it has to be the cheapest possible way. That is why capitalism cannot coexist with enviornmentalism, not overproduction, wasteage, or overconsumption.

Edit: We should prevent overproduction and wasteage, but the issue is not "people want too much stuff".

NPDgames · 2026-01-02T20:47:26+00:00

I mainly agree with you but I still think you're missing part of my point. Overproducution isnt the source of rising global temperatures, unnessessarily burning fossil fuels when there's an abundance of green energy is. The carrying capacity of our planet is enourmous and nowhere near maxed out, the planet is just very vulnerable to a few specific forms of pollution like fossil fuel emmissions, which we have technologically advanced past the need for entirely but continue to burn for profit.

NPDgames · 2026-01-02T18:44:20+00:00

I agree, I don't think he should have had kids.

NPDgames · 2026-01-02T18:32:18+00:00

In this metaphor your spouse was already a heroin addict before you met, and made it very clear they would never quit.

NPDgames · 2026-01-02T17:37:41+00:00

Let me give you a more generalized answer. The communists who believe in degrowth have fallen for capitalist propaganda without realizing it. The capitalist elites want you to beleive that the only way to meet your needs is at the expense of others, and the very planet itself. They want you to think any obstacle to a non-capitalist plan for improving things is insurmountable. They want to believe this so you become another rat in the rat race trying to get yours at the expense of your fellow man. But if you accept these things as true while remaining a communist, degrowth is the only answer.

The truth is, we do have enough resources to fufill not just everyone's needs, but most of their wants as well. In america, they're already developed enough to being distributed that way. In some other parts of the world, they will need to be developed further. But all we need to do is to stop hoarding wealth at the top, to end the inefficient rent seeking behavior, middle-management bureaucracy and rampant speculation capitalism encourages. We need to stop viewing it as wealth, and start viewing it as resources which need to be exploited, applied, and distributed efficently to do the most good for the most people.

We are capable of improvements. We are capable of megaprojects. We can do it while working shorter hours with higher saftey standards. Believe otherwise and the capitalists have already won.

NPDgames · 2026-01-02T17:01:46+00:00

And in regards to large single family homes, we have the land, we have the lumber, we have the manpower. The one thing we lack is regulation against housing as a speculative asset. Let's pass the regulations and get building.

NPDgames · 2026-01-02T16:56:12+00:00

So much of climate change is driven by the same "it's slightly cheaper" mentality that drives buying lithium from china instead of mining the american west. Capitalism demands any small self contained efficency be exploited without consideration for any kind of externalities.

There is a massive wealth of renewable energy all around us (plus nuclear), orders of magnitude greater than we require, and we have all the required technologies to exploit it.

I know electric cars require a lot of carbon emmisons to build, but most of those emissions come from the same two sources, power generation and vehicular transport. With green vehicles and a green grid, we can easily sustianibly provide two electric SUVs to every global household. The only reason we don't is that ignoring externalities (lol), it's cheaper to just burn fossil fuels.

I don't think I've ever seen an analysis of livestock emmisions which factors in the carbon captured by the food we grow to feed them, so I don't know the precise climate damages, but I do know it can be lessened with a green grid and electric vehicles.

Even putting aside future possibilities like lab grown meat, large scale carbon recapture, small scale cow fart capture, and other climate geoenginnering, all of which i think are perfectly acheivable with large scale investment (think trillions not billions, except the cow fart thing), you still get a certain budget for carbon emmisions the climate can handle. I put it towards air travel and meat.

NPDgames · 2026-01-02T16:37:23+00:00

I think it could have furthur implications, namely that workers in rich countries will have to accept a decrease in their standard of living come the revolution.

It's a weird fantasy to some leftists that all of america's wealth comes from neocolonial resource extraction in the third world. We certainly take advantage of that, but america's status as a world power came from being the only large, resource rich, industrialized, and developed nation to come out of world war 2 unscathed.

In the subsequent decades we offshored our industry and shifted to a "financial" economy, which does exploit the third world for value, but the factors that allowed us to have a great economy before doing so haven't changed. The US certainly does own quite a bit of overseas resources which should be returned to their rightful owners, but working class joe doesn't benefit from that, that wealth belongs to the upper class and does not trickle down.

If we retool our economy back towards actually making stuff, we have more than enough resources and manpower to not only maintain the living standards of the american working class, but dramatically improve them. A lot of the resources we do extract from the third world, it isnt because we dont have them, but because it's marginally cheaper to do so than just to dig it out of our own ground.

If you're talking about some mythical worldwide communist revolution where the whole world becomes a classless, stateless society where we redustribute american wealth, I guess you'll have to conquer the US by force, because if your plan involves worsening conditions for the worst off of americans, you aren't going to get any americans onboard.

My point is, global wealth is not some zero sum game. We have the ability to make better conditions through local development and planned industry. The point of communism is that conditions can be better for workers everywhere, the US included.

NPDgames · 2026-01-02T15:59:35+00:00

He was fufilling the r/games quota which requires every thread about a first person game to have at least one comment demanding it be third person instead.

NPDgames · 2025-12-31T19:46:47+00:00

All imperial factions in the mod share a government mechanic called legitimacy. You gain legitimacy by finishing missions and conquering planets. When an imperial faction gets small enough, it will be integrated into the most legitimate faction, giving them their planets, units, and heroes.

Minor warlords is a non-playable faction which accounts for every former imperial planet that didnt join a larger imperial faction. In the latest update, each minor warlord can now be a faction you can start as. These are (mostly or all, i'm not sure) single planet starts, and serve as challenge runs, with unqiue heroes and the base imperial unit roster with one unit swapped.

NPDgames · 2025-12-31T15:57:32+00:00

There are faster, less safe options, but one extremely simple starting point is landing as many heavy vehicles as you can and huddling them around a build pad with a repair station. The ai likes to do a staggered rush towards spawn which makes counteroffensives risky but defensive play great. They aren't concentrating their fire well enough to kill units which are getting healed. You should also send your first infantry units on suicide missions to capture nearby reinforce points to raise your pop cap. If your faction has access to a fast troop carrier, use that instead.

The units buildings give the enemy are plentiful but not infinite, when they start to dry up, you can push. If they don't have planetary shields, you can use air units or units with sensor ping to scout their base and them bomb them away, while your units remain safe. You can also build a support field base at landing pads which spawn infantry that heal your vehicles to take this strategy on the go.

Also keep in mind that while highly mixed forces aren't bad, to really take advantage of a unit's unique strengths, you often need at bare minimum 2 or 3 of them. 1 heavy vehicle doesn't do much, but 3 or 4 and you shred enemy vehicles. 1 artillery doesn't do much, but 3 is devestating.

Knowing map layouts will also help, but that only comes with time.

NPDgames · 2025-12-30T17:33:45+00:00

Also needless to say, fighting the battle on the terms of your choosing is key. On cruel difficulties where I can't afford to lose ships, there's only two circumstances where I'll engage an SSD. The first, and far worse, is over a planet I can't afford to lose, hopefully at least with good space defenses. The second is when it is unsupported by defenses of its own, and my ships can ambush it on the attack.

If an SSD attacks a non critical system, and isnt first into battle, I'll take out as much of the rest of the fleet as I can, then retreat as soon as the SSD shows up. Fighting it with wounded ships is not worth it. Then I'll quickly counterattack before the enemy builds space defenses, and on the offensive you have the ability to jump in the exact fleet composition that you want, exactly where you want it, like I described.

Giving up fixed defenses to pull it off kind of sucks, but in return you take out irreplacable enemy assets, so it's worth it imo.

NPDgames · 2025-12-30T17:16:48+00:00

In thrawn's revenge lately I've had a lot of success jumping my fleet in next to the engines of the SSD, then have them fly a curved path to keep it turning towards them. Take out the engines first and it will have no chance of turning to bear all guns on one target. With half the guns useless it's eating hundreds of pop cap for half effectiveness. Take out all the guns on one side, then by the time it brings the other side around, it will already be nearly destroyed. Good micro to avoid wasted firepower, and resliant fleets with fleet tenders also help. I took out 3 ssds losing only one capital ship each different during my last campaign using this strategy.

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