Karax is my favorite commander hands down but lately i’ve been really bothered by his unit selection. It took me a while to realize that it wasnt the units that i hated, its that somewhere along the way, the hero commander’s design has broken down.
In a nut shell the only effective unit he has is Carriers. Now when i say this I strictly mean on difficulties that are somewhat high and weekly mutations.
Well anyways there are so many upgrades on Karax that it is obvious the intention was to choose which pathways you are going down, you simply can’t afford to fully upgrade all your units and, your spear of adun and your cannon’s. You actually can only realistically do 1.5 of those things and i do like this design aspect of the hero. However in design philosophy when you force me to specialize, you need to reward me and that’s where it all breaks down. If i fully upgrade my ground forces i really get nothing in return when i could have put that money into carriers, air upgrades and canon/spear of adun upgrades.
Which leads to the main issue. As i typed this I realized this is a multi layer design issue, his cannons are so good, honestly, anything not a carrier is so not worth it compared to a cannon. It only costs 150 and is instantly deployed into battle with 8 range, detection, and 320 effective hitpoints. Meanwhile to make his midtier units, of which he only has 3, zeolot, mirage, and immortal (very borderline tier 3 cost), you need considerable upgrades, takes lots of production buildings, and have extremely poor value per cost and they are susceptible to dieing in battle. You can build 3 canons for the cost of some his mid tier units at no gas cost, meaning you can deploy aggressive canon positions 3 times. I did have fantasies early in my co-op day’s of using zeolots as a cool immortal mineral dump to lead my army but then quickly realize cannons are just better. Setting up a small station of 4 canons and 4 batteries under carrier push is by far the better mineral dump.
Another thing is his carriers aren’t even particularly good, the only reason they are usable is because you can keep them at the edge of battle and slowly build up a fleet that won’t die but in terms of power, are just mediocre.
I think to attack this problem, simply changing stats here and there wont really solve the fact that cannons are just better than most of his own unit’s, so to fundamentally solve this issue, it needs to be attacked in a design perspective.
My first idea is that they should increase the cost of his mid tier units even more, and really sell their specialty niche for very specific set of circumstances. Keep the stats relatively the same but really improve their abilities. Karax does not need early game units or midtier units frankly, he has canons to survive and take early objectives with.
zeolot: initial gateway cost the same, revival can happen every 15 seconds but now costs half the price of the zeolot when it revives. The price cost on revival will keep this mechanism balanced but open whole new ways to use this unit. It’s possible to effectively keep 10 in your mobile army and only need 1 gateway to upkeep this small contingent. Before if i wanted to be serious with my carrier zeolot combo, id have to also invest heavily into 4-5 gateways and tech trees, well I just gave up and said canons/shield batteries are just so much better for so much less work.
Immortal: changed to a premium unit with a primium t3 pricetag, shadow cannon now has a 15 second cooldown with an autocast against air units. Kharax anti air is tricky, but strait up giving him some might go against the design of the character, i thought it would be cool to have 7 immortals in your mobile army, that for the most part, can handle air units reliably if you are not against an all air composition.
Mirage: increase cost by 100% more minerals and the same gas. phase now lasts 3.5 seconds with a 5 second cd. They go into phase mode when they deplete their shields and when in phase mode, attack speed is increased by an additional 100%, Attacks in phase mode will restore shield. They currently suffer from many thing’s, they are ridiculously fragile. send this into a mutator wave and it blows up so fast. Because they relatively have low total hp and against large waves you’ll still take heavy casualties, but against more sustain fighting and medium fights, you have some sustainability. Otherwise, id rather just buy carriers and not deal with this canon strapped to a paper airplane.
The rest of his units: aren’t very interesting, but it’s fine, I have alot of ideas for them, but mostly it’s karax’s low tier units that needed a change to compete with cannon’s.
Let me know your thoughts. Will this make him op of a hero?