Make Dash only in a straight line

[VOLAND]

My two cents…

Dash is part of a larger problem of extreme mobility. The question is not so much what to do about dash specifically as whether there is too much mobility and what should be done about it. I don’t want to go off topic or expand the scope of the issue, it’s just that you can’t consider dash in isolation. Nerf it too much and you just make quickaim and various speed buffs the optimal solution.

To quote myself:

@VOLAND

The problem is that PP soldiers can have too much mobility. Some maths to illustrate this:

The tiles that can be moved at the cost of 1 AP is soldier’s speed/4. So a soldier with speed 16 can move 4 tiles per AP, or 16 tiles if he uses all the AP for movement.

If the same soldier uses dash to move, he can move 12 tiles (16 * 3/4) per AP, or 48 tiles if he uses all the AP for dash movement.

Now, if the same soldier is frenzied when he dashes he can move 12 *1.5 = 18 tiles, or 72 tiles if he uses all the APs for dash movement.

That’s already arguably too much, given that most maps are around 45 tiles in length.

And that’s with a completely unoptimized build, of average speed.

Take a build with top speed (25), speed leg mutation (+5 to speed, so 25+5=30) and light body armor (+2, so 30+2 = 32), add frenzy (32 * 1.5 = 48) and make him dash: he will move 48 * 3/4 = 36 tiles with a single AP (and 144 tiles using all APs)! That means that on most maps the player can arbitrarily choose any spot and teleport the soldier there at the cost of 1 AP and 4 WP, or 2 AP 8 WP max.

(And this is without taking into account blood lust buff…)

This is the “too much mobility problem”, because it makes distances absolutely irrelevant for the player.

And as someone pointed out in that thread in my calculations I didn’t take into account a third row skill that gives another +2 to speed, so the maximum speed is 34, after frenzy 34+34*50%=51. So 51 tiles in a single turn without dash. Now combine with things like vanish (which allows moving 5 tiles for 4 WP), quickaim (which gives 1 AP worth of extra movement) and of course Rally the Troops and hopefully you can see that even without dash you can have too much mobility.

So, unfortunately, just nerfing dash would upset many causal/novice players without fundamentally solving the problem.

My suggestion in the thread I shamelessly plugged in here (sorry about that ) is put a hard cap on speed and make frenzy add +10 to speed, instead of +50%. So frenzy could be used to make slower soldiers faster, not turn fast soldiers into Flashes.

Leave dash as is, but make it optional in the difficulty settings to cap all skills to one use per turn.