BAR offers some 'hold the fort' maps, where there is a strong/fortifiable area and then the 'outskirts'. These are catered to offer great gameplay for battles against Raptors (previously known as 'chickens') and Scavengers.
Correct.
We recently even saw that a tactical nuke dropped from a bomber, created a blast-wave that pushed 19 flash-tanks so much their got a temporary 300% movement speed (if they weren't flying/crashing/exploding). https://www.twitch.tv/tarnishedknight/clip/AssiduousAttracti...
I love the fact that Zero-K has such a large group of people really enjoying it. It's both proof that a spring-engine game nowadays still can work/be played very well, and also that gameplay is what matters most.
For me personally, it's the taste that's different. ZK has a kinda chaotic/weird setup/design-style. And even though gameplay > graphics, i do really love it when they match/meet/work together. For BAR it is one of our missions to make looking at the game to already be very enjoyable. (and since the basic gameplay mechanics derived from TA were already so good).
We're working on new GL rendering for units, which is a huge part of slowdowns in FPS mid-late game. In testing environments we can see over 3-10x better performance on rendering.
We rarely see simulation slowdowns (<1.0x speed) so this is already pretty good - though also here we're on a mission to multithread as much as humanly possible.
Yes, i agree.
But besides that, also the planetary maps where an awesome idea, but for me is just very bad in practice. Also performance was problematic from the first launch. Though improved a lot, still not where i'd like it to be. (though BAR also still has a road ahead, but we're close to updating to new GL rendering, which can improve unit-rendering multiple times over... :) )