CO Conversion Part 3: Black Hole,

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Black Hole

Sturm

Tabitha is the obvious inheritor of Sturm's archetype (Very powerful, CO Power nukes people), but she leverages Days of Ruin's CO Zone mechanics to make something very distinct from him anyway. This opens the way to make Sturm himself distinct from her.

Lin complicates things, as she's a 1 CO Zone CO with 2/2 stars... who only affects ground units, and has a specialized, not-that-amazing-even-in-Fog CO Power. That means the easy, obvious way of making Sturm distinct from Tabitha and faithful to his Black Hole Rising self is... not an option without risking invalidating Lin. Really, the ideal scenario would be to bolster Lin -among other COs- and have Sturm take over the slot of "1 CO Zone, broadly powerful effect" and truth be told it's incredibly tempting to break my rule of not altering the Days of Ruin COs.

The following is what I would have Sturm as in the scenario of "Lin gets boosted."

2/2 stars. All units.

1 CO Zone.

Meteor Strike: A meteor does 8 points of non-lethal damage in a 3x3 area, targeting the highest total cash value of units, with Sturm's units counted as negative for this purpose. Additionally, Sturm's units ignore terrain-based movement penalties.

Without that, this gets a lot harder.

0/0 stars. All units.
2 CO Zone
Meteor Strike: A meteor does 8 points of non-lethal damage in a 3x3 area, targeting the highest total cash value of units, with Sturm's units counted as negative for this purpose.

Settling for focusing on Meteor Strike instead of his strong daily, and making it something he just keeps throwing at his enemies, instead of only getting it very intermittently. I don't actually like it, honestly, but compromises.

It might also make sense to bolster Meteor Strike's area of effect. Tabitha gets a 5x5 radius, for reference.

Flak

I don't like the randomness of Luck specialization in Black Hole Rising and Dual Strike, but it's interesting how Luck damage effectively ignores the type of unit being targeted. Flak himself is a straightforward individual, so I'm inclined to make him straightforward as a CO.

0/0 stars. Units in CO Zone do +1 'luck' damage.

1 CO Zone.

Brute Force: The 'luck' bonus becomes +3.

A daily that's probably a bit underwhelming -just like his actual daily- if only because the effect is optimized for using swarms of cheap units to beat bigger units while his CO Zone is quite small, but his CO Power lets him break through enemies pretty much without regard to unit matchups, so long as his units can land damage. We're talking 3 Infantry being enough to reduce a Wartank to 1 HP! Even if the infantry are nearly dead!

He'd tend to struggle a bit more with naval and air-focused maps due to the lack of cheap units capable of landing a shot in the first place. He might be one of the better users of Dusters, though.

Truthfully, it might be necessary to exclude Infantry, Mechs, and Cycles from benefiting from his 'luck' damage. Being able to break counters by overwhelming the enemy with infantry might turn out to be a gamebreaker.

Compared to Nell, he's focused on having an actual daily effect, and a slightly stronger spread from his CO Power, but he lacks the one-hit-one-kill part of her CO Power. This would probably require refining to make them distinct and equally valid.

 

Adder

Adder is a straightforward, yet surprisingly powerful, CO. His entire thing is that he has a lightning-fast charge on a movement-boosting effect. This can let him pressure the enemy with the threat of a first strike, where his tanks stop just out of range of the enemy's tanks, the enemy backs away for fear that Adder will use his CO Power, and the cycle repeats until finally the enemy can't or won't retreat anymore. It's quite sinister.

Unfortunately, I can't replicate the part where he can stock up enough charge to do this back to back, but oh well.

-1/-1 stars. All units.

4 CO Zone.

Sideslip: +1 move to all units. Also negates the negative stars.

So I made Adder have an insane CO Zone for an insanely fast charge... that provides no stat bonuses to the units inside, the -1/-1 canceling out the hidden +1/+1. He really is just his fast-charging movement-boosting CO Power. This is important, as otherwise he'd tend to incidentally invalidate Forsythe.

Arguably he does anyway... in the sense that Forsythe is really, really weak.

Lash

Lash's whole thing is that rough terrain is her playground. She can be translated pretty directly, I think.

?/0 stars. Lash's troops gain 10% attack per terrain defense star they're benefiting from, when in her CO Zone.

1 CO Zone.

Prime Tactics: Units move at full speed through all terrain and terrain stars are doubled for Lash's units.

A rare case of almost directly translating from Dual Strike to Days of Ruin... with the caveat that Lash was actually stealth-nerfed in the transition from Black Hole Rising to Dual Strike. In Black Hole Rising, she gets the +10% per terrain star I've got listed. In Dual Strike, she only gets +5% per terrain star, I suspect primarily because Dual Strike introduced Kindle.

Much like in Dual Strike/Black Hole Rising, she'd tend to lean toward artillery blobs that take advantage of Forests/Cities, using Prime Tactics to make aggressive pushes. She'd be a little less impressive in Days of Ruin than in Black Hole Rising, though, as terrain stars have overall lowered a little. On the other hand, she'd be better at sea than in the games she's actually in, thanks to Days of Ruin playing around more with naval 'rough terrain'.

Hawke

Hawke is a generalist with a powerful CO Power, with his only real weakness being that said CO Power charges slowly for the payoff. (He takes as long to charge as COs like Eagle, who has a much more amazing Super CO Power) This isn't quite possible to pull off in Days of Ruin, since boosting his units broadly directly leads into faster charging, so a small amount of compromise is necessary to keep him balanced while trying to translate him.

2/0 stars. All units.

2 CO Zone.

Black Wave: Non-lethally removes 1 HP from each enemy unit and restores 1 HP to each of Hawke's troops.

I compromise by giving him a 'standard' CO Zone size, but use his CO Power instead of his Super CO Power as his DoR CO Power. I also bump up his offense boost to make up the difference. He's directly superior to Will on a day-to-day basis, unfortunately, but Will's CO Power is probably the more impressive/useful one, and... well. Will's already difficult to justify picking in the base game. More reason to not pick Will being introduced isn't changing much.

Jugger

The final luck-focused CO. Gotta make him distinct.

0/0 stars.

3 CO Zone.

System Crash: All units do +2 'luck' damage.

Compared to Nell, he lacks the one-hit-one-kill, but charges faster. Compared to Flak, he lacks the daily and has a weaker CO Power, but again, he charges faster. Again, this would probably require refinement as an actual project.

Koal

Koal is Adder with a random Road gimmick, and his basic CO Power charges slower in compensation. Trying to be faithful to that in the most direct sense is a bad idea, even aside from the twin points that A: a 'road specialty' is awful and B: it's even worse in Days of Ruin.

So I got creative.

4/0 stars. For every terrain defense star the unit is benefiting from, -1 to attack stars. All ground and sea units.

2 CO Zone.

Trail of Woe: Koal's units do not benefit from terrain defense stars, gain +1 movement.

This way, Koal has some contrary incentives. Don't get your Rockets into a defensible position: leave them on the Road, so they have their maximum damage! This gets particularly interesting when Fog of War is involved, as Days of Ruin correlates "hides units" with "solid/high defense stars" very consistently. Where other COs will just get the Rockets hidden in defensive terrain and be done with that topic, Koal has to decide whether he wants firepower or protection.

Trail of Woe is of course an obvious major offensive push.

As a serious project, I'd be open to tweaking the exact attack star number he gets base. 4 is partly because it can't go negative under any circumstances -4 stars is the highest you'll see on terrain type- and partly because he really needs to have a pretty big bonus to make it worth abandoning actually good terrain, but it might make more sense to downshift it to three stars. At four stars only forests, mountains, and non-City properties will push Koal below two attack stars, which for instance tends to make him better than Will. On the other hand... say it with me: Isabella basically invalidates Will anyway.

I originally had Koal affect all units, but then it occurred to me that air units get his full bonus with no disadvantage. He would almost directly invalidate Tasha, for one thing, as he'd have a larger CO Zone that also benefits non-air units and his only losses are 2 defense stars and 1 point of CO Power-granted Move.

Kindle

Kindle is the only Dual Strike terrain specialist with an actual valid niche. She's also a bit complicated: her daily makes her units better at fighting from properties, her CO and Super CO Power both exaggerate this truth but the CO Power also punishes enemies for daring to be on properties while the Super CO Power is more about dominating property control to then crush your opponent.

Having her only benefit units that are both in her CO Zone and on a property isn't a good dynamic, though, as it's too constrictive, and offsetting it by giving her a larger bonus is either not going to fix the problem or it will just make her unfair at defending her properties.

As such, let's take this in a different direction.

0/0 stars. +1 attack star per property (Ownership irrelevant) in Kindle's CO Zone. All units.

2 CO Zone.

High Society: The property bonus only uses properties Kindle owns.

I like this daily a lot. It makes Kindle good at fighting over properties, regardless of who owns them -in Dual Strike her property advantage can apply even when attacking well-defended properties, but it tends to do so only inconsistently. (Because it's dependent on there being properties nearby to attack from) Here it's not only consistent, but she does better the more clustering is going on.

High Society is a bit more tentative. I like the idea of it, in that Kindle switches from fighting over properties to leveraging the properties she has, but it retains the same design flaw High Society has in Dual Strike: that Kindle's balance varies based on how many properties a map has, with no real 'sanity check' preventing her from basically automatically winning on a map that has more than X number of properties. It might make more sense to use Urban Blight as the basis of her CO Power, especially since there's not that many CO Powers that do damage.

Von Bolt

Von Bolt is weird in Dual Strike.

So I made him weird for Days of Ruin.

1/1 stars. All units.

1 CO Zone.

Ex Machina: Targets the enemy CO with a chain lightning bolt that effects every enemy unit in their CO radius that does 1 non-lethal damage and paralyzes the effected units. (Note that this includes the part where the CO Zone expands to cover the entire map when their CO Power is activated) If there's no enemy CO to target, instead fires a 3X3 lightning bolt at the largest concentration of money that does 3 non-lethal damage and paralyzes the effected units. (Also, capable of friendly fire)

Special Note: Von Bolt's meter is broken up into four parts, with CO Zone expansion appropriate to such. (ie he reaches a CO Zone of 5 at max charge) It charges each part at the usual rate, however.

Yeeep.

An argument can be made that he too directly invalidates Forsythe, but since he starts from a garbage CO Zone size, he's pretty clearly operating at a big disadvantage when first fielded, and outside of using Ex Machina's looming threat to discourage CO Power usage his CO Power is not, itself, that amazing. And his bonus is sufficiently small it's not that hard to kill him and force him to start from scratch.

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So that's the main of the project done!

Next time, a bonus update.