Wheeler

Xenoargh

Core, lvl2 laser wheel

Buildpic: The unit itself looks really good with the large exception for the extremely odd and totally unfitting laser \"beam\". Just as the many other variations of laser beems I\'ve seen in buildpics, it sucks. Lasers always look stupid in such small pictures and I yet have to see an exception to that [2]. The background is... ergh... wasted, to say the best. First of all, I detect the common spotlight-effect when only the unit and the area in it\'s close vicinity are properly illuminated. The night falls thick just a Hammer barrel away. Further on, I somehow fail to get a grip on what it is and why it is. It is flat and mainly green and so far so good, but then comes two really damn odd white stripes on eather side of the unit that confuse me a bit, but when I get to the purple \"cloud\" behind the unit, by brain functions jams. What the hell is it and why the hell is it PURPLE of all colors? I mean, it can\'t be mud that is seen when the giant wheel rolls over the piece of ground and it can\'t be dirt and dust that is threwn up for the same reason and if it is the exhaust pipe that is broken in some odd way, then why purple? It just doens\'t make the slightest sense... [0.5]. THe merging seems fine, besides the fact that being merged with such a background is a direct insult against the unit. It is correctly shaded and the shadows seem fine, even though a tad too sharp [2].

Buildpic: 4.5

Model: First of all, this model is so un-OTA it can be. It is a giant, spinning wheel that rolls around and tries to look frightening. Then following the first part it's interesting to note that the blocks that holds the wheel without problems pass through the main body as they rotate and it looks REALLY odd. Don't worry to spend some extra faces to make it look right, as long as it does look right, I won't object. Further, at least in my personal opinon, it would look much better if the wheel blades were inverted... i.e. having the sharp side on the outside instead of the inside, thus fixing the edges and giving the wheel a more wheelish look. Another thing, that I might be alone in thinking of is to enlarge the main body so it fills out more of the empty space in the ring [1]. The textruing follows the OTA scheme on a couple places, but many of the shadings are totally misplaced, especially on the minor barrels. The texturing on the wheels would look a lot better if, as I said before, the wheel is sharper on the outside [2]. The corpse is acceptable [1].

Model: 4

Script: The wheel spins a tad too slow compared to the ground when it spins, or at least the spin acceleration is too slow. For some reason the wheel continues to spin for a while sometimes when force-stopping the unit, even thought the script looks correct. The tilting is cool, but it should definitly be a tad smaller, but more important, the animation of it should be a bit slower, so that long turns would tilt the wheel a lot while those small 10 degree corrections don't trigger the unproportionally large banking. In the readme file, the author notes that the unit has a delibirate blind spot directly in front and directly behind the unit for quite obvious reasons (the wheel is there) and the extra realism point is noted and accepted. However, that action is almost made in vain because the unit has a bad habit of aiming straight through itself with one of the barrels when aiming to the left or right and further on, the unit somehow dislikes to keep an aim on the target, so it restores after each fired shot and can at times fire 90 degrees straight out of the barrel. You can see it in the in-game picture, although my reflexes aren't the best and I didn't manage to capture the actual firing moment... Also note that I don't play with such crappy resolution. I just had to resize the pic so people could see the barrel tilting a bit clearer.

Script: 7

Balance: Okidoki... Here comes the fun part. I compared this unit to the Core Can due to the similarity in their weapons. First of all, the Wheeler costs almost twice as much metal as the Can while having only 30% as much armor... 15% actually, if comparing to the costs. The Wheeler makes up for this insufficiency by having as much as six times higher speed and a much more effective weapon. First of all, the weapon is almost twice as powerful to start with (231 d/s for the Can and 375 d/s for the Wheeler, as seen in the summary on the top), aims a lot faster than the Can's and have twice the range. Due to the costs differences, we only have the range superioty left. Actually, I think that this unit is quite underpowered because despite it's relatively high speed, it is so weak that bases with any real defences have almost nothing to fear. This unit is so fast that it races away from the rest of the attacking forces, meaning that they don't get the protection of the better armored Storms as Mortys when they hide in the rear and the weapon drains hideous amounts of energy. My suggestion is to cut the metal costs to about 600 and cut the energy with a proportional amount.

Balance: 8

My score: In my personal opinion, this unit should be resized to Peewee size (all non-OTA units look much much better when sized down, just look at the whisper), cut the costs to around 250-300 metal, keep the speed and range, but severely reducing the damage/second ratio. That would make a fun unit to play with. As always, I'm totally allergic againt all units that cost more than 600 M.

My score: 2

Review by Storm | Others by same