Poll: Worst Unit Of The (time interval) Award (V)

[Martyn van Buren]

The problems with decoys are that they are very arbitrary. They have so little hp, but you can only target them one at a time. So a blob of 100 ships takes the same amount of time to kill 30 decoys as 1000 will. In the player hands, on 1 homeworld, it is not so bad since there are so few. But if you get into 4 hw games it in theory can allow some interesting tactics and wormhole clearing. The flip side is that with AI when they use them ai waves come with a guaranteed protection timer that cannot be shortened.

I've never seen decoys, but just asking, what if you had your fleet powered off?  As in, if I had a hundred missile frigates, and then activated ten, would they shoot at the first drone and destroy it, and then allow me to turn on another ten to get an immediate shot off at the next one?  That would be annoying-as-hell micro but curious to know if I understand right.

[Lee]

I tend to agree with most of the votes, just about anything at or over 10 is really deserving of another look. Although some like the metal/crystal converters probably just need their turn on/off to occur much faster. Teleporters work really well as hit-and-away alpha strikers, and the battle stations toughness doesn't really reflect that well. You could probably get rid of cleanup drones and no one would notice. Many of the mobile tachyon ships have far too little range or are incredibly fragile. I think we've all tried flying a tachyon drone around a system trying to find the 200 cloaked ships that are apparently playing keep-away with it.

How did Maws make it onto this list anyway?  And got votes too

[TechSY730]

Awesome stuff. Thanks to the Enclave starships now having a superior self assist-construction rate than the space docks, I would be tempted to augment my fleet ship production with them, except that enclaves don't get rally points for their units without themselves also moving. Oh well, still will try them on the field though.

Also, I didn't really care much about the armored warhead, but thanks for fixing the odd ranges of both the armored and the lightning warheads.

I also noticed that Mk. III harvesters got their nerf.
You shouldn't of done that...

Sorry, just recently found the BEN DROWNED stuff. Fun (and creepy) stuff

[chemical_art]

If only my computer could handle it, the stage is now perfect for a fun game of mine:

Unit choices:
<any super long range unit>
Cutlasses
Vampires
Shredders

Pump out melee units using enclave ships. Zerg most systems anywhere. The long range unit snipes gravity.

[Huaojozu]

Can we get rally points for Enclaves? That is one the main reasons I tend not to use them.

[keith.lamothe]

Can we get rally points for Enclaves? That is one the main reasons I tend not to use them.

I would have done it for 5.033, as I know that a lot of people don't use them mostly for interface rather than stat reasons, but having them have separate points for "this is where I'm going" and "this is where stuff I'm building should go" is a pretty major change under the hood and I just don't have time to implement and test that right now.  And if it broke a bunch of stuff now is not a great time to have to stop working on AVWW for a couple hours to fix a critical AIW bug

The main method of use I was seeing in the enclave starships with current mechanics is bringing them to the planet I'm attacking, parking them either in a beachhead area or off near the edge of the inner grav well ring, in FRD mode, and putting them on loop build of whatever I felt I could/should afford to loop build for that battle.

I mean, if blade spawners are OP, what about Enclaves producing FRD cutlasses?  Or vampire claws?  Imagine how you'd feel if the AI had blade spawners that produced cloaked blades   (chemical_art appears to have the idea)

Out of curiosity: what happens when you have a rally post on the planet with the enclave starship?

[PokerChen]

I'm okay with the present Enclave controls for now, they're very Zerg-like for FRD'ing everywhere. Would imagine that enclaves will be a bit OP in the next patch. I did end up with both cutlasses and vampires in one game, and well, cutlasses outperform vampires in most duties as well as being spammable from enclave starships.

Any unit with 1 second build time is essentially spammable and OP from enclaves... *cough*

[Huaojozu]

Damn, right when I wanted to focus on work, you put this Zerg rush idea into my head. Good thing the release isn't live yet.

I assumed it wasn't an easy code change for the Enclave rally point, since it really seamed like one of those things that if they were easy would already be implemented.

[chemical_art]

I've actually already done the zerg idea before, after the cutless but before the vampire buff. Here's how it would go with the current tactics.

The key is that you need both cutlesses and vampires. Shredders are better suited for defense because with their mechanics so you can't spam build them because most of the time you are already over the cap. So instead for that reason you want vampires and cutlasses.

The cutlasses are the tanks and general damage dealers. They are fast, cheap, tankish, and oh so many. They take up the vast majority of the ai's time because even before the enclave buff they are made quickly. Now it will be hilarious.

The vampires are sneaky. They are cloacked to right when they smash the ai. So the ai will be firing upon the cutlasses as they decloak, so the distraction combined with their vampirism means they don't die. But they will eat some of the shots so the cutlasses alone don't get overwhelmed.

Togehter, the only thing they fear are forts and gravity. Hence why in my desired game you want a super long range weapon too. Sentinel frigates, snipers, or bombards work.

The only shame is right now in the lower caps the vampires suck because so many units are over the 1m health mark. So I can't make us of that tactic.

Can the 1M health immunity to vampires and shredders please be changed to scale with unit caps, so it increases with decreasing caps?

Right now on ultra-low caps I think MK III triangle ships go over 1mil health. So in essence by mid game most units are immune to vampires/shredders, and by late game 95% of the ai is.

[chemical_art]

Other zerg units to try from my experience:

Nenzul units are all good, but the best one by far are the parasite ones. Trust me on this, your first game after this patch should be with those parasites and the enclave ships.

Also good are autobombs. Need I say more?

[Hearteater]

What was the reason for the 1 million health immunity to melee?  Seems so randomly arbitrary, almost like a quick-fix.

[TechSY730]

What was the reason for the 1 million health immunity to melee?  Seems so randomly arbitrary, almost like a quick-fix.

It's not immunity to all melee, but only certain types of melee, fusion cutters. I can think of only two units that have fusion cutter attacks, vampire claws and Z viral shredders. Notice how both of these have mechanics tied to HP of damage inflicted.
This rule was put into place to prevent high HP units from becoming "farms" for viral shredders and "practically infinite health sinks" for vampires.
With the Z viral shredder nerf making the penalty to reproduce count all shredders of that mark and not just ones on the same planet (and I still think that the 4x per cap is too high), this rule might not be needed anymore. The the "practically infinite health sinks" of the vampire claws can be solved by just throwing more firepower at them (enough that rate of the health they are regaining starts falling behind the rate they are taking damage). This is especially true if neither of these ships types have very high hull type bonuses (which IIRC, at the time this change was made, they did have same crazy high bonuses, now they don't, so it isn't as big of an issue anymore)

I still think the split should stay, so we can have continue to "levels" of melee immunity.

[Huaojozu]

Yeah, I tried Nanoswarms and loved them every time. Just FRD them in, send the rest of the fleet through and then collect your 50 new ships. Not to mention everything being paralyzed. Cutlasses, Vampires and Nanoswarms it is, sounds like a fun game. Just need to decide on caps setting, since it seems that my usual Ultra-Low wouldn't exactly mesh well with this strategy.

[chemical_art]

With the current state of affairs, I don't think the arbitrary system of health is needed.

Shredders, as pointed out, do not farm anymore because of the expodential costs for caps. Farming is still possible, but its farming in general, not being tied the hp directly.

For the vampires, I think high health has the opposite. When the vampire attacks a small health unit, it kills it quickly, reducing fleet battle dps more rapidly and allowing the masses of vampires to concentrate attacks on a smaller group. There is no real lag time in team fights because all the targets are bunched anyway. When it whacks larger targets it takes longer for the vampires to concentrate fire and attack (if not microed). The only theory I can see to why you'd ban the vampires is because you'd have them be able to attack the same target 30x before it dies as opposed to 10x, but as I pointed out earlier in large fleet battles it doesn't take more then half a second before its attacking at full speed again.

In conculsion, I feel like the limit nerfs shredders and vampires a little on normal and above, and really hard for us who use low caps or worst. If the limit was determined to still be needed, it should be on the ships themselves and not on their given health. So starships and buildings and super low cap fleetships could be banned, but others are left alone.

[Hearteater]

I agree with chemical_art.  I think some things that might be getting the 1 million health immunity to Fusion Cutters might need that immunity added anyway (if they don't have it already).  Because Vampires able to attack Home Command Stations would be very bad.