"Fucking idiot team..."

thats like Firepluk rolls while sucking whole game the metal........

A nontrivial part of the annoyance of AutoLLT is that it doesn't play nicely over the network, though this probably only becomes apparent with NZ tier internet.

To illustrate, compare and contrast to what a player would do to recreate the effect manually, without any automation.


Set lotus state to repeat order mode. Start with a wait order to prevent order interleaving. Hold down ctrl (fire once) alt (at ground) and shift (add orders) and scribble force fire orders over terrain. Let it go by removing the wait order. You end up having a lotus with a command queue that no longer requires any network traffic, continues to fire optimally irrespective of user ping, and can even be efficiently paused and resumed by returning the lotus to standard fire-at-will with a wait command, and going back to execute the old queue with another wait command.

How does AutoLLT work in comparison?

AutoLLT floods single orders to fire at a given position at the ground one at a time, without regard to whether or not it fired at the last position yet. This means that even with a local server and ideal, zero ping network conditions as in the recording environment, most of the orders get lost/overwritten for no effect. Rather than a one-off cost of giving an array of orders to a unit, this requires constant traffic to be sent to everyone. It's not even beneficial for the owner, since the lotus spends most of its time swinging to aim to locations that it, more often than not, won't even actually fire at!

Looking at the two videos again, compare the throughput of ground zaps per second between the manual apprach (where again, "manual" just means doing a one-off scribble and then doing other things) versus the widgeted approach (where again, it's implemented in a terrible way for both the owner and for everyone unfortunate enough to be in the same game).

This isn't yet getting into the functional downsides of running AutoLLT:

• Revealing each and every point of expansion through fog of war thanks to the audible lotus hum.
• Providing advance warning of the lotus range before it enters line of sight.
• Regularly reducing energy production at best, and cutting the economic grid at worst, by causing allied solars to close up through friendly fire.
• Not offering a decent chance at decloaking even a large pack of scythes wandering straight through the field, even with perfect zero ping in local testing.
• Becoming polynomially worse as the owner's ping goes up.

I do not see the appeal of AutoLLT beyond sheer novelty/gimmickness.

Are all the downsides really worth it just to ward off scythes from new players that don't yet know how utterly ineffective the scan is?

With the manual method, the lotus no longer targets enemy units in range. Also, if a friendly unit or building gets in the way of the laser, the lotus stops firing until the friendly unit leaves.