Lotus

The Lotus is a light laser tower.

Lotus (turretlaser)
Light Laser Tower
Stats
Cost	90
Hit Points	785
Vision Radius (elmo)	554
Weapons
Laserbeam Damage 7.5 Damage per Second 75 Range (elmo) 460 Instantly hits

Description

The Lotus is a basic turret. A versatile, solid anti-ground weapon, it does well versus scouts as well as being able to take on one or two raiders. Falls relatively easily to skirmishers, artillery or assault units unless supported.

Tactics and Strategy

In the early game it is common for small forces of raiders and scouts to run all over the map, both to gather intel and to pick off any vulnerable builders, factories or economic buildings they find. The Lotus is a cheap and effective way to protect your base and metal extractors against these early raids.

They're also useful for protecting larger fixed defenses that deal poorly with raiders, such as stingers, from direct attack by such forces.

Their low cost comes at the expense of low power, however, and lotuses are easily overwhelmed by large groups of raiders, or even by a small number of heavy raiders. Assaults, riots and skirmishers will all take them down easily as well. It can be tempting to simply build more lotuses, but large groups of lotuses are highly vulnerable to anything that outranges them, as the individual turrets don't even have enough health to slow down an enemy skirmisher or artillery push.

Occasionally, building a group of 3-4 lotuses around a critical building, such as a factory or fusion, may be useful if your enemy is making use of stealthy raiders or other such deep-raiding tactics.