Reef

The Reef is an aircraft carrier from the Strider Hub.

Reef (shipcarrier)
Aircraft Carrier (Bombardment), stockpiles disarm missiles at 5 m/s
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Stats
Cost	3000
Hit Points	7500
Movement Speed (elmo/s)	83
Turn Rate (deg/s)	61
Vision Radius (elmo)	660
Sonar (elmo)	660
Abilities
Spawns Drones Unit Gull Max drones 8 Range 1000 Spawn interval 5 Spawn size 1 Build time 25 Drone building capacity 4
Weapons
Disarm Missile Damage 0 Disarm Damage 15000 Reload Time (s) 5 Damage per Second 0 + 3000 Max Stun Time (s) 10 Range (elmo) 3000 Area of Effect (elmo) 140 Projectile Speed (elmo/s) 1200 Homing (deg/s) 165 Stockpile time (s) 30 Stockpile cost (M) 150

Description

The most versatile ship on the high seas, the carrier serves several functions. It is equipped with a manual-fire disarming Tactical Missile launcher for disabling enemy capital ships from outside of their fire range. The reef serves as a mobile repair base for friendly aircraft. Perhaps most notably, the carrier provides its own complement of surface attack drones to engage targets.

Tactics and Strategy

The Reef's drones can travel a fairly long distance away from it, so it can be used in a similar role as a Skirmisher (as opposed to the amphibious Detriment, which is like a riot/assault unit compared to the Reef). Moreover, when you've built up enough drones (each Reef can have up to 8 Gull drones, with a combined dps of 640), they can easily overwhelm enemies through sheer numbers (especially when you have many Reefs). However, anti-swarm units and structures, including anti-air weapons, can and will give the Reef's drones problems (in which case, if you're noticing that your Reefs are not breaking through the enemy's defenses in a reasonable amount of time, then it might be time to send them back to recover).

- Still, even when the Reef's drones are being shot down, at least they can distract the enemy from your other units, including other heavy units like the Grizzly. Besides, the drones are totally expendable, while the Reef is sitting at a safe distance away.

- Amusingly enough, since anti-air units will target the Reef's drones, a single Reef can cause an enemy's Artemis to waste its supply of insanely-powerful anti-air missiles on constantly-respawning drones, potentially allowing allied aircraft to take advantage of the situation.

As for the Reef's disarm missiles, keep in mind that, while they're being stockpiled, you'll be draining 5 metal-per-second-per-Reef. Therefore, if you're building many Reefs, and you want to conserve where your metal is being spent, you may want to limit how many disarm missiles they're allowed to stockpile. (The Reef's stockpile size is set to a whopping 100 by default.) Generally, a stockpile size of just 1 or 2 missiles per Reef should be sufficient if your Reefs are seeing constant battle. (For the record, 2 or 3 missiles should be adequate to keep a Shogun disarmed, while 16 should be sufficient to keep a Detriment disarmed, though you'll still need to follow it up by destroying said units.)