How is it possible on such a large-scale map to resist the raider with a running speed of 207?

Hm, perhaps i rushed with my judgement. At 07:15 you are actually quite stable. Randy has just completed the cloaky switch. You have not reclaimed even one rock on the map. Do you know that the map has like 6k reclaim lying around? That is why Randy gets his initial advantage and how he can escape being raided (you raid the mexes while you should be raiding rocks).



Note that this also comes with randy having had 50-70% attrition rate until now. He is only even on you in army size because he had that income lead to replenish the casualties. A very telling example here is Randy opting to attack your expeditionary Vandal force just outside his base, with locusts. This is inefficient (he loses more value than he kills), but it gives him the strategical advantage of not having his factory blocked, and he can afford this.

Also now that Randy has completed the switch, you enter the phase of the game where you play against a combination of air and ground units. You have not completed your own switch, so you are still stuck in the previous phase, lacking many options.

You know what would work fairly well here? Dagger spam. About as mobile as locusts, but once you have many, it laughs at locust, as ddaboqepp handily demonstrated recently.

Maybe Crashers will be fast enough?

I've just gone through the AA line up of the ground units and it doesn't look good... They either have too low DPS to fight Locusts (like Flail or Crasher), are too fragile (why is Ettin made of paper?) or too slow (poor Vandal).

Maybe the Gremlin's cloak would give it the edge?

Also, the Locust's AI is pretty stupid... if you move your AA away from the Locusts the Locusts will keep stopping after the catch up and spend a lot of their time not firing...

by the way this is not the first such game with the domination of this fraction

Would it still be an issue if there was no reclaim, or reclaim positioned differently?

Would Thornford be Gunship meta in this place where we are reaching?

For it to be considered meta I'd like to see more than just me doing it...