Let's talk about flea

Should flea be able to kill economy? Googlefrog seems to think yes. But should fleas be able to beat glaives, riots, llts, comanders, and whole bases in FFA?

Discuss.

I think no. it's BS. nerf flea.

Flea is a really strong unit and I see people regularly build spider factories just for the flea. I sometimes think they are a bit too good, but any nerf to flea would put a big hole in spider capabilities.

Lul not building venoms against fleas.
Resign lobster.

http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/627496

Here's a replay where I abuse flea again. flea is especially powerful on small maps. things like placing buildings incorrectly lead to death, and the cloaking makes ambushes super easy even if they see it coming.

3 nerfs:

lower attack range

take 1 slow damage every time if fires(tiny unit tiny power reactor)

to burrow takes more time than instant.

These are all good spider maps for what that's worth.

And yeah, redback is not the spider riot I would build against fleas. I'll grant that jump has a rough matchup against flea spam but since the factory has no functional counters to Venom on rough terrain I'm not sure that matchup is playable on Frozen Planet in any case. Certainly I never had any luck with it in the past.

tl;dr: I am not yet convinced that this is more due to "flea OP" than to "your opponents failed to respect/understand flea". I believe I could be convinced though.

(Not by beating me with fleas, though. I'm rusty as.)

Let's talk about fleas, ba-by

Would it be possible to make Fleas less capable of firing over each other? I think that would reduce their mobbing power without reducing their capabilities in lower, more manageable numbers.

Fleas are significantly more mobile than glaives and have even higher dps/cost. The game has quite a few anti-raiders without aoe that fail to counter flea swarms.

Redbacks are labeled as "riots". They should have been a decent option even if suboptimal compared to venoms in this particular case.

The logical nerf would be to halve their dps. It would still have some harassing power, but the enemy would have more time to respond.

iv been listening for a while.. fixing everything thats slightly off would be cool but maybe we should also prioritize the things that are more broken then others.. fleas are in some ways balanced while other units like detriment are so underwhelming that it may warrant a higher priority no?

im not saying dont tweak flea if it needs a tweak.. but many units in this game are meta owled while flea is still massively used and useful

As a porc lover in FFA, I can categorically state that while flea is strong, it is not OP.

People are simply not respecting flea and building their porc wrong. Lotus is very useful against flea and you need to build them in chains. You also need to place weaker porc behind stronger porc. Something like Razor on the outside, Gauss behind those and a combination of Lotus and Faraday behind those. Even clouds of fleas struggle to deal with overlapping porc arranged like this.

Other ideas are setting up energy pylons and Snitches as wave breakers. A single energy pylon can destroy wide swathes of fleas. I've also noticed that if you can channel fleas into narrow streams, things like Stardust absolutely mallet them.

Now, I guess I haven't mentioned units yet.

If you MUST use units, then I suggest making Fleas.

They make great border guards and provide intel on enemy positions.

They can be used to swarm ill-defended strongpoints and be used as cheap probes to find weak spots.

Furthermore, if you build 10000 of them, the players with anything less than a supercomputer are forced to drop out due to unbearable lag. Win!


*(This post written part tongue in cheek ;) )