How to stop badgers?

quote: edit: pickets on height-7 spires outrange them. So I guess that's a good defensive solution.

Heh, such artillery

This is not a new idea: Play against someone using badgers in the very manner that you cannot find a counter for. See how your opponent handles it. If it's really such a powerful weapon, you'll win the game. If it's not, you'll learn a good way to counter them. You can't lose.

quote: I haven't tried emissary against badgers. Not sure that would be better than tremor.

They are very accurate. Emissary is one of best counter to badgers. Better then tremor.
Jumpjet have firewalker (best counter as fire burns area effect).
Planes can use phoenix.
Dunno if sling is good vs them from cloaky.
Shields have dirtbag and they can just take mines on meat shield.
Spiders have crab spire.
Tanks can just go through mines because minotaurs have large health pool.
Gunships can kill them very fast if there is no anti air nearby.
Amphs seems is in very sad position against mines. Seems they need gymnastics with lobsters or sen grizzly in.
Hovers can use halberd in bunker mode or lance.
Anyway badger is unfun unit (like tremor) and they don't require large skill to be used.

Halberds don't strike me as particularly good against badgers, specially if defenses are involved. They might be a pop-up unit, but their range is tiny and they aren't that fast, its a long chase.

Based on your description you should have built bigger artillery. If the enemy was sinking all their metal on badgers and fixed defenses, an artillery superior to badgers such as emissaries would have eaten them for breakfast. Cerberus would also work very well defensively. Lance is a difficult and expensive unit to use and not the best against large swarms.

From the rover factory itself, impalers could at least take care of their fixed defense spam, since they have more than enough range to shot them from well beyond the range of badgers.

Depending on the map, try using a ball of cloaked units to get to their side or behind them to bumrush them. Whenever I see a mass of artillery I start to get the urge to spam cloaked roaches just to see the debris fly. Granted that badger are trickier than other artillery due to their persistent ammunition, so you may have to circle wide to avoid the mines.

I would say Emissaries aren't necessarily a good answer to Badgers if the Badgers simply dodge the shots with their speed, and they remain out of LoS with their range so all you're shooting at is radar dots. If the minelayers get killed by other ballistic arty they DESERVE to die.

Here is my suggestion: If you'd rather not fac switch, then invest 420 (maybe + 180) metal in a cloaking field generator. They cost even less than a single Emissary. Just make sure you have the energy to keep it up. Badgers are normally good vs. cloak if they can fire where you're trying to move, but sometimes you can surprise them, and if you do it's game over for the Badgers who can't turn and run in time.

But if you do fac switch, you can never go wrong with Shield Bots. Those are THE counter to light vehicles. Make a thug ball, also get 1 or 2 Outlaws to minesweep with their radial pulsers and deter Scorchers. If you've got the metal, Racketeers can disable Badgers (or the riot units covering them) from range.

Berder - Watching that game, a few comments.


1) Building two lotuses next to your factory at the start like that is a little heavy on the defense and you would normally be better off expanding faster instead. Try to build extractors before building defenses and keep your constructors safe with your mobile units.

2) Early game vs the scorchers, your life would be a lot easier if you had one Bolas with your Daggers. Bolas will slow the scorchers and reduce their dps allowing Daggers to kill them more easily. Daggers are hit and run units, they take a while to reload so you should back them away from other raiders like Scorchers in between shots when trying to kill them. You had good results with the early Scalpel play, keep that up.

3) Pointing back to point 1, your expansion is really slow. A big problem you're having is that your enemy is out-expanding you, even though you're winning the attrition war and disco3llt3 is spending most of their metal on just building defenses, which if you scouted you could destroy before they're finished.

4) Use daggers more for scouting, disco3llt3 had a bunch of undefended expansions you could have raided that would have slowed them down significantly if the expansions were shut down.

5) The halberd + scalpel group that ran into the first stardust were working pretty well. If you had waited for the scalpel missiles to be off of cooldown before attacking the halberds would have been able to clean up the stardust without losing any of their number and then you probably can kill the commander there and maybe transition that into winning the game. Three scalpels will straight up one shot a stardust for future reference.

6) The two halberds plus 3 scalpels group was extremely successful in killing badgers, pretty much took no damage while hunting them down and killing them. Later, at about 8:45, you are right next to disco3llt3's base with both the base and the caretakers naked, while all disco3llt3 has are two badgers and their commander. You get scared off when you notice the stardust but you could have easily taken out both caretakers without losing anything by just staying in the north side of the base, and probably even the factory as well.

7) It would have been a good idea to build a caretaker a little earlier as you did excess 600ish metal, you probably wanted it around the 4 minute mark.

8) Taking out the stinger + faraday position was actually fairly efficient, good job. You should have waited to kill the stardust in the west until your lance was off cooldown though and take it off fire at will to ensure you can kill the stardust with it :) If you have to fight a stardust with halberds, spread them out with right click and drag a line around the stardust so that the shots don't hit all of them at once. If, say, you draw a circle around the stardust while holding down right click your halberds will encircle it and only one can be hit at a time.

9) You had another chance to take out the enemy base with the halberd group you forgot about on his island :(

10) If you had stuck to just 1-2 likhos they would have worked, but you built too many and neglected building ground units. If they had stuck to taking out the enemy defenses you could have just kept spamming halberds and won. Otherwise halberd spam was working but you needed to keep scalpels around to burst the stardusts down, spread your halberds better, or lance the defenses down better. Or all of the above :)

I hope my quick and dirty analysis of your game helps!