Since 1.1.7.0 balance is completely lopsided and is always stacked in favour of the team with more gunship players. Banshee swarms need a lot of investment to kill, a lot more than the cost of the banshees. Rapiers can mass into huge balls that, like banshees, need significant investment to destroy. Investing in countermeasures takes time, time that is easily filled by having your base destroyed by gunships. Black dawn rushes are pretty much essential, Krows are indispensable, tridents stop it all being killed. Now that gunships have nothing to fear from planes they can often make 3x cost against even land based AA. Only copperheads can touch them and even these need to be massed to be effective. Unless massed, chainsaws cant do much for cost and screamers can easily have their shots wasted by blastwings. Planes are pretty much worthless now, they do not counter gunships, they do not even counter land units since they got their weight decreased. Am I doing it wrong, or are they outrageously overpowered?
+1 / -0
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Most gunships have high hp, are faster then most land units but much slower then planes, they can do a lot of damage to ground units (or vs air units if tridents), but can also be hit by a lot of non-AA ground units. Gunships are suited for hit-and run tactics, raiding in AA-less zones and retreating for repairs. A big gunship ball, with tridents, is hard to stop. As an opposing planes player, you can easily outmanoeuver them, bomb a lot without fear of slow tridents (until there's enough to cover the whole map, so planes are better on bigger maps) if you need to stop gunships, work together with ground AA(kill tridents first) and your fighters slay the rest. It is possible to bomb gunships, so they can all be stunned by 'OP' stilleto, if it gets close enough, krow, bd, brawler, rapier/banshee balls will go down to a/some licho's, altough it sometimes misses. Ground AA does good vs gunships, but it's frustrating when they keep going back for repairs. Try to lure them further in and chase them down. Some ground units do especially well vs gunships: three sharpshooters can instagib a blackdawn, moderators can slow 'em down so they cant escape AA, banishers hit groups of banshees quite hard, any accurate/fast moving projectile will hit them bad. Also: EMP-weapons: venoms can easily stun light or damaged gunships, zeuses do well vs banshees. Special: i heard it's possible to use a skuttle's jump + ctrl+d to hit gunships
+1 / -0
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main gunship problem is blackdawn (it kills comms too easily in early game and is impossible to kill at that stage due to the lack of proper aa and the hilariously huge HP). i'm not sure about trident being balanced though, i need more games to check that. krow is actually UP. so the factory isn't overpowered, only BD is...
+1 / -0
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quote:
main gunship problem is blackdawn (it kills comms too easily in early game and is impossible to kill at that stage due to the lack of proper aa and the hilariously huge HP). |
This takes me back to the pre-update strategy of rushing 2 shadows to kill comms in the early game I find it hard to see how BD is more of a problem since it has the same cost but a much lower speed, altitude and projectile speed “but it has more HP!!!”- half the speed means twice the damage from static AA to reach the same target, easier to intercept and keep in range for mobiles, can be hit by non-AA ground units, can be hit by bombers, can be hit by other gunships, and because of its cost it should be impossible to rush before being scouted. So again, how is it any more of a problem than a pair of pre-update shadows?
+0 / -0
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its pretty easy to lose shadows when rushing them due to low hp, also they need to go back to pad to reload and don't have aoe. also, you can dodge their bombs, so they will have to go back and reload. on the other hand black dawn is easy to keep alive, can do much more damage before having to retreat to base, has aoe and is way easier to micro so, if you are being bombed by shadows you can usually make a hacksaw before the next bombing run comes, whilst if you have a black dawn in base you can't even build a rk because you are already dead
+3 / -0
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you can scare away BD with some jethros or vandals...
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Those two shadows could be killed by a preemptive hacksaw though, and since one of them would die before it can release its payload over the target your commanders are safe. As for banshee balls, the only mobile that can counter them is the copperhead, so they counter every other factory when massed. I think that to deal with new gunships there needs to be a new AA riot unit, preferably in the cloaky bot factory, that would deal with banshee swarms without having to build a new factory and a copperhead or four while your base is being smashed. I would send the replay but the game had to be exited because of a bug that kept the game going even when we had resigned. As to the BD being the only problem in the factory, I think that may be true and you just get the impression that the whole factory is grossly overpowered because the OP unit is overused. If it got a weight decrease it could be countered by normal land AA (not copperheads) without having 40 of them.
+0 / -0
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on the other hand black dawn is easy to keep alive, can do much more damage before having to retreat to base, has aoe and is way easier to micro |
Not only does BD have higher survivability and is easier to manage, it also is much more versatile, and doesn't need to reload at base, allowing it to inflict much heavier casualties before being forced out.
+3 / -0
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i don't think banshees are a problem, they are pretty easy to kill
+0 / -0
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they are pretty easy to kill |
If you catch them. And you won't, because with over 6 speed, they're faster than any land AA, so you're forced to cover whole front with tons of AA, which is many times more costly than the Banshees. 
+4 / -0
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man, your PS skills are so mad @.@ but I agree that GS became very important after this update. I mean why weakening fix air and boosting GS at once?
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sooo have we forgotten about razor's kisses? 3x razors can kill pretty much anything opdent is OP though, agreed. planes used to, and SHOULD, hardcounter gunshits. Ground AA used to, and SHOULD, hardcounter air. imo bd isnt OP for cost. Sure a bd rush will ruin you, but only because its a high cost rush. if you dont see it comming, and dont counter with something like an archangel rush, then its not broken if you get ruined by it.
+1 / -1
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lets play a game called "how many puppies to kill a BD?" Round 2: how much metal did you just earn from it? Round 3: how many puppies can you spawn from that? Round 4: how many commanders can you kill with those puppies XD
+2 / -1
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A small analysis: Black-dawn HP: 3 400 Reload: 9 Damage: 1 760 (220 x 8) range: 300 for cost 900 Razor`s kiss HP: 3000 Reload: 0.1 Damage per second: 164 range: 1040 for cost 280 Time needed for RK to kill BD : ~21 seconds Time needed for BD to kill RK: ? Seconds to close range + 9 seconds to fire second volley [IF razor is NOT microed to take advantage of armor bonus AND BD does not shoot at anything else AND If no accurate units are present such as most raiders and riots and some of the skirmishers] This means that if once in range of a RK a BD fires at ANYTHING ELSE! It has no chance of killing the RK because it cannot afford the additional reloadtime, so 1 RK = base safe from BD rush and just about any gunship rush (unless the cheaper and faster stiletto stuns it, but stiletto is not a gunship) Because damage=1760 and commander health > 1760 BD needs 2 shots to kill a comm. Thus using a BD to kill a commander that is near a Razor is an almost guaranteed 900metal suicide mission with significant chance of failure Meanwhile using the same cost in shadows, under the same conditions offers virtually guaranteed commander annihilation with the loss of at most 1 shadow (300 metal) while superior speed means that the blow is dealt sooner (useful in a rush) [also, even if the more expensive hacksaw is present, losses still remain at 300 metal] Also, shadows can counter BD quite well on the defense So, no matter how I look at it, I can’t figure out how BD is better as a rush compared to shadows, I can see how it may be better as a frontline harasser forcing AA cover over the front, but that is attrition warfare, the opposite of rushing. Unless the thing I am not taking into account is people not scouting to see if any airborne threats are likely and not making any basic AA thus being surprised by a floating elephant, but that would be silly, almost as silly as knowing hostile air is present and STILL not protecting the commander, or having an air player that has no fighters (or shadows, or a stiletto) by the time a BD lumbers into his side of the map…surely this can`t be the case… can it?
+0 / -0
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1 RK = base safe from BD rush |
Cool, your 3 starting mexes are safe! Now try moving outside the RK range. BD with its 4.5 speed (still, not as bad as Banshee with over 6) will always be able to juke around your ground AA (unless you have 100% coverage, which means massive overspending).
+1 / -0
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(unless you have 100% coverage, which means massive overspending). |
Should read as: "unless you have Screamer". Same applies to Licho, of course Licho is much more expensive. There are some things you simply can't kill cost-efficiently without making screamer.
+1 / -0
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