So when will Archer be nerfed?

Kill it with FIRE!



*and they are Cheap as hell.

just slash it's water tank (and water regen) in half! let it run out of water fast and then laugh at it

also you forgot ravager ping pong!

and it's atk fuck pathfinder, units get semistuned unable to move, even when trying to escape, i.e. moving in the opposite direction of archer, trying to make distance.

http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/195131
We all started amphs and suicided our Archers. But the enemy couldn't push out until they had Archers of their own. Weird game indeed.

I don't know if you watched the replay back, but that was not really them 'not being able to move out' so much as them cooping on a blackdawn. They went for a gunship rush, only one player pushed out, and it took -all- of your players to... not kill his commander. Glaives would have wiped the floor with that single jumpcom. Then you spend several minutes expending all your water tanks to kill his factory.

So, it also showcases how poor Archer is vs comms as well as buildings. Oh, and air, because air takes no impact damage with the ground and their gunships basically destroyed your archer spam.

They wasted their blackdawn really badly, so that rush failed, then they finally put down their factories snd beat you with land units because your archers did nothing. Only, they also chose to use archers, so they took ages to finish you even though you were completely crippled. Because the archers just could not finish off any buildings, so they resort to behemoths and other silliness of all things.

I mean, okay, Archer is a bit of a universalist with a lot of range and kite factor, AoE and it's good vs a lot of units. I'm not against a nerf (Or really, a role-tightening). But this game really showcased it's weakness, I think my game vs the nub where I destroy all his glaives with my archers actually showcases archer power better.

I think archers recharge should be ONLY in water, ammo much more limited, and produced empty, but they like shields exchange charges.

@[RD]Godde and I played a few games.
B195146 2 on Red Comet
The first game, I just reasoned regarding the two weaknesses of the Archer: High HP units which waste its tank, and homing high-alpha skirms which can hit it even if it pushes them away (In fact, this helps them to kite!).

So, halberd and scalpel were the natural choice. As it happens I didn't even really need to make it to Scalpels, exhausting his archers alone meant he couldn't raid me, was stuck in his base, and I could snipe his eco with Halbs once the archers ran out. One closed Halberd can drain 3 Archers.

It became a bit harder when he switched off of Archers to Bouy/Duck, but I was too far ahead and won that game. Rare that I can take a game from Godde, so that shows it's a very strong counter, which he agreed with. That's only one factory though.

So I tried shieldbots:
B195152 2 on Archers_Valley_v6
I figured I could do a similiar thing to Halberds as I did with Zeus, but it just didn't work. I thought with their range and accuracy they could hit the archers, but they just got pushed around and didn't have the HP to drain their tanks. I switched to Scythe, which did a lot better and got into his economy several times, figuring that with Scythe I can get in range and hit, and if he pushes me out of range I can just cloak again. This worked for the most part, and I think could be viable, but by then it was too late. Worth noting: I was ahead in eco the whole game. The Archer in the bottom left who dies to an in-construction LLT and the con assisting it shows how poor of a raider Archer is, and with it's slower speed and high cost it's coverage is poor, so I could really expand aggressively. But he got army advantage and Archers scale really well with other archers, till the point he could take out my comm, and by that point I didn't have the static defenses to stop him.

I still think the correct counter is to slow down his eco and expansion either using Scythe or Glaive (Glaives just avoiding his Archers, since they're faster and cheaper for better coverage), then expand with LLT's yourself. Edit: It's also important to spam solars, archers can kill winds, but solars waste their tank so bad. If you can take out his buildings and he can't take out yours, you out-eco him, but dealing with that big mid-game Archer ball is still going to be hard. Burrowed ticks?

Anyway, there are counters, I don't think it's OP. But it also has no synergy, stacks only with itself (and grizzlies), is good against almost every class of mobile and is annoying to fight against.

Godde raised the point that it had good synergy with old duck because the duck was like a mini-scalpel. You'd get your high alpha shot off, then push the enemy away while you reload. I think this means the duck and archer have better synergy, but it also gives them the same role (Since the archer and duck both can be 'shot wasted', are both good vs mobiles, etc). Either way I think the Archer probably needs it's range to go down to at least the range of a conventional riot unit. Then skirms become a much more obvious counter because pushing them away just helps them kite.

Its too fast, half its speed .. and some

I wonder how you want to make cost with skuttles vs archers. Unless they clump like a shieldball (which would be horribly stupid), you won't.

If you had watched that game with the halberds or ever used a closed halberd vs an Archer you'd see how much the tank matters. Matters for solar panels too.

Anyway, from the commit log:

Duck back to tracking missiles. Reload time 3 -> 4, same DPS. This has synergy
with the Archer, since the projectile can fire, will still hit a unit under
impulse, and the high alpha works with Archer skirm factor and persistent DPS.
Stats allow it to 2-shot a llt (suiciding) or to kill an LLT with archer
assistance. The reload and alpha should (hopefully) allow raiders to waste it's
shots, because it should require the Archer and not be anti-raider on it's own.
May have to up the alpha further for this though.

Archer range 400 -> 300, impulse 40 ->30. First change is to allow it to screen
for Ducks and Bouys, since previously it had too much range to really let either
fire (Duck because it has less range, Bouy because it misses). The impulse is a
general nerf because it's no longer the sole source of anti-unit DPS in a
duck/archer pack (which was not viable to use anyway), and this should make it
harder to deal with heavy units (which is meant to be the ducks role).

P.S the duck gets a longer flight time, it's missile should track a unit that's thrown back and have a good chance of hitting it.