I think bomb bots should be moved to t2. Early bomb bot rushes are way too powerful and make it way to easy to snip commanders in the first 5(ish) min. Or is there an early counter that I'm missing?
Yep I'm a fan of the early boom bot rush but yes it can be easily countered by dox and my rush had failed a number of times due to dox. People underestimate the power of scouting. They should remove scouting from the game, it's way OP.
No, bomb bots are great at sniping, but if your opponent has proper coverage with either tanks or dox (and infernos seems to not take damage when dealing with dox) it can easily spiral out of control for the boom bots
They are really useful in the current dox-heavy meta. They are not OP persay, they could be moved to t2, but they could also just rebalanced the game off of tanks and junk and make boom bots like they were. HOWEVER, they are strong. Imagine, 8 factories build 3 boombots each in 18 seconds and 1200 metal. They can nuke a commander if your army can walk a path up to him. That is MUCH cheaper than an actual nuclear missile. They can just about do as much damage to a base, if a factory-row is exposed or a mex field, they can kill about 8 of them.
The counter is anything but have your comm all alone and not pay attention to it. In one of my first ranked games someone tried to rush all boombots. My comm was a little bit exposed, building factories, but I scouted the mob, sent in supporting dox, hit the blob with an uber cannon... let's just say he self-destructed about 4 minutes later when my actual army was halfway into his base.
He did it wrong if you where able to disable his bomb bot rush with one uber cannon. Really, it is just the shear number of them that makes them so strong. Its like having a cheep nuke in t1 because it is near imposable to get off enough shots to kill a decent sized mob before they hit and kill the commander. I agree that they aren't really over powered as they are now, just that they are a bit strong to be considered a T1 unit.
You didn't read what he said. He had a sizable dox force near his comm. The Uber cannon simply took out the initial wave - the dox finished the rest. It's not nearly as powerful as you think. Yes, it can be really annoying - but it's not metal efficient in battles and it's so situational it's ridiculous.
I think it's mostly an issue with map size; on tiny 1v1 moons, bomb-bots are going to be OP because of their ridiculous speed. On a larger map, the opponent has more time to scout/prepare. There are also some hard counters to boom-bots; besides the already mentioned Inferno defense squad, you can also get silly with Pelican lifts or just chilling in an ocean.
Where I think booms are questionable is against structures, like fusion plants. Defending your commander is easy but defending your entire base isn't. A relatively small number of Dox can defend my commander against a horde of booms but later game, I'm not sure how you practically defend from all directions against a possible swarm of booms. I find them to be way better than bombers when it comes to sniping some important structure, like that Holkins you just built or your anti-nuke silo or your entire row of fusion plants. All I have to do is attack you somewhere else and while you're microing your Dox fight, my booms are coming in the back door to blow up all of your power generators. Of course, I'll snipe your commander if I can but if you have him reasonable well guarded, there's plenty of other stuff to blow up. The problem may be that booms are a bit too cost-effective.
This is a fair point. The anti-snipe methods I mentioned above are useless against base bombings, except if you feel paranoid enough to put holkins/orbital factories/T2 power in a lake... not that that's a bad idea, mind. Perhaps defenses are lacking right now? In theory, a dense line of single-barrel laser towers would be able to whittle down bomb-bot swarms with great efficiency. T2/T3 towers appear to only get a straight damage increase, when it would make more sense to give them the same damage and a much higher rate of fire to protect against swarms more effectively lategame. Land mines might even be a viable counter, as boom-bots can't disarm them with their guns from afar like other units can. But the meta is such that stopping to build defenses or lay minefields isn't a viable strategy, as it detracts from your necessary aggression.
Boom bots snipes are an all or nothing strategy, sure u can get a snipe but if your opponent is building doxes and your snipe fails you just lost the game. If you put them in t2 people just wont use them for anything. They are easily countered by building a radar and scouting, and actually defending your base, also walls. If you are not doing that you are open to all kinds of nasty surprises boom bots being one of them. And yes faining an attack to open the way for boom bots is actual tactical game play and should not be removed. Ive said this on another post what we really need is a commander boost in health to make all snipes more difficult. And double his ROF and halve his damage keeping DPS the same for him to be better at dealing with bots in general.
I feel like if you're spending time building walls, watching your local radar and keeping that close of an eye on your defense, then you're the one who already lost. The more time you spend doing all of this, the less time you are spending on aggressively harassing your opponent. What you describe is exactly how you win FFAs but I would suggest it's generally how you lose 1v1s. I need to play more with boom bots but I suspect the eventual meta may be that you have to build them to attack your opponent's base. The numbers look pretty good. It's worth it to throw booms at T1 energy plants. Even if they have light defense and you need 2x more booms than you should, it's still worth it. You'll spend less metal on booms than they spent on the energy plants you blow up and, of course, they now have less energy. This may force people to put up defenses around their energy plants but then this is wasted if you attack with basically anything else. Incidentally, in trying to think how this all worked and felt better in TA, I think the answer is that in TA, units just plain moved slower and most of them were woefully inaccurate. Laser turrets were somewhat unusual in that they always hit their target whereas things like flash tanks and the various lobbers were "spray and pray". Accuracy across the board was far lower in TA with laser turrets being one of the few exceptions. PA is more fast paced with higher accuracy which, I think, may be the biggest factor in why it's all about aggressive maneuvering, sometimes even to the point of micro being more important than macro (economy).
Even high level players lose 1v1 due to not building radar, u can build walls around your commander if u see the boom bots approaching, i'm tired of watching games being lost or won due to scouting, and yes defensive forces are a late game kind of thing witch never play a role on 1v1 cause the matches usually last 10 minutes now witch is a shame really. But i might be seeing this in the wrong light since i dislike 1v1s, cause currently they are a competition of who can click faster, more times a second. No real strategy involved, it's mechanical and boring. U don't have to believe me just see the youtubers channels and see the drop in views in the 1v1 since the dox patch came out.
Dox and walls are a hard counter to these things, so they aren't op. I have been making good use of booms in my games though. I know they are very situational, but at 45 metal each you can usually afford to keep 20-30 sitting around waiting for a perfect opening. If they comm push without much support, you win the game GG. If you are attacking and they have to defend with their commander, bait out an uber cannon shot and then send in the booms for GG. Sometimes you can attack a weak side of the base that you know their commander is near. If you can get him to come out and use the uber cannon, GG. If none of that is an option, you will still find a chance at some point to kill off their energy or metal with booms. That's not going to end the game right away, but if you hit them hard enough they will have to go all-in with a commander push. (See #1) GG There are so many ways to fail with this during a game that it isn't a guaranteed win at all. A good player that scouts your booms will start to get up a few carefully placed walls and build more dox. The reason I make them anyway a lot of the time is because they really don't cost very much (30 booms are metal-equivalent to 9 tanks). At high level play, the booms won't be able to do much until you kill off all of their counters. This means that you still have to beat them before you can win the game, but at least you can end it as soon as you have them beat instead of dragging it on for a couple more minutes.
I feel like the lasers are ill suited to even fighting dox, let alone booms. I think it in the turret turn speed and rate of fire. Like the LLT from TA, cheap, light, but spammable, and very counter able.
