What Units Are These?

Also you should know its criticism, I really like some of Jaron Lanier's opinions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds#Criticism

StormingKiwi's Guide to Planetary Annihilation.

How Not To Scout Late Game:

made me lol

I daresay it made him lol too...

Yeah. The advantage that PA does have is that if something is a counter, it does a lot of damage. To get an air-force capable of surviving in hostile anti-air requires about 100 scouts, 100 bombers, 30 fighters, and even then they aren't able to do much damage.

Why would you build that many scouts. Just replace those with fighters or more bombers.

Most of them were bombers.

No I mean like... why build 100 scout planes. The fireflies. It makes no sense.

Because they have lasers.

Lasers are awesome.

100 Fireflies can actually do a lot of damage. They're very fast. A group of 100 Fireflies has 300 dps. So 100 Fireflies can destroy a metal extractor in less than 4 seconds and a Missile Defense Tower in 2 seconds.

So 100 Fireflies can destroy metal expansions REALLY quickly. A few seconds per metal extractor, and a few seconds in travel time since they're almost twice as fast as Bumblebees and have a much tighter turn radius.

But a bomber does much more damage, a fighter protects your bombers, both from turret fire(by intercepting it) and other fighters.

lasers

how do they work

highly focused intense beam of light can generate heat at its focal point.

I don't know. But trust me. I'm an engineer.

Seriously though. The reason is basically because at 300dps they destroy a hummingbird in less than a second. It can only destroy one of your scout planes in return

About 5 scouts are an effective raiding and rapid response team. You can just scout the approaches to your base, and they do 15 dps to the ants moving towards you. 15 seconds of damage later, the enemy is one ant down because they didn't bring anti air. Ants only move at 7 speed, so that's a decent amount of travel time. If the enemy counters with hummingbirds, you just outrun them. And if your scouts are across the map when you get attacked, you just pull them back to defend, and return them to what they were doing.

Why so many? I was trying to find critical mass of bombers and scouts, and scouts are only effective in groups. From about 45 on their 135 dps is magical.

At 300dps, they are beautiful. If the enemy sends an army, you send in your scouts. They can catch them, make several attack runs, and fly away again. They take down hummingbirds in less than half a second, peregrines in less than a second, so those barely do any damage to the blob. Plus they are really quick, so the enemy doesn't really have time to react while you attack from a strange angle. Because of speed you can easily replace units, so you can hit an army entrenched by an anti-air position, retreat your units, pump out replacements and hit them again.

It was mostly the ability to hit the enemies army. I could harass him all the way to my base with impunity by producing one unit. He kept destroying me with hummingbirds, so I provided a fighter escort.

Once they number 45 they start being competitive with hummingbirds though. Any number over that and they start to rule the skies. (the ratio is 45:1, but the blob takes 45 seconds to kill)

If my opponent had sent a spinner with every 5 ants, it would have been really bad. But they didn't bother, so after the first attacks took me by surprise they didn't make any more successful attacks. A small force of scouts can be deployed quickly and do a significant amount of damage.

Their lasers don't have splash damage, which is less effective than bombers against groups, but good to pick off stragglers, lone units, and small groups of units. Plus they don't often miss, so their attack runs are more effective.

Mostly there is something glorious about a group of units that large taking off together, flying over your tanks, making a precision attack on the target, lighting the area up with laser cannon fire, and returning home.