I'm not sure how the community feels about using arbitrary debuffs or armors and what not. but hear me out for the sniper bot and maybe you can suggest an improvement on the design. Currently the sniper bot is great. Kills stuff. Over kills every T1 unit. And dominates the T2 land tanks if given the time to do the damage. However, The unit is just as fast as other bots and is quite the efficient killer at long range. I think what it needs is a moment or period in which the sniper bot can't move after taking a shot and can only shot objects when facing them. If the sniper bot is retreating, it can't take pot shots while running away. since it would have to turn around/stop/ fire/ and then keep moving back. This should prevent microing sniper bots to get a little more juice out of them, and also giving them some negatives to balance out the positive damage. What do you guys think?
I think highly mobile sniper suits it well. But I think any ranged unit should have a much faster "melee unit" which can catch up to it and kill it before it can be killed itself. I think Doxen should be able to race up to and kill a sniper bot without being killed themselves. (i.e. sniper bots are slower than doxen) Likewise I think that light tanks should be able to outrace heavy tanks. Even if it's just an acceleration thing. (i.e. acceleration of a Bugatti Veyron is approximately 10 m/s/s, it's top speed is 80 m/s. The acceleration of a Taffi is 60m/s/s, it's top speed is 7. I think those values should be the acceleration of a Taffi is 1m/s/s, the acceleration of a Leveller is 0.5. Nominal/Proportional values only)
I don't particularly see them as having a problem right now. My feeling is that tanks are meant to drive at the enemy base with the goal of reaching it and wrecking stuff before they all die. Tanks are not meant to chase bots. If you are sending your tanks to attack a bunch of bots, you're doing it wrong. You send tanks to the enemy base where they are generally good at killing anything too slow to avoid them. They must stop your tanks with any combination of defenses they can manage, including running out to attack you with bots. (Thus you should arrange it so that the bots have to come to your tanks. Your tanks do not try to go to the bots.) To deal with bots harassing your tanks (or your base), you want aircraft, your own bots or static defenses like walls and turrets which are extremely effective against bots. So, bottom line, bots (including snipers) kiting tanks is fine and good and normal. If you need to chase down snipers, use aircraft or T1 bots which the snipers are not efficient at killing. You'll have a hard time winning with 100% tanks because they can't chase bots. You'll have a hard time winning with 100% bots because they are awful at dealing with base defenses. You need tanks + bots for a plan that's solid and consistent. Incidentally this brings up an interesting thought... Tank AA should be better than bot AA. Aircraft should be pretty decent at attacking bot hordes but not overly good at dealing with tank hordes. This puts bots as good at harassing tanks and tanks as good at attacking bases and planes as good at harassing bots.
kiting and roaming snipers are too strong. any number of nerfs work I do like preventing kiting, and forcing immobility when firing, maybe make it not start firing unless not moving nor allow it to fire shortly after. Talking 2 seconds each way. maybe, small speed nerf. Or it it keeps kiting, larger speed nerf. I'm in favor of armor values limiting sniper damage to bases, but that's taboo, I'm dodging thrown tomatoes as I even type that.
Before, I could wipe out half the base and when bombers were sent after them I could dance while stingers take them down, and I would still keep 3-4 sniper bots and stingers while I killed the bombers because that silly bot left-right clicking weaves off the bomb trajectory. So no, they are still even more broken then that if they can wipe off half a base and cost an enemy a whole t2 bomber force just to kill *most* of them. Generally, they are good, they lose some mobility, they will still be able to both snipe commanders and wipe bases, but couldn't kite armies and kill ALL of them and would give opponents time to react.
Going after bots with bombers? Yeah I would imagine they would fail I mean please, bombers? So yesterdays go to air. Gunships won't fail. So solution to snipers is already in the game. Roaming gunships >>>> then roaming snipers. once t2 air is finally balanced and t2 anti air bots/vehicles are in the game then you can start calling out nerfs to ground units.
After using them a bit I agree that snipers shouldn't move as fast as they do for the range and damage output they have. They feel way too strong against other ground forces. They should be all about organizing and setup. They could still kite falling back, but not as swiftly as they do now. No use using slammers for now. But yeah a healthy dose of gunships or bombers come in handy. They can still get outranged and decimated by T2 artillery though.
i would vote to make them squishy. in reality, a discovered sniper is a dead sniper. and that should apply here.
Bots are *terrible* at harrassing tanks. I believe you have that wrong. Tanks are good at attacking bases. Planes are good at harassing vehicles. Bots are good at attacking undefended stuff. The best thing at attacking bombers are fighters.
this is how it should be. dox vs gil-e at long range=gil-e wins dox vs gil-e at close range= dox wins
