No counter to 5x SSX1304 lasers ?

100 anchors should be able to kill 5 lasers in 0.167s, And that's if they pop into orbit at the exact same time, which is unlikely. At the moment, I'm pretty sure the lasers would still fire in time.

What if you told 50 avengers to guard the static commander. Would the lasers be able to appear on top of the commander still?

Why are we still discussing this when I've already pointed out a commander patrol is a 0 cost hard counter to this tactic?

Why have you also not addressed the point that 5 SXX costs as much as a 3 halley planet smash?

Because not everyone agrees with you ZaphodX, cdrkf and aevs seem to think like me.
While setting your com on patrol is nice to make nuke targetting a pain in the *** you still may have a few antinukes around as a additionnal layer/means of defense to avoid that nuke snipe. In the case of lasers used in the way described in the OP, if you don't set your com on patrol then you risk an instakill without any possible exterior counter.
Only very experienced players would know of setting their commander on patrol to avoid this specific exploit. Average players will just build antinukes to avoid nuke snipes and think an anchors/umbrella spam could protect their commander from orbital attacks.


Who cares about halleys, this has nothing to do with it, on large games (think 40 players) you may run out of moons/asteroids to throw at each other, but you will be able to reuse your lasers and chain kill commanders. Not to mention that currently people tend to build systems with a lot more than 3 halleys required.

If a ton of anchors can't deal with 5 lasers, then 50 avengers (each 6x less dps than an anchor) certainly won't be able to deal with them either

I think what currently happens is that, on the very same game 'tick' where an interorbital traveler arrives in a new SOI, it

1) establishes its position, which currently just places it directly over where it was instructed to move to
2) seeks its target
3) immediately finds its target
4) fires upon target.

since this all happens in 1 tick (same as the astraeus vanguard drop issue), the laser literally cannot be shot down before it takes its shot (unless the target is moving and is no longer directly beneath its destination point.)

I didn't mean for them to take out the laser, I meant for them to use all available space above the commander, so the laser appears next to them and out of shooting range of commander. The 100 anchors could have been spread over the general area of the commander for all I know, 'guarding' is ambiguous.

Lasers don't seem to withstand much damage. They move faster as the orbital defence platforms, so if your commander is walking around on the planet the lasers will be drawn out of the pack of orbital defence platforms and will be picked off with umbrella's or orbital fighters. Instead of a patrol, teleport the commander to a different spot when you see orbital comming in could also help.
It is easyer to nuke sniper a commander as it is to laser snipe.

Maybe the best way is to make the commander take less damage so you can react if your commander comes under attack by a few lasers. But eventually someone has to win and long dragged stalemate situations are boring
That and orbital units arriving stacked also kinda sucks
(or make umbrella;s do splash damage)

This post has been overlooked. We are talking about 125000 metal.
1 2 5 0 0 0. One hundred and twenty five thousands metal.
That is a **** ton of metal.

If they invested into so much metal, you can invest into 20 or more anchors above your commander.

Shall I make a thread "No counter to 20x nukes"? And it's not even as expensive as 5 SXXs

Uhh, what? 5X SSX costs the same as 3.6 nukes without even considering the cost of a nuke launcher. How on earth did you get 20?
And a hundred anchors above your commander won't help you here (although using the same technique to land them on top of the lasers under construction would); you would need to patrol the commander, which is a silly condition for the loss of a game. That's the main point here I think, not just for SXX lasers, but that interplanetary travel is easily exploited in general. I can make a radar satellite switch between a planet & a moon at different positions to get full intel on buildings relatively quickly without any risk whatsoever, because it can never be shot down if it instantly leaves orbit again, and it can leave and return faster than it can move from one side of a planet to the other.

Oh i confused the cost of the launcher

Has it not been established earlier that no amount of avengers is able to prevent the lasers' damage to be applied?
At the end of the day this not a balance issue but an exploit instead and should be dealt with accordingly. For example by having any newly arrived orbital units not be instantly teleported to their destination and have them move their lazy behinds there on their own instead.

You don't get it superouman. nomatter the amount of anchors, the lasers instantly shoot as they appear in orbit, not leaving time for the anchors to shoot them down.

Okay. I thought it was feasible.

If your planet with the commander is locked down, put your comm into a pelican and set it on patrol. Any number of SXX won't be able to shoot it down.

Special tactics.

Or bypassing an exploit.

• It's quite unrealistic that units would pop into orbit at exactly the point they were ordered to. That is not necessarily a bad thing as long as the travel path drawn in the system view roughly shows the area of re-entry. This let's attentive player intercept lasers more easily.
• Not letting the laser fire during movement and having it power-up before shots would make it easier for defenses to deal with it. If it can't fire while moving, that might also make it more viable against buildings and static units. It could still lead its shot for (slow) moving targets at the cost of accuracy.
• Attack-moving lasers into another sphere of influence should only work if intelligence on the target is not interrupted during any point in travel. Otherwise the laser should just arrive at the target's last known position.
• Radar itself could be made quite inaccurate for moving targets (or even for buildings if at the edge of radar coverage), making visual contact for perfectly accurate units necessary in order for them to hit. Anything with AOE can still aim for radar blips and is quite likely to hit, an SXX would be quite useless for commander snipes though.

That's already the case, and actually even if you maintain intel during full transit, the laser will appear where the target was located when you placed the command.

The issue here is though, that any 'tactic' that allows you to send a small force of units into heavily guarded territory and go and kill a single unit to win a game is an exploit and isn't in the spirit of the game.

I could understand more if you had a stealth unit that you could sneak in, but the fact is that if you hold orbital and you have lots of defences the lasers shouldn't be able to insta-kill the commander. The same applies with the vanguard drop. If you don't have the resources to overpower your opponent in a normal way you shouldn't win like this.

Nukes aren't the same issue at all- to be able to nuke spam enough to overpower your opponent you'll need lots of resources and build time and are usually well ahead anyway. If you're on level footing and your opponent doesn't protect their commander then also fair game.

Sometimes, people just argue for the sake of arguing, no matter how unreasonable their viewpoint is. Probably I'm the worst example of that.