land spam solutions

Hi guys, If you've played the planetary annihilation alpha, you have probably noticed that the only strategy people use is land spam. I would like to hear ways to make this strategy less of an effective choice and get more strategy variation. Post your solutions down below.

This will get less common when we have custom maps that can support islands and non amphibious tanks.

Land should be the best choice on some maps but not all.

If you're on a land locked map and you want to attack you build land units, air units or a turret next to your opponents base.

The obvious alternate strategy to land when going air would be to build a bomber and attack your opponents resource production.

But the question is a bit like saying I want to get from A to B using my legs but I don't like running, what alternatives do I have.....not many.

The agreed upon solutions so far are AoE Artillery Pieces, T1 AoE Bombers, and mines. Feel free to sugges more, I want to see more debuffing weapons.

Arty with more splash
Mines
Stronger (ground) defense turrets
[...]

The issue is not land spam, but tank spam.

This will get solved when we get more and more diverse units and later on when real balance happens.

Land spam will end when it no longer becomes effective, that is, when we no longer start 5 feet away from each other on the same planet.

Also when tanks no longer become omni-effective, ie: When we get natural defenses created by water and mountains and land, spamming tanks won't be effective vs well entrenched bases will walls, turrets and artty.

what turroflux said, essentially when tanks are no longer all-purpose. more delineated unit roles and balance between them like Zero-K would accomplish that well.

Wrong, t1 land spam is whats its about when mass is spread over the map, the only way to guard it is tanks in large numbers to defend it.

Spam will be less of a benefit i think when more planets are involved.
Time will tell.

Are tanks still effective at AA? If so, then reduce their ability to just outright shoot down bombers and then introduce AOE bombers to clear out a blob.

I miss having the Punisher / Guardian plasma turrets from TA. Any blob that wanted to get past those had to pay for the privilege.

Definitely this.

Looking forward to any type of turrets similar in nature to those. (I remember having a good battery of 15-20 of them minced anything into paper shreds.. even took down krogoths. at least one, anyway. They were supremely impressive, but if you had time to get that much defense in one area on PA, you should probably be worried about the collapse of the rest of your base.

once they fix the tracking of bombers and allow them to attack multiple units at once (1 bomber to one victim rather than all your bombers dropping on the same t1 tanks circling around and repeating, completely wasting their potential) and take away tanks aimbot for anything flying well be in business.

In SpringRTS, playing the "mods" XTA or BA, the variety comes from:

In plains (earlier game), some people rush for really fast and fragile scout tanks to circle defenses and try to cripple undefended economy. Or choose "Flash" raiding tanks, which have good mobility, are somewhat durable and hit much harder.

When defenses get in place, people vary between raiding tanks (Flash) to smash through weaker defenses and quickly break-through to the economy or using assault tanks (Stumpy) to really challenge the oponent's defenses or anything that comes into range.

In plains, some people choose to go (ro)Bots instead of vehicles. They are slower but they can challenge the vehicles by massing up concentrated fire (the Rockos have a much larger range than vehicles) and babysitting them in a «go into range» - «back away from incoming vehicles» (a kind of fun "micro").

Another strategy is to build defenses - either just for protection while your rushing for T2 or a big economy increase or any technical solution - or as a form of attack to break the oponent's defenses with longer ranges artillery.

With roughed terrain and Bots it adds the possibility to generate raids from unexpected paths (actually if the terrain is too rough, it is the only way to go instead of vehicles).



Between
choosing Bots or Vehicles,
attacking with scouts, raiders or assaulters,
building more or less defenses,
using turrets for just defense or to attack the oponent's defenses as well,
the possibility of doing crippling air-strikes,
economy rushes and BigBertha/Nukes rushes,
SprintRTS's XTA and BA offer a huge ammount of variety in the gameplay.