Although in my opinion dox are too strong and too versatile compared to tanks, I don't really think it's as black and white as build dox and nothing else: Well you need t2 eco for sure, and the t2 vehicles are all pretty good. The ranged t2 bots are great for sniping comms or outranging defences and the slammers eat the dox nicely. Dox do very badly against single laser turrets and walls so you need infernos or t2 units to assault well defended positions. I think the problem with that is that a nuke costs too much - 14k+86k metal per nuke (2,200 dox or a nuke?) Dunno, I think orbital is great, radars can be very useful, orbital fabber reclaiming factories or eco, anchor defence and creeping, surprise teleporter sneak attacks, and sxx sniping. Perhaps so, but maybe dox shouldn't fire underwater. I'm sure leviathons can still be a useful long range aoe support to them though. Air scouts are mighty essential things, and I find bombers are still entirely useful for thinning out a dangerous dox deathball, or acting as a flexible defence against an attack you can't defend in time.
I was thinking about this and for me solution to the Dox problem is simple. They need a good counter right? How about just remove their ability to shoot air? Keep everything the same, price, vision, range, speed. This way if you try to build a death blob with them I just send bombers, if you build spinners to protect them you have to sacrifice their speed. If you can build fighters to protect them but they are going to cost you (less doxes). You can still use the doxes to raid big time. But if you lump up a deathball you will get shredded by a few bombers (you can still do it but you will have to protect them), if you spread them out, bombers become less cost effective. This seems a perfect balance: you build doxes to harass, vehicles to hit hard and planes to crowd control. All has a counter, you can't depend on a single factory.
I think this is spot on. As they are the dox are upsetting the balance, but nearly as much as so many are saying. I think just a bit of tweaking turning other units up slightly and dox down slightly and we'll be in a nice spot.
i think the main problem with dox is they need to slow the hell down, there is literally no build time on them the only thing your waiting for is for the bot factory to clear before you start making your next dox literally like 2-3 seconds per dox people who dont wanna use dox are getting swarmed early game
My biggest peeve with dox (and slammers) is the fact they can now go underwater, which is just land combat... but underwater?? You can't use oceans/lakes/seas etc as natural defence barriers now and that makes the terrain more boring, might as well just have a 100% land planets. I'd like to see land units stick to land, and naval units stick to the oceans to give the variety in terrain. The next thing we know is we'll be having battleships able to cross land . I hope its addressed in the next patch, but I'm not holding my breath .
Problems with dox are, succinctly put: a.) ridiculously cheap, T1 b.) build ridiculously fast c.) ridiculously fast movement speed d.) can shoot land, sea, and air e.) can traverse water Upping their build time or build cost, lowering their movement speed, and/or removing their ability to shoot air/sea or traverse water are all ways to balance them. 90% of my non-balance mod matches are ended by dox spam. I have a feeling Uber will address this somehow. I do like the earlier suggestion of removing their anti-air. It would give a player an instant counter so long as you spotted the dox spam early enough to save your base.
I also wasn't keen on the whole spam dox thing but in all honesty I now think they have a place in this game. It forces people to actually fight in the early game and think about their expansion strategy. Before the dox spam, people would just sit in their little hemisphere of safety and mass up a big army. Yes you need dox in order to counter early dox spam and this forces you to go dox as well as vehicles, not just choose one or the other. Also try and stop a mass inferno army (with dox only) from rolling over your base and ripping it apart. Yes Dox are mobile and without your own army of dox it is very hard to stop them and they can seem OP, but thats their role. In one on one confrontations where they are forced into a fight (with inferno) then they are going to lose big time. RTS games are supposed to be hard and it takes time to learn good counter strategies. I am definitely glad that Dox can't fire underwater anymore and the only other change I would like to see is to make the bombers have more splash damage so that they can annihilate large groups of dox. This would mean people need to think about either mixing in some spinners (AA) with their dox, which would make the dox move slower (as a group moves the speed of the slowest unit), or head out without spinners, keeping their agility, but risk being taken out with bombers. For every strategy their should be a good counter, this is the key to balancing an RTS. There's still some more tweaking needed to make Dox balanced. I just thought of something too. If they introduced unit acceleration into the game, then this would nerf the dox a little bit too. This would mean that they are still good at raiding, but if they extend too far into enemy territory then it would make it harder to retreat. Or possibly make them move slower if they are walking backwards while firing. We need to keep them an agile unit, but give some sort of consequence to their actions.
Units do currently have acceleration. No unit currently really uses extreme different values however. So no unit requires a great distance to get up to full speed.
