My God, these things are annoying. They're even worse than Mercies. At least with Mercies, you had to make a tech investment, and they weren't basically free, and only one faction had them, and they weren't remotely effective against regular army units. Although admittedly Mercies did fly, the Boom Bots are so fast and cheap that terrain (including walls) doesn't seem to bea a substantial obstacle. Most of the land metagame is interesting, but the bots seriously need another look. Dox are an interesting unit conceptually but without a supply limit to limit the number of them you can make, people keep just lagging up the game making ten thousand. Boom Bots are plain annoying- they don't seem to have any inherent downside designed into them. You can't split your Commander or other vital things against them, and they're astoundingly cheap. Boom bots might make an interesting conceptual counter to dox but they should probably not be effective in countering other units and especially Commanders. Many of the other Bot units feel like "Vehicles but it has legs".
Most people believe that booms are effectively worthless. But overall, I disagree and love the boom's ability to eat commanders and walls. And the dox doesn't need an arbitrary limit, what we need is better servers of off-line. I find it unacceptable to try and balance a game based on it running at it's lowest possible hardware.
i dont like the damage that boombots output, also it doesnt seem like they explode when they die but do alot of damage, but little to no aoe, i wish boombots had a much larger aoe but less damage overal (the easiest reference ever is banelings, they explode on death, large aoe but not alot of damage overall, but still incredibly fun and useful)
Make a minefield. Have your commander stand in it. lols ensue. Ideally you can put mines all over the place (although this is rather time consuming) but if you want to protect your commander against boom bots, you really just need one modestly sized minefield that he can stand in. A few T1 laser towers will pick off the rest. Just be sure to replace the mines because there's always another wave of boom bots. Luckily mines build faster than boom bots. You could also probably stand in the middle of a handful of flame tanks. I sometimes give my commander some "bodyguard" units like this that I never send away, purely to protect him from cheese like this. T1 flame tanks, once they get lined up, mulch waves of boom bots pretty easy.
A simple planax of Dox between the booms and thier target will result in one of 2 outcomes: 1. The enemy tries to rush through them, taking massive fire from the Dox. Add in fire from Bolo's where applicable (the bot vehicle counter). 2. The enemy goes for the Dox. 1 Boom kills 1 Dox (both cost same). And not all boom will get through the dox firepower. So the enemy makes a net loss. Also booms have: 10 HP (Dox overkill them with one salvo). Shitty sight range (they can't even see a flametank before it is in range) Same cost as Dox. Booms are far from unbeatable.
A comparison between Dox and Boom Bots is meaningless. It's meaningless how low health Boom Bots have, because basically any weapon one-shots them. But since you can make so many for so little, their effective health can be much, much higher than the raw value, since virtually all weapons massively overkill against them. In addition, Dox are a primary army unit. For Dox to be effective, you have to beat the enemy, army for army. This is not true of Boom Bots. You only have to kill the Commander. Of course strictly this is true with Dox too but given their damage model, it's very unfeasible. With Boom Bots however, it's quite feasible to simply nuke the enemy's important structures or units. They don't need to be cost-effective in the same way as other units do. Air scouts are more than cheap and spammable enough to overcome any low sight range limitation of Boom Bots. As for flame tanks, the core issue here is that if you spend 3k metal bodyguarding your Commander with flame tanks, then the guy with the bots can just spend that metal on Dox and own your flametanks with his Dox. Also, I have definitely not observed flame tanks to be that reliable against Boom Bots except on much bigger scales that you would achieve before being boombot sniped in most situations. I'm coming to believe that you win with Vehicles only if you spawn very close to your enemy, so you can pressure him quickly even with the low movement speed, and otherwise, you always win with bots.
Only if you try to argue an issue into existence. The core rule of effective combat is: Spend less metal on the units that do the killing then the ones that are killed. Boombot vs Flametank does that (2x45 + approach loss* vs 225). Boombot vs Dox can never do that: If you fight 4.5k Metal in Boom bots vs 4.5k metal in Dox (100 of each) there is no way in hell the Booms come out on top. At best they would kill 1:1. If they would not be shoot down massively during approach, that is. And note that the enemy could just walk away once the first dox come into firing range, effectively making the booms unable to archeive anything till the dox have to dodge terrain. The main vehicle armies in PvP are Bolo's. Wich are the natural counter to bots. If you add a layer of Dox to that + running away once in range, the booms will be slaughtered with next to no effect. *Asume this to be 1 for every 2 that hit thier mark in case of pure Flametank armies. So 135 vs 225. If the enemy has enough time to build up the masses needed to overwhelm you despite the ineffectiveness of Booms or has you boxed in so much you have no maneuvering room then the Booms are merely the means to your end, not the reason you lost. He could ahve kileld you for the same metal worth in flame tanks or bolo's. Propably even in Dox.
That's not true at all. The core rule of effective combat is to deal more damage to your enemy than he does to you. It's clear that if you deal 10,000 metal in damage, or 5,000 metal in damage to your enemy Commander, then the 5,000 damage is superior because you just won the game, which is exactly the scenario I'm discussing. Or spend 200 metal on tanks, to kill a 180-metal extractor. This is clearly a good trade because the enemy loses additional metal in income whilst rebuilding it. There are many ways to deal damage other than just destroying units that cost metal. Your model is far too simplistic to accurately consider strategies other than just "Tanks vs Tanks".
His model works for everything other then the strategic target of the commander. So yes, dealing more economic damage out weighs the literal damage done.
I ran the numbers. It is not even really effective to use Boom Bots vs Bolo's. You will loose 3 Booms (1 to the kill, 2 to the approach), that is 135 Metal. To destroy 150 Metal. 90% efficiency is not that good (but propably the best you will get from bots vs bolo's). The commander is indeed the one unit where efficiency is not that relevant - even a terribly high cost is cheaper then having the enemy around. But before the commander is even attackable the enemy has to bring down all the units that can stop him for getting hits in. Units cannot bring down thier counters effectively (if the enemy has the masses/econ/production for that you have already lost), so if boom are the issue you need to invest in the counter for booms. And I just prooved that Dox are the (hard?) counter to booms. There is no way the booms can win a equal metal fight, wich means 100% chance for the Dox to win. And as bots they are too fast to be outmaneuvered by other bots. In practice a dox/bolo combo has been most effective (the bolo have the long range, while the Dox are the chaff).
Booms do get slaughtered by most T1 stuff, but most T2 weapons aren't exactly high in their DPS so really, Booms are much more effective against enemy advanced units, where the exchange should be heavily in your favour. But even so, T1 is the meat of your army, T2 isn't cost efficient enough to mass produce like that. (WHICH I FRIGGING LOVE BTW)
Booms are great against T2 things. It's funny how huge, armored and feared vanguards, levellers and shellers fall into them. They are good against buildings too but i don't like to use them for this purpose. And t1 units in general beat them really easily. But I personally think that what lacks in them to be REALLY AWESOME is JUMPING! There is a balance mod where they do a little jump before hitting the target and it's so beautiful and so spiderlike! Uber NEEDS to implement something like this in vanilla!
Boomleaps are cool and all but really don't add all that much to them and make them significantly harder to balance.
