Can bots be useful without making tanks useless?

Well? Can they? To be honest, I'm not entirely sure.

I have a better question, why do you think they can't function side by side?

Mike

Only if you differentiate them.

Statera: Bots are fast, made of paper, and have lots of DPS. Tanks are slow, tanky, and have good alpha but mediocre DPS.
RCBM: Bots are slow, made of paper, cheap, and have lots of DPS. Tanks are fast, tanky, expensive (For every five tanks you could have four factories), and have decent DPS.

The key is making both useful direct fire units, but for different reasons.

Yes they can, feel free to play redox mod. https://forums.uberent.com/threads/wip-re-dox.61019/

The answer is not dps as suggested, but cost and aa utility

In the words of the virgin Mary: "U WOT M8?"

Hey don't knock RCBM tanks, I was undefeated in the early land tests and I only used Ants! ;p

Very much so. Bots need to be less effective than vehicles in encounters vs defenses and/or vehicles, but not as completely useless as they are currently.

The Dox really needs a range boost. They get vaporized before they get hardly a shot off.

That's another option, but I feel that every basic factory needs units with analogous roles. The ways they accomplish those roles can be different, but I want the core roles (fabrication, scout/raider, direct fire/assault, turtle breaking, anti-air) to each have a unique unit in each factory. I don't want one factory that has one unit that does a half-censored job at two roles if the factory doesn't also have units that do the job fine and don't cut corners to be able to do additional things badly.

Vehicles might need a speed and turret tracking nerf so they have a hard time acquiring perpendicularly/ spread out moving bots. I'd also argue that level 2 vehicles should have a slightly bigger footprint so they they have a harder time getting around small openings. big vehicles being cumbersome in wreckage fields added more strategy to TA.

This is the approach uber has tried, and it doesn't work because each factory needs to have a frontline unit regardless. Make it a 'raider' all you want, it doesn't mean anything if you can neither attack or defend.

If you decrease costs (which is an effective dps increase btw) instead of straight increasing dps numbers, you have a frontline unit that behaves in a totally different way to tanks. That is, their effective hp is in numbers, and not inherently present like the ant. If you wanted to metal balance dox via damage, you would be looking at an absolutely huge dps buff, which imo is unreasonable and actually makes the dox behave more like a tank than not. Mex hp has not changed for many builds, so i don't see why individual dox dps needs to also change.

This comes with the added bonus of now not needing to go back and buff and tweak the hp/damages of every single other unit just to compensate. Uber should be changing the dox to fit the current paradigm, not the other way around (which is a totally legit area of design, but one that should be left to overhaul and re-design modders).

The timings in this game absolutely require that bot have a unit they can get out to defend a stock standard tank pressure build up. Quite honestly, I don't feel like any of the balance modders seem to understand how powerful tank macro play really is, and how relatively quickly it hits.

Uber gave bots two raiding units, the dox and the boom, and some sort of weird frontline/turtle breaking unit that's too inefficient at frontline combat and too unreliable at hitting over walls to be useful in turtle breaking in the grenadier.

That's not following what I said.

What makes tanks tanks is IMO the HP and front loaded damage. I didn't say to give the dox either.

The boom is a raider?

huh....I tagged it as more of a base destroyer, or possibly a siege unit.

You're trying to make dox high dmg and fast, without changing the metal to hp ratio. That is basically what uber is trying to do with dox, except they failed at it where you guys are succeeding. Don't get me wrong, you've balanced it for that role nicely. I just disagree that it should be a specialized glass cannon raiding unit when it has so much more potential to provide synergy in more interesting composite armies.

Grenadier is simply priced too expensive at 120, and boombots currently are a meh concept. I think we can both agree on these things atleast!

I think the issue is that there trying to make it a cheap raider. It can be cheap or it can be a raider, but it shouldn't be both.

I thought they allrdy were useful. If only u could make 2 dox at the same time, upthe cost abit and wola and maybe less hp and then abrakadabra.

There are a few ways Uber could balance the dox here.

The least effective would be to dramatically increase their DPS. It would make them quite effective as raiders, but leave them with a lot to wish for as a frontline unit.

An interesting route would be to drop their cost to 50 or 60 metal, as well as marginally increase their DPS. This would allow them to spammed early as a zerg unit.

A more effective approach would be to increase the DPS of the dox by 2, decrease cost to 75, and increase the cost of all tanks by 1.5

That would prevent tank rushing to some extent, but still remind you that BOTS ARE FAST RAIDERS AND TANKS ARE FOR REAL MEN.

who uber? Or are you talking about statera? *confused* If uber, 90 metal dox is pretty expensive.

Also, I don't see why a raider can't be 'cheap'. It's mostly about metal to ehp and metal to damage ratios, both of which the dox is currently deficient in. Doesn't matter so much whether it comes as one expensive unit or many cheap units.

I think I should have phrased that a little differently, and I am not sure I meant what I said.

I think that both bots and vehicles need to have a unit that can be considered the core unit. The default offensive unit that does reasonably well in most situations. For vehicles this is the Ant and for bots this is the Dox.

However the Dox is a cheap raider unit. Being both cheap and fast, there's no way it can stand up to Ants and be balanced. Your go to bot needs to be something that can fair reasonably well vs. Ants. It needs to trade speed or cost for the ability to fight Ants and not lose too badly in terms of metal cost.

Yes they can, but again it depends on if Uber is gonna implement better terrain.

The solution is definitely not to nerf vehicles. atm vehicles is actually fun, they arent snail slow and can actually shoot.

Where bots need to shine is that they are bots, as in they have arm and legs as in they can scale much steeper terrain that any other ground vehicle, and obviously they will be more fragile but faster than the current vehicles. You could even have bots being able to jump small gaps, again its about using what makes bots well bots, that they have legs and arms. that makes it possible to climb, jump, move fast up and down steep terrain

The problem I see with Dox currently , is that they have no damage, no range, and the durability of a piece of wet tissue paper, but are fast. So early game they are very useful for engi hunting, other than that, well useless.

So something need to be buffed, either straight up damage, so it can function more like a glass cannon, or range, so it can kite a whole lot better (discount Gil-e). HP buff would make it on par with tanks, so that won't work.