Hi, I was just reading a post about artillery adding cost to an area, to make an "avoid this area" scenario - wouldnt a good alternative be to have a bot/tank which is weak like the Sup Com stealth tank/bot but generates a constant emp, or something which would say scramble engineers building, or disable all land units in an area? It could be used for temporarily holding an area which has just been attacked, but all your offensive units have been killed during the attack to stop engineers just walking in (because its closer to your enemies base than it is yours) and rebuilding. I think bombers should be the main way of killing an emp unit like this. I think the range of the emp field should be smallish (say something like a t2 point defence in Sup Com) so it can be killed by longer range units like missile launchers and bigger mobile artillery, but not things like tanks and assault bots. Any defence could basically kill units like this with ease - but they could be used to hold an empty area until a larger force arrives? but would have to be removed to avoid disabling the friendly units, so they would only ever be able to be used individually. Mike
Build lots of emp bots, bum rush enemy base, watch as they can do nothing against your unit as you are stunning everything, win.
avoiding that exact problem could be to make the emp units v weak and their emp effect stop immediately when theyre destroyed, as rather than emp, it could be more something like scrambling, so there would be the lasting effect needed to then send in units to attack (as it would scramble those two, so you could never send them in together) Nice that you think through the possibilities rather than just dismissing something...
Could be that such a unit would be geared against swarms of weaker units? But leaving the larger tanks and units unharmed? That way you would have a nice weapon against a swarm of small infantry bots, but would have to use something else against their heavy tanks.
I thought of using them in a more defensive manner to hold an area temporarily so you didnt necessarily have to have a force big enough to overwhelm a smaller enemy base and then have some left over to hold out against a counter attack before you could send re-enforcements, or drop in engineers to setup a base of your own. Its happened to me many times, that I basically destroy an enemies 2nd/3rd base, but loose all my units in the area in the process, so the unit im talking about here could be held back a short distance and then step in to deny the enemy recapturing it all with an engineer and a couple of AA to stop any bombers etc. purely because the enemy's main base is closer
yeah - given the topics about using artillery as an area of denial, I thought this might be a good alternative idea. It could be used to capture/deny use of high value areas for players early game if the unit is quite fast moving, but easily killed if someone is determined to capture an area
With the whole cost system under the hood of the game, you could create a bot which was purely for scrambling navigation systems of opposing troops, jumbling up their navigation systems.
that sounds pretty good - so rather than an emp etc. it could do scrambling to add cost so enemy units avoid a particular area. If the unit had stealth too, then you could basically put a few in strategic places which would make any attacking army's route longer? Though that would remove the usage of holding somewhere, as unless it disabled units via emp etc. it wouldnt actually stop anything (unless the cost it added made the area look unpassable)
Zero-K has one of these guys, and he seems to work pretty well. I'm just sure on the exact balance for it but conceptually it's an interesting unit.
This is contrary to the purpose of any crowd control ability. Unit disabling skills will ALWAYS be most effective against the biggest target possible, and will be weakest on swarm. That's not necessarily an imbalance. In fact it makes a very real weakness that is otherwise difficult to create against big units. The controller just needs to be designed with it in mind.
Again; it exists in Zero-K, where burst-EMP works really well against smaller targets while targeted EMP works really well against big units. The basic idea is that the more HP you have, the more resistance to EMP you also have. So a burst of weak-strength EMP will cripple all the little bots while a directed oomph of EMP will take out a big bot for a bit (or practically permanently disable a small one, but only that one)
So bigger is better? That's totally redundant with guns and defeats the purpose of a crowd control utility. There are a thousand ways a bigger gun can be more effective. The whole point of CC is that it gets more effective as the ENEMY gets bigger. There are not many ways to take out big targets in a way that are mostly harmless against swarms.
That's because it's not the whole concept of EMP that's pinned down to crowd control. Just specific units have a role and happen to use EMP to achieve it. You can have a crowd control EMP unit (like the Racketeer EMP artillery) or a single target EMP unit (like the Panther EMP assault tank) , or even both (like the Stilleto, a bomber which drops an area with so much EMP damage that it shuts down absolutely everything, including your own stuff) It makes EMP useful for many different things, instead of just "shut down big bots".
