Should Bomb Bots Leap?

kind of really like this idea. They could call it the "Flea".

I dunno, once we get formations it'd be a lot easier to safeguard the bomb bots. I'm certainly not against bouncing bots, but I'm not sure it'll be necessary down the line.

Tanky tanks up front with a layer of bomb bots behind them, followed by fields of dox then arty.

If the tank layer makes it to the front lines it's done its job and the bombs go bananas on the buildings. If they don't, the bombs act as a defensive barrier to give your dox breathing room to escape.

Of course, we'd need formations for that to work without stupid amounts of micro.

I don't really know how they expect the tanky tanks to work if they are still planning on having units be very smart about their targeting. Wouldn't units just automatically shoot at the bomb bots anyway?

with formations, having these jumping self destructo fleas behind tanky tanks then jumping to important eco buildings when in range would be, to put it lightly, AMAZING. And amazingly frustrating lol

EDIT*
A word

EDIT**
you would also need copious AA, I'm sure one t2 bombing run would insure that your whole line of bugs would make quite a boomboomboomboomboomboomboomboom

The AA comment made me wonder about the other side of it. I would imagine jumping bombs would be very vulnerable to AA fire during the final jump. This jumping bomb bot idea just keeps getting cooler.

At this point let's load some TNT of a Firefly, and call it Kamikaze.

Taking this further, could the splash of the bomb bot affect the planes as well? How would that affect balance/gameplay?

I really think jumping bomb bots would have a great chance at getting us some really interesting emergent gameplay.

Starcraft devs have said that one of their most difficult units to make was the Baneling. I can't blame them. You have to work with not just the actions of the Baneling, but have to account for the behavior of every other thing in the game as well. Cost, health, speed, size, micro, it all has to be factored in to make the Baneling work exactly where and when it was meant to. It takes an immense amount of talent to make a Baneling unit that is GOOD.

TA and Supcom were not good at designing suicide units. I expect similar results here.

Don't forget that the SC Baneling also depends very heavily on damage types to function properly. Structures typically have a low cost and lots of health, so the Baneling needs a damage multiplier to be remotely effective against that.

I'm not so certain about having the crawling bomb leap. I will have to wait until the unit cannon is in, because crawling bomb + unit cannon = devastating interplanetary artillery.

Fragile suicide units are always interesting for variation in strategies. But my main problem is the chain explosion mechanism, which I really don't understand at all. Shooting a missile won't cause it to explode as well...?
The main balance factor compared to its huge (splash) damage, is the low health. But including chain reactions this unit is only an unnecessary micro intensive tool (coordinating attacks from many directions), that unit will be rarely used.

+1 for leaping, flea-like bomb units.

They would need to be balanced, but would be fun, cool visually, and add more variety to the game. There's probably some significant dev cost in comparison to more generic units though.

I see it now, two main forces cracking a turtle base with radar shielded crawling bombs in tow of one group. Group with the back up bombs runs first targets mainly defenses. After the forces are at the tipping point of being wiped out send in the second raiding force.
while the enemy is distracted with the second force sneak the bomb bots in to hit their eco!

very very specific example but I'm feeling at least a little creative

I think the best way to use them would not be on bases (whose standard defenses should out range them) but as a cheap one use army. You see an enemy tank battalion moving up and you ambush them. If they automatically got behind tankier units all the better.

I also would not allow anti air to hit them. I think that would just get annoying, as it would effectively be shooting bombs/bullets out of the sky.

I do agree we should be wary of how the unit cannon plays with them however, I don't think they would be that much more devastating than any other army dropping into your base. They can only fire once, imagine a tank battalion landing in the same spot, kill for kill they would probably end up about equal. It is also likely that there will be some form of defense against anything launched by the unit cannon, the ion cannon thing might shoot them out of the sky for example.

As do chargelots

I'm inclined to disagree there. If the baneling comparison is at all relevant, bomb-bot unit cannon drops would be primarily aimed at defensive structures or high-priority targets, such as anti-orbital/anti-nuke defense or T2 factories. "Damaging Econ" is all well and good for a small game like Starcraft, where bases and factories can be counted on one or two hands, but in PA the late-game economy runs to such excess that nothing short of wiping half a base out will have a significant effect. To be able to do that requires one of two things; a critical mass of army units that can breach defenses, or something to conveniently pave the way for the army. Bomb-bots fall into the latter.

I think this mod effectively makes the case for jumping bomb bots. They never seem to work right in vanilla, but @burntcustard's mod has them working very well.

TA roaches were epic... thanks to some creative thinking by some of the better players...

The best way to use roaches was a technique called 'roach bombing' and required very precision timing but the results when done well could be devastating.

The play went thusly:

1: build roaches
2: build atlas transports
3: load roaches into transports
4: scout target and send transports towards it and order them to unload around desired target
5: When a pre-requisite distance away, set all the transports to self destruct (which starts a 5 second count down).

*if* you got all that correct, the transports would explode *whilst they were descending to the ground* causing the roach bomb to detonate with them. End result was a large explosion just off the ground that could level buildings A very hard manoeuvre to pull off but beautiful to watch (even as the person *getting* bombed) when done well!

Holy necro batman! Wait a minute...

Carry on! Everything is fine!

So I think for vanilla PA the jumps range could be reduced, maybe as much as halved.

I brought it back because I was thinking about how easy it would be for them to throw a change like this into pte. Back when we were talking about it before we assumed it would require a lot of coding, but then you got clever.