There's a Turtle in the Water!

I just came out of a three hour game on this map. 10 People. 2v2v2v2v2.
It was an experiment, using current minimum metal settings.
It went very well - there wasn't anybody spamming nukes mid game, and we mostly annihilated eachother using Armies and Air.

However when there were just two teams remaining things got slow. Our opponents had barricaded themselves into the seas with Flak, Catapults and Peregrines.

The game went on for 90 minutes like that until they managed to drop six nukes on me, and three on my team-mate (this was after a lot of other Nukes)...

When confronted with arguments about Nuke Spam, the usual response is:
"Well it's expensive, why didn't you build an army?"
We have no amphibious units.
Catapults and Holkins sap incoming armies (T2 armies at that).
Defences mince armies.
Flak shreds Air.
We had no way of encroaching on their established territories. I tried using Shellers, but they could send Kestrels out onto area I couldn't build Flak on due to Catapults (which never miss).

There's no single solution.
A major nerf to Defence Towers and AA, and a buff to ground units.
Not being able to build Catapults or Holkins on Water, and having underwater bases would be the best fix for this kind of turtling in my opinion.
Removal of AOE from Peregrines (I know this is coming ).

What do you guys think?

Mixing stingers in with your shellers.
That's the solution.
Trust me, stingers destroy kestrels.

T1 AA? I did :l It was mainly the enemy arty/catas that took out my shellers. The shellers couldn't encroach too far on the seas anyway.

I was on burrito's team
Not trying to complain below! I hate to say anything is impossible overcome creatively. Just stating my thoughts of that long game:

• Sadly, they had lots of artillery that was out of reach from sheller's as well, most of them died anyhow before they got to the shore.
• Aircraft escort didn't help, they lined the edge of their base with flak. Any aggro from enemy aircraft would draw our group into the shredder.
• Counter Artillery wasn't easily possible, any artillery creep was quickly destroyed when built in their range. (Nearly worked on one base, but they repelled it eventually.)
• Scouting couldn't be done without unacceptable loses due to all the AA, orbital scouting wasn't viable, they had like 30 anchors and well over 100 orbital fighters sitting around and over their base.
• Their aquatic location made any sort of vanguard drop impossible (Assuming we got by the AA)
• Their base effectively covered all connected waterways, making a Sea based incursion impossible. (They on the other hand had plenty of land area that they could land and produce off of that was within their artillery's protection. Arguably we could have protected the shores better, but it was a lot of ground to cover and control)
• They had nearly as many Mex's in their water's as we had on land. The eco was pretty even between the two of us.

It seemed to me to only have one available solution, and that was to out nuke them. Which we did succeed in killing one Com when they weren't paying attention to the remaining anti-nuke stock.

In hindsight, seeing the battlefield after we lost, I noticed they had only 1 anti nuke protecting their last Com, we might have been able to out nuke them had we been able to scout for it's location.

To be fair they played really well, it was a close game, however they were more patient and stockpiled more nukes then we did anti-nukes. So good game to them. (although they really could afford to be patient with their defenses XD )

One more thing: <3 to Uber, I played Theta now that his face was "fixed" He is adorable and lovable again.

If you can keep them from getting vision of what you're building, you can also build walls to act as improv radar-jamming to keep them from hitting the important stuff. Not always effective, just thought I'd mention it.

I think Burrito has a really good point, for situations like these. Amphibious units of any kind would have given us other options to pursue. It would be nice to play games without Asteroids that don't need to turn into a nuke throwing contests.

Any other idea's on how to effectively breach a closed off ocean?

Yes that is a great tactic! But sadly we couldn't stop them from getting vision, their Adv radar satellites covered the shores pretty far out for both vision and radar. Also they had clear space supremacy, we stopped building a lot of Orbital units once they had set up so many Anchors. We pretty much only built radar Satellites and umbrellas at that point. Originally we had complete space supremacy the entire first hour of the game.

They managed clear space supremacy, clear air supremacy, land superiority (in the form of artillery)... They even managed nuke supremacy.

With a track record like that, they would have won no matter what happened!
If there were amphibious units, I think they would have beat you with them.

Nah we were pretty tanked up ourselves as well. not as much as them though, and Air superiority was pretty split, we covered most of the actual planet (but with so few mexs that didn't help us), but they were able to establish a land force near the very end.

Besides their base was so crowded they couldn't build any more factories for amphibious units even if they had them XD

Oh, yeah, there is!
Such a badass turtle!

No one used the Triton, Croc, or Gimp in TA because they lacked a torpedo defense. They need to be able to deal with surface naval units in order to be effective.

That nukes are a viable strategy. But their purpose is often misunderstood.


Nukes are stalemate & turtlebreakers. I've played SupCom nukeless matches on 84x84km maps. Armies are useless. Air is useless. anything takes forever. At some point, when logistics break down, nuke em. Bonus points if it's from orbit.

Air Transports and Teleporters could help here - it should be possible to break turtles with conventional units That's where the fun's at. I think a defence nerf and amphibious units would go some way to solving this.

But I agree as a last resort, stockpiled nukes could be used, as they were here to end the game. The problem for me is that they're often spammed.

You ideas are terrible and knee jerky because of a temporary balance.

Cheers.
What in life isn't temporary?

I'm just proposing possible changes to redirect gameplay in favour of the actual units, as opposed to Tower Defence and Missile Command. I don't think a buff to units' HP is knee jerky. The units are weak, the defences are strong as hell. We all know this.

Also that turtle was impossible to break as there are no amphibious units, and anything that got remotely close was picked off by Catapults.

I mean no insult to you, but your ideas.....

From what I read, you looked at the current balance and echoed what meany of us have experienced.

A lack of counters, no amphibious units for land to water combat, ships that are ill suited to dealing with enemy counter battery's and of course, boring nukes.

And then suggested we destroy the entire point of such defences by reducing their effectiveness and making them placeable only on land instead of suggesting that we actually fix the problem.

By introducing units for amphibious warfare, and ships that can deal with and resist enemy defences.

So I had no idea why you did a 180 on a perfectly acceptable criticism and suggested something off the wall that realistically wouldn't help much anyway. (You would build naval bases on the coast, and still be protected by catapults).

Maybe I was a bit too broad in my terms. XD I was assuming they would have a way to deal with surface threats since the context was taking out a base on the surface of the water. But that is probably a good thing to specify, since not being able to answer to a surface threat would be a mistake best not to repeat.

What about suicide aircraft that prioritize tower defenses? I think Aeon had something like that in SupCom. (Disclaimer) I'm not aware of how effective or ineffective it was, or the meta game around it's concept, I didn't play much SupCom multiplayer.
I'm thinking where it would have enough health to withstand a above average amount of flak, thereby making air patrols outside your line necessary to intercept them earlier. Then ideally, you'd need at least some support outside the form of artillery or towers (I think we can agree an Anchor can be considered a defensive tower).

I was arguing for there to be differences between ground and water bases. That would work better with Amphibious Units; Amphibious Tanks could assault a base on the sea-floor.
Having differences of what can be built on land and water provides opportunities for different and new units and playstyles, resulting in more depth, not less.
I argue for amphibious units in my OP as well.
Catapults on the coast would be reached by tanks. In fact they tried that and I managed to destroy them with Slammers.

The problem with that argument is that the units confronted by land and sea bases is different, resulting in a difference based on what you will be fighting, rather then arbitrary obstructions.

I think it'll be difficult to balance Holkins and Catapults with high-value Naval and lmass Ground. I played a naval match today and they decimate ships.

It makes sense to have some differentiation of defence between Land and Sea. Torpedoes, for instance.

It would also encourage people to get out of the water and fight over islands as places to put Artillery.

If anything, the holkins will be the anti-land, and the catapult will be the anti-navy.

Not that it matters to a navy all that much, being all artillery units of some nature.

And the problem with enforcing island gameplay, is when there are no islands to fight over on a water world.