Very detailed and balanced analysis of techs, well done Rooster! My fav tech is phoenix's jumpdrive: for the cost of a single missile you get to bait out multiple responses from the opponent. Now THAT'S value.
very nice video and a great way to get past choice paralysis. I did have some things I like to ask your opinion about. Granted I am kinda new to the game and low-ranked but I like to hear other people's thoughts on this. 1. Elite marksmen of Wasps INSTEAD of Range. ( not both ) as well as Jump drive on Wasps. Jump drive is cheap and can at a low cost force your opponent to respect the flanks, but I have started using Phenoixes for that more and more. But you never mentioned it in the video at all. It has in my experience always been great to run because of unit drops. I run Elite Marksmen INSTEAD of Range as if I'm using them as chaff I don´t care much for their Range upgrades. ( because I want them to get hit and would rather invest in energy shields. ) And if you get 1 or 2 high-level wasps from unit cards they become monsters, especially with items. I assume it is because it makes wasps from boats worse, but is there another reason I don't respect the range upgrade on chaff units? I'm more of a replicating crawler person and rarely if ever use Fangs as anything other than meatshields that come in late thanks to slower movement speed. But maybe I'm not giving it enough credit? 2 Quantum Reassembly on Pehonix was never also never really addressed other than carry pheonix is bad. I like to use Pheonix as a utility pain in the back unit that zips around the flanks with jumpdrive and/or electromagnetic shots at low investments. It is very slow to resurrect (20 seconds vs 10 cd on Fortress Rockets) but makes for great swamp potential with War Factory. 3. When is it better to go carry War factory instead of the production factory. And in what situations do you want to do so? I find my carry factories always gets destroyed by acid or electromagnetic stuff after the Photon coating runs out. ( which probably is a placement issue and because I refuse to sell them ) So I have started running all production techs because I never bother with carry war factories anymore. But in what situations would you tech into one over the other as in my experience just a raw factory usually is not worth the investments? Or am I just bad? Feel free to bash me in the comments.
Thanks for these questions! 1) I would generally advise against going for carry wasp, as it gets hard countered by mustang. Elite Marksman is quite an expensive tech upgrade, which does not give you any significant benefit on its own (as it will still die very fast to mustangs due to the lack of range). Using them as chaff is indeed their safest use (buying shielded wasps against marksmen or phoenix for example) or with jump drive (as a very inexpensive tech) to potentially get a tower debuff for one round and gain some tempo. 2) Carry phoenix indeed struggles somewhat in the current meta and it seems that marksmen are the safer/better scaling option within the sniper unit class. Quantum reassembly is often too expensive of a tech for what it provides, especially because you will want to have more phoenixes to make use of it, with more techs (such as range) to make your multiple phoenixes useful. Producing phoenixes with war factory used to be a thing, but is very uncommon right now due to the production limits of that tech (maximum of 5) and how expensive it is. 3) Carry factory is the most common at high MMR, due to the significant nerfs to the production techs over the last patches (especially phoenix production is rarely worth it). With the range tech however, war factory can go toe to toe with units like the melter or scorpion, and does exceptionally well into boards with medium sized units (e.g. sledges). To set up a carry factory board, you will need a solid base of chaff in the early rounds to protect the factory, as well as some chaff clear in the form of arclights and mustangs. There are situations where ball production can become useful to dodge emp missiles and create more chaff (with mech division teched on the steelballs).
great video thanks! You went fast on linked (chained) sledges and balls, I heard that we should never link them. I recently linked steel balls in a carry steel balls game and things started to go wrong for me after i pushed this button. But i don't understand why this tech seem to be more of a disadvantage than a helper... the hp buff seem enormous (120% i believe) on paper but in game, I couldn't get what went wrong... your input would be welcome :)
Link is an interesting tech, often used as a gutshot due to the massive increase in hp. However, by linking the sledges or balls, they become very vulnerable to melters for instance (where melter normally takes a long time to clear a pack of balls or sledges). One thing you can do with link is alternating high level sledges/balls with low level ones. The lower level units will then die first, breaking the link and preventing all units from dying to a single melter lock.
And on top of what Rooster says : Can make them vulnerable too big damage units. Like a lvl 4 scorpion (40k damage per attack), without link 2-4 steelball kills per shot, with link steelball goes to 10k hp each => so even if only one steelball got hit = 4 steelball level worth of hp in one shot. 3 steel ball hit => 12 steelball level worth of hp in 1 shot. So against units which already overkill by a large margin it's a downside. You have +120% hp yes, but all damage taken will be valuable and thus, there's no more wasted/overkill damage for your opponent. Against melter, you migth want different lvl of unit and good placement : a lvl 1 ball/sledge to take the beam first then at one time it'll die before your lvl 2 ball/sledge so the melter needs to restarts his channeling on the lvl 2 ball/sledge, then lvl 3 etc. Totally not a counter, just a way to limit the massacre (which can be enough time gain).
@@Masao_ours Wow thanks you for the great inputs guys! I think that explains why I got wiped out so quickly when I linked my balls (questionable wording here), the link applies to all nearby units with same tech! Totally forgot / overlooked this. The opponent had leveled phoenix (L4/5) that were already destroying my steel balls that were all packed! The linked helped him even further...
Yeah I may have used my standard recording scene by accident, but I will make the excuse that it makes the viewer listen to what I am explaining (so that they may understand it better) ;)
Quick reload is a tech that gets used a lot in FFA (1v1v1v1) I believe. It is not common at all in 1v1 and 2v2. Range, Elite and AA are simply mandatory in my opinion, and emp is required to have a shot against melter spam in standard.
Only fire and acid on the ground, and spell cards (nuke, the 3000 damage missile, javelin, orbital bombardement, emp, etc.) and spell summoning cards (rhino/vulcan will deal damage equal to their hp on things below them and take damage equal to the units hp they stomped).
Units need a lot more valid options. Right now most units have one viable build and everything else is just memes or has 0 synergy. Scorps should have a nice tank build, but the hp techs are way to expensive and don't gell with other techs for the scorp. Assault marksmen are fun on paper, in reality they lose their one advantage, range, and the perks don't offset the negative since they still fire slow, have poor target priorities and die way to fast. This game gets tedious quite fast cause of the randomness and lack of direct control, they need to give players more to tinker around with.
It is certainly true that the higher you climb on the ladder, the fewer options you will have as the meta will be more pronounced. This is quite a normal thing for these type of strategy games. More variety would be fantastic (especially in the form of new units), but that takes time to develop and balance. We'll get a new unit next week which should already add some additional variety!
On Mustangs, I always find HE to be so bad, espcailly if compare to AR The only use case it can actualy make a diffeance is Shielded fangs, but worst for every other case. It just make them lose a lot of dmg. It can be very easily tested AR will be better or at least as goood in almost all cases.
You make a good point, though it is precisely against shielded fangs that I would click HE. I find myself rarely going for anything besides range and Anti-Air anyway, with carry mustangs often resulting moreso from items (e.g. laser sight, improved/advanced firepower) than something like AP. It is definitely possible to run it though, as missile interceptor is by no means required and can be replaced for AP.
@@RoosterRU-vid drat i realised that like, 4 minutes after i posted that :) cheers! lovely! (new to the game - didn't realise sandworm didn't release until recently!)
