Cybran Vs UEF Cruisers

[Flamingo]

I play a lot of uneven games. 3v1, 2v1, 3v2, 4v2, stuff like that. This stuff is hard as it is, but repeat experience has got me thinking really hard about cruisers. UEF cruisers are the problem specifically in my case because it's usually the UEF player who rushes the things, but looking at the unit:

They have amazing anti-air capabilities to the point where two or three can shut down all drop play within their operational area. Those AA guns have a range of 75 whereas a torpedo bomber has a range of 42, so although you theoretically only have to have four torpedo bombers to stop a cruiser, the fact is, the longer range and burst damage from the cruiser makes it a little unpredictable how many torpedo bombers are actually necessary, especially when there is a group of cruisers and not just one. If the bombers bunch up a little, you've got a real problem, but if they don't attack simultaneously you aren't going to touch the cruiser because they won't make it one at a time. Torpedo bombers therefore work, but in a highly unreliable fashion.

They have TMDs and are reasonably mobile. That means if there's a group of them sitting around outside your base, they don't have to micro to escape TML retribution, but they can do so if they feel like it and that means you don't even really overwhelm their TMD by building more missiles. Or in other words, the TMD is sort of like gravy on the unit, reducing micro needs.

They fire tactical missiles faster than any TMD can react to them. They fire four missiles with 1.4 seconds between each missile from a range of 150. TMDs only fire once every 2 seconds. So cruisers will easily overwhelm TMDs and TMDs don't really protect you unless your base has more TMDs than base. Spamming TMDs is reactive anyway, treating symptoms without providing a cure, and therefore is a stupid way to go, so your only defense from cruisers is to attack! You've just got to attack before the tactical missiles do too much damage and utterly cripple your base, so I hope you were already building an indeterminate amount of torpedo bombers or... something.

Sure, these boats don't have torpedoes or torpedo defenses. So I guess I could build Wagners and use their unrivaled 3 DPS in torpedo damage (Why do Wagners have this? We should replace their torpedo tubes with T-shirt launchers to spread Cybran propaganda). Really, if I don't have a navy in the water, I'm certainly not going to get one unless my opponent falls asleep at the wheel for five minutes. I could build artillery if I want to increase my frustration levels by watching the inaccurate shells land nowhere near the boats. Mobile missile launchers are possible if the boats are in a narrow straight except oh damnit, they've got TMDs. I guess I could upgrade my commander with the torpedo launcher, but they outrun my commander!

And anyway, I'm thinking: these things could use a little more versatility. Do you think we could have stealth cruisers? That would be great.

I mean, 1v1 it's not that big a deal. These boats are expensive and if there's five of them at my shore and I have no way to stop them, then clearly I did something wrong. In a team game, especially with uneven teams, the story is a little different. I know there are a lot of ways to get blind-sided - mercies, fire beetles, TMLs, strat rush, and so on. However, all these other things have their counters. Mercies have low health and are easily stopped by AA, fire beetles are clumsy and have a hard time walking to their target, TMDs stop TMLs on a highly cost-effective level, and a strat can still be shot down by interceptors because at least a strat isn't packing outrageous AA, or at the least we've got T3 maa now or you can get up a T3 SAM before the strat does too much damage.

I've only been able to come up with one solution to get a handle on things if cruisers show up and I don't have anything in the water already. Cybran T2 transports. As wacky as that sounds, it's a result of me throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, at stopping cruisers without having to rush an experimental. See, the transports have enough health to actually make it within firing range of the cruisers, and then their EMP weapons freeze the cruisers so that I can follow up with torpedo bombers, gunships, or whatever. It feels like an unintended, out-of-the-box counter, and it takes some micro, but to be honest I haven't been able to determine another method that's actually cost-effective.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on this? The obvious and most effective way to stop cruisers is to have naval control, but let's say you have a teammate who fails at this, and you scout three cruisers headed to your shore now. When you scout the three cruisers, you haven't built any torpedo bombers. They'll generously arrive at your shore in approximately one minute because their captain is drunk and taking his sweet time. There's no way you can build a navy fast enough to stop them by that method. How do you use this one minute's intel advantage?

[NewForumAccount]

Cybran has the torpedo upgrade on the commander, which is very strong and your UEF enemy will need to build Coopers or torpbombers to counter it. The only problem is the range of the cruisers, but they will at least have to retreat which gives you time to set up your own navy.

[Flamingo]

Cybran has the torpedo upgrade on the commander, which is very strong and your UEF enemy will need to build Coopers or torpbombers to counter it. The only problem is the range of the cruisers, but they will at least have to retreat which gives you time to set up your own navy.

The problem here is, you're proposing the commander chase the things far enough that the cruisers are further than 150 ticks from your base. Bearing in mind that if they have any way of spotting your naval factories, they can shoot tactical missiles at those too. Even if you can manage that, your commander is now a long way from home in a T2 environment with fundamentally no support. You can't even send a transport and pick him up from the waters, so the predator becomes the prey so easily. The ACU torpedoes are great, but are only good to get the cruisers off your immediate shore.

The absurd range and consistent firing rate of those cruisers is not a joke. Generally, they don't chase off. The cruisers have to die without exceptions or they'll apply pressure until your whole base cracks. I don't want to briefly delay the inevitable because they keep adding cruisers to the fleet during the delays. I'm trying to figure out how to solve this problem after it's too late to get ships in the water.

The damn things outrange Fatboys and in terms of potential damage per mass they're about 50% as dangerous to structures, but 400% more threatening to air units. It's a long-range attacker with a high resistance to long-range responses. To be frank, it's a devastating unit just by how many layers of resistance it has to counter-attack.

Heaven forbid a shield boat should add yet one more layer at some point.

[Rogueleader89]

First, that is an awesome use of t2 air transports

(cutting multiple long paragraphs down to a few sentances...)
Your best bet is to delay, there are lots of ways to do this, best ways to delay are generally pressing an advantage somewhere or wiping out production.
Remember you have good stealth as cybran and most of cruiser's vision comes from built-in radar.
Torpedo bombers are a mass equivalent counter (or pretty close to it) to cruisers once you reach decent numbers.
If you hit t3 air a mix of t2 torp bombers and t3 strats can work well, if the cruisers have no vet a strat will 1-shot a cruiser, torp bombers are likely to be prioritized by the aa guns over a strat (as long as you don't send the strat in first) since cybran strats have built in stealth and aa range is higher than vision range, not to mention that if the cruisers are parked close together the splash damage of the strat will hit multiple of them.
You must re-establish navy eventually though and start getting subs/frigates out, its pretty hard to win navy without being in the water.

If you have an ally dying on navy the solution isn't to let them die and then try to figure out how to counter cruisers from your land position where you have no naval control and the enemy has free reign, its to support that ally so that they don't die and don't lose naval control completely. Imbalanced games do happen yes but you need to recognize problems before they get to the point where you can do nothing about them, there is no time 3 cruisers should suddenly appear and surprise you with only a minute's notice, scout the enemy, pay attention to what is going on, plan ahead, communicate with your allies, and work together.

In a 3v1 or 4v1 situation, your only advantage is superior concentration of economy (assuming you survive the early game and take the amount of map control your team would have), which may allow you to overwhelm your opponents if they don't work together well or they vary in skill level, but just because you have more eco than any one player on the other team doesn't mean you can get away with just reacting to your opponents as they attack you, you still need to scout, you still need to be proactive in all areas of the map, you need to do everything that 4 good players would do on a team in your position, you should see that you are losing naval control and divert resources, or that they are quickly getting t2 up well before it becomes a serious problem and divert your resources. If its a 3v2 or 4v2 and your ally is handling the navy you are worried about then communicate with them and support them.

Otherwise, you are fighting from a losing position, so yes, you should lose. You might be able to take it back and you absolutely should try but all things being equal you have lost navy and at this point, if your opponent is skilled and you can't press your advantage elsewhere you probably aren't going to negate all of their work, push them from the water and reclaim naval control anytime soon.

No idea why you are suggesting cybran cruisers get some sort of buff like built in stealth because UEF and seraphim have missiles (especially since cybran have a t2 mobile stealth boat for this express purpose), cybran cruisers are actually pretty fantastic, I'd take them over UEF cruisers in most situations that don't involve bombarding a base from the water (and even then in small numbers I'd still take cybran cruisers..), they do surface damage that is pretty comparable to destroyers in dps, excellent supporting units.

[Flamingo]

No idea why you are suggesting cybran cruisers get some sort of buff like built in stealth because UEF and seraphim have missiles (especially since cybran have a t2 mobile stealth boat for this express purpose), cybran cruisers are actually pretty fantastic, I'd take them over UEF cruisers in most situations that don't involve bombarding a base from the water (and even then in small numbers I'd still take cybran cruisers..), they do surface damage that is pretty comparable to destroyers in dps, excellent supporting units.

I'm joking about the buff. I was joking that UEF cruisers should get stealth because they're so versatile as it is, not that anything needs to be rebalanced to accommodate games being played in a way they're not intended to be played. And actually Cybran do get stealthy navy thanks to the T3 sonar and the counter-intelligence boat!

Your advice is solid, but

Otherwise, you are fighting from a losing position, so yes, you should lose.

Is what I'm afraid of for the situation. I'm trying to figure out how to flip it around and be able to bring down cruisers from that losing position. The transport EMP trick does work! But I'm not always building transports if the map doesn't call for it, and while it is a cost-effective solution, I have to watch the things because on patrol they may not fire on the right boats, and if I a-click, they'll actually hover briefly, land, then stop firing, so I have to keep a sharp eye on it.

T3 works too, but takes that extra investment and lets the pressure off the opponent while you make the transition, and it's rough to get to if you aren't there by the time cruisers show up at the shore.

Playing these types of games I feel like I learn a lot about the way all the tricky little side-advantages function. I wind up trying to squeeze blood from stones more often. However, cruisers present a unique problem in that I can have almost total control of the land and air yet will still lose because cruisers are only vulnerable to naval threats. It's like this, I feel - imagine Renegades had 150 range and all else was the same except they cost more to balance them out. Try to imagine stopping them from killing you if you've lost control of the sky. You'd be screwed. Almost no trick in the book would work, save regaining air control, and how would you regain air control with 150-range renegades consistently shooting your base?

It seems like there shouldn't be a way, but even tough obstacles are just obstacles. There's got to be a way. Even if it takes absurdly more micro and a bit of luck.

[gnatinator]

I hear you, Governors are one of the best naval units in the game for the cost. If you've lost sea production, you're fairly screwed, as the Governors' only real weakness is head on naval warfare.

All other factions have great response builds in the form of floating units via mass Riptides, Blazes, Zthuees.

This is why I would support a Wagner torpedo buff, OR perhaps a Wagner "toggle float" ability.

[Apofenas]

1) T2 torpedo bombers have no problem with killing mass sufficient naval force, unless it's really good and well microed combination of governors and bullwarks. T3 aircraft carriers are efficient versus t2 torp bombers, but UEF don't have any.
2) T3 gunships have no problem with killing mass sufficient naval force, which doesn't have flak in it(and UEF navy doesn't). UEF player needs to make really good mix of cruisers with shields and micro it well to deal with walers.

In IceDreamer's balance preview mod, wagners have 12 dps torpedoes, which are not useless: stronger than t1 subs, but not strong enough to take on t2 navy. It would be good, If you would test it and give a feed back here viewtopic.php?f=42&t=9379&p=94346#p94346

[Flamingo]

It would be nice if Wagners had effective torpedoes, but sadly that's not the case at the moment so Wagners can't even be used to clear the lightest of naval units.

As for torpedo bombers, on paper all it takes is four torpedoes to take down a single cruiser, but in practice they feel a great deal less efficient than that. You can sacrifice eight bombers per cruiser and still break even, however. Like I mentioned, I think the trouble is that the range of the torpedo bomber is shorter than the range of the cruiser, so you have these issues where a squad of eight bombers may bunch up too much and then get shot down before they drop their payload. Aside from that, because they need to drop the torpedoes some distance from their target, they can't fly directly from the shore. You have to micro around and set them on a vector that will actually drop their payload.

Then that's all in a vacuum. Add in a small handful of interceptors and the sky over the cruisers becomes a no fly zone anyway. Again, this is why the T2 transports seem to be the most effective. If you can freeze the cruisers, suddenly you have a bunch of options. Your interceptors can fight theirs and not be shot down by the cruisers, you can attack with gunships, you can bomb them with torpedoes, or you can fire tactical missiles at the things.

The reason I'm wracking myself on this is because, in the last game it was an issue, I held the land and air, but the guy who built cruisers ditched and hid. His few cruisers could reach any piece of land on the map because it was a smaller map. Three cruisers was all it took to stymie a run-away victory in my favor. My ally got whacked because - it was my fault, because I think I left him without realizing what state his health was in. I know that in hindsight it's easy to say I should have covered him, though he seemed to simply give up on having his mass extractors after they got attacked - but looking at the map as it was, I'd whittled three opponents down to two, and I was running equal or greater mass throughout.

Here, I suppose I'll post the replay:
http://content.faforever.com/faf/vault/ ... id=3115825

The first cruiser comes around and my teammate handles it, but then he loses his mass extractors in an attack and gives up on having an economy. I'm kind of focused on things, so I don't realize he's doing this until we've fundamentally lost control of the sea. When the next cruisers show up, they park next to my air factory and are close enough to fire on aircraft as they launch from the pad, which contributes to my problem. I try to chase the cruisers off with tactical missiles, but he really only has the boats to micro at this point, so they just move out of the way.

The situation was pretty bad from a positioning standpoint as well, but the thing that gets me is how consistent the pressure is. Artillery functions in this same way, where a bunch of them stacking together will punch through a base and wipe everything out, but cruisers do this with a rate of fire that prevents defenses from recovering early on. Static artillery don't get SAM launchers or TMDs built in. It all contributes to a very grim psychological effect, where you feel compelled to try to run damage control, but honestly you can't because the missiles will just erode everything by sheer volume, and because of the defensive capabilities of the cruiser there's maybe only one single-purpose unit that can stop them if you don't have a navy of your own.

That's the torpedo bomber. Supposedly. But I tend to find them really unreliable, and I don't think I'm alone in feeling that. As a result, especially in this case, I fell into desperation and cries of, "Oh no, what do I do?" Double the mass income of the enemy and no ideas how to use it to stop these things before they whittle my base away. I wasted time building TMDs to stall it, but I can only wonder if trying to rush torpedo bombers would have made any difference or if my base would have been torn apart faster.

[keyser]

build tmd to allow you to creat enough torpedo bomber/corsair to one shot them.

[Rogueleader89]

Watched the replay a few times, and yeah in this particular case its all about map awareness and communication with your ally, its clear your ally is losing very early, you should have gotten stuff started in the water to support him, gone for torpedo bombers much earlier and of course supported him more on land; you get too focused on wiping out purple and lose track of what is going on.

But lets ignore what you should have done and focus on your reaction to the situation once it gets going. I agree the torpedo upgrade for your com did not work out well, but then by the time you get it its too late, if you had gotten it while your ally still had navy going it might have shifted the balance there a bit, especially if he transferred those factories to you when he lost the econ he needed to support them, but with nothing in the water you aren't going to accomplish much. At this point you have minor advantages on land and in the air, probably would have been better to push these more instead. You definitely don't start your torpedo bomber production early enough, they should start the moment you see that first cruiser if not earlier (really much earlier in this case since scouting shows your enemy has a bunch of naval production, you have none, and your ally is dying). You don't get an air factory up in your TMD covered base, thus you never get torpedo bombers in sufficient numbers because your air factory that is building them is making them in cruiser AA range and with no real defenses near it, your TMD is working to buy time, but you aren't using that time to counter.

You also seem to not be scouting, you throw away a lot of units that you don't need to which could have built up into a stronger attack or been used more effectively elsewhere (and a couple of times you sacrifice units for no reason, like t1 gunships vs the first cruiser you see, or torp bombers that decide to suicide against a cruiser instead of waiting for proper numbers), fortunately for you the enemy doesn't immediately reclaim these and turn them into more cruisers .

Also you put a ton of resources into a monkeylord.... all of those resources could be torpedo bombers or better yet a strong ground push that could kill your enemy, a monkeylord won't solve any problems that solutions a fourth of its cost wouldn't. A strong t2 or early t3 push with proper support would be enough to secure the mainland and you can hit grey's naval yard from the shoreline to cut off cruiser production, not defended much.


But yeah, there may have been a few brief windows through which you could have pressed your advantages or bought enough time to stabilize the game, and you very nearly pulled off a tac snipe that would have won it for you, but most of the problems that wrecked the game for you were a direct cause of a lack of coordination and teamwork earlier on.