noms wrote:uberge3k wrote:For the price of a scathis, you can have 49 bricks. How can you defend the scathis against those 49 bricks? Or the 10 that enter your base and murder the scathis before it's even built?
Play offensively, on maps that are more complex than "50 mex and one choke point", stop expecting to be able to magically turtle and survive against a 50-brick advantage from your enemy, and I think you'll find that the scathis isn't effective.
This would never happen in a real game. They wouldnt just rush a scathis until after they built a couple T4. They will build up a really strong defensive area with huge defence and shields before even making one.
Irrelevant.
Team A puts X amount of mass into their defensive area. We're assuming that by "defensive area" we're referring to a balanced lategame army, and not stationary defense units that can be cost-effectively beaten.
Team B puts X amount of mass into an equal force that can match Team A's.
Team A now starts a Scathis, which costs Y mass.
Team B now has a window of opportunity where they can enforce their army with (Y * (current time / total time to amass Y mass)), and proceed to overrun Team A with their superior force before the scathis is finished.
noms wrote:Plus it takes alot of engy power to make that many bricks in 2-3 minutes late game.
The scathis could only be completed in "2-3 minutes" if you have 63k mass in storage. A decent player would have instead continually spent this on a larger army, easily overruning the scathis-building player. If they couldn't overrun the scathis-building player, then the scathis-building player evidently had such a massive lead that they probably would have won regardless of whether they built a scathis, bombers, a larger army, more experimentals, or whatever else they felt like ending the game with.
noms wrote:You would allow the scathis player to keep spamming ASF to protect his beloved scathis from t3 bombers.
Scathis costs X mass.
Enough bombers to kill a shielded scathis cost Y mass, where Y is less than X. For the sake of argument, let's say you made 15 strat bombers at a cost of 31,500 mass (and deal 41,250 damage per pass, for those counting). Therefore, we can assume that Y = ~X * 0.5.
We'll also assume that the remainder of (X - Y) is put into ASF. That works out to around 78.
Now for the tricky part. Assuming that the scathis-building player continues to produce ASF in addition to building said scathis, at what point will the scathis-building player be able to defend against the bombers?
The answer: never.
With proper micro, enough bombers will always get through to destroy the scathis, and probably a lot of other things that the scathis-building player likely would have preferred weren't destroyed. And, even worse, for every ASF the scathis-builder makes, that's an additional ASF that the attacker can build himself.
Air warfare rewards aggression quite well, and punishes those who fall behind.
The reason for this is that ASF need to be behind their targets to shoot at them for a long enough time to destroy them. But, with a 78-ASF lead, the enemy will simply never be able to get enough ASF built to stay alive long enough to shoot down a significant amount of the incoming bombers.
Thus, the only way that the scathis can be built and survive against a snipe in the meantime, is for one of these situations to be met:
1) Massive micro failure on the part of the attacker. (ie, not selecting their ASF and right clicking on the lead bomber to assist it)
2) The scathis builder already had enough of a lead to have an equal or larger air force to match the attacker. In which case, he deserved to win, and could do so at his leisure - scathis or not.