Anaryl wrote:Irrelevant - how many people playing a faction has no bearing on it's strengths or weaknesses.
Yes it does. Every competitive game scene I have experienced from RTS, to fighting games, to FPS, top level players will always use whatever is the strongest race - character - gun is. There are times when new strats are found and tiers shift (as you mentioned about Zerg when we had
this exact argument 5 mins ago in chat) but we have enough experience now with F.A as it stands to make those judgements. So until more people start playing and winning tournaments with Cybran, my point stands in this case.
Anaryl wrote:It's amazing how little you actually said here. If gunships were too strong people would spam them? Tautology much?
The only point you made is absurd - transports have more strategic significance than gunships? This is not even remotely close to being true. The only real importance of transports vis a vis the other factions is whether T1 [transports] all can carry 6 T1 engys - they can.
There is a very good reason I made this statement about gunships
specifically. Gunships have the ability of a land unit to continually attack ground units & structures (unlike bombers that require a 'run') but they have the mobility of an air unit. This makes them in effect a class breaking unit, since why would you bother with ground units over gunships 'if' they didn't have major vulnerabilities. When restorers were strong, they could fight against air, had air mobility and kill ground units. There was almost no reason to build anything else. Other types of unit don't overlap class divides in this way, hence why they need to have more balancing tradeoffs than other types of units.
Yes ofc transports have more strategic significance than Gunships because transports can be used in so many more roles than them. Economic expansion, raiding, snipes, circumventing defenses and radar, evacuation etc etc.. Gunships can only fulfill a few of those roles. gunships fulfill as many roles as the units u can load onto them. You can even make a gunship 'out of a transport'!
Also, it amazes me how little you say and how many big words you look up in the thesaurus to say it (no one is falling for that btw).
Anaryl wrote:I suspect you really want drops to be a significant part of gameplay but there's no point warping gameplay/balance in order to facilitate this. Cybran units are incredibly unsuited to drops - they have weak artillery so arty drops are going to be weak, the mantis is ill-suited to frontal assaults, it's strength lies in it's speed - it's far more suited to raiding and battles of manoeuvre. The same could be said of it's T2 bots.
Due to the Deceiver working when its loaded onto their transports (as opposed to shields not working), drops are clearly supposed to be a major part of their game play, but the numbers as they stand gimp their effectiveness a bit too much (just like pretty much every unit in the game that has had to be tweaked to fulfill its role properly).
Anaryl wrote:You know a lot of the players posting here are on the business end of the ladder - for all your talk about empiricism, you seem to be proceeding about this in a very unscientific fashion. You are blatantly cherry-picking your data.
In summation - some Cybran units need fixing. But I could deconstruct this further - some units need fixing
Oh yeah here's a replay - I just picked up and used Cybran, apart from one game last night vs a poor newbling, for the first time in years. All those things that you said suck won me the game.
I defer to my stat above of 2 (TWO) out of SIXTEEN, until that is until the empirical evidence of overall usage / win-loss stats and general trends change.. Not
your single replay from last night.