Non-Conventional Chrono Dampener

[Flamingo]

I was playing a FFA game earlier and a friend wound up with some breathing room to upgrade to Chrono Dampener. Now, I've never seen that ability before, but I couldn't help but notice that it has an extreme range and that it frequently subjects everything within that range to an EMP stun. Both myself and another player, considered two of the better guys in our group, were totally stumped on what to do about it.

I tried dispatching some gunships to snipe the guy, but he ground-fired the chrono dampener, which stun-locked the gunships and the interceptors that were trying to support them. Several times I had a far superior ground force, but they couldn't advance between the enemy gun range and the dampener's stun power. They could fire once, then would fall into stun and get picked off by the much smaller force of auroras. Armies that could conventionally kill an ACU were pretty helpless. It seems like the only option was to spam mobile artillery and T2 PDs until I could get a Monkeylord. Maybe a tac missile snipe or a bomber snipe, too, but that's winning the game in one fell swoop.

So supposing you're playing a non-conventional game like FFA and you're facing down this upgrade. What do you do? What's the justification for this ability? It seems like if an ACU with that power got into your base it could stunlock the entire defender's advantage into submission while a token force clears out the resistance. What's the balancing factor at work here? Because we had two players trying to work on this and neither of us could get any kind of favorable engagement until the air snipe pulled through. I guess another Aeon player would win the fight if they had shields, but I play Cybran - so you know, it's not like I'm going to beat an Aeon ACU at mid-game if my army, which relies entirely on it's high rate of fire, can only fire off a shot once every three seconds.

[Reaper Zwei]

Well certainly a cool upgrade that you don't see very often, and I suppose it does seem strong. Trying to out range it is one thing you can do, so as a Cybran I'd say rocket bots would be pretty decent idea. Also it uses power so power stalling your opponent will make it useless. It doesn't specifically target air units so you can use them against it. If he ground fires to manually set it off keep in mind he cant move while ground firing, so having say a tac missile strike ready to go could work in conjunction with an air attack.

Did a bit of playing around with this in sandbox(maybe most people know this stuff but who knows).
The upgrade works against a lot of things but it doesn't work against ACU's, structures, and Experimental's. It does work against SCU's. The upgrade has a range of 35 and specifically targets land and sea units. Air units will be stunned if within range of it. Also it will not work in the water(even if its shallow water and the gun can still fire). It can be manually set off so as to stun air units by ground firing. Even though you can set it off by ground firing it will automatically trigger if a land unit is within range regardless if the commander can shoot it or not. The upgrade uses 200 power when it stuns.

[Flamingo]

Although the ACU can't move while it's ground firing, it only has to ground fire once to activate the EMP stun, after which it can move, which will prevent it from being hit by tac missiles.

You know, this really doesn't seem like a very strong upgrade against most factions, but against Cybran I'd say it might be just goofball levels of OP, and it's due to the particular advantages the Cybran are supposed to have. I mean, suppose you try this against the UEF and they build Percivals. Well, Percies load all their threat potential into the alpha and have to reload over a long period anyway, so they hit you with their alpha, get stunned, reload during the stun, then kill the Aeon ACU when the stun wears off. This upgrade has pretty minimal impact on their performance. Any unit with a higher alpha and lower rate of fire is not too greatly affected by chrono dampener.

Additionally, most factions can get shields, an engineering suite, and some form of gun upgrade simultaneously, maintaining their abilities as dangerous combatants into the mid game if necessary. In a mirror match between Aeon players, the Aeon player that upgrades the shield will have more general survivability, and since Aeon units will still function at a reasonable DPS, the Aeon player that gets the shield will still probably have an advantage or will at least break even. This is not so for the Cybran, who have to sacrifice their gun upgrade for their engineering suite, meaning their ACU will fire less frequently than the Aeon ACU and can't obtain greater durability in the other case.

Meanwhile, since Cybran units rely on their high rate of fire, chrono dampener is disproportionately effective against them. The brick, for example, does 150 damage and then freezes for two or three seconds, which puts it at an effective 50 DPS, an 85% reduction in combat ability. The Percival, as I mention above, doesn't care either way - it does 1,600 damage per shot and doesn't worry about your stupid EMP radius. Resorting to mobile artillery allows you to hit the Aeon ACU, but Cybran artillery enjoys lower overall damage in exchange for much larger splash, which makes trebuchets a lot less dangerous to the Aeon ACU in spite of it having less health than if it were using personal shields.

The second thing it does is disable your mobility. Again, for the UEF this is no big deal because their units are normally slow anyway. Ilshovas can rely on their range, Aeon obsidians are beefy and slow normally. Cybran units usually rely on more micro, and the chrono dampener prevents that from being a thing. You can't comblock the Aeon ACU if he's using chrono dampener. You can't surround him if he doesn't intentionally let you. In fact your basic units can't push past their outer-most firing range, for the most part. You suggest hoplites, but someone in our group thought the range on the dampener was 35 as well, which means hoplites only just barely exceed that range by a hair.

So to sum it all up in terms of standard ground engagements, chrono dampener has reasonable impact on other factions, but against Cybran it reduces direct army-wide combat effectiveness by about 70-90% due to Cybran units relying on their rate of fire to be threatening. It prevents micro, which disables the Cybran advantage attached to movement speed. The Cyran ACU can't beat the Aeon ACU in a toe-to-toe fight by mid game. And on top of all this, the chrono dampener also disables air harassment by freezing incoming air units. Freezing air units is particularly meaningful when thinking about interceptors, which have to chase their targets and will immediately be picked off if they're forced to hold position over even a small grouping of AA.

I'm wondering if there's not a lot of untapped defensive potential behind this upgrade as well. I know that Aeon players would probably prefer to have their personal shields to save them from sniping, but as a Cybran player I know you really don't need personal shields to stay alive. Imagine, for example, if your opponent gets a strat bomber before you have ASFs. Normally that's a big deal because they're so fast and you can't catch them, but with the chrono dampener installed, all you'd have to do is ground fire as the strat bomber passes over your base and your defenses will have plenty of time to shoot it down before it makes a second run. You don't even have to time it - just set your commander to ground fire and have him be a standing EMP beacon. It'll practically eliminate most air harassment, and anything that passes over the ACU on the way to its target won't make it.

-edit-
I hashed out the math on DPS reduction a little too fast earlier. It drops rhinos and bricks by about 60%. As I understand, the dampener stuns units every five seconds, the stun lasts for two seconds, and it takes a second for turrets to find their target again after the stun has worn off if the enemy has moved at all. Still, having your entire army reduced to 40% combat effectiveness is pretty insane considering that it only gets more powerful the more units you have in the fight. What are the mental gymnastics people went through to make the dampener work like this? Do you guys just want it to stun Percies and that's all you were thinking about?

[KrogothFTW]

Theoretically, the Wagner might fair better; its two surface weapons fire every two and four seconds. I understand the Percival's slow firing weapon is hardly effected.

[DeimosEvotec]

Maybe we can make it so that the dampener also affects reload progress so it doesn't differ so much between different units.

[Lieutenant Lich]

Theoretically, the Wagner might fair better; its two surface weapons fire every two and four seconds. I understand the Percival's slow firing weapon is hardly effected.

Yeah, because percivals are LIFE! So damn good and awfully useful.

[TheKoopa]

Buildings and ACUs are not stunned, and it is not a cheap upgrade. I would kill their units with your ACU and retreat, and surround the enemy, at which point stun will do nothing.

[Lieutenant Lich]

Have you considered getting stealth, gun, microwave laser and kill the dude? With Chrono Dampener, he sacrifices the Aeon's strong defensive shield that can take a big beating.

[briang]

Do you have any idea how much energy the ACU Lazer costs?

[TheKoopa]

I think it costs at least 10