Special Unit Balance

[vivafringe]

Okay, I hit Super Titan today. To commemorate this event, here are my opinions on special unit balance. The tl;dr is that Feedback is trash and Scallywags is the best.

Feedback:

Maybe it’s obvious that Scramblers are trash. But I wanted to explain anyway. The basic problem is that they are guaranteed to die after they hack a target. Also they have a chance to die before they even hack once.

I think the contributing factors to this are:
- It’s the only special that needs a melee attack to work. So after it runs in there and does its dirty scrambling business, it’s in totally exposed territory.
- 1 hp.
- 1 hp on your hacked unit. So you can’t ever use it to wall (a scout will just kill it).

The one thing they are good for is they can situationally do a lot of damage to a base. But proper play mitigates a lot of this threat. A scrambler is terrible against 2 layers of soldiers. And since soldiers are this game’s bread and butter, the natural counter to scramblers just happens to be what I want to do anyway.

On the rare times I’ve lost to a scrambler, it’s involved them taking my heavy. The easy solution is to not let them take your heavy! Hide the heavy in behind a layer of soldiers and the scrambler can’t ever get to it.

Both Adorables and Scallywags dominate Feedback, imo. That is to say, they are even or have an advantage on every single map of the game.

Adorables:

Adorables are all about the surprise cheez wins. But again, it is possible to protect yourself from this to a large extent, just by infinite walls of soldiers. There is nothing a Mobi can really do against 2 rows of soldiers, other than attack somewhere else. So as player skill increases, the amount of miracle Mobi base kills decreases sharply.

How often can a Mobi player attack somewhere else? All of the two-spawn maps are wide open enough that it’s hard to defend everywhere. However! Foundry and Sweetie Plains are such quick beatdown maps that special units don’t usually enter the equation at all. Even at high levels, most Foundry/Sweetie Plains games end without a special unit being made at all (note: this might change once FTA is fixed). That leaves Long Nine, which is indeed a very nice Mobi map. You never know whether the Mobi’s going to come top or bottom, so you have to try to defend both and just hope for the best.

On the one-spawn maps, Mobi is at a huge disadvantage to Scallywags. Anyone who’s fought a well-placed Bombshell on Glitch knows how difficult it is to beat that position with Mobis.

Scallywags:

People are terrible at using bombshells, which I think negates their effectiveness at the lower levels. But if you are good, play patiently, and place your bombshells well, this is the best race.

Bombshells are simultaneously amazing at fending off early rushes (any wouldbe rush of soldiers just gets blown to bits) and winning the late game. While an Adorables player has to build a considerable force before she can safely build a damage-free Mobi, early bombshells are very stable and difficult to beat on the 1-spawn maps. On the 2-spawn maps, bombshells are much worse - just attack where the bombshell isn’t! But on the 1-spawn maps that’s really not an option. For instance, on Peekaboo, your only valid attack is through their extra witpoint. If you place a Bombshell near that witpoint and your opponent is Feedback or Adorables, you’ve basically won the game already.

Furthermore, as mentioned before, the 2-spawn maps (especially Foundry) are generally very light on special units. So the fact that Bombshells are especially bad on them doesn’t matter much.

As a result, I think Scallywags is by far the best race. I am winning more than my fair share on the 1-spawn maps, both as 1p and as 2p. It's gotten to the point that when I see I'm paired against a non-Scallywag on a 1-spawn map, I do a mental fistpump because I know it will be an easy game.