Special Unit Balance

[vivafringe]

I think Bombshells are pretty amazing for attacking, though. It's a slow and painful process, but once a good player starts his Bombshell deathpush, I think it's impossible to stop. It's easy to confuse the speed of a push with the effectiveness of it. Again, if the opponent can move the theater of war away from the bombshell, then he has a chance. But the 1-spawn maps don't let you do this, so you just have to roll over and die, from my experience.

Can you link me to some good Scrambler replays? In particular I'd be interested in scramblers being used to fend off slow, measured Bombshell deathpushes on 1-spawn maps. Whenever I watch a Feedback replay in the super-titan thread I see lots of mistakes.

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(09-07-2012 07:59 AM)bmike Wrote:  Does it need to have +1 health or perhaps be able to scramble a range of 2?

Is there something that would fix this unit in your experience to make it worth 7 wits? (or should it be discounted to 6 perhaps)

It would be interesting to see statistically how often each piece is spawned sorted by league. It would be a bit tricky since you first would need to see what race was played at what level (removing the people that didn't pay for the packs) and then also see what rate of play vs rate of usage was.

A big confounding factor in the statistical data would be that Scallywags is the default race. I'm willing to bet that even within leagues, the better players are the ones that have paid 6$. So Scallywags is going to look worse as a race than it actually is.

Proposing fixes is tricky. My recommendation would be to try a lot of different fixes and see what's best. There really isn't a substitute for testing. That said, here are my knee-jerk responses:

- Reducing wit cost seems like a good proposal. You could try 6 or even 5 and see how games were going. I don't know if the designers want every special unit to cost 7 though.
- Increasing HP seems bad for flavor reasons. It "makes sense" that this tiny microchip thing only has 1 hp.
- Increasing range to 2 flashes alarm bells in my head. Maybe it would actually be fine, but it sounds way too good.
- Increasing movement to 4 isn't as powerful as giving it range 2. However, it would give it a really good shot at hacking other special units, which would make it very strong. It's possible that's still too good though.