EA Staff (Retired)
@Mavster07 I am unsure what design you are referring to. But I don't agree with that either. Just make the harvestor free to build upon death without the reward. The time it will take to get back to the ore field will result in the opponent yielding an extra 50+ Tiberium over the player who lost the harvestor instead of the 150+.
Developers,
If you believe this mechanic has a positive effect on gameplay, I must say you do not understand what incentive's you are creating here. 4/5 of my games opponents completely disregard the missile pads AND ME until they kill a harvester. If you make harvesters faster, then this mechanic is more manageable. But people straight up sacrifice attack bikes just to get the 1 single volley off. Despite my harvestor being almost 100% on the next tile over, it does not matter = He is rewarded the volley before my 2 laser rocket troopers can do enough damage to kill him.
And the fact he used 2-4 attack bikes is irrelevant. He is rewarded for his poor play and I am punished for successfully defending my harvester 3/4 times.
Please reread the last sentence again as I cannot state the results of this mechanic any more clearly.
This mechanic either needs a tweak, or to be removed. Here are some potential suggestions:
Does it not seem a bit off that the best chance to win is harvesters instead of the missile pads? Missile pads are irrelevant map wise. It is all about attack paths of the harvesters that dictate game play and unit decision.
If you want to argue that I need better positioning before hand, I understand. But realize when you are defending a pathway to your harvester and a well placed jade missile comes, your units don't move fast enough. At most you can save 1 or 2 units before it hits. And then he just rolls in and gets the 1-2 volleys he needs to down the harvester.
This is the game's biggest fault game play wise. Because of this mechanic, strategy goes out the window. It is not an RTS in it's current state. I do hope the dev's will play this game enough to realize this.
I have uninstalled the game as I wrote this, but should the devs remove this mechanic I will come back running. But until then this game is nothing more than at C&C Harvester Hunting Simulator.
Best of luck to all the devs and everyone else involved in this project. Thank you for letting me partake in the closed Alpha. Also thank you to all the players on the forums I got to banter with. Peace & love to you all.
- JPie_
You can defend against bike spam, it just takes a ton of really silly pathing-abuse micro. You basically have to take advantage of the way that your units can move through your own units and the Bikes inability to be moved onto hexes where you have a unit that's still partially atop. It's not so much a matter of racing the damage as it is body blocking.
However, in practice this is a bit frustrating because the simplified controls of the game don't exactly lend themselves well - if you make your units overlap each other it becomes impossible to select the one you want, and when you're trying to hex-block movement it can get finicky as to whether the game accepted your move command or saw it as an attack command (which might result in some really terrible pathing). Given how crucial pulling off and/or defending harvestor rushes are right now to the outcome of the match - having it come down to a lot of fiddly pathing is understandably frustrating. I can only imagine newer players getting turned off when matched against higher ranked folks that not only have stronger units but have gotten a lot of practice at making this movement system work for them.
Losing a game in the first 45 seconds because your opponent's got a better grasp of the wonky movement/attack stuff and can basically leverage that to win the first engagement even with a worse composition of units (and kill a harvestor to snowball the match) puts way more emphasis on micro than strategy.
The problem is that there's no real cost to trying a rush strategy. I'll say that high-level matches typically don't have harvester-rush as the go-to strategy, because it is defensible if you know how, and if I know you know how then it's not worth risking my units. However, there's almost no opportunity cost to send my first few units at your harvester field. I can immediately tell whether a rush is going to work by what units you've built and how you positioned them, and if you're set up proper I can pull back and we'll be fighting over point control. I remember back in the day in Starcraft when "Zerg Rush" was a thing that basically meant an all-in early tactic where as the rusher you needed to get a ton of advantage from the assault as you were sacrificing your tech and economy to get a larger initial force for a quick attack - if your rush got defended well you probably lost. But the thing was you had to gamble by doing a rush build before knowing if it was a good choice. In this right now, it costs me nothing to go probe whether you could defend my rush, and I can switch to rushing on a dime.
