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When do you actually want to make Athenas

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7 years ago
Discuss.


When do you feel like you should make them.

To me it's when I need eraser/djinn/halberd/infil/ultimatum, but there's not much else
+1 / -0

7 years ago
only time to sneak around back and make fleas / con on big hilly type maps

otherwise I never make em
+0 / -0

7 years ago
They used to be a nice comeback mechanic in FFA that allowed winning uncoordinated 3v1 even. Since the insane rezzing nerf I haven't seen them anymore. Stats wise the nerf wasn't too crazy, but removing cloak and low weight of Athena turned them into pure aa food.

All I'd recommend them now for is sneaky djinns and if you need its units.
+0 / -0
7 years ago
Athena does have cloak...
+1 / -0
On hilly maps I don't want to make a light vehicle factory but I do sometimes want an Impaler.

On flat maps I don't want to make a spider factory but I do sometimes want Flea/Infiltrator.

Occasionally I might want Djinn/Scythe/Spectre but I'd be more likely to just make their factories.

Having made those units, I would generally set an Athena to repeat-build Bandits. Many factories' compositions are improved by a smattering of Bandits.

I use the Athena far more for its variety of units than for its specops or rez roles.
+7 / -0
Firepluk
Obviously when u want to deal with the enemy's nuke and his whole base alltogether :P
+8 / -0

7 years ago
It loses cloak when rezzing. And for just standing around it's too expensive.
+0 / -0

7 years ago
I can't be bothered finding any of the ravings I've posted about Athena, but basically you need to think of it like a factory that's cheaper and highly mobile.

Its Resurrection is a trap, and stealthy delivery is a cheese that can be effective, but requires opposing team to not have air. Aquanim has the right of it IMO.
+3 / -0
I feel like rezzurecting mechanics is a bit obscure and confusing for noobs, as only 2 units can do it, many don't know about it and nobody uses it. Imho it should be embraced or removed. Personally I'd like to see an experiment where rezzing costs much more energy and is faster, allowing it to be aside overdrive more interesting "economic victory" than in BA building metal converters.

2 units being commander and Athene, hint: it's more efficient to build athenes, apart from first commander. Yet they get very close at 3th-4th upgrade and commander has a gun and more hp :)

@edit: I said it should be embraced or removed, but it would make me sad to see it removed.
+2 / -0

7 years ago
I'd probably use athenas much more if they were easier to use. Currently they are quite micro-intensive to build stuff with. With a factory I can go 1-q-q-q-w-w-w-ctrl-r and make 6 units on repeat, while with Athena I have to manually place all of them after digging through the menu to find them first.
It would be very nice if hotkey support was better for athenas, and if you selected to build a unit, instead of having to place it, athena would just plop it right under itself(or nearest available area).
+4 / -0

7 years ago
I think caretakers should be able to rez
+0 / -0

7 years ago
I think resurrection should either be a specialised unit (similar to domi), be for commanders only, or be taken out of the game entirely. It's simply not viable at a competitive level, and largely serves to troll.

Athena itself is a unit that only shares the abilities of a whole bunch of other units/facs, doing nothing unique on its own, while being rather messy (as USrankFealthas pointed out). While I personally enjoy exploring its uses, I don't really think its current iteration has a place in the game.
+1 / -0
5 years ago
Normally, I start with a tank factory, so that I could churn out a few fast and durable Blitzes, and I usually want to start building striders after 10 minutes pass. However, not only do I want to support my striders with Iris mobile cloaking fields, but I'd also like the option to be able to supplement my tanks with more lightweight units like Glaives, and anti-heavy units like Lances. While I can't build either with an Athena, I can still build units that are close enough in purpose, namely Bandits and Phantoms, and I can even build Fleas and Djinns on top of it all, all for a lower price than building a Cloakbot Factory and Amphbot Factory. Plus, Athenas can be built from Strider Hubs, which I need to build striders with anyways, so that's a convenient bonus.

Oh, and Athenas also come with quite a bit of build power, flight capabilities, cloaking, jamming, and radar, all of which would make them helpful for reclaiming metal on the fly (which I utilized in some of the final missions of the campaign).
+0 / -0

5 years ago
I really like Athena for the flexibility it gives you.

I get that it's expensive and that you have tospend ~1400 metal for just having one. But I find Athena stops up the gaps other factories have. I primarily use Athena for making Conjurers and fleas.

For some reason people don't scout properly and the amount of times I see Phantoms and Lances on my side shooting at radar signatures -which they always miss - makes me ill. I queue up 50-100 fleas and then there's always scouts available.

The resurrect function is underutilized. I remember a huge game on Altored Divide where our side was doing great with deep raiding and really hammering the enemy rear areas. I couldn't understand why these lobsters kept fighting on and seemingly with little ill effects from our deep strikes. In the replay I saw Jummy flying around a fleet of 10 Athenas and rezzing the destroyed stuff almost as fast as we could kill it.

Other units that it makes that are particularly useful are the Scythe / Phantom combo which is great if you're playing something non-sneaky and need an extra dimension to your game.

Impaler is an excellent LR unit that Aquanim already mentioned.

It's really a great constructor, even if we forget about all the sneaky Djinn tricks and Firepluk "did u nuke urself" shennanigans.
+0 / -0

5 years ago
When i need help my teammate with his trollcom com rezzing (who lost all his module shards already).
+0 / -0

5 years ago
Made some Athenas to get in the back lines and build an infiltrator to land a nuke once.
+0 / -0
Firepluk
Made 5 today in clusterfck battle just to fast-rush some widows closely to the enemy front-line to sneak-in && emp anti-nux
tl;dr - success, enemy's front porculon went with a shiny poof and allied tanks marched in meeting no resistance :D

[Spoiler]
+0 / -0


5 years ago
quote:
It's simply not viable at a competitive level, and largely serves to troll.


Lol. I'd say resurrection is stealth OP. Paying E only for units is insanely opportunity cost effective past a certain point in the overdrive system.
+3 / -0
It becomes extremely annoying in games which are already taking too long to finish.

A few hidden, terraformed singus are something that is nigh impossible to kill with long-range weapons, impossible to scout if they are built underwater (because Swift has no sonar...), and enable a swarm of Athenas - which themselves are cloaked, extremely fast, radar-invisible, regenerating targets, thus also completely immune to long-range weapons - to rez everything very quickly, even after a nuke hits the spot repeatedly.

Sure, the amount of Athenas you need to do this costs like a Paladin. But a Paladin is interactive: it has to take risk to make cost, and this risk features very effective Paladin counters. Athena does its job behind the lines, and there are no efficient ways to kill a Paladin worth of Athenas which are protected by the enemy's entire everything.

Oh and also if you kill only a half of the Athena-ball, the survivors will just rez their fallen sisters.

---

When more than one player uses this, or even just the hidden buried distributed singus to rebuild, the result is three and a half hour long games where the only way to win is to hope the other guy gives in to hunger and exhaustion first.
+2 / -0


5 years ago
Athena balls are allergic to shaman surprises.
+2 / -0