Dregs asked me to have a look at this game involving Thug. In short I don't conclude anything about shield balance on the basis of this game. I think Dregs plays it incorrectly by being too eager to dive in to push an advantage, attacking piecemeal and not using Rover mobility.

[Spoiler]
By 3:00 both players have expanded fairly peacefully. Dregs is doing a bit better on economy but @ATOSTIC is about to fix it with a Caretaker.

At 3:00 Dregs spots the enemy commander and moves all units to fight it head-on. All the fighting in the relevant parts of the game takes place in this area. I think this is the strategic mistake of the matchup, since choosing to fight in a single location negates the Rover speed advantage.

[Spoiler]
By 5:00 Dregs has lost a Ravager, Ripper and Fencer (630 metal) to attacking into the enemy commander and then retreating. @ATOSTIC has lost a Thug and an Outlaw (420 metal). I think there is a big mistake here, which is the 1050 metal in army left rallied just south of the battle. This latency in getting units to the front probably makes up the difference in economy management from earlier.

[Spoiler]
At 5:24 @ATOSTIC pulls back to meet his reinforcements and kills the Rovers.

[Spoiler]
At 6:05 @ATOSTIC attacks and picks off an out of position Ravager. The Stardust fights it off with support and he loses a Felon and some other units.

[Spoiler]
By 6:41 the pattern for the rest of the game is set. Dregs feeds handfuls of units into the shieldball on multiple occasions. Other positions on the map are barely attacked.

Dregs has spend 1310 metal on defenses on the other side of the map so far, while @ATOSTIC has spent 530. The shieldball costing 2150 is fought piecemeal by Ravagers and Rippers over the next minute, but with no individual assault costing more than 500 metal.

Thug is certainly looking fairly powerful and it is interesting to see the slow valuable units beat the less efficient mobile units. None of the engagements seemed to be wildly off. I would expect 630 cost in Rovers to lose when assaulting 420 cost in Shields plus a Lotus and Guardian commander.

What I want to see from Rover is more mobility play and better use of Fencer. In this game each battle had one or two Fencers sitting on the side of each battle, however they had to set up after the battle started because a lot of battles were Rover assaults. I think Fencers should be used to force confrontations instead of as a bit of extra DPS (if they should be used at all here). Fencers are significantly faster than Thugs and have the DPS to break through three Thug shields. In theory they are impossible to catch or harass without Bandit or Rogue.

This game could have gone differently if the Rovers that were idling near the battle at 5:00 participated. The faster reinforce time of Rover is part of the mobility advantage, and it was not used.

@Godde's solution to this matchup was spam ripper and then dodge every Rogue shot using superfluidity.

But that was when Ripper was overtuned. With that out of the equation, looks like things are back to normal.

I think Dominatrix changes hurt this suprisingly much. Rover kind of used to be able to do a judo trick by trying to steal Thugs and Outlaws while avoiding Rogue and Felon fire. This rarely was sufficient to win, but it was a decent stalling tactic.

This required the capture to be successful in a very short time; those times have significantly increased vs specifically Thug, so now the expected outcome of trying to steal individual Thugs from a ball is the semi-captured Thug filtering away before being captured, and Dominatrix taking (possibly fatal) amount of damage to Rogue/Felon.

On the spectrum of commonly played Zero-K maps it seems to me that Fairyland is a map where Shieldbots should be mildly favoured over Rover - or at least, it wouldn't trouble me greatly if that were the case.

B862972 2 on Banana Republic v1.0.1 Tried a bit of fencering the ball, didn't manage to kill a single thug in early game. Just wasted time. Also opted not to try raiding because outlaws/bandits, especially in chokepoints on that map would easily have stopped me from doing so and I don't like donating metal where I can avoid doing so. Maybe my best option was to go mostly ravagers but even still, bandits, rogues, outlaws and snitches would have done me in. I decide to switch to recluse spam and ATOSTIC simply makes a good play with cloaked snitches, GG.

Since it's part of the same brand of typical crap you can expect in this meta that I'm so wrong about, I built AA because I knew GS were coming. Imagine that, like fucking clockwork the locusts came. But it was already lost by then. The initial cheddar is strong enough without brie to go on top.

Postgame chat Randy says he doesn't agree with my perspective but I honestly can't see what options I have as rover here. The fact that so many people can argue against this for so long has frustrated me to the point where I'm honestly confounded. Really pissed off that I'm having to expend so much energy on something that to me, appears glaringly obvious.

My 2c Rover is screwed in this match up if it loses the early game initiative. Once a ball is allowed to form and put you in a position where you need to combat it, things go bad. Rover must try to use its mobility to indefinitely prevent that happening on anything close to an even cost:cost basis, and that imo takes much better play to execute than it does to defeat.