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How to stop badgers?

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Just a strategy question mostly for 1v1. Badgers confound me again and again. They outrange most units and defenses, they are cheap enough to appear early, and they are fast enough that chasing them down usually doesn't work.

With tanks, I can try to chase them down with kodachi/blitz but they usually have LLTs, scorchers, rippers, or a commander they can run behind. And kodachi/blitz die fast to badger mines, too.

With tanks I can rush tremor, but tremor is expensive, slow, and vulnerable. Also tremor can be only 1 place at a time, while badgers are fast and cheap enough to attack everywhere the tremor isn't.

I haven't tried emissary against badgers. Not sure that would be better than tremor.

I might try to make and repair razors or gauss to just take the hits. Is that the answer, just make defenses that take them a long time to chew through, to delay them while making tremors?


Spiders also seem to have no good answer to badgers. I've heard it suggested to make widows to stun their riot units, and then chase down the badgers with fleas. This sounds like a difficult micro-intensive plan that might not work if he has more than a couple scorchers or LLTs. Badgers are so fast, they are good at retreating into safety from even fleas. But maybe it's the thing to do anyway, what do you think?

A crab on a spire can outrange them. Maybe that's the real answer with spiders.


Same for shieldbots, doubly because badger mines can get through shields if you walk over them. Shieldbots are slow, especially a shield ball with aspis. In team games the answer is to ask an ally to make artillery units. Maybe a stream of dirtbags would work to push them back in 1v1. But that would be constantly bleeding resources.


Is the answer simply to switch factories to one that can counter them? e.g. hovers have halberds that I've heard are good against badgers. Or the rover factory can produce a unit called a badger that can trade on equal terms with badgers.


edit: pickets on height-7 spires outrange them. So I guess that's a good defensive solution.
+0 / -0


3 years ago
quote:
edit: pickets on height-7 spires outrange them. So I guess that's a good defensive solution.

Heh, such artillery
+0 / -0
3 years ago
Just avoid them. Arty has low dps and is slow to push. While the enemy wastes metal on arty, just build raiders/assaults to go around them and kill enemy eco/production.
+1 / -0
3 years ago
This is not a new idea: Play against someone using badgers in the very manner that you cannot find a counter for. See how your opponent handles it. If it's really such a powerful weapon, you'll win the game. If it's not, you'll learn a good way to counter them. You can't lose.
+3 / -0
3 years ago
Badgers are great at escaping pursuit, but the're lousy artillery overall. You can counter them with better artillery. Emissaries should work, as should slings.

Not every factory can fight every strategy well, so yes, sometimes you need a fac switch.

Also, maneuver warfare is indeed a thing. If your enemy has a large badger ball somewhere, you can attack where it isn't. If your enemy has badgers everywhere, you can concentrate your raiders/assaults and push one spot in.
+0 / -0
3 years ago
+6 / -0


3 years ago
With Tank, just investing in a similar value of Reapers should allow you to cruise right through the light rain of mines and squash everything
+0 / -0
quote:
I haven't tried emissary against badgers. Not sure that would be better than tremor.


They are very accurate. Emissary is one of best counter to badgers. Better then tremor.
Jumpjet have firewalker (best counter as fire burns area effect).
Planes can use phoenix.
Dunno if sling is good vs them from cloaky.
Shields have dirtbag and they can just take mines on meat shield.
Spiders have crab spire.
Tanks can just go through mines because minotaurs have large health pool.
Gunships can kill them very fast if there is no anti air nearby.
Amphs seems is in very sad position against mines. Seems they need gymnastics with lobsters or sen grizzly in.
Hovers can use halberd in bunker mode or lance.
Anyway badger is unfun unit (like tremor) and they don't require large skill to be used.
+1 / -0
Multiplayer B932942 2 on Firebreak v1.1
This game, I had hovers and my opponent had rovers. He made almost nothing but badgers and static defenses, and when I saw that I made almost nothing but halberds, which I heard counter badgers.

The halberds did usually catch the badgers, but they often died in the process. While it was almost all I could do to make enough halberds to catch his badgers, he somehow had enough metal to constantly build more badgers and more unbreakable defenses closer and closer to me.

Even though I had more units and more map presence, and both my Value Killed and my Army Value charts were ahead most of the game, I had no way to stop his tower + badger push.

I kept winning the exchanges but could never get enough breathing room to kill his defenses. I tried making a few Lances, but they are slow and fragile and died fairly quickly to the badgers. Eventually I tried an air switch with some likhos, and they were getting some damage done, but by that point he had built his static defenses too close to my base, allowing his badgers to safely shell it. With no way to break his towers I resigned. In fact I had greater army value at the time I resigned, due to my Likhos, but I just didn't see any way to regain the territory I had lost.

So what should I have done?

Perhaps if I did a tank switch instead of an air switch, I could have made minotaurs which could have killed his defenses. In hindsight maybe that would have been better. However once I switched to making minotaurs while he's still on badgers, he'd be whittling down my minotaurs from afar while I would not have any more halberds to stop that.
+0 / -0
Halberds don't strike me as particularly good against badgers, specially if defenses are involved. They might be a pop-up unit, but their range is tiny and they aren't that fast, its a long chase.

Based on your description you should have built bigger artillery. If the enemy was sinking all their metal on badgers and fixed defenses, an artillery superior to badgers such as emissaries would have eaten them for breakfast. Cerberus would also work very well defensively. Lance is a difficult and expensive unit to use and not the best against large swarms.

From the rover factory itself, impalers could at least take care of their fixed defense spam, since they have more than enough range to shot them from well beyond the range of badgers.
+0 / -0


3 years ago
quote:
Based on your description you should have built bigger artillery


non

Penetrators should apply steady attrition to Wolverine. Hovers are otherwise pretty weak vs wolverine spam.

fac switch to air to mass carbonize them with phoenix
fac switch to shields to effortlessly tank with thugs
fac switch to cloak to get close with cloak field
fac switch to amph to attrition them with Grizzle
fac switch to jump to mass carbonize them with firewalker
fac switch with tank to roll over them with reaper
+1 / -0

3 years ago
Depending on the map, try using a ball of cloaked units to get to their side or behind them to bumrush them. Whenever I see a mass of artillery I start to get the urge to spam cloaked roaches just to see the debris fly. Granted that badger are trickier than other artillery due to their persistent ammunition, so you may have to circle wide to avoid the mines.
+1 / -0
3 years ago
I guess the real problem that game was that I don't know how to deal with defenses like stardust + faraday + gauss using hovers. My opponent had at least stardust + faraday basically everywhere making raids impossible. Lances can do it but only quite slowly and they have a tendency to fire at the wrong radar dot, or miss. Halberds can rush in but not cost effectively. Maybe I need to use a sacrificial halberd to spot for each lance shot? Very micro intensive though.
+1 / -0
3 years ago
I would say Emissaries aren't necessarily a good answer to Badgers if the Badgers simply dodge the shots with their speed, and they remain out of LoS with their range so all you're shooting at is radar dots. If the minelayers get killed by other ballistic arty they DESERVE to die.

Here is my suggestion: If you'd rather not fac switch, then invest 420 (maybe + 180) metal in a cloaking field generator. They cost even less than a single Emissary. Just make sure you have the energy to keep it up. Badgers are normally good vs. cloak if they can fire where you're trying to move, but sometimes you can surprise them, and if you do it's game over for the Badgers who can't turn and run in time.

But if you do fac switch, you can never go wrong with Shield Bots. Those are THE counter to light vehicles. Make a thug ball, also get 1 or 2 Outlaws to minesweep with their radial pulsers and deter Scorchers. If you've got the metal, Racketeers can disable Badgers (or the riot units covering them) from range.
+2 / -0
3 years ago
Against defenses like that you want skirmishers, hover fac also has scapel. With enough scapels you'd have enough alpha to blow up defenses before any of your scapels die, unless the porc was truly thick in which case get arty (or go around).

Its a good idea to set lances to hold fire to that they don't waste their shots on useless radar dots. When you micro lances well, you don't need a lot of shots to create a lot of attrition, since most things shot will be insta-gibbed. If you really want to go for a lance-based strat, invest in some robust scouting such as cloaked scouts so that your lances can shot at stuff they can clearly see without you constantly having to suicide something to get a shot in. Cloaky factory and spider factory can both provide you with cloaked scouts. Airfac has owl which has a huge sight range and can spot for you if the enemy doesn't go out of their way to shot it down.
+1 / -0
USrankBerder - Watching that game, a few comments.


1) Building two lotuses next to your factory at the start like that is a little heavy on the defense and you would normally be better off expanding faster instead. Try to build extractors before building defenses and keep your constructors safe with your mobile units.

2) Early game vs the scorchers, your life would be a lot easier if you had one Bolas with your Daggers. Bolas will slow the scorchers and reduce their dps allowing Daggers to kill them more easily. Daggers are hit and run units, they take a while to reload so you should back them away from other raiders like Scorchers in between shots when trying to kill them. You had good results with the early Scalpel play, keep that up.

3) Pointing back to point 1, your expansion is really slow. A big problem you're having is that your enemy is out-expanding you, even though you're winning the attrition war and disco3llt3 is spending most of their metal on just building defenses, which if you scouted you could destroy before they're finished.

4) Use daggers more for scouting, disco3llt3 had a bunch of undefended expansions you could have raided that would have slowed them down significantly if the expansions were shut down.

5) The halberd + scalpel group that ran into the first stardust were working pretty well. If you had waited for the scalpel missiles to be off of cooldown before attacking the halberds would have been able to clean up the stardust without losing any of their number and then you probably can kill the commander there and maybe transition that into winning the game. Three scalpels will straight up one shot a stardust for future reference.

6) The two halberds plus 3 scalpels group was extremely successful in killing badgers, pretty much took no damage while hunting them down and killing them. Later, at about 8:45, you are right next to disco3llt3's base with both the base and the caretakers naked, while all disco3llt3 has are two badgers and their commander. You get scared off when you notice the stardust but you could have easily taken out both caretakers without losing anything by just staying in the north side of the base, and probably even the factory as well.

7) It would have been a good idea to build a caretaker a little earlier as you did excess 600ish metal, you probably wanted it around the 4 minute mark.

8) Taking out the stinger + faraday position was actually fairly efficient, good job. You should have waited to kill the stardust in the west until your lance was off cooldown though and take it off fire at will to ensure you can kill the stardust with it :) If you have to fight a stardust with halberds, spread them out with right click and drag a line around the stardust so that the shots don't hit all of them at once. If, say, you draw a circle around the stardust while holding down right click your halberds will encircle it and only one can be hit at a time.

9) You had another chance to take out the enemy base with the halberd group you forgot about on his island :(

10) If you had stuck to just 1-2 likhos they would have worked, but you built too many and neglected building ground units. If they had stuck to taking out the enemy defenses you could have just kept spamming halberds and won. Otherwise halberd spam was working but you needed to keep scalpels around to burst the stardusts down, spread your halberds better, or lance the defenses down better. Or all of the above :)

I hope my quick and dirty analysis of your game helps!
+5 / -0
3 years ago
Thank you, that's super helpful!
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