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Athena

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12 years ago
Has anyone seen it used to good effect since it was removed from plop? Or at all?

Give it more health, let it be plopped, remove its construction abilities, and let it deploy like djinn to land and act as an actual factory with a proper interface instead of shift-queued construction orders.

A low-health (like 1000 HP) factory that can get up and fly is interesting. More so than ploppable buildpower, and more so than an unploppable factory that nobody uses.
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12 years ago
It isnt being used now.. i really miss it.. bring back the plop?
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I have actually seen it a few times today .
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12 years ago
Bring back the plop, nerf its mobility (seriously, Crane speed is *plenty*), buff its armor, take away its ability to build buildings. If you want to use Athena to build structures, you have it build cons. Considering that the Rector is a jammer anyways, that's just good sense regardless.
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12 years ago
pretty sure the whole reason why Athena wasn't plopable was to prevent it from quicksnatching mexes.(Too lazy to edit my Grammar here)
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12 years ago
One of the major reasons it was removed is because it can fac-assist. Imagine what krow/gollie/sumo rush will be like with +5 (+7.5?) extra BP from the start and then still preserving the ability to make units etc.

The other was rush-to-mid and fast expands.

The final one was that the only thing that balanced the other two was fighters, which is really factory dependent and hardcounter RPS.
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I used it recently mostly to cap mexes that my allies didn't cap, when I couldn't do it with normal cons (for example I was ships and needed to cap land mexes or just the mexes were too far and land cons would walk too long).

I also use it to farm windgens on really high hills where normal cons cant reach when I have no all-terrain or air cons.

I don't remember using it to build anything other than mex, windgen, radar or rector in last weeks.

Would be useful if it could build pylon.
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12 years ago
when ploppable it was a massive massive noobtrap. Watching 'the usual suspects' go Athena ('IM GOING COVERT OPS!11) and fail like baby to 1 glaive/flea every single game was incredibly depressing.
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I was also incredibly satysfing to kill enemy Athena with Flea or Dart :D

Imho it needs moar HP but less speed, so it is less noobtrap and less OP at the same time.
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12 years ago
It did too many bad things for the game so it was basically Owled.

We had been attempting to reduce the importance and power of land grab. Land grab is where you are forced to walk a commander forwards and build defences at the halfway point. Doing so early enough gives a large advantage as you are free to mex the area behind. It can also mean expanding really really fast. Athena was good for both these things.

It was also good for unit rushing. The extra BP made Athena start a very good choice in game with many players because it is more assist for large units. A related problem is the idea "factories = fun", if you have a lot of people just assisting a normal factory they are effectively not participating much in the game.

Athena creates blind RPS with the plane factory and is particularly bad for this on large maps with small teams. This is a simply guessing game mechanic and was one of the main things keeping Athena in check, it was stupid.

Finally Athena is a noob trap which leaves the affected player without any sort of factory and other players raging.

So in short Athena creates:
  • Powerful land grab.
  • Faster expensive unit rushes.
  • Players left without a factory or much impact on game.
  • Noob traps.

So could someone point out what was good about Athena and if they are any good maybe we could make it do that.
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AUrankAdminSaktoth - oh, yeah, I never saw the fac-assist, but that is an obvious use isn't it?

Fixing that would require some brutally ugly hacks - make it clear that Athena is a flying factory and not a con by giving it no assist and making abandoned incomplete construction vanish in a puff of self-reclaim... but that creates a nasty inconsistency with other cons (and the Strider Hub) and a nasty UI problem since you can accidentally cancel construction with a move order.

Yeah, I guess the ploppable Athena has to stay gone.

The only way to make it work, imho, would be to make it a morph for a lab (cloakies, obviously), and at that point you may as well start coming up with special powers for all the labs. Which would be nifty, but silly and a whole new problem.

I am showing intense restraint by not coming up with powers for all the labs.
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12 years ago
Athena's original purpose was to build striders, but thats for the strider hub now. Currently I see athena's use is to create stealth armies.
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12 years ago
Make Athena an intel warfare unit. Meant for late game scouting.

Cloakable as now, radar jam as now.
Is radar source. Is sonar source.
Has a light/icon that turns on/off when in enemy radar range.
Same for enemy radar jam.

Can only build cloaker, radar tower and flea.
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i like jseahs idea but i want it to make units it can make now
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12 years ago
Athena should be a transport for one unit, a radar station, a short range ultrasonic station, etc.

Ultrasonic stations should make cloaked units visible, but are very short ranged.
Radar costs only 55m, so why not include it in a unit?

If it could transport units and cloak, it would not require so much build power.
If it could stay cloaked while it drops the transported unit, it would be very different from Valkyrie - >1000m units are too heavy for it.
As a transport it could enhance the other facs usefulness.

BTW: why can you not cloak a cloaky fac? why does the shield fac not have a shield or the tank fac not have a peewee weapon like Welder? Why can the jump fac not jump and the (smaller) spider fac not be build on a step cliff? Why can the ship fac not be submerged on demand? Why can the hover fac not hover like the BA hover fac? How about hovering defenses? XD
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12 years ago
Athena= ultamant stealth strategy
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12 years ago
>Would be useful if it could build pylon.
I think this (pylon) and something else I forgot (can't remember now), are the only things anthena miss.

Also plopping anthena is a bad idea. It has a really terrible health, so anyone to lose it in the beginning of game... "noobtrap" it would become.
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12 years ago
We could bring plop back and remove all or the economy and defense buildings, and add more specialist units. Let it have Djinn and tick/roach (skuttle would be bit OP for it).
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12 years ago
What about the assist-rush problem? A ploppable athena is 10bp instead of a factory you can use to help push out a Krow that much earlier before any of the enemies have any real forces to speak of.
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12 years ago
nerf it to crane's BP?
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