Scythes

Stop watching too many KGB games.

quote: It is fast enough to be quite effective at killing raiders, which in the hands of a good player can shut down raiding

Not vs humans. Scythe can kill lone raiders one by one; if it tries to do this vs more than that, it gets killed with no additional kills after the first one.

If you field multiple (e.g. a scythe for each of their glaives, or at least enough to pull off recloak rotation), your raiding squad likely still costs 2x-3x the cost of what you "shut down".

Contrast this with Duck or Kodachi for a dose of insight. You can make Glaives against Scythes and it's often optimal (though Scythes become more useful as game progresses). You shouldnt make Glaives against Duck because that's just giving enemy the lols.

Don't get me wrong; i'm not saying that scythes are anything but extremely powerful in capable hands. But try to stay away from overexaggerations.

I'm fairly comfortable with scythes being what they are currently because i really hate how teamgame and mid-late 1v1's often have sufficient density to shutdown almost all forms of raiding. I like raiding, and scythes make the game more likeable by being highly resistant to density-induced raider shutdown effects.

Anarchid B386823 2 on TitanDuel

I'm gonna side with Ivory King on this one. He deserves it, I've been breathing down his shorts way too long XD

Not that I'm up to date with current meta, but scythe is a powerhouse that last time I checked was single handedly carrying the cloak fac in team games. It's similar to scalpel, in that it sort of leaves most of an opposing fac dead in the water. Assaults can't see or catch them. Skirms can't take advantage of their range. Raiders lack the information to consistently maneuver well against them. Artillery are sitting ducks. Statics are either too weak to cause attrition, or must be clumped densely (I believe you need three lotus in one place to kill a single scythe without losing the position over time). Planes and GS have difficulty reacting to them because they're reliant on units from other facs to catch them out. Commanders are a liability that needs to be escorted everywhere. Expansion is far more difficult because you can no longer trust in holding choke points.

There are counters, but they're sort of specific. Glaives and ducks are raiders that tend to lose to scythes over time unless the scythe player mucks up, but bandits and pyros are great. Outlaws, roaches, ticks, and venoms wreck them, but warriors, mace, and redback tend to die before making cost. Assaults hold them off locally, but exercise less map control, and are sort of forbidden from assaulting for so long as they don't know what they're running into. They break the rules for the counter structure, which I'm all for, but they do it at such a broad level I can't help but think them imbalanced. Some factories have a very easy time (shield, spider), while some feel like they don't have a single 'real' answer (amph, LV, HT).

For now cloaky needs them, but if cloaky gets enough power in other areas to break the reliance on scythe, I think they need a nerf.

They're one of my favourite units, even though I don't use them that much. I think they need their range cut down a little so that glaives and fleas are more likely to do damage before dying. Decloak radius is another option, and that would make ducks work a little better, but it's easy to overnerf that way.

Scythes can be effective against raiders, especially heavy raiders. They can wipe them out in small groups when encountered. That dosn't make them a counter to raiders, but does place a potential requirement on an opponent that his raiders be clumped in sufficent force. Scythe can usually choose when to engage.

They do not massacre glaives in the same way as Koda, but then Koda dosn't have all the strengths of the Scythe. Its a meanginless comparison.

The answer to scythes isn't in a unit but in a playstyle.
You can highly abuse two facts:
1) The other player can't micro two scythe groups efficiently at the same time.
2) Every scythe that is busy defending is not attacking.

That means you can waste a huge portion of your enemy's attention by periodically sending multiple raiding parties with fight command on different routes.
Will they make cost? no.
Can you outexpand the enemy while this is going on? Hell yes!


Stop comparing units with the "making cost" heuristic.

quote: The answer to scythes isn't in a unit but in a playstyle. You can highly abuse two facts: 1) The other player can't micro two scythe groups efficiently at the same time. 2) Every scythe that is busy defending is not attacking. That means you can waste a huge portion of your enemy's attention by periodically sending multiple raiding parties with fight command on different routes.

Situational at best, you're assuming 1v1 on an open map at the raider spam phase. The logic dosn't really hold up either, since the same relationship applies to you - every raider attacking is not defending against scythes. scythes are more effective vs light defences than most raiders. Can also assume nobody goes pure sycthe but also uses glaives/riots etc where needed too.
best not to overcomplicate the issue, which is quite straight foward:

great com snipers
brutal vs static light defences, esp defender
brutal vs skirmishers and artillery
reasonable against a number of other units
have a relationship with raiders that can go either way depending on circumstances.
They have decloak range close to zero making them hard to screen for
Fast
Very cheap to keep cloaked on move compared to other cloaked units - compare to spy.

Result when used correctly = powerful generalist

quote: Of course, applying that to Cloaky right now will make the factory worth building for exactly zero units.

Agreed - the rest of the cloaky lineup could do with some love and affection as powercreep elsewhere has put them in the shade.

I remember a team game where Svatopluk (or someone else) kept hunting my ravagers with scythers, it was extremely annoying.
Their decloak radius and re-cloak time feels ridiculous, it's pretty hard and costly to hunt them.

quote: I remember a team game where Svatopluk (or someone else) kept hunting my ravagers with scythers, it was extremely annoying. Their decloak radius and re-cloak time feels ridiculous, it's pretty hard and costly to hunt them.

On large maps with spread out mex like eg. Real they are especially difficult to deal with- there is no way to screen for them with their small decloak/high speed, and often nothing short of Banshees capable of intercepting them before they slash the mex/LLT and vanish again.

the only reason spotlight is on scythe now is because all the other good cloaky units got shit on

serious question.. how does hover counter scyth in units? dart? i tried and scyth pwned every hover unit =P