Scythe spam?

Ye. Scythes are an incredibly irritating unit to deal with atm. They cost too much micro to counter irrespective of the tactic used. I suspect the only reason we don't live in scythe hell yet is because not many players seem to like to use it.

My personal experience in dealing with scythe is having Imp + some follow up like glaives on stand by. You can safely put IMP next to a factory that is likely to get targetted and stun a stack of Scythes without harming the factory itself and then swiping in and reaping the benefits of the metal delivery. This however, is not attention free and will require micro and planning to counter the scythes.

Easier way is to simply set enough strong static defences like Faraday and Stardust to prevent scythes from targetting your critical infrastucture, but most of the time this just means the scythes will go else where or overwhelm you with superiour numbers anyway where applicable. A scythe will easily beat Lotus and likewise 3 scythes will easily beat 3 lotus.

In both scenarios, you will kinda need to rely on investing metal on the counters preemptively, meaning they might never make cost if the enemy is not actually planning on scything your entire backline. You will need to learn who are the people who might make scythe raids and scout if they built a cloak bot factory so you know what to expect.

Here's a thought: a building that is 5 c/v terraform ticks up, cannot be targeted by scythes because they can't reach. That costs 48 minerals for a Lotus. For mexes it's cheaper than putting a wall around the mex, but on the other hand doesn't protect the mex from anything except scythes.

i would say blastwings are anti cloak walls.. except they dont have a trigger radius that matches the decloak radius and the burn time is a sad joke.. if they did the same damage but over 20 seconds and had a larger blast and trigger radius then they would be amazing anti cloak
they are mostly scouts with some area denial and cost made vs large clumps

maybe fleas? but flea just die... hmm... flea and defender wall.. outlaw wall?

roaches?

quote: i would say blastwings are anti cloak walls.. except they dont have a trigger radius that matches the decloak radius and the burn time is a sad joke

Why not just a terraformed wall. If the wall is the minimum height of 24 elmo, that is actually about the same cost as a line of blastwings.

I think everyone is missing the key problem, to properly counter them EVERYONE needs to do what you are suggesting. For a big team game with 16 players on team there will always be people that do not terraform or make defencesw. If everyone did make defenses how much metal would that cost? Even if everyone only made a single Faraday its 4000 metal.

When I am air I always make lots of swifts, which are a semi decent counter as they can respond fast enough. However they do super low damage and spend so long flying away and turning that the Scythes often just recloak and run away.

Lotus is useless.
Faraday doesn't do damage and can only stun them if grouped.
Terraform is expensive.

Basically preemptively building a shitload of defences is not viable. Especially on larger maps.


I.E. this all boils down to it being too easy to sneak past defenses. You get no reaction time. So first you know about them attacking you is when they start attacking your stuff.

Even 2 scythes are enough to kill a fac most of the time even with defenses, you just need to put them at an angle where the fac blocks the turrets. Or if com is defending fac then you just run round the factory and com can't hit you. By the time any units get even close the fac is dead and the scythes are away in the wind, or died to the factory exploding.



1. I would suggest increasing decloak distance from 75 -> 125. Plus reducing hp from 800-600.

2. Make units that provide cloaking also decloak enemy units. Or a separate building that performs decloaking role.

Just as there are players who dedicate their whole income to making your life miserable Scythes, there should be a dedicated player aimed at countering them on the other team. In big format having each player go to immense length and spendings to protect their shit will never pay back and only plays into opposite teams hand. When there are tons of Ravens flying all over your base you don't go building Tresher at each factory, you scream at your air player to make some goddamn Swifts. One player on cloaky/shield/spiders is perfectly capable of stopping any number of Scythes players. The moment the Scythes group gets detected - it's all over. You look at the early scout, see a Scythe being made in the factory, and then? Glaives, Bandits, Fleas, Venoms, Imps under doorsteps, Swifts, Outlaws - pick your poison. You make patrols, place some guys behind the lines, put one unit in a cheeky conner and crush them into dust. The difference will be that, after crushing the bastard and reclaiming his Scythy-bois, you will have an army to support the frontlines.

Here's a wierd idea: maybe the problem is there's too many players.

Having more players means that the game gets warped in ways that aren't intended. For instance one person 100% spamming scythes in a 2v2 will likely lead to a loss for the scythe team if misused like they are in big team games. In big team games your individual contributions (see: losing 6 scythes to murder a factory) are diminished by the 15 other players who may be playing in variance that allows the attrition failure on the scythe player to recover. In the aforementioned 2v2, the nonscythe player would have to have recover 950m in attrition vs 15 recovering that 950 (a net effort of 64m per person).

Also because the increase of player count means that apm can be dedicated to scathing while other people expand and raid, etc.

I frequently see 1 scythe being traded for 1 mex or other stuff that doesn't make cost (even with economic impact taken into account). Sometimes entire balls of scythes are lost to a single imp + followup. The micro for imp factory defense is minimal though (set imp to maneuver and fire at will).

As per the why it happens: see the above part where contribution is diminished. Scythes are a contribution multiplier in bigger teams as the attention to do something about it is uncoordinated and thus may result in multiple people spending into a solution thats inefficient.

Shaman: That is true, but at the same time someone 100% spamming scythes is kind of a strawman. You don't need to 100% spam scythes to put together a scythe group that will win you the game by taking out a factory/com, even in a reasonably sized team game, possibly as a first attack and thus with no prior warning.

Also, what I'm bothered with here is not necessarily OPness. I am not sure if I would say scythe is OP. But they cost an inordinate amount of attention to deal with, assuming you're dealing with an insistent and competent scythe player. You're gonna have to take out time to build complex defense nets and keep replacing them, or to maintain and watch a reaction group, rebuilding stuff, relinking your energy grid, any squishier units in your front will need almost maniacal escort, etc. They feel like a single unit that is capable of causing too much impact on how your opponent conducts themselves.

And, off course, the entire thing is immensely annoying. Scythe feels like an unit that should have an expensive but definitive counter, a bit like what building a sufficient number of chainsaws does for air.

quote: That is true, but at the same time someone 100% spamming scythes is kind of a strawman

I used the value '100%' because of the following op line:

quote: Every game today has been 100% scythe spam from multiple players.

Although the sentiment behind the post boils down to the basic statement of "more people, more individual safety there is to pursue strategies like scythe spam" and of course having 16 people means 2 or more can safely spam scythes with the rest picking up the attrition failure that comes from it.

I have a distinct memory of facing 4 scythe spammers on top of a group of 2 frontliners as a group of 3. It was one of the most annoying experiences I have had because in addition to the frustration of fighting nearly 2x our playercount/resources, we ended up getting blamed for the loss because "our side didn't expand" or some stupid crap like that.