Scylla is kinda OP

quote: The Tactical Nuke Missile Sub provides a standoff precision strike weapon in the form of tactical missiles. It has no defense against direct attacks and should avoid contact with the enemy.

Am I the only one who things the tacnuke sub is madly imbalanced? It costs money to shoot the missiles, but it has an absurd alfa-strike, long range, its hard to locate, and when it is found, it routinely can just run away (80 deg/sec, 83 elmos/sec). Not only is it among the units that are best able to inflict a game-changing attack, but so survivable that it can often be done sloppily. IMO.

I'd provide ideas, but I'd rather not take away from possible ideas.

Well i disagree with idea that scylla is too op. To me it is perfect, in a way u can't ignore sea battle. Like in
https://zero-k.info/Maps/Detail/18434 - FolsomDamDeluxe
https://zero-k.info/Maps/Detail/7889 - TheRockFinal
If not for scylla i think u could just ignore sea completely with tera and basic defence. Btw in Folsom if one team lose sea they usually do just that and it is super hard to break with amph,hover units. And the only reason losing side still produce some sea units like ducks - is to contests scylla if out of position.
On other maps like:
https://zero-k.info/Maps/Detail/63480 - Supreme Strait
there would be no point in fighting anywhere but for mid support - that would make sea role boring imo.
So i think it is good scylla is so frightening u need to contest every part of sea.

What's missing from this discussion is a take that isn't entirely subjective.

What scenarios are there where scylla cannot be stopped, or is too effective for cost even if killed?

Saying "it's not tactical" means nothing and the only information that can be inferred from such a statement is "I don't like it". Fair, but there will always be things in the game that some players don't like and that won't change just for that reason.

Scylla is often misued. It can't even kill factories for cost and yet players often use it for that purpose.

There are two scenarios where scylla shots really shine: taking out unprotected eco (which tends to explode and destroy surroundings), and shield balls/unit clumps, which have other counters and are hard to shoot at when moving.

Once in a blue moon you can target reef/shogun when the enemy is not paying attention and destroy those, but if players keep ther units moving, it's hard to predict shots and even harder to make cost.


Silo has significant advantage over scylla because it can make different kinds of missiles (mainly shockly, but also quake and inferno when the situation calls for them) and more imporantantly, it can be assisted so building a missile doesn't take as long. Eos also has more range than tac nuke if memory serves.


I agree with tivoris. Scylla makes it so you can't entirely ingore water on maps that have no metal in it. Water can still be used to sneak attack, and all you really need is an owl or a few well places urchins to screen for a potential strike. It really doesn't take much to detect or even deter scylla, and a failure to do so and not protect eco should result in catastrophic losses.

You can very quickly take out scylla with either sea units or ravens and if the enemy is already countering those to support the scylla, odds are they could also have just made a silo instead and the result would be the same.

I think there were something like one, maybe two games I in which I was able to send a naked scylla right to the enemy front and take out eco from plain sight, which is the one case where scylla does a lot of damage for cost without the requirment of building a silo in vision of the enemy. It's excessively rare simply because things that enter sight usually either dominate or die.

The game needs to end somehow. I'd be far more in favor of nerfing artemis than anything else.

Maybe on water maps where rebuilding ships is problematic because you can't plate it if you had the only one in the area.

Otherwise, plates make targeting factories inconsequential the vast majority of the time IMO.

In 1v1 if you lose your factory you stand to lose a lot of metal in excess, but in a team, the excess goes to the allies.

If we're in lob pot and you're using scylla to kill my factory, just wait! I'll rebuilt it so you can waste some more metal.

The point is that if you have to scylla the factory, odds are that you don't have the units for an assult that would do the same. You're just forcing one player to rebuilt 700 worth of metal when you spent ... 1.2k? Is it 600 per missile? I forget. Pretty sure it's around that and that you need two for one factory.

As an inexperienced player, I'm not going to claim Scylla is OP. After all, it needs to be powerful given how setting up one Scylla salvo costs more than a fully featured midgame army.

I will, however, claim I usually can't deal with a Scylla. If a Missile Silo strikes me more than once, I have a pretty good idea where it is and I can try to push and kill it. But a Scylla can move a great distance between strikes, so knowing the direction of the first strike doesn't tell me where it will be when my push develops. Also, I can't yet tell a Scylla strike from an Eos, so the first sign that I'm dealing with Scylla might be the lack of a silo where I expected one.

But that assumes I can do anything about it. A majority of factories cannot! The only universal sonar unit is the static Urchin, and by the time those are built the Scylla can be long gone. Nor does an Urchin alone solve the Scylla problem, because they have enough speed and HP to run past a loose Urchin fence. A large investment in Urchins, or a terraformed obstacle, can keep a Scylla away from specific waterways, but the Scylla is still there and, because I can't realistically send builders 3000 units in front of my front line, still a threat. And I need to defend my blockade as I would an anti-nuke, or else the opponent can destroy it conventionally and then salvo off all those stockpiled missiles.

Even if I do happen to have a factory that can try to hunt Scyllas, actually converting that into a Scylla kill is very difficult. I don't usually have air, but even though Ravens can quickly cross the map, a Scylla is fast enough to run for AA cover that's out of range of my front. The other factories have much slower responses and might not catch it at all. And I might not even have the factory after the missile salvo. Even though it's poor attrition for the Scylla player, they might reasonably spend a couple of missiles on preventing me from building anti-sub units so that their sea strider can stay active for longer.

In short, most of the time the best thing I can do about a Scylla is ignore it and accept that I'll get nuked repeatedly and without warning, and maybe rebuild my factory further from the front.