Sling

The Sling is a light artillery bot from the Cloakbot Factory.

Sling (cloakarty)
Light Artillery Bot
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Stats
Cost	100
Hit Points	350
Movement Speed (elmo/s)	48
Turn Rate (deg/s)	297
Vision Radius (elmo)	660
Transportable	Light
Weapons
Light Plasma Cannon Damage 140 Reload Time (s) 6 Damage per Second 23 Range (elmo) 860 Projectile Speed (elmo/s) 270

Description

The Sling has a long range plasma cannon that allows indirect fire over obstacles, and outranges static defenses up to heavy laser towers. Slings are ineffective against most mobile units and should be guarded in order to prevent raiders and other fast units from closing range.

Tactics and Strategy

Slings are by far the cheapest artillery in the game, which is both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, this means you may need lots of them to accomplish the same task as a single Impaler or Lance. On the other hand, Slings are far better suited to combating light static defences like Pickets, against which the relatively fragile Cloakbots are vulnerable and where heavier artillery units would be overkill. Building a few Slings for this task is often a good idea - being low cost allows them to be used with more granularity and earlier in the game than most other artillery. Since their projectiles are slow and do not have a significant area of effect, Slings are poor against mobile units except in large-scale engagements. Make sure to protect your Slings against raids since they are flimsy and weak at short range combat.

While Slings are not effective against most mobile units due to the low velocity of their projectile, they can still hit large targets such as shields or slow moving groups of enemy skirmishers. This makes them a useful soft counter to small quantities of shield bot units, particularly the relatively fragile and dangerous Felon. However, when encountered in larger groups linked Shield bot regeneration will be too high to overcome and the Slings will likely become ineffective.

A common employment of Slings is to station one or two within your own front line defences to prevent opponents from building defences and metal extractors of their own nearby.

Slings have excellent damage per cost compared to other artillery but have relatively low range so will take losses from heavier artillery such as Emissary or Firewalker as the game progresses and unit density increases. Slings will likely need protection so they can remain near the frontline, or support from other, longer range artillery to act as suppression fire.