Why has artillery become exceptionally strong?

we need artillery award

There's always lobster, although it doesn't work exactly like artillery, it still works pretty well and it might help with emissaries since emissaries have to stop to fire.

quote: does not artillary make.

Its job is to unmake artillery.

The proper way to use Lobster is not lobbing units at enemy arty, but lobbing enemy arty at your units/porc. Needs Cloaker or 2 Lobsters of course.

quote: Why has artillery become exceptionally strong?

Partially meta player behavior (if everyone else in a large game defends and makes arty, being aggressive doesn't work).

Partially balance changes (overkill prevention, cheaper terraform, pop-ups self-heal when closed, Picket nerf, stronger faraday, powerful coms, stronger riots, nerfed raiders).

Addition of some tools good for busting heavies and counter attacks (placeholder, Lobster, Limpet).

Artillery gets much stronger when micromanaged, and teamsize:mapsize ratio has constantly got denser..

Detatching income from com + making coms way tougher reduced the slippery slope/importance of territory in large teamgames.

I think a lot of it is also that ZK unit roster provides a lot of RPS counters to groups of attacking units, and the community meta has collectively learned which to apply where, and the importance of reclaim, over the years to the point of making penetrative attacks risky. The community at large discovering how OP cloak fields were was a pretty sesmic change to late game play for example, without balance actually changing.