Is this how this game is supposed to work?

Why is a builder shieldball unkillable?

shield con has a 900 hp shield and 11 hp/s regeneration for free. 17 shield cons cost 2000 metal and have a significant buffer of shield, as well as regen to full in about a minute.

It can be scary to think that a llt can be built super quick and that you have to deal like 10,000 damage to kill it in kind, but do know that shields are a one-way wall. If you wander under the shield to point blank range, the shield does nothing. With 15 glaives you can totally just force the issue against pure cons and attack the turrets they construct. If you see a turret going up in 2 seconds, know that combat repair will be 1/4th as effective, meaning that once it's built it will only gain hp at 1/4th the rate it does during construction. If you can match dps to hp gain during construction, it will fall during repairs. Force the issue.

Another note, you don't even have to target the thing they are building. If you have raiderslury, just shove em into the ball. Their shields will fall, but more damage will hit units instead of shields. The cons also will phisically block the allied turrets, so your units are hard to kill in a dense con ball. Repairs work the same way as previously stated, so if the cons just stop building to do repairs they are fighting a losing battle.

Think raiders aren't enough? AOE ignores shields. You just have to have an explosion close enough to the unit underneath. Ogre is notorious for dealing damage to thugs even though they hit the shields. Reaver will do a good job at it too, as long as you close the distance, just run at them and force the issue with a lot of metal in riots. As cloak, you have the added bonus of being able to cloak, by using a conjurer or an iris. Toggle firestate to never fire, use ctrl+left click to move the conjurer and reaverball close to the ball, and then toggle firestate to fire at will and let er rip (just make sure you're not killing your own units too much with friendly fire, spread out a bit).

Your firewalker idea was genious and almost worked, but the counter that jhdreemurr found of not moving is really all it takes to stop it. You can approach it in other ways, like napalm bombers (they will apply damage and fire through the shields) or likho.

Besides all those specifics, dreemurr's stratagy worked better against you in particular because of your timid play. You started securing mid with multiple cerberus as a long range damage option instead of building more units, you fortified south instead of having a mobile army that could go around the cons, and maybe you didn't invest in overdrive hard enough. A key difference between 1v1 blue players and gold players is that the blue player knows how to identify a weak frontline and aggressively attack it instead of being conservative and building stand-off defenses.

Thank you to all for responding. Yes, I knew about the free shield regen. I thought afterwards that I should have used cloak better (maybe imps + reavers). I also thought about Phantoms as I think that they have enough burst damage to penetrate the shields, but their DPS is very low. Yes, building static defenses agaist someone who can build them better than me was not a good idea. Also, acknowledge the idea of needing to know where to strike. Your comments were all really helpful. Thank you, again!