Felon initial impressions

It was designed with several purposes in mind:
1. An accurate mid-ranged unit. To deal with roaches, ticks, etc which utterly demolish shieldbots because they have nothing that can effectively take them out at range. The AoE from these units utterly demolishes the generally light, spammy shieldbots, and penetrate thugs shields, rendering half their HP useless. It also helps more generally to flesh out the ranged capacity of the factory (helps vs gunships, planes etc too).
2. A unit beyond 350 cost in the shieldbot factory. Their lack of heavy units suffers late game as such large clusters of light units get bogged up and are easily dispatched with AoE.
4. A genuinely unique unit which interacts dynamically in a new and unexplored way using physical properties, giving tradeoffs and offering synergies with other units. Balancing offense vs defense, having a burst that can be shot at multiple targets, and being charged up by other shield units adds something totally new, and allows a player fielding a lot of shield power to use that power offensively rather than being stuck behind their shield wall.
4. More options in a factory which has markedly less strategic diversity than cloakbot.

What i dont like about it is that its not really any harder to take out than the other shieldbots late game (in many ways, its easier with snipers, penes, bombers, etc), and just how easy it is to drain or waste by tremoring/racketeering/hammering his shield generator or spamming razors kiss/clogger to waste shots.

The major problem is just how hard to use and hardcounter it is. It is a lot like the capcar or roach- utterly overpowered and ridiculous when it works, totally useless when it doesnt. These kinds of 'toys' are nice, but shieldbot really needs more standard units you can safely field in an army composition.

Sak, these low HP, shielded units will always be easy targets for AOE or pene/sniper/prec (depending on weight). If you feel it is a problem Felon could have more HP, at least enough to survive one Prec bomb.

To throw out some rough numbers:

• 1000 -> 1400 HP?
• 700 -> 600 cost?

Being good against firewalker is fine. Firewalker is great vs cloak because it reveals units in a large area. Taking out these kind of high-cost support units is what sniper should be good at (If anything, it should be weaker at other things). The problem with sniper vs felon is just how much of its HP is in its shield, which if both were 1500/1500, would still be penetrated by the sniper.

I'm fine with those buffs, but that may make it a touch strong. I'd worry that in those circumstances where it is really, really strong (such as vs raiders and defense and vs small unit numbers) it will continue to utterly power through enemies and feel too hard to counter.

The major problem is that there are a range of weapons that ignore shields- flame, gauss, slow (?), capture (?) and any AoE with a radius larger than the shields. With those values, even a wind or nanotower explosion would kill it. The other thing with the felon is it actually spends most of its time with its shield DOWN (even if they are still being charged and thus its outputting an OK DPS), and it is not at all a tanky HP unit. Getting it to hold fire is probably way more effort than the unit is worth. Micro on higher cost units is good, but it is too low cost and probably not rewarding enough to have it be a unit that -only- functions properly with constant attention.

I LOVE the idea, especially when comparing it to Dominatrix, but that's it. The implementation needs some work, I don't know what exactly needs to be changed, but we'll find out some day. The unit will probably need more than just one revision to be perfect. :)

My biggest concern is the same as Pxtl's. It's too extreme when it comes to counters. It's kind of "op vs anything but doesn't stand a chance vs Racketeers".

Skasi and pxtl: Although with full shield it's hard to counter, it's dead if it runs out of shield. This often happens within a few seconds of firing. Cheap raiders spam would kill it for less than it's cost. The felon fires and kills some of them, but this and the raider's firing drain the shield, letting raiders quickly kill it.

I am not sure that the Felon does more good than harm. It is easy to kill because it have low HP and likely no shield. All you other shield units are also now vulnerable because they have low shields.

Felon only seems good as anti heavy or vs isolated units.
People who try to use them when assaulting will likely fail.

Pyros, Glaive, Bandit, fleas, puppy.

The only time I have seen Felon do well was vs comm.

Its also has over kill DMG vs raiders.

Can has the AI to auto-retreat if energy is low? like auto-skirm to longer distance until energy charged. Would relieve its micro burden and make worth it...