How to fight Pyros / are Pyros OP?

So I've been having trouble lately defeating Pyros in the early game. During the early raiding game, I've found that an enemy Pyro can reliably kill several bandits or glavies and walk away with about half health, and if confronted with a large enough squad of raiders to kill it it can easily jump back to pull distance and continue flaming or flee. I've also noticed that a single Pyro can kill a Lotus and survive. Not bad for 3.4 glaives worth of metal.

So what's a good counterplay when getting thrashed by Pyros in the early raiding game? Transition to a heavier unit mix earlier and accept that the enemy can raid your expansions better than you can raid theirs? Try to overwhelm them with even more of your own raiders?

Or is the Pyro just overpowered? If it is, a reasonable nerf would probably be to make the flamethrower range a bit shorter, thus making it a little less effective in raider v raider combat.

quote: Once the jump player notices your knight/reaver composition and shifts to moderator spam, add snipers, or switch to emissary.

Cheaper would be an eraser for your already built Knights and Reavers. Never forget the power of cloak. You can start building Eraser once u have at least ~1200-1500 metal in units.

If I didn't know about anything about the game and I didn't know better, just reading these comments about what you have to go through to counter a pyro makes it sound silly overpowered.

Does pyro need a nerf while compensating with giving the rest of jumpy a buff? (and does this apply to a few other facs with all-star raiders, too?)

Pyros are very strong, their mobility and ridiculously high damage means you need to be ready for them or you can lose the game really fast. For the most part i stopped having problems with them early when i started using a balanced opening with 2-3 mexs, an opening raider squad of about 400 metal built immediatly,a few energy structures to keep me floating, and 2 lotuses to help protect my base. Send the raiders out immediatly to scout and try to punish an over eco build so it doesnt outpace you. Get your second worker while you raiders are on the way. Depending on what you scout you go from there.


What i do to defend vs them depends on factory but i often like to get stardust turrets vs jumpbot because lotuses are not very cost efficient vs pyro and jacks seem capable of ignoring most other early game turrets.
and of course use radar to intercept.

I imagine a well-tuned "philosoraider" ability on Glaives would make Pyros fail on fight move.

By "philosoraider" here i mean the emergent fight-or-flight decision technique pioneered by aeonios in ZKGBAI and quickly ported into every other competing ZK bot, which works this way:

1) All enemy units emit threat auras onto the threatmap that the AI uses to path for raiders
2) Controlled combat units emit confidence auras instead
3) If at a given point, confidence exceeds threat, assign nearby units into an ad-hoc squad and commit to an attack

This means that several glaives circling around a Lotus, while individually unable to overpower the Lotus, and while handled as individual raider micro-squads, will know to merge into an attack squad. And similarly, insufficient numbers of glaives will not press the attack (though tuning that is something that has so far been done only poorly and manually).

I think that while circuit does use this technique, it under-uses it, which is why it's a bit hard to notice that this happens. Circuit prefers to keep its raiders in reserve and find juicier naked targets rather than accept losses to inflict lasting damage.

Anyway. If fight-move glaives knew to not attack pyros unless numerically superior and in a concave...

quote: the solution is easy then.Lets just buff glaive make it 40 Metal and give it some extra firepower and speed so lobsters can counter things they should have made a warrior/zeus for.

The sarcasm is misplaced here, i find. Noone is arguing to make Glaives physically stronger. I'm suggesting that it would be cool to make them smarter so that their auto move would approximate their proper use better.

Should i sarcastically interpret your statement as "yeah let's rip out every bit of automation in ZK because it makes things too easy for noobs to play with what they got instead of use what they should"?