How to counter riot-skrim balls?

arti

While this may seem like a stupid suggestion, you can also make your own riot-skirm balls as rover. Another good way to counter riots and skirmishers is to use artillery. For rovers this would mean Badger, as Impaler doesn't hit too well moving targets.

You got Badger as rovers. Spam Badger and stomp everything.

If you do "1." youll get kited to death.
"2." seems like a plausile option.

You counter it with artillery and bombs.

Riot and skirms are fairly balanced composition since they tend to counter each other's weaknesses. You could try, to summarise a few things that have been said:

• Make pure skirms. Your skirms should outnumber the opponent since some of their metal was spent on riots.
• Make forward defenses if you need to buy time. Most riots and skirms are inefficient against at least one type of defense.
• Harass the riots with assaults that can survive the skirm supporting fire. Minotaur is a good choice as it can retreat and repair.
• If the game is closed in then artillery can work.
• If the game is still fairly open then the best idea could be to go around the slow army with raiders.

I believe that riot-skirmisher combos would indeed usually be countered by pure skirmisher forces, or by reliable artillery kiting, since you'd then overpower the enemy's skirmishers through sheer numbers (assuming equal mass), or at the very least, trade even with them. Once the enemy's skirmishers are gone, you could then safely kite the riots to death.

However, if the enemy is using mostly skirmishers in their skirmisher-riot combo, then it'd probably be better to focus heavily on raiders and/or fast assaults (like the Ravager or Halberd), since chances are that the enemy riot would be overwhelmed by so many fast units barreling down towards it (and the skirmishers).

Alternatively, you could try to sneak up to the skirmisher-riot combo with cloaked riot and/or assault units (such as Reavers and/or Knights hidden by an Iris), and not only overpower the riots through sheer numbers, but also negate the skirmishers' range advantage over the riots.

Holding their ground against a superior number of raiders is the specialty of riots, though. You don't need a large metal investment in riots to shut down raiders. Fast assaults units can work if you have access to those, but it depends of the riot/skirm units in question. Some riots like ogre can deal a lot of damage to an incoming ball of assaults, even if they die quickly. Light skirms like ronin tend to come in large numbers, which assaults might have trouble dealing with.

tried a badger-ripper combo it it did work quite well (still got out-ecoed cos i can't macro well) i guess arty was the was to go. thanks for all the suggestions!