Cloakbots vs Shieldbots in high 1v1

I want to hear the opinions of my peers on how you are able to actually beat shieldbots as cloakbots, because I am having something like a 1:9 win-loss ratio against them. I'd even say I have an easier time as rovers against them now, and I'm a broken record when it comes to that difficult matchup. I'm going to lay down my case piece by piece first.

Glaives need to be micro'd to get the drop on bandits, or bandits will always win (especially on fight move). This isn't anywhere near as possible as the game progresses on. Outlaw and Felon delete glaives too.

Warrior is ok vs bandits but inevitably gets cooked by spread bandit, rogue or felon.

Ronin is subpar and gets toasted by felons, if not ignored by thugs and chased by bandits.

Knight is decent, but gets mashed up by rogues.

Sling is good, but it takes way less cost in thugs to make them invalid.

Sniper is good against felons, but every clever shieldbot player knows to switch to low cost high density units. PetTurtle in our most recent match did exactly that with bandits, rogues and some dirtbags mixed in.

Imp requires perfect execution and micro PLUS follow up, and gets made irrelevant by the presence of a singular outlaw. Snitch on the other hand, just gets the job done on the spot.

Part of the problem is that predictive aiming has given bandit the drop on glaive. Another part of the problem is the unit synergy with shieldbots just being too good. Felon comes with 1600 "Ammo". Thug, for just over a quarter of the cost adds another 1250 ammo and each thug adds another 16p/s regen to the pool. Outlaw becomes unhittible among thugs and prevents most things designed to take it out from doing the job, other than the sniper.

Shieldbots are able to walk through their cost and more in porc with the aid of a handful of super cheap thugs. Since the majority of the damage is absorbed by shields, there's no attrition - whereas knight would suffer massive HP loss. Shield regen rates and strengths are essentially as powerful as Archer's ridiculous underwater regen rate.

All of Cloakbots true plays are high micro. Shieldbots most powerful play is "retreat a small distance and regen the shields, then go make attrition gains again" on repeat. The difference in effort to reward seems to favour the wrong fac here.

Rogues outrange LLT. Ronins don't, and suffer attrition.

People say "Outmanouver the shieldbots". What does that even mean? 1v1 maps art tight, and SB are popular one maps that it's easy to prevent free movement from being beneficial upon. At best, your only faster units (glaives, maybe ronin) are eventually headed towards bandit or outlaw waiting in the place that you're meant to be outmanouvering to.

People also say facswitch. Only viable if you're not already significantly behind or about to see the ball at your front door. I have more success switching to recluse, the only skirmisher with enough range whilst mobile to be of use, than I do switching to thunderbird which gets toasted by 2-felon. Meanwhile, I have very little difficulty fighting shieldbots with some factories like JJ, spider, even hover occasionally.

I honest to god see them as the easymode factory that a subset of the top 15 fall back upon when they simply can't be bothered to actually match their opponent skill-wise, and want that factory RPS win. I experimented with them over the last two weeks to see it from the other side and it was, for the most part, easy street. It was funny to suddenly hear anyone but myself finally piping up to criticize shieldbots.

In summary. Outlaw; too much damage and slow. Rogue; Questionably high damage per missile. Thug; too tanky/synergistic with felon. Bandit; Getting too much benefit from predictive aiming, just like dagger.

I think Cloaky simply lacks a strong Ronin. Nudge Ronin a tiny bit and it'll change everything. Knight is already much stronger than it used to be and Sling is too.

I wish shieldbots were less synergistic, atm they're a one trick pony factory, said trick being shieldballs. That's not very fun.

I mean, there are different shieldball compositions, but it still feels like a lot less strategic range than other facs.

Without outlaw, shields would be toast.

Damn. Build a missile silo or call air support.

I think a lot of the question here is "why does Felon exist".

Like, we know what it does currently - erases thunderbird, zaps smaller skirmishers, etc - but why should zk have a shieldbot that does those things?

The problem isn't the concept of Felon, its current implementation. As far as I'm aware, Felon is the only unit in the game that has:

-A continuous laser that switches targets rapidly.
-While also having skirmisher-tier range.
-While also having enough alpha to destroy even assaults quickly.
-While also being able to hit aerial units just as easily.

Its weapon is just too good, in short, to the point of standing out dramatically from the rest of the game's weapons. Having an unique ammo limit doesn't make up for all of that.

Scythes don't work because outlaw. Lots of things don't work because outlaw.

Scythe is countered by both outlaw and felon.

Once they are revealed they can be murdered fast by a felon. Bandits and dirtbags if you need them make excellent screening before outlaw is up or if it got sniped.

Its pretty clear that the balance between cloaky and shield is heavily reliant of a strong Sniper/Phantom that shield is forced to engage upon or that can snipe out one-off important units (felon/outlaw).

If we try to remove/weaken felon, then shield will need micro even more and produce more rackteers dirtbags to counter shirimisher.

What I'm really looking at is smaller grouped units, for shieldbots and cloakybots.

Allowing another unit stay very close to a thug: a outlaw will always stay under the shield.

I'm terrible at micro APM lower than 30.


Cloak a newton to pick off felon.