Starlight needs a nerf

So I've played quite a lot of FFAs and enjoyed quite a lot of them recently. However, it seems that on any map where you can get 80+ metal per second, the safest strategy seems to be to rush a starlight.

It makes quite a lot of sense: why spend actions expanding and fighting, when you can settle in, make singus and then rush a starlight.

Starlight costs 45k. If you can push 100 metal/second to it, you can make it in 7.5 minutes. For what it can do, there is no reason not to build it if you have the economy. (+ 10k of units to defend it, but since you aren't attacking, then you will have that army.)

Starlight used to have weaknesses:
It could be blocked with a large amount of shields
It could be blocked with a terraformed building
It used to have less range (I think?)

Now it's a glorified I win button. I mean, it's supposed to be, but it's way more effective at destruction then the other superweapons. I've had 2 games this week where my finished Starlight got zapped by the enemy Starlight because they finished it less then 20 seconds earlier. There's no way to block the Starlight beam even for 30 seconds. It's also much more effective then Zenith or DRP and it hard-counters them.

Now, while I think it should get nerfed, I don't know what would be the best way of going about it.

What I want is for the interval between "Starlight turns on" and "All opposition is dead, resign already" to be a little longer. Right now it can be as low as 30 seconds. My point is that it's a lot longer for other supers and it gives more time to react to them.

I've made a similar argument in the past regarding artillery and the feedback I got was that there are so many ways to end a game at multiple points that there isn't a solid reason to nerf anything at the moment.

My initial argument was for artil in 1v1. Whoever manages to build one first can start chipping at no risk while repelling what is otherwise an even battle, and that was shut down stating there's pretty much always a way to handle that situation.

Tech switches... or in ffa, teaming vs the online super... stuff like that.

Starlight does seem much better than Zennith in FFA...
Zenith is probably the weakest FFA superweapon as it takes a while before it can start doing damage while a DRP can be popping singus 20 seconds after completion.

Starlight relies a lot more on scouting than a DRP so can be countered by blocking scouting. e.g. a cloud of swifts, chainsaws, artemis, etc with a lot of depth.

There has to be a Game Ender which leaves no(/low) chance for a stalemate.

quote: Starlight relies a lot more on scouting than a DRP so can be countered by blocking scouting. e.g. a cloud of swifts, chainsaws, artemis, etc with a lot of depth.

Hard disagree on this particular point.

SL is amazing at everything. The only thing other supers do better than SL IMO is area denial. If you really need to create a no man's land, then I guess DRP and Zenith are better. But if you need to focus a particular building or even an army walking your way, SL will nearly instantly vaporize whatever it aims at.

And with ZK showing explosions through FOW, you can just wait until boom, move to other target. The other supers will take time as they randomly scatter across a large area.

SL also messes up the terrain pretty good. It's not rare to make area mex fail at scale beause the laser is digging metal spots into a slant and you first need to restore or somehow level.

I dunno. The original discussion was about how great an asset it is to have a SL ready in FFA. That's one argument I don't really have an opinion on.

But when it comes to which super I would rather build, I'd take SL all the time. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to bother making something else moving forward until I'm either shown something I didn't think of or the supers change.

Complaining about a game ending weapon ending games seems redundant, if they're dedicating their eco to a game ending weapons they're not dedicating it to defenses or units. The only time you can safely rush it is if you're already dominating the game.

My understanding is that the superweapons are there is finish these neverending games.

Starlight needs to look a bit assymetric, so that one would now which way is the laser gonna go after it is built. This way, you build your starlight in your base, it is surrounded by a few funnels, some aa, etc., and you are just praying that that laser wont destroy most of it.

quote: Starlight isn't effective at ending neverending games. If 2 players make 2 Starlights just out of range of each other, this can easily prolong a game by 30 minutes.

good argument for giving disco, starlight and zenith effectively infinite range.

We need to add mini-starlight as a counter to full blown starlight, so then you can make mini-starlight equipped raiders or mini-starlight bertha or something.