Artemis ruins air lategame

Again, Licho survives up to 3 chainsaws, Revenant is basically unkillable atm, it even needs 3(!) artemis-shots to die. You are aware that without artemis, the game will be completely air-dominated?

quote: Air player has no recourse against them short of building a silo, and then nuking them that way.

Classically the air-player switches to ground and keeps their own air as defensive forces.

Anyhow what's wrong with silo? You can see missiles as a kind of air :-p. And the 1800 metal investment sounds lower than whatever enemy put into Artemis(es).

Not firing at swifts is a risk as you can scout it - easier to snipe it with silo.

Also if map is large enough, the value in Artemis to cover all front is rather large. And if map is small air should not be that powerful.

Ok, but at that point the artemis-owner could have just manually targeted the other gunships.

A funny thing you can do with krow is sponge those missiles. 80 metal per shot, and a krow can safely eat 9 of them.

IMO krow is underrated, and this is one of its uses.

My general take on this sort of air interaction is here: http://zero-k.info/Forum/Post/256192#256192

Most of what I would say about Artemis can be derived from it. Not everything though, as there are versions of Artemis that would clearly be too good under my post above. For example, if Artemis had 8k health then it would be too hard to counter with other means. So it isn't as if I'm saying that an interaction like Artemis is automatically fine.

I have heard about Artemis being a problem in quite a while, but it is worth keeping an eye on as there could be a trend. Air has been viable surprisingly late into large games for a while now. So it isn't like Artemis is tracking air coming into viability. Funnelweb prevalence seems to have been increasing and there are a few relatively new large maps with a lot of metal. Still, three Artemis seems like a lot and surely happens quite late. Air having a great game up until the enemy team is forced to make three Artemis sounds fine. At that point is is probably time for a heavy strider or something.

Some example games would be good.

Well I'm not referring to either of those games specifically, mojjj. I messed up the micro in both of them, and paid the price. But again, I am an air noob and admit that. I do not go complaining about unit viability after making my own mistakes, I'm grown up enough to take responsibility for them. The concern I have is that artemis in its current form is not making the game better due to lack of effective counterplay, thats it.

Overall, there have been suggestions to :
- Make a silo. Yes, this works if artemis is exposed. No, it does not work if it is covering the singu line in the back lines, making bomber dives essentially infeasible.
- Switch factory. duh.
- Feed likhos as tanks. This is cost-prohibitive and you never know if that would even achieve anything (in terms of shielding the main bomber swarm).
- Feed a krow to artemis to "disarm" it. This requires 4200 investment into the krow, and, assuming it can survive, reasonable buildpower to repair it. 9 Artemis rockets are 720 metal, which may sound significant, but the risk of losing the krow is also quite strong. In a realistic game the krow would be able to eat maybe 2-4 shots at a time to ensure it has enough HP to retreat to safety. This can be an interesting way to "steal" metal from the enemy, but does not appear to be an actual counterplay.
- A variant of the above idea is to use aspis to soak artemis shots. This is far more interesting, as a couple of aspis can keep artemis busy shooting at a parked revenant (unless the enemy switches to manual targeting, of course). This may not always work if artemis is in the back lines.

Overall, I think none of the proposed solutions are truly addressing the lack of counter play problem. A few observations to compare artemis to other turrets:
- It has best range of all turrets (except big bertha and friends)
- It has best DPS of all static turrets (except Starlight, but its close). And its not per cost, its best DPS of all statics, period.
- It has really good AoE for what it targets to kill
- It has decent rate of fire to act as a sort of high-end riot unit.
- Most other high-end turrets can be countered with impalers, swarms of little units, bombers, and a variety of other things. Artemis has effectively only two counters - silo and BB (as it is normally too far back for impalers to be useful). Artemis in the back lines has no counters short of feeding it likhos hoping to deplete its stockpile.

Bottom line is, if Artemis is supposed to be a win button vs air players, then so be it, I can live with that. If it is supposed to counter things like Likho and Revenant, then its too strong vs basic ravens and locust spam, and reducing its AOE may be a simple way to address that.

I'm quite curious what a lob pot without Artemis would look like...

AA is still fairly cost effective, so I don't really think people will switch to only making air.

If you really insist on having a scenario for defeating the FlyerDefeater9000 using aircraft, then i'm pretty sure a gnat swarm costing equal or less than the Artemis, missiles included, can do the job under optimal conditions*

AA is super strong because it is soo layered. Rarely do we find an artemis alone. Mostly you have a chainsaw around the corner, some razors up front. Often some random emp turrets, flex aa by the millions (moderators, felons, juggle, ogre, etc), mobile aa (gremlins and vandals and stuff). Any bomber has to get through all this (which spots the planes and attrits them) before they even see the artemis. Return trip? Lolz. An impaler for AA makes a lot more sense than an Impaler for ground porc...

Artemis and AA in general is strong - too strong - because ground players want to counter air without playing air.