Purpose of Nimbus?

I remember some time 10+ years ago when it was still called brawler and shredded stuff and was super strong...

Now as I understand it, it is pretty off meta and useless. I found a replay commentary by PLT_Godde where he calls them "low impact units" too:
(At time 11:15)

I'm curious if anyone has used nimbus's effectively?

Why would I make one when at roughly the same price-point I can get Revenant which is faster, tankier, higher dps, and delivers its damage all at once (very high impact)?

In theory since Nimbus has much longer range it's positioned to just sit there and attrition the enemy to death. In practice it's still outranged by all true anti-air so it's not going to be winning that battle of attrition, and it's unlikely to be able to kill anything important before said anti-air forces it elsewhere.

The decrease in brawler damage and hp was accompanied by a huge increase in range. It can comfortably sit outside the range of Gauss, and I think stinger. With bad radar wobble, aa tends to not hit them.

They do enough dps to be a problem, particularly for skirmishers.

All other gunships are able to be shot by non aa ground units while fighting, but Mr Nimbus requires AA cover.

When you consider "coulda had a krow" after a few, they aren't usually worth it.

Sometimes I like to make a little air just to force my enemy to make AA, and one nimbus is annoying and continuously tells your opponent to make aa.


It's also just kinda a leftover from the merge to 1faction, there the arm and core gunship factories merged, and the new combined gunship fac just got all the units from the two old ones. The revenant was basically unchanged, and the brawler became a wierd skirmisher.

Kerr I am not sure if we need to go back that far. Nimbus was last nerfed in 2014 and has been built a lot more than Revenant over the last 10 years. This was a string of three commits that reduced its speed, then reduced its DPS, then partially reverted the DPS reduction six months later. So we don't have to look at the old Arm Brawler, it warranted a nerf in 2014 with only 18% more DPS and 12% more speed.

Since then I saw Nimbus in use, but it was mostly as a fairly safe thing for mid-ranked players to do in teamgames. A ball of Nimbus could be scary to face. I think it is mostly a unit with fewer opportunities for great plays, so now Revenant offers that, it has been sent to the sidelines. Nimbus just does a bit of damage at range and eventually has to be dealt with. It is also weak to raiders so isn't great out in the open.

I don't think Nimbus is going to be the type of unit that you see much in 1v1. It deals damage too slowly and requires too much support due to its soft-counters.

It is good at putting pressure on the opponent and can take some amount of aa damage (use on retreat at 60%) and can be effective to prevent or stall enemy offenses.

It also isn't vulnerable to stuff like ogre or mace and is even hard for aa to hit without proper vision.

Fine is right about that: Phoenix is much scarier vs the units nimbus would threaten.

GoogleFrog : I haven't been a constant presence, so idk the middle of the story :)