Magpie is not countered by Ettin or at least any less than 4 Ettin

Aquanim asserted that ettins can shred magpies

testing revealed this to be false

here's my video people can replicate them





Comparing similar metal amount on both ettin and magpie, with a slight edge to magpie as ettin is suppose to counter air

Magpie was selected as they were flying, no special formation

Magpies were queued up to target ettins one by one as all air players should do
Ettins was attack moved to the front as players tend to use them

Magpies are allowed to repair to full after each run as is normal practice for air player

Ettins were not repair to full but the result should not have change much even if they were

Results are as follow

Cumulative death	1 Ettin	3 Magpies
1st pass	0	0
2nd pass	1	0

Cumulative death	2 Ettin	5 Magpies
1st pass	1	1
2nd pass	2	1

Cumulative death	3 Ettin	7 Magpies
1st pass	1	2
2nd pass	2	4
3rd pass	3	4

I mis-manage this one but seem to be when ettin start making cost

Cumulative death	4 Ettin	10 Magpies
1st pass	1	4

So as we can see to actually stop magpie metal for metal, you need to invest 2000 metal into Ettin and even then the air player can just go elsewhere leaving you with useless AA

so Ettin is not the counter to Magpie

Artemis is counter to Magpie, but Artemis counter almost all air units,

I assert that aside from Artemis, Magpie is only counter by heavy shield or AA under shield

They're coming for me...

Aquanim you do have some good points, but AA, being Anti-Air, should still counter airplanes, and what I see in the video is not even close to countering. Even though it's not the ideal situation for the Ettins, it would still be reasonable to expect them to be making more of a dent in the magpies than they do. Not to mention, magpies are not exactly the beefiest planes, and Ettin is not exactly the wimpiest AA; like, honestly, I usually think of Ettin as one of the best mobile AA, and if that's all it does against magpies I would be pretty disappointed.

Also: you mention that repairing the Ettin would be reasonable, and indeed it would be, but if the magpies were targeting the Ettin specifically, then this video shows that a group of 5 or so magpies could just rush an Ettin, kill it in one run, and end up losing only one magpie if any at all. Let's just say if I saw 5 daggers destroy a redback with little to no casualties I would definitely be making a thread about it.

Aquanim
this set up was advantagous to ettin

in fact since the AA builder have to take ground as well [pure AA doesn't hold ground either] you would have less AA than the air player have magpie, skewing the advantage to magpie player instead of parity as demonstrated here.

to address ettin repair 4 magpie kill 1 ettin outright, so each pass the result would be largely the same

4 ettins have to be together to make cost and can only cover a specific area so the same amount of magpie can force a multiple of AA metal built if the front is large enough. If air player force 2-3x their metal share in their opponent to build AA and also score kills, then when ground lose to inferior force, it's not the air player fault.


Magpie priority target to me and I expect other as well was almost alway AA, so AA first then the rest

given move attack command, ettin do automatically retreat a bit, not as good as manual control of course but then you are forcing the oponent to lose more APM than you [air player can just shift queue the attack]

in comparision

1 likho vs 4 ettin end with likho dead and 2 ettins down even if ettin is relatively clumbed up [almost to a point] [which they rarely are] and ettin is AoE AA so it should have been better against magpie than it is against Likho

1 odin is killed by 3 ettin in 10-13 secs and ettins can respond better to odin due to their speed


if your answer to magpie dominance is that the defender should have had more metal in shield and cloaker then I think it is high time to nerf magpie


My problem is not that nothing can kill magpie, my argument is that it is too good for its cost. I am not addressing the E cost in this analysis and I admit this is a major weakness .

I am advocating for a minor nerf to HP making it closer to raven in term of hp per metal or a buff to AA AoE

It would also be good for my morale if you publicly admit that 2 ettins were not "sufficient to shutdown all magpies" as I recall you said.

specifically you said: " he [the enemy] only needs two [ettins] to delete you [Sortale] from the game"

it is about the truth,

I tag your name because we were discussing this

if you didn't care then you shouldn't have contradict me when I made my statements.


you have made several unsubstansiated false statement despite my objection to the contrary

I have went through the trouble of providing the evidence which I notice you have not bother to

and I have seen so far that you have not even acknowledge that you made false statement unsubstantiated

I believe I have argued politely and in good faith through out this and other conversations.



in light of this, I will now model you as someone who will not admit he is wrong in the face of evidence. Who made unsustaintiated claims yet demand that others provide proofs and conversation with you is a waste of time.

I had thought that you were more reasonable than this and I am disappointed to be proven wrong.

I'm not sure a test in a vacuum means all that much for bomber balance. The ingame relevance will have more to do with opportunity costs. But I was curious about the test, so I investigated it anyway.

The first thing I noticed was that my Ettins were a lot better against Magpie than those in the video. I think the difference is down to sight. I used /globallos because there was no LOS in the video, but some rough measurement of the video made me think that LOS view was merely hidden, because your Ettins were shooting rather late. Ettin has 660 LOS range and and 900 weapon range.

Reality will sit somewhere between minimal LOS and global LOS.

• The approach will be covered by radar in most cases. This at least lets Ettin turn and start firing. Its AoE of 64 even gives it a decent shot at dealing damage to the Magpie before it enters sight range.
• Other units can supply vision beyond what Ettin can see. This is a recommended, but not always possible.
• Terrain blocks radar (but not Air LOS!), so the radar advantage can be mitigated by approaching over uneven terrain. However, this makes things harder for Magpie as well.

I found that a single Ettin could kill an attacking Magpie with global LOS enabled. I ran further tests with radar coverage, which will introduce more variance, but having the Ettin turn to start firing seems more realistic than being taken completely by surprise.

I ran a modified two-Ettin test, and kept track of time and energy.

• Run 1: Two Magpies die, one Ettin dies.
• Run 2: No deaths
• Run 3: One Ettin dies.

Each run occurred a minute apart, which is just how long Magpies took to reammo, repair, and reorganise. A single Caretaker assisted the repairs, and the distance was a relatively short 2500 elmos (the same geometry of your Titan Duel test).

The Magpies spent 1455 energy, two minutes, and two Magpies, to kill two Ettins, including the final repair and reammo. So the costs are.

• 1000/1000 lost for the Ettin player
• 440/1895 lost for the Magpie player

It is hard to compare uneven costs, so I'll use some overdrive conversion rates. A E/M rate of 3 seems to be common for 5-20 minutes into the game, which corresponds to a Fusion payback time of around 3 minutes. I watched a few games to get this value, but it will vary by map. Anyway, if we convert energy cost with a 3:1 ratio, then:

• Ettin player lost 1333 converted metal.
• Magpie player lost 1032 converted metal.

This does not seem like a great outcome for Magpie, given that everything had to go right, and it took a whole two minutes to make 200 metal over the enemy. For example, the Ettin player had to not repair the Ettin between the second and third runs. Ettin can also be improved by spotters and by sitting near flex AA.

The Ettins were not repaired.

ignore this mod chicken magpies cant rearm.. and i cant seem to get the nests to become air pads ill work on it some time soon
[Spoiler]

A team without planes is certainly disadvantaged on a large map. Part of the question with Magpie is not whether some Magpie is better than no Magpie, but whether some Magpie is better than whatever else a plane player could be achieving. My general feeling at the moment is that mono-Magpie is a bit slow to get going, and hits a used-by-date, so it relies on building enough momentum to hit a mid-game window. It won't save a front early game because it deals damage too slowly, and it will be countered late game.

Maximum LOS is 660, except in exceptional circumstances. Ettin has enough else going for it that it doesn't warrant an exception.

Fighting X AA with Magpie is too wide of a question to be answered accurately by anyone. Instead of this, people should look at games where air players use Magpie and then look at how they interact with AA.

I will say that a majority of people who have been trying to adopt this strategy have been very passive, so perhaps not a lot of interactions are observable outside of my games...

But overall, since 3 Ettin puts my Magpies on a one second clock, I would be very hesitant to send my units to such an area.