So I recently tried out the athena. I played two games, one vs bot, one vs a human of my rank (won vs bot, lost vs human). I used only Athena, no other facs. It's a weird unit, like a Crane but it can stealth and build armies on the field. I didn't feel limited by it's small unit selection, but I did feel limited by the amount of micro it takes to construct things with it. I did like the striders, those are cool.
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There is a widget called "Auto Mover" (should really be set to default on) iirc that will make units move out of the way when built by the Athena so you can actually use repeat on it. Still can't set a waypoint but it clears up a lot of unit micro. The Athena is a really neat unit, and viable starting factory if you have really good map vision and don't get caught out of position with it. And because it can die so easily it makes it very difficult for some people to use effectively.
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Do most Athena users also make a static factory?
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From what I have seen, yes, they do, but that usually only happens when they need something that the Athena cannot build. Some noobs will build a a static factory immediately after the Athena, but do you really care?
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But yes, of course! Athena can be used as cloaked backstab base, where you send it to the back of enemy base early, where you use it's small radar jammer to produce group of raiders and devastate enemy eco by surprise. Or you can use Athena to get early middle positions, which is very important. 9/10 of athena usage is for this reason - rush important place in centre and start few defenders, radars, LLT and before the first enemies reach there, they are fended off. Until they break your athena defenses, your team reinforces the middle and voila, eco victory. Both of these tactics are risky, need game experience and usually occupies athena completely, that's why you might want to build static FACTORY too. Or not.
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however, once detected by opponents fighter.. you know what will happen.
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Athena is the only unit with seismic detection, but the enemy has to move to get detected. But I didn't know that it has a jammer too. I try to build my things behind a hill, because Radars can't see behind hills. Or a quick LLT/Flea in the enemies wind farm, then he has to spend about 600 metal to raid, rebuild the windfarm and make a few defenders.
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what is seismic detection?
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seismic detection: detect the movement of cloaky stuff on ground
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lol I thought every unit has that ability, once touches the detect range
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> Athena is the only unit with seismic detection, but the enemy has to move to get detected. No it isn't, no units have that type of seismic detection.
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GoogleFrog how exactly does the (un)cloaking work then?
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seismic dedection displays some kind of "makers" witch dissaper after a second. It only shows you where the unit is - not what unit, don't even cause that defenses Atack this unit if I'm right, but if you spam Athenas .... I only want a 5k metal unit with a huge radius that dedects any unit that can cloak itself at the game endings. That would be really nice: A unit witch costs 5k metal, spam 1HP drones with dedection all over the map, and dies if one of this drones die. If it die it place a marker where the last attack was. This dedection can dedect ANYthing - even fleas.
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Make a tactical missile (from tac nuke launcher) that does nearly the same thing? A missile, cost 500, hits an area the size of HLT-range for 1 damage. Call it "flour bomb". =P
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If the distance between any non-allied unit (A) and one of your units (B) is less than A.collisionSphere + B.decloakRadius then B is unable to cloak. B.decloakRadiusis displays as the blue line around units when shift+mousing over them. Every mobile unit that has no form of self cloaking has a decloakRadius of 75. Likewise every building except Sneaky-Pete has decloakRadius 150.
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Or make a gunship factory and spam Blastwings.
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Athena produce fleas everywhere, thats ugly...
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The Athena's unit page ought to feature a link to this forum topic. http://zero-k.info/Static/UnitGuide#fac-AthenaConTrust: I have seen the Athena backstab many a time. Never had it happen to me, though. I actually use athenas to produce fleas behind the enemy base. This way they it is not obvious that I have an athena back there, and I do not have to worry about sneaking the fleas past the enemy defenses. If I'm lucky, I can get away with the following, too: http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/791
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not within the range of defenders
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