Impaler

Impaler is not a fun unit to play against in large teams. Its greatest strength is psychological: at SOME point in the game the enemy player will stop moving their com, will stop moving their jugg, or will get widowed. And they know it. It induces panic. I have to be CONSTANTLY clicking shit or otherwise alter my tactics in ways an impaler isn't supposed to influence. I can't spend 80% of my time making sure my units dont get sniped by what is supposed to be anti-static artillery. This doesn't apply to small teams or 1v1, but I've seen at least 1 high-elo 1v1 where units dying to impaler still happened due to inattentiveness. It can be frustrating.

Patrol does not work against this that well, and even if it did, that would still be kinda... not good. I believe one of the core philosophies of TA was large scale battles, and as Impaler demands constant micro to make sure your units don't get straight up deleted that Impaler does not fit well in TA philosophy.

I understand Impaler spam usually isn't effective or cost efficient, but I still feel it shouldn't have the effect that it has. It's anti-fun.

Now let me mention some other Impaler strategies...
- Impaler + widow is in most instances far superior to Ultimatum. An ultimatum costs 2500 metal and rarely makes cost. 3 impalers and 3 widows? about the same, widows are a lot faster and usually make it out. Then Impalers go for their risk free target. You may think screen can deal with this, but not if impalers manually target fleas outside of your notice... assuming you even have time to set up screen whilst manually dodging impaler fire
- Athena-Impaler ambush: Superintendant has used this a lot I think. Impalers have quite a 'soft' firing and hitting sound in proportion to their immense damage. As a result, someone sneaking in an Impaler next to a singularity reactor often isn't noticed until its too late (given they take advantage of radar dark spots)

Most of what I said only applies to big teams, but I know Impaler is a common complaint. A better description for Impaler would be 'anti-APM artillery'

quote: Impaler is not a fun unit to play against in large teams. Its greatest strength is psychological: at SOME point in the game the enemy player will stop moving their com, will stop moving their jugg, or will get widowed. And they know it. It induces panic.

I have found that Impalers are very annoying in big team games and are one of the units people build lots of, but there are definitely ways to deal with them, but not very many and they are often expensive. Actually I just checked the wiki and apparently merlins (which I was thinking of as a counter) actually have less range then impalers, (Impalers having 1,500 and Merlins having 1,450, according to the wiki) even if only by a little bit, maybe that could be changed?

quote: Patrol does not work against this that well,...

Actually I have found patrol to work well, but only when the person with the impaler was focused on other things and didn't really care if they were hitting your guys or not, they just wanted to distract you our something, but I guess maybe that doesn't count.

quote: Impalers have quite a 'soft' firing and hitting sound in proportion to their immense damage. As a result, someone sneaking in an Impaler next to a singularity reactor often isn't noticed until its too late (given they take advantage of radar dark spots)

They definitely do have a quiet hitting sound, but their launching sound is fairly loud, but I guess it would be really hard to distinguish a couple impaler sounds in back from a million of them in front.

Several times used good tactics against Impalers (Turrents). =) Just a bunch of small units patrolling the front line or better silenced Halberd.

I don't understand why everyone complains about impalers. They have low dps and consequentially they are probably the slowest artillery in terms of making back cost.

A Cerberus or Likho can counter impalers decently...
Or you could possibly scout and then tac nuke.

quote: ... Likho can counter impalers decently.

Not with any decent AA + faraday/blitz/venom/newton/jugg coverage...

quote: And how often does that happen in the average lobsterpot?

More often than even impalers are used

quote: I've said it before: Make a widget. It's easy, will take only an hour or two of your time.

Unless that widget is automatically on for everyone it would change much.

I think the biggest problem is really the super long range. It allows them to sit well behind frontline defences with very little risk of being damaged. Even if you get raiders through they can run away while firing with no pack/unpack time. This is also a problem trying to likho them, as they will spread out. If the enemy air is at all competent they will kill your bomber as it has flown well over the front line.

For me the easiest way to address them would be to reduce the range slightly, maybe 10%. Also have a pack/unpack time of say 1s. Or however long the launcher takes to move up and down so it fits with the animation nicely.

> Conversations that only happen because 16v16 is happening on small maps #1638

Agreed that the "anti-APM artillery" aspect is unfun. I think a random-wandering widget for idle units would work very well, no stats nerf necessary.