http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1619029?Literally nothing could have countered this. Redback is the best unit for countering dirtbags and even redback spam couldnt beat them. They're fine in normal games but in high metal games the ratios are all off and its uncounterable.
+2 / -0
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Shouldn't you be able to build something stronger than redbacks to kill them if it's a high metal map? I don't know much about dirtbag counters, but there's gotta be a better unit or unit combination than that. How good is dante against dirtbags? Maybe you could have some tremors combined with some crabs, redbacks, and a dante, or you could even get creative with Newtons to hold them off while you obliterate them or the factory, or something like that. Maybe even the new Zeno missile would help.
+0 / -0
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newtons (buildings): 2 are good to keep away a normal stream of dirtbags. but if only 1 impaler or any other erti is added, this will not work for long. juggernaut is better but a pretty expensive specialised version. half dirtbag's health!
+1 / -0
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On some zoom out the whole concept of dirtbag seems to be anti-fun. Kinda like halberd, but even more. Maybe rather than a buff or nerf, it needs a redesign.
+4 / -0
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quote:
Shouldn't you be able to build something stronger than redbacks to kill them if it's a high metal map? I don't know much about dirtbag counters, but there's gotta be a better unit or unit combination than that. How good is dante against dirtbags? Maybe you could have some tremors combined with some crabs, redbacks, and a dante, or you could even get creative with Newtons to hold them off while you obliterate them or the factory, or something like that. Maybe even the new Zeno missile would help.
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Yeah, you -should- be able to build something stronger than redbacks, but what? The only things capable of traversing terrain with that many dirtbag hills are spiders, jumpbots, and scorps. Scorps would just get overrun by dirtbags, same as any other unit..
+0 / -0
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I'm gonna go to bat for Dirtbag here. East eventually gets a small map advantage and significant overdrive advantage. This is a winning play. Before that, west and east sorta trade blows a bit, but rovers and hovers aren't doing well against spiders on this kind of map. East had multiple spider plops, building crabs and taking advantage of cliffs. This helped lead to the ground advantage. Another thing that helped to get the ground advantage, is admitately the dirtbag spam. Redback is great against Dbag, but also AOE is good against dbag, and the hovers especially were not with that message. I saw like 6 lances, and they just got jumped upon by a hoard of dirtbags. Additionally, the dirtbag spam eventually does block path-finding across the map, which in this case it does look like the dirtbag player was conscious of and actively decided to make complete walls(good play). I would suggest the following for countering mass dirtbag clutter- Tremor. This is a mobile unit that can level the dirtbag terraform in a wide area from range in about 30 seconds. If you don't have a tank factoy, it should take less than 90 seconds if you focus your entire economy into getting one at 30m/s. Quake. This will be more expensive than tremor, due to silo cost, single use etc, but is widely adaptable to the entire map due to its range. Terraform restore. This is, in my opinion, the weakest anti-dirtbag tactic here, because cons can just die to dirtbag or other enemy units and terraforming slowdown due to enemies near by. In this game   B1503908 26 on Victoria Crater v2.1 I built a couple tremors to deal with the narrow lane, the dirtbag terra clutter, and the tremors at the end actually won the game by clearing all the terraform blockages along the lane(defended by turrets so cons would die) so our paladin and other units could push down the lane and kill the enemy superweapon. I would say that tremor is even more applicable to OP topic map cause that map is so narrow and lane focused. EDIT: Also, still watching the replay, spectators point out that at that time (15 minutes) Dbag spammer lost 20K metal of dirtbag but killed 7.5K metal(most of that was about 4 lances)
+3 / -0
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I think there is another question here, which might be whether they are fun or not. I usually find them annoying to play against. What makes them annoying? I think the high health and that they aren't easily countered by stuff you feel should counter them like glaives. Idk.
+0 / -0
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quote:
I would suggest the following for countering mass dirtbag clutter-
Tremor. This is a mobile unit that can level the dirtbag terraform in a wide area from range in about 30 seconds. If you don't have a tank factoy, it should take less than 90 seconds if you focus your entire economy into getting one at 30m/s.
Quake. This will be more expensive than tremor, due to silo cost, single use etc, but is widely adaptable to the entire map due to its range.
Terraform restore. This is, in my opinion, the weakest anti-dirtbag tactic here, because cons can just die to dirtbag or other enemy units and terraforming slowdown due to enemies near by.
In this game Multiplayer B1503908 26 on Victoria Crater v2.1 I built a couple tremors to deal with the narrow lane, the dirtbag terra clutter, and the tremors at the end actually won the game by clearing all the terraform blockages along the lane(defended by turrets so cons would die) so our paladin and other units could push down the lane and kill the enemy superweapon. I would say that tremor is even more applicable to OP topic map cause that map is so narrow and lane focused.
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I agree that those are valid strategies in some situations, but in this specific case it is 1. A very high metal map 2. A wide open map, minus some hills, and 3. Has some hills that restrict movement some, but there are still a lot of various lanes. These three factors mean that a player is able to continually produce dirtbags, and even if you have a good counter for them they are able to keep you from advancing because you have to not only kill the dirtbags, but also clear the dirt. tremors and quakes only clear a specific area, and youre assuming the other team isn't actively trying to kill anything that counters the dirtbags. In the replay i posted, tremors would have gotten killed easily by dirtbags that just flank it. I would much rather deal with them on a narrow map. I think it was just the perfect storm, where the three factors I listed above makes the dirtbag unbalanced.
+0 / -0
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I don't think anything past minute 10 says much about Dirtbag balance. As     Steel_Blue said, East had a bit more of the map by that point and a lot more overdrive. It's also notable that West made two Berthas simultaneously, and had a Hover player clinging to a Lance composition that wasn't appropriate for the situation. East had an advantage and West didn't really switch things up much, so West lost. I also don't think Redback is "the" counter to Dirtbags. I feel like clearing the terrain or making units, to deal with it, is the important thing. Killing the Dirtbags is secondary. If one side has to worry about killing Dirtbags to avoid the heatbutt damage, then they're probably at such a disadvantage that they've lost anyway. I saw a comm survive a Dirtbag dive pretty late in the game, although they were effective at sniping Lances in Lance + Flail balls. The terrain could have been cleared in the mid-late game with a Tremor, or circumvented. Trying to kill the Dirtbags then restore the ground, so the hover army can act, isn't the way. Anyway, it seems like the first half of the game is the most revealing. But it's still a bit hard to see what's going on. I feel like East having planes, with nothing from West, was a big part of it. Dirtbag blocking up the north into the hover ball was also effective, although the hover ball has trouble in the base terrain anyway, and it spent a lot of its time idle. The Rover dives didn't seem that useful on this map, especially into uncontested Likho. South East was essentially Dirtbag, Recluse, Likho and some Redback, but South West responded with Reaver and shieldball, both of which are terrible against Recluse. The Reaver at least looked like a response to the Dirtbag. I guess I would like to see a game where people don't pend so much on countering Dirtbag.
+1 / -0
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Maybe quake missile could do some light smoothing on a wider area. That'd counter dirtbagged terrain. Tremor is annoyingly clumsy to use.
+7 / -0
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TREMOR JUST NEEDS TO BE CHEAPER... IT'S OLD RANGE USED TO JUSTIFY IT'S COST. BUT NOW IT IS A EASY KILL.
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The dirtbag terraform north requiring QWOP to get rid (and even more QWOP hell to carefully move units 10 elmos to fire through valleys and realize what bits of terrain are ACTUALLY pathable by each unit and which pathfinding THINKS are pathable) of was a big factor in outcome, but the bigger one was south recluses being countered by nothing because all south west saw was dirtbags. If there were a good smoothing unit people could build that would automatically smooth away dirtbag bumps it'd make playing against them a lot more fun. But that's actually more like removing the terra ability of dirtbag. But given how little blobs of terra create UX pain/legibility issues when it comes to pathfinding and line of sight questions it'd probably make the game more fun just to remove the dirt part entirely any way (as I don't think the pathing/LoS legibility issues are solvable without orders of magnitude more resources than this project has). The central dirtbags themselves getting extremely confused on pathing at 12:03 is probably a good example of this.
+0 / -0
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Maybe the dirt should be more spread out to allow making larger hills rather than the spikes which affect pathing so badly. They are still useful as a very high hp/cost unit with jump.
+1 / -0
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MAKE RESTORE TERRAFORM ONLY COST E.
+5 / -0
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> Tremor is annoyingly clumsy to use. > TREMOR JUST NEEDS TO BE CHEAPER... Just make tremor move faster, i guess.
+0 / -0
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I don't think that you necessarily have to "counter" the terrain left by Dirtbag. It is more or less equally difficult for both teams to attack across Dirtbagged terrain, so don't feel like you have to restore or Tremor it. You can make it work for you instead. The game has been slowed down for both teams at the other team's expense, so take advantage of that and rush a nuke or something.
+5 / -0
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Agreed with Aquanim, dirtbags are annoying, but easy to deal with. Stopped by a few riots, be it a few reavers or an ogre. They provide vision, but do not deal that much damage, and that terrain terraform is annoying for everyone. People sometimes assume that raiders such as glaives should be able to deal with dirtbags, but the contrary is true, dbags are hard countered only with riots.
+0 / -0
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   Silent_AI : Raiders bad against dirtbags? Dirtbag cost in glaives kills them in about 1000 elmo. Much better than Mace or Redback.
+0 / -0
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Glaives kill them, but they are pretty slow at it, due to their fairly large health. I mean if you have a lot of glaives, they kill them easily, but when faced with a dbag spam, I would rather make some riots.
+0 / -0
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