Cloak has become a support factory.

I've played a few games of cloak in small teams as well as in lobsterpot, and fairly early on I end up feeling like my hands are tied army comp wise. Cloak starts off extremely aggressive with glaive raiding, having skirmishers, riots and artillery all available in the first minutes off the game, and also including a cheap bomb. However, once mid tier units come out, (heavier skirms, artillery, beefier assaults, shields, etc) Cloak loses it's ability to do much offensively. Knight, isn't particularly effective at doing a lot of damage. Phantom seems less of a unit you naturally transition into, and more of an obscure counter to a particular unit, such as for sniping a lance, firewalker, emissary, or commander. It's easy to run down and destroy with pretty much anything, and if you position your forces too close to the phantom to protect it, your enemy will usually end up killing the phantom with collateral damage or decloaking and sniping it. Again, lances, firewalkers, or emissaries will kill phantom fairly easily in a situation where it's lurking nearby with lots of protective forces. It shines with cloaked imp or snitch, or scything, but scything is only deepstrike and cloaked bomb is a fairly defensive ability unless you have other allies backing you up. The factory as a whole lacks the abilty to be as offensive as a small hover army with lance, or a small amph army with bouy or grizzly, jump with firewalker, shield with felon, or most other factories minus Rover.

I think that's true for every fac in lob pot. We're supposed to escalate.

Units are very important early on to deny mexes and keep the enemy honest, but given the number of commanders, raiders are usually not able to do much.

A few skirmishers are nice early on to contest commanders and riots, but at least one if not several people per team build artil as their first unit so owning skirms quickly become a liability (especially against pillager). There is a very tight window for skirms to make cost.

Large shield balls are prone to getting shockly'ed.

Tanks can get trapped by placeholders.

All air is usually quickly denied free reign by static and unit ground to air and can only do dives on the front line.

Spiders either successfully push with spired crab for a quick victory or get tremored.

Even lone striders get widowed.

We're supposed to escalate to artil, clear a path through the front with a nuke and then invade (at the risk of getting counter nuked while in enemy territory).

On very low eco maps, sling spam is pretty good until you face a firewalker. At that point you need to either transition out of cloakie entirely, or you need to add aegis to your comp.


No matter the fac, I find that it's only worth to keep making non-striders past 10 minues is if the attrition is tilting heavily and you can actually keep putting increasing pressure. But if attrition is not constantly growing, making more small units generally results in reclaim on enemy territory and a reversal of territory control.

The only factories that can hold a lane until pala shows up is hover and shield. Cloak used to be able to do it when snipers were faster, but not really anymore.

amph, tanks, spiders and jump all can get shut down hard, and rover never had line army for mid game.