How best to deal with Ravager balls?

When a shieldball gets to over 3000 metal it becomes pretty unstoppable, but before that point it's not invincible.

A particular vulnerability for Shieldfac at the 1k-2k metal range seems to be Ravagers. This is the point where a Ravager ball is too big to deter with Bandits (as beyond about 5 they start taking too many hits and their DPS is uninspiring) but not so big that your shieldball has gained lobsters or the Ravagers start to get in each other's way.

In general, how do factories deal with Ravager swarms at this size?

The only hardcounter I can think of is Placeholder. Massed Ogres, Reavers, Bolas, Rippers, Claymore and Redbacks are all decent soft counters (Claymore and Ogres in particular seem to do very well, while Bolas are a closer match), but those are mostly riots with limited wider utility (except Ogre which has a Dominatrix problem in that matchup). Amph seems to struggle almost as much as shield, with even Limpets not being enough to save a Buoy or Duck horde.

Defences other than Desolator tend to fair pretty poorly (this includes combinations of Faraday, Stardust and Stinger that you might think would work). And even a Desolator dies to 2x its cost in Ravagers (which is why you always spend the extra 300 metal to put it on a pole that most things can't reach).

You might think Snitches would work against the densely packed Ravagers, but the Snitch takes about 3 detonations to kill a Ravager and in practice getting them into a position in front of the fast-moving horde without a friendly fire incident is tricky, particularly in the open terrain Ravagers favour. And once the Snitches have detonated the enemy will be a lot warier about them and will probably manage to save most of their Ravagers, so you'll have barely made cost (3 Snitches cost the same as 2 Ravagers).

So what do people think? Any other ideas?

I like to use a combination of statics and shieldball to fight stuff like this. If you can lure a ravager ball into range of a few faraday and attack them while they are under emp they will have a horrible time. Also, you want to have a bunch of racketeers and rogues in a shieldball to deal with the Ravagers. The key is to never attack into the Ravagers but to make them chase you. You want to draw out the length of time before the Ravagers make it under your shield envelope as long as possible.

Ravagers are good?
Best day of my rover life!

Snitch!

Use fight command. Yes, they cannot reliably kill ravagers, but the rover player cannot do much either. If they cannot use their horde offensively, I think this is already a good situation to switch into something more powerful.

Then again, if you find yourself in a situation that seemingly has no good solution, then the mistake is to get into that situation in the first place. I don`t really know what map is favourable for both factories, so please link replays. Maybe plopping Shields was the mistake. Shields want chokepoints, rovers want space.

Also, why can they even get such a ball?
Maybe the solution for shields is to exert as much pressure and aggression as they can in the early game. I think exept domi rover has not much to stop something like 5 thugs 2 outlaws in the first maybe 10 minutes of the game.

And again, I have not played 1v1 in ages, so maybe my blabber is total bs.

Skuttle doesn't have enough AoE to make cost vs Ravager, snitch was also already covered as lackluster

For shieldballs, adding more outlaws than you feel is reasonable works pretty well. 1Felon-3Outlaw-8Thug is comparable in cost to 10 ravagers, and easily defeats the ravagers while a comparably costed 2Felon-1Outlaw-6Thug ball dies.

I don't know why you don't consider Riots to be a hard counter, as even Reavers manage to trade quite favorably. You can usually afford 1 Riot per Ravager, so that should be a solid solution especially given the lucrative reclaim you'll get. Of course, riots usually can't maneuver as well as the Ravagers so if you're on a map that favors vehicles then you're in a tough spot. I'm really not sure what amph has that can deal with ravagers though. Ducks are too easy to hit, archers and scallops don't have enough range.

This is pure theorycrafting, but as amph I feel like Limpet+Scallops could do well.
Add lobster and you can maybe deal with badgers or fencers too.

It's difficult to use https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1887440 as evidence. Basically you have mediocre rover play not beating a purple-ish (the inflection points are the comm snipe at the start and the Thunderbird nearer the end). That might mean that Ravager is too strong against shields, because I should have been crushed, but I guess more evidence is needed.

In a straight fight shieldball should lose against the optimal unit composition from another factory, right? If it does better than that then you can only fight it by not fighting it, which doesn't seem like good design.

Just at a very high level you'd expect Ravager to work relatively well against shields since the weakness of weapon range and accuracy is less acute, and strengths of speed and not being made of paper really help.

I cant dl the newest version of the game, so I cannot watch the replay again, but there are 2 kind of even encounters around the midway. First is the one where your opponent chases you with scorchers, those die, then goes in with the ravagers. And then there is the one I assume you mean, which is where it looks like you would lose. What confuses me is that the first of those 2 encounters works quite well for you, the second maybe not. The thing is that you abort the figt the moment the ravagers are completely slowed, which should shift the balance into your favor quite a lot.

But then, the most important thing is that you do not fight with your entire army. Ravagers can shoot over each other, thugs cant really. So you are effectively fighting the whole ball with the damage output of 3 or maybe 4 thugs. What you do is using a defensive formation that puts the emphasis on the shield-link, not damage. At least in the past, ravagers used to be not that good against shields because they didn`t have the fire-rate and damage to go through the shields well. Maybe the nerfed shield-regen is a thing as well? Not sure. What I think needed to be done is a bit more spreading to allow all of your thugs to fire and profit from the full slow. You could also do a bit of rotation, pull the damaged thugs back behind the fresher shields of their comrades.
(On a sidenote, I do not understand why you insist on building felons. Assaults are kind of a counter to them, and their shield-drain somewhat works against the defensive formation. But that is probably not of any concern for our actual topic.)

Now again, I cannot log in to do my own tests, and I might be quite wrong. This post is not me saying I am definitely right and you just cannot play shields well. I will look at it again as soon as i am able to log in.

Skuttle might work well, but if you say that ravagers can go around a shieldball simply, then I would argue that skuttles are really slow and the ravager-player can screen with darts. It should be comparatively easy to avoid getting skuttled. Maybe. BUT if you have a jumpy fac already, why not go for placeholder? THAT should allow you to use almost anything INCLUDING skuttle to finish your opponent off.