Multilobbers are unfun to counter

I agree that it's unfun. Maybe an easier way to decloak or to reliably one-shot a lobsters in air would be good. Maybe put all lobbed lobster on cooldown, no matter if they used their ability or not?

1 faraday?

[Spoiler]

If you monospam assaults, especially on maps with a lot of water/lava, you're just asking to get lobbed into the depths. Assaults are bad at hitting moving targets and are sometimes (especially tanks) slow to target in the first place.

Assuming it's not cloaked, racketeers will disable lobsters mid air and they can't miss.
Some skirms with instant damage, such as moderators, will reliably snipe lobsters before they land.
Riots could gun flying lobsters down, but that's more risky.

If the lobster dies while it is activating lobbing, your units will just be thrown straight up and land back where they stood. For your units to get thrown, the lobster needs to be able to land safely within range and survive the action activation. Most of the time that means a single or few costly, unsupported assaults.

Crabs, grizzly and mino balls beware. Lava is gonna getcha.


When it comes to cloaked, well, there are a number of cloaked things that could surprise you depending on the circumstance so that's moot I think. Either screen with flees or sacrifice a sparrow before moving into a risky path.

quote: Lobsters by design should be kings of lava maps.

My hot take here is that I don't understand how insta-death pits are a thing in this game, at least I don't understand why they are that popular with players. They just make lob and juggle unreasonably good in my opinion. One cloaker and one lobster are potentially able to instantly kill a number of paladins + some other heavies by lobbing them into lava and I think THAT is too much, especially because the player on the recieving end has no chance and time to react. You can dodge shockleys by moving at least and an ultimatum is likely to kill a number of units, but will likely die itself before it kills all enemies. Death pits turn cloaked lobsters into an ultimatum with quite some AoE, and I think if an ultimatum were able to reliably kill that many units with one hit, noone would think: "Yeah, reasonable." To me, it is hard to think of lobsters as unproblematic while hermits or old dante totally are/were at the same time. I get that you love to lob things to their death, but aside from that I personally don't see a compelling reason why lobsters should be even able to lob enemy units. In this regard, my stance is obviously quite extreme, but I am very aware that it is and runs contrary to most players opinion.

quote: Nerfing it further is likely to just make it into a niche unit without many use cases except throwing units into lava.

I think this is flat our wrong.
-Lobsters main use is still to allow the quite sluggish amphbots to offset their speed-disadvantage and close the gap to enemy units. As far as I remember, that was their main intend, and I agree that this was quite an ingenious solution to the "amph has no arty" problem as well. I see that in TAW all the time.
- Lobsters are used to ambush things on cliffs and be more mobile in general in otherwise unpassable terrain.
- Lobsters are used to get units out of dire situations, most notably striders that got stunned or overwhelmed.
- Lobsters are used to move ships and with them, shoguns or scyllas, over land. Now, THAT is a niche usecase, but still. It is by far faster in comparison to using transports, albeit not as good if you want to relocate them over larger distances.
So I think that lobster is a very good unit that really does a lot for the amph factory and other units, even if we just look at the usecases that only contain lobbing allied units. Being able to lob enemies goes on top of that, and I have a hard time to think of any other unit that is that versatile and universally useful.

That is for the main part of thegame, aka ground combat.

Where I do think lobsters are genuinely, objectively problematic without doubt is in the amph - ships matchup.
(sorry aioeieoiao)
Ships REALLY struggle against lobbed scallop-balls because they don't have the tools to deal with them. This is so severe because it is very easy for the amph player to abduct a number of ships and kill them of mid-air, so that a single encounter can lead to the shiplayer being behind in army value for the rest of the game. The reclaim lands in the amph players hand additionaly.
The ship player has to have support from other factories to survive this.
Here is an example: https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/2413948 starting at roughly at the 30% mark.
The reason why I as the ship player never engage with the enemy scallop-ball is precisely because of this and I only survived because other players also used lobbed scallops, mojjj used cloaked claymores and, most notably, at some point aioeieoiao got a bit too ballsy, killed most of our units, but failed to prevent us getting the reclaim.
If you want more and better replays, I can dig through my played games, but that will require a lot of time, so I will restrict myself to this one for now.

Hard disagree here. As someone who does use funny lobster a ton on lava maps, they require the highest degree of skill, timing and massive amounts of luck. All your normal anti cloak stuff works vs cloaked lobster. Air dropped lobster is easy to counter with any of your own aa, swifts, or just moving your high value stuff away. Lobsters have already been hard nerfed with the recent change that lobbing is almost impossible (plz revert, lobster dying should not cancel the entire jump!!!).

As for the ship matchup, amph needs all the help possible vs ships. Ship is still the best sea fac by a wide margin, and lob scallop kinda just dies to siren-mistral.

quote: The possibilities with cloak are pretty much endless. Today I witnessed someone wield a cloaked puppy ball to extreme success. It killed groups of heavy units astonishingly quickly, cost the user almost nothing because all the puppies came from the battlefield reclaim, and it made quick work of much of our frontline.

This doesn't make sense to me as a comparison. If you apply this consistently and treat puppy goo (which is limited only by reclaim) as free, you're saying every other unit in the game is massively underpowered by comparison. Realistically 20+ puppies and one lobster aren't remotely equal in value, and so I think my suggestion that lobster is ridiculously cheap and deadly near lava or water stands.

Yah I don't know what mistrals would do vs amph either. You'd have to be facing an amph opponent that amoves their scallops, which is not what you want to do with scallop-lob ball. Even sirens tend to get stomped by scallop-lob. As soon as the scallops reach critical mass, ships have no answer. Their heaviest unit, the siren, becomes paper. And helpless paper at that as it gets chain lobbed.

The only things I can do vs very large scallop balls is spam hunter / claymore and hope to micro my way into a favorable engagement, or hope for insanely timely support such as a likho shooting the scallops mid air, shockley, a reef disarming the scallops... some manner of extremely timely and circumstantial counter or end game escalation.

If it wasn't for lobster, claymore would be a really cheap HARD counter, but with lobsters in play you kind of have to wait for the lob, retreat as the scallops fly into your kill zone and then hope that the amph player doesn't have one more lob available.

At this point, I am genuinely tempted to try a new sea strat (to me) for large team games: siren monospam with lobster support. Let's see if ships can out-amph amphs, but I doubt it because generally a larger number of cheaper units is better than equal cost swarm. 2x the individual unit cost does not mean 2x the damage.

Thunderbirds and phoenix counter scallops pretty hard fwiw.