Magpie & AA & Air

Alright, it's time for that yearly balance thread.

I'll get straight to the point.

Magpie is fundamentally badly designed unit

Let's look at it's strengths and weaknesses:
Strengths:
Excellent speed
Good maneuverability
Great HP/cost
Perfect accuracy
Homing projectile
Fast projectile speed
Good range
Weaknesses:
Absolutely terrible damage/cost

How did we end up with a unit that has only one weakness? And it's not even a weakness can be used to kill it.

Magpie is effective against any unit, as long as it's valuable, punishing potential interesting gameplay
Imagine this scenario:
You run a raid of 25 Glaives. You manage to evade the enemy's defenses. You enter the enemy's core territory: rich, full of eco and undefended.
Now - imagine a unit's value - it's based on the unit's state and position. A raider in the enemy base is worth much more that one in the factory. Magpie's role, due to it's bad damage/cost and perfect accuracy, is to fire at units that are the most valuable.
So your Glaives just die to Magpies, preventing any interesting gameplay.
With Raven you could have outran the projectile.
With Thunderbird you can spread out or wait for the disarm to run out.
With Phoenix you could at least have spread out your units. (I do think this problem affects Phoenix as well, it's another unit that's faster then raiders and counters them)
With Magpie you just die. The missiles home towards your units and there is nothing you can do. There is way to limit your losses or even kill it without AA.
This can happen with any game move that increases the value of your units, unless you have a swarm of AA to protect you.

How to counter Magpie?
Don't even bother with flex AA, Magpie both outranges it and outmaneuvers it.
There is only one answer - AA. And not a reasonable amount of AA. If you want to deny Magpie from attacking your forces, you need a stupid massive amount of AA. The issue lies here: Lanchester's square law

Zero-k has many game mechanics to reduce the effect of Lanchester's square law on the game, but none of them apply to AA and Magpie. Both just deal damage. There are no AA units that deal status damage and there are only few that do AoE. Ettin kinda works, but good players will spread out their Magpies. Only Artemis does enough AoE to truly stop Magpie. I believe Magpie was originally intended to be a counter to Lance (or other arty), but it fails to be one since Lance is usually co-located with massive amounts of AA and other targets are not.

But in most cases it's just two damage streams competing. And as modeled by Lanchester's square law, the bigger force will do overwhelming damage on the smaller force. And Magpie is faster then AA, so it can choose where to engage.

Because of this,a Magpie swarm might just be the best counter to mobile AA. You would think that ground units would be the counter to mobile AA, but how would they do that? They can't catch them. Crasher is faster then Scorcher. But a Magpie swarm can actually catch them. A large enough Magpie swarm can counter reasonably-sized AA forces. (I fully believe that in practice most mobile AA units die from player inattentiveness.)

Also, the AA units built by the arms race that Magpie forces counter every other plane/gunship as well, and it counters them better then Magpie. So building Magpie discourages building any air unit that isn't Magpie. There is no way to counter Magpie specifically.

Conclusion
I hope the arguments presented here make logical sense to people. Fixing this, though, will not be easy.
I hope the game developers carefully reexamine units with the unholy combination of high range and fast speed.
Magpie, sadly I don't think is salvageable in it's current state. Nerfing will not fix it's fundamental problems. I believe it would be ideal if it was fundamentally reworked.

I am not sure how you reach the assessment magpie has terrible damage per cost because it's the second most efficient bomber in the factory:

damage per metal:
magpie: 1.71
raven: 2.67
likho: 1
phoenix 1.38 +0.34 aftertburn

Likho is terrible on paper because it does exactly 2000 damage for 2000 metal, but it does it in one punch which often makes the difference between piercing a shield and being blocked by it. Magpie will be reliably blocked by sufficient shields, while likho will pierce half depleted shields and that is a very important distinction. A stack of aegis/aspis that has been previously pressured will still efficiently block a volley of magpies, while a likho will just punch right through.

Phoenix is pretty awful. The damage listed above is purely theorical because it assumes all firebombs hit the target when really, when do they ever? The idea is that they saturate fire an area and the weak targets will burn. That's its job.

Magpie has better homing than raven because it can reliably bomb raiders, but doing so is usually a poor use of it. The reload time makes it an expensive "riot" option. It's just convenient that it can catch raiders at all, providing an extra safety net should you need it as some raiders slip through a crack in the front.

The magpie slightly outranges the likho (550 to 500) but the likho has way better AOE (96 vs 24) and homing (164 vs 82).

The one thing magpie is exceptionally bad at, and used to be worse in the past, is rearm cost. It's 0.057s per metal, compared to the raven's 0.0267 and the likho's 0.013.

It also doesn't have exceptional speed by any means. Magpie moves at 252elmos/s while likho at 270 and raven at 246. Magpie barely, barely outruns raven but by so little that if I didn't tell you that and you just glanced, you'd think they move the exact same speed. I don't know why you think magpie moves quickly. It does not. Not exceptionally fast for a plane anyways. The swift moves at 390, the raptor at 228 (lol it can't even catch up to bombers despite being purely a response unit), thunderbird at 270, owl at 360 and sparrow at 210 without the detonate boost. What makes you say magpie is fast? I am genuinely curious.


Ravens cannot hit moving raiders at all. Likhos are too expensive to just open with. Magpies provide safety at first and you can group them in small squads to snipe early artil like emis and lances. I don't know why people keep making them beyond like 40, which is already a lot. I think that's too much and I can ususally think of better ways to spend metal than making even more magpies at that point. Usually I plate a tank fac and get emis or something. Or plate shieldbots and snitch shieldballs... whatever high risk low cost strategy that I think can be more beneficial than afking 20k's worth of magpies only to send them into artemis half way through the game. Just make 2 artmis. On most map that covers pretty much the entire base. That's 4.8k to stop a seemingly infinite number of magpies. Limit stockpile of each artemis to 10 so at most that will cost you an extra 800/per... a relatively small investment to 100% counter a monospammer and it will also shut down owls, which is priceless. The blind team tends to lose.

All AA counters magpies effectively. It's just that no aa outside artemis counters a sudden ball of 15k+metal's worth of magpies for a tenth of the cost, and why would it? Why would a ground aa unit counter thousands of times its own cost?

The question you need to ask yourself is how do games get to a point where a player can mass 15k+ of mostly idle magpies without their team falling behind and then suddently wake up and decide to do something with it? That's not game mechanics. That's just disfuctional TAW behaviors. TAW makes no sense because the vast majority of players in TAW never learned to do antying other than TAW stuff, and they explain it away saying that "teams is a different skill". I wish I could find it but around a week ago there was a lobby in which 2-3 high ranked players were facing 7-8 low ranks with equalcom set to 1. It went exactly as expected. The low ranked players didn't know how to handle raider phase, were reduced to 1/3 of the map instantly and then the high ranked players could essentially win any way they saw fit. It happened in every of the 5 or so games they played. That's what TAW teaches, and it's all TAW teaches.

I covered that. None of those costs are hidden.

Lanchester's Square Law doesn't apply to Magpies within a single engagement, because they shoot once and need to rearm. No amount of scaling up Magpies will let the same Magpie fire twice in the same bombing run. Contrast, say, Harpies, where Lanchester's Square Law does apply because the first ones to die grant the others more firing time before they too get shot down.

One practical application of this is that more spread engagements favor the AA over the Magpie, so a Magpie flock spreading out to avoid even the small AoE of a Tarantula or Vandal is receiving extra shots by doing so.

And if the Magpies are making repeated runs at the same player's AA squad, that player can choose to prioritize building more AA to keep the collapse at the end of Lanchester's Square Law from occurring.