an hour with the Athena

So I recently tried out the athena. I played two games, one vs bot, one vs a human of my rank (won vs bot, lost vs human). I used only Athena, no other facs. It's a weird unit, like a Crane but it can stealth and build armies on the field. I didn't feel limited by it's small unit selection, but I did feel limited by the amount of micro it takes to construct things with it. I did like the striders, those are cool.

Do most Athena users also make a static factory?

But yes, of course! Athena can be used as cloaked backstab base, where you send it to the back of enemy base early, where you use it's small radar jammer to produce group of raiders and devastate enemy eco by surprise.

Or you can use Athena to get early middle positions, which is very important. 9/10 of athena usage is for this reason - rush important place in centre and start few defenders, radars, LLT and before the first enemies reach there, they are fended off. Until they break your athena defenses, your team reinforces the middle and voila, eco victory.

Both of these tactics are risky, need game experience and usually occupies athena completely, that's why you might want to build static FACTORY too. Or not.

Athena is the only unit with seismic detection, but the enemy has to move to get detected.

But I didn't know that it has a jammer too.

I try to build my things behind a hill, because Radars can't see behind hills.

Or a quick LLT/Flea in the enemies wind farm, then he has to spend about 600 metal to raid, rebuild the windfarm and make a few defenders.

seismic detection:

detect the movement of cloaky stuff on ground

> Athena is the only unit with seismic detection, but the enemy has to move to get detected.
No it isn't, no units have that type of seismic detection.

seismic dedection displays some kind of "makers" witch dissaper after a second.

It only shows you where the unit is - not what unit, don't even cause that defenses Atack this unit if I'm right, but if you spam Athenas ....

I only want a 5k metal unit with a huge radius that dedects any unit that can cloak itself at the game endings.

That would be really nice:
A unit witch costs 5k metal, spam 1HP drones with dedection all over the map, and dies if one of this drones die.
If it die it place a marker where the last attack was.
This dedection can dedect ANYthing - even fleas.

If the distance between any non-allied unit (A) and one of your units (B) is less than A.collisionSphere + B.decloakRadius then B is unable to cloak.

B.decloakRadiusis displays as the blue line around units when shift+mousing over them.

Every mobile unit that has no form of self cloaking has a decloakRadius of 75. Likewise every building except Sneaky-Pete has decloakRadius 150.

2 fleas? lol :)

The Athena's unit page ought to feature a link to this forum topic.

http://zero-k.info/Static/UnitGuide#fac-Athena

ConTrust:

I have seen the Athena backstab many a time.
Never had it happen to me, though.

I actually use athenas to produce fleas behind the enemy base. This way they it is not obvious that I have an athena back there, and I do not have to worry about sneaking the fleas past the enemy defenses.

If I'm lucky, I can get away with the following, too:
http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/791