Tsars are supposed to be the Emperors of T2, but are actually really bad. Fatboys are even worse...

[fiery forum]

It's well-known that Tsars can be useful if rushed as an early T2 unit, but after that are too slow to be useful for anything. So, they need to be buffed! How about making them faster, with increased turret turn rate? Fatboys are similarly niche.

[round knot]

they are good vs bulls. well they give superiority in tank vs tank battles, though they fall off once starlight comes
they just die to mauser tick

[fiery forum]

It seems dumb that the brute force faction effectively has weaker tanks than the finesse faction, as their most powerful tank is much too slow to be useful 😢

[snow roost]

cor isn't the brute force faction, and you should ignore anyone who says otherwise.

[silver scaffold]

Bull and tiger stats should be reversed

[fiery forum]

What is Core, the Slow, Underpowered Faction? 😄

[snow roost]

#1165607954611961938 message

[snow roost]

There're trends which groups of units share, but neither faction can accurately be described by any grand doctrine or by saying "they're the faction which is always [x]"

[round knot]

Tzar not a bad unit

[fiery forum]

When was the last time you've seen it used effectively? Outside of an early rush?

[round knot]

in 1v1

takes more micro but more impact than an early banisher

[fiery forum]

OK so it was early game only? The most "Core" Core units are the Tsar and the Tremor. Unfortunately, both are useless apart from the early Thor rush 😢

[silver scaffold]

Tzar are good early or later on when there’s tank spam going on

[round knot]

imagine tank + tzar battles
that'd be a nice change from mauser meta

[unreal token]

I support giving Tzars a faster turret, but they are absolutely not bad. They're bad if you only started building them in late t2, but in early to mid t2, they give you a huge advantage because nothing can really defeat them cost effectively, only slow them down. You stick one in a unit comp with some printers to heal them and watch them obliterate concentrations of units. Even against mausers they're able to bully them into dying or retreating unless they have a lot of starlight support—one or two starlights will just die—and nothing is stopping you from also having Quaker support if they spent enough on starlights to stop a Tzar. The only units they're truly bad against are ticks, but tick spam is op.

[unreal token]

I use them effectively all the time. They're the first unit I build in t2 if I think I have an opportunity to get value out of them because my opponents are making hounds or jags or t1 units or other low HP units that can't kill the tzar before it kills a whole lot of them. They're not a reliable comp unit you make on repeat, but if you have one following your tanks and Banishers, it's a devastating force that turns enemies to slag.

[unreal token]

The only reason I don't use them every game is their high cost and slow speed can delay your main comp coming online if your opponents aren't already trying to walk the sorts of units Tzars kill with ease into range with it. It's also an exceptional friendly fire risk if you have high momentum already, so banishers become better composition units for tigers since they can easily keep up and land more accurate alpha strikes from further away.

I think it's fine that Tzars are not a unit you build every game. Against certain t2 unit comps which are themselves pretty op at times, they can be the answer, they just aren't always the best one. You're meant to build them early in t2 to give your army a huge cannon with a lot of impact, but Tigers have far better HP for the metal, and Banishers have more range and much better reliability, so Tiger/Banisher ends up replacing them in the long run.

[snow roost]

Just to clarify why reaponses aren't complaining about tzars not being strong late t2: any buff which would make them generally a solid pick in late t2 would make them entirely oppressive in early t2. You can't really have it as a useful-but-not-op unit during both phases for a variety of reasons tied directly to the type of unit it is.

[sudden plinth]

They are really good honestly. As long as bulls- tigers are meta, they will be good.

[unreal token]

Yeah, if you made Tzars op in late t2, then what use does the Banisher have? Tzars still work in a Tiger/Banisher comp, but you're only supposed to make one. They make a fantastic "core" of your unit comp.

[fiery forum]

5 ticks can defeat an isolated Tsar, if they run behind it and keep moving as the Tsar slowly rotates its gun turret, to make sure they can never hit. Early Tsars also usually get Shurikened.

[vivid bolt]

Why would you ever have an isolated Tzar?

The entire point is to have Tzars work with tigers and banishers like what Juniper said

This is just a silly hypothetical that has no bearings on 99.9% of games

[gloomy musk]

armada is the true brute force faction in terms of strategy while cortex requires outsmarting

if your units trade really well you can afford to loose them as long as they kill something. A lot of units are allso a lot more straight forward to use on armada

the best example is shiva vs marauder

shiva is a slow siege mech, marauder is up in your face kamikaze

the tzar might be a brutal unit but you really dont wanna loose it so cant play brutish with it like youre supposed to, every time i tried that they got dgunned and i was helpless because of their abysmal turning rate

[sudden plinth]

Banishers counter sheldons- mausers- hounds, tzars don’t

[sudden plinth]

Why though

Making mausers + tigers at any time would be op

[fiery forum]

When you rush a Tzar early. I've seen this many times

[snow roost]

Better phrasing imo: arm is more about making the right set of units and sending them to the right general place, cor is more about how you micro the units you make

[vivid bolt]

You... You're gonna send a Tzar out? Or did other people rush Tzars out to send them out solo? If that's the case that is not the way to play them, as you've been told in this thread multiple times

This is the same as rushing out a mobile tachyon solo and leaving it isolated... It's just a waste of a unit

[gloomy musk]

i have seen this a lot a single tzar some rezbots to repair and t1 medium tanks obliterate enemy t1 and early t2 like hounds but it has to be really early

[vivid bolt]

Well then the tick techniques that Sun was talking about I think is an appropriate counter to this

[snow roost]

People have repeatedly stated here that tzar rush as your first t2 unit is basically the best use-case for them. At that point you have leftover t1 to screen for it, tick spam isn't effectively free yet for opponents, balls of units which tzar outranges as well as porc it outranges are everywhere for it to wreak havoc upon, and ecos are small enough that it won't get 1shot and you can pull it back for repairs

[unreal token]

Well you don't just build a tzar and then stop building units. You send it with a radar, a jammer, one or two Salamanders, AA, a few Printers, and then start making tigers and banishers on repeat. You don't have to have the AA all ready for the Tzar to just hit the battlefield either, because you don't tend to get shuriken'd until you reach the enemy fighter wall. In 8v8 when there's definitely an air player, all attacks on the enemy base need AA or you're going to get shuriken'd and feed no matter what you send. The fact that you frequently get to the enemy base with the Tzar shows how effective it is.

Shit, you can just have the com escort the tzar and build AA as you go if you need to pinch every penny.

You need to babysit your tzar, that's why you don't make them more than once, but if given the right support, those things are wrecking balls.

[unreal token]

Yes, it does have to be reasonably early, early enough that a tick lab isn't free and gets stuffed by a single Salamander anyway. It's not like you don't send it alongside the rest of your remaining t1 forces, which can also help with ticks. Even if Salamanders are off, even having a single tiger or the commander nearby can render any tick rush ineffective.

A super early tzar rush from a tech player is not the only use case for them, it's just the one scenario where the entire enemy team has to scramble to stop it or else the game is over. If you have it in early t2 yourself even if you got to t2 late, all it has to do is get value and scare away the enemy forces until your army has its numbers built up. That's its purpose. You can do it from regular t2 timings on lane maps. If it kills 10 hounds it paid for itself more than twice over, and if they keep making hounds to try and fight the Tzar they're just wasting metal. They can try making Sharpshooters before fusion if that's what it takes, but they're gonna need quite a few to stop a Tzar, or else they just get killed by it. Its raw destructive power in early t2 is akin to the power gap t2 has over t1, and it gets even better the more of your units show up to the battlefield to support it.

I promise you all, it's a great unit when used correctly. A lot of Cortex units are like this. So many are niche but amazing, it's just that using them is a thing you have to get a feel for. I once built a Tzar on reaction to a jerk marching up to my base with a huge ball of sheldons and then turned half of them to scrap before they realized I had it. In just a few easy shots it paid for itself 3x over.

I support a faster turret on the Tzar because the damn thing can't even turn and shoot at the same time, but I suspect in order to buff it enough for most of the complaints to not be a problem for it, you'd have to make it not what it is anymore or else it's literally OP.

ffs, a handful of ticks countering something is not special. Mauser get countered by ticks too. Anything gets countered by throwing ticks at the right time. You throw them behind a com that's busy fighting something else and you kill a whole commander with them, even though the commander normally counters ticks. Nobody's gonna argue in good faith the commander is a bad unit. Literally just don't send it in all by itself. I've seen Juggs and Behemoths killed with ticks because they got sent alone. I think it's fine for the Tzar to get killed by ticks, actually, because if it was literally invincible to ticks, what is the other team even supposed to do if you rushed it out with communism at 4 minutes? You'd have to risk your commanders to dgun it, and it can easily kill coms, so that's far from easy if they have radar with it - and you should!

[gloomy musk]

as i stated earlier, armada is the brute force faction cortex requires outsmarting

[unreal token]

https://www.beyondallreason.info/replays?gameId=2f518f65be011529ef2bd7a963d36bc5

This is an example of a tech player getting a Tzar out at a normal t2 timing, and even as the other team got their tech 2 well underway, look at how much destruction that one Tzar caused. It paid for itself 5x over and nearly ended the game singlehandedly. The other team couldn't respond with ticks or shurikens because my team was protecting it too much. Rompy had flak and missile trucks. Opposing backliners were forced to respond, and a few of them had no idea how to handle it, so it ended up annihilating their forces.

Gandesz is known for doing this almost every game he gets to tech, and it's quite effective. I saw him do it in the game prior and it stopped his team from losing the game even when one front was entirely collapsed. It almost reversed his team's misfortune and turned it into a lead, even with tick spam and shurikens trying to shut the Tzars down, but his team lost to bombers in the end. In this game, though, our team was the one using tick spam to support it. It did so much damage that it basically allowed Rompy to push them back 3v1. I was able to leak into their backline through the front door and destroy their air player's first fusion, and we eventually won the game off of that momentum.

Don't ask to buff this unit lightly. A Tzar in the right hands at the right time is an oppressive force that takes experience and a well-coordinated effort to bring down. No other single unit available this early in the game is this powerful. It hard-counters entire classes of units that are quite common in early tech 2.

[fiery forum]

Better tell Devs to update the faction descriptions!

[unreal token]

https://youtu.be/ED1VZ2ZLTZc?si=HCLC5zttz4xV-Ui3

Here's a game where I saw opportunity for a Tzar to get a boatload of value and then I went and did just that with it. :3c Skip to 16:03 if you want to see that part. Opponent in the lane north of me went fast tech 2 and made Hounds, and since I was up against Hounds and Brutes, a Tzar was the answer. Snipers were fielded in response, but not in enough numbers to kill it. It eventually ended up going down from sheer attrition, but not before carving a swath of destruction, and I secured the reclaim anyway, so we ended up pushing them back and winning.

This is basically how you use a Tzar. You make one when you see units it's good against being fielded, it does a fuckload of damage, it gives you time to amass your t2 army proper, and then after a brutal slugfest, it either died a hero or lived long enough to lag behind the rest of your army half the time, contributing whenever it catches up. X3c

Honestly, I think I should make them more.

[snow roost]

The majority of the dev team wasn't even aware of that flavor text on the website. That's why i say to ignore any claims about "faction doctrine"

[unreal token]

Throughout TA's history, Core has always been the faction that's hard but good in the right hands, so it's ironic that the website bills Armada as the finesse faction and Cortex as the brute force faction when their very names betray the truth. Armada has a lot of units with outplay potential, but Cortex does too, and when you see what flavor their outplay potential comes in, it almost loops right back around to seeming like the website is telling the truth.

[snow roost]

Aesthetically, you'd expect arm to be the "big brain" faction because "higher tech". However, in most games with that dynamic thematically, the gameplay is entirely inverted in relation to that

[tepid dust]

As a arm main
I think arm is less powerdull than core lmao
Banisters are great
Arbiters are great fiends are great

Both factions are good in their own area

Core t3 is just amazing

[fiery forum]

Sure, but anyone new to the game who read the Core ethos would expect that they could use Tzars as their main battle tank and crush their foes, backed up by a couple of Tremors. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way, which must be tricky for noobs, who don;t realise that there are only a few units from each factory that are actually worth building.

[fiery forum]

Dunno man, pretty much all Arm units do more, sometimes way more, DPS than their Core rivals, e.g. Starlight 532, versus Banisher 130. Starlight is literally 4* more powerful, and also longer ranged.

[snow roost]

Laser damage dropoff=50% of that dps. Maneuverability difference.

[unreal token]

The only unit in that list that's straight up better than the arm counterpart is the fiend. All the rest, Armada counterparts hard-counter the Cortex counterpart.

Banishers are great, but useless once Starlights come out. Arbiters are expensive, don't track, and have really bad AoE compared to vehicle launchers, only useful against Sharpshooters, and are the only tool besides spy bots that Cortex t2 bots has to fight them.

Janus, Sharpshooters, Mausers, Starlights are the reason nobody plays Cortex, because they're way harder to counter than they are to use.

[unreal token]

And they still have 5x the max DPS and fire every 4 seconds, it's just reduced to 2.5x at max range, which is 150 longer. Lasers aren't always 50%, if you want to counter a laser unit you have to get close enough to hit it, and the longer the range the more of their DPS they get to use.

[snow roost]

Max dps difference at point blank is 4.09x, and if things are getting closer than max range the starlights are probably moments away from all blowing up, so dps at max range is what matters.

[unreal token]

Starlights are not that flimsy lol, they're tougher than brutes. If you get in range you better cause a chain reaction immediately or else you about to lose all of your tanks.

In practice, tigers don't have enough DPS to chunk them instantly, and they fire so quickly that tigers really do tend to just get murdered by them.

So no, it's not only max range that matters. Their max DPS matters a lot because you die faster the closer you get, and they don't have an exploitable window where they're all reloading unlike with banishers.

[snow roost]

Saying arm units are way harder to counter than they are to use is fair. Saying sharpshooters hard counter arbiters is not.

[fiery forum]

Not to mention that Core spybots are way more expensive than Arm ones, no idea why? 165/135 Core/Arm, and the Arm spybots are faster too...

[unreal token]

Core spy bots cost 50% more energy, it's disgusting.

[snow roost]

Roll past them while shooting them and their dps becomes 0 for a very long time while they slowly try to turn their chassis/turret

[fiery forum]

True, but at 950 range, the difference is 266dps versus 0, so I know which unit I'd bet on. Starlight even has more HP, which also seems to go against teh core ethos 😄

[unreal token]

I've tried that and gotten killed either by something else, or by a more distant starlight turning just enough to fire anyway, or a different starlight that was arriving as reinforcements. Nobody sends them alone lol, what is this argument. Starlights are fucking bullshit unless you have quakers. None of their mobility weaknesses matter in practice unless they're not paying attention and clumped them all together in a nice tight ball. They're just that powerful when you spread them out adequately.

[snow roost]

There is no ethos for either faction. 1 guy made them up and put them on the website without anyone else knowing

[snow roost]

Just that the max range dps value of starlights is generally far more relevant than any closer dps, due to maneuverability. Starlights are very good units, just not when other things get in their face and have half-decent speed to keep most of them from shooting

[unreal token]

The sad thing is the only t2 vehicle with enough speed to truly make them feel it is the Jaguar. Nothing in the Cor Vehs lineup is fast enough to outmaneuver starlights unless you flanked them using a wall as cover. Even if it feels like they're really slow they're not as slow as a tzar, sadly. Maybe they should be lol.

[snow roost]

Plenty of vehicles can heavily outmaneuver them at close range, it's just hard to get a significant amount of most of those vehicles to close range in the first place, again because of the damage being dealt at max range

[unreal token]

Yeah, even their max range damage is completely insane lol, and if they get to shoot you up close even once, your tigers better have full HP or they're toast.

If you're in a narrow lane, forget about it, there's no way in on them except from the front.

[sick gull]

Right take

[fiery forum]

Arm has been the finesse faction since 1997, however over the years, Arm units have become the easy to use ones, with Core requiring tactical finesse to use to their full potential https://totalannihilation.fandom.com/wiki/ARM

[snow roost]

Protoss has been described in-game as being outnumbered and outgunned, needing to rely on superior tactics and strategy to succeed, since 1998. It has always been the easiest race to actually play at a basic level, and scales with player skill less than the other 2 races, relying on the fact that its units and strats are significantly harder to counter than they are to use. Sound familiar?

[round knot]

i mean the units are expensive

protoss has hard time dealing with maxed tank balls and spider mines, and lurkers

when your army has reaver shuttle, observers (which unlikely ticks you can't spam them on repeat lol), high templar it's a lot to control

[snow roost]

The description applies a bit more in sc2 than brood war, but obviously, no race in either game is anywhere near being "easy". Toss is just "moderately less impossibly difficult, and diminishing returns on player skill kick in moderately sooner".

It's equally unfair to say arm is actually "easy" or "no skill" compared to core, but a gap in those areas is still very clearly present between the factions

[unreal token]

In my defense, I never said Armada was easy, just that Core was hard. :3c

[snow roost]

Rts is hard, protoss and arm are just less extremely hard than their counterpart(s), but it's externally implied that the opposite would be the case for both of them

[tepid dust]

Vehicles I would say there about even
but bots Core has many more choices

[unreal token]

I actually kind of agree.

I would say Arm Vehicles is by far the best t2 lab by a long shot, but I would also say Arm t2 Bot Labs are not that great even compared to the Cor t2 Veh Plant. Half their tools are either countered by a Tzar, or countered by the Banisher, or countered by the Quaker, two of which are good enough to see constant use, and one of which can ruin your day if you don't have enough fusion to spam Sharpshooters to counter it.

The only reason t2 Arm Bots isn't strictly worse than t2 Cor Bots is how effectively the Sharpshooter counters Cor's greatest hits all the way up to t3, but at the same time you kinda have to leverage the Sharpshooter with t2 arm bots, and Cor definitely has multiple ways of dealing with them.

The only reason hound spam and recluse spam were OP is that at one point they were on the Consul, so Arm Vehs got to whip them out while also building Mausers, eating lab, and making afus. Having to make them from an actual bot lab you built yourself makes them feel so much less op. Arm t2 bot labs are becoming more of an endangered species than Cor t2 veh plants.

[snow roost]

Welder is also good, cheaper spybot is good, butler spamming winds is good on maps where mass windmill eco is worthwhile in general. Doesnt save arm t2 bots from being bad, but it has those things going for it.

Due to not playing recently, i still don't know if webber spam was a fad or not...

[unreal token]

Webber spam is mainly a thing because they're able to shoot air units and EMP them almost immediately, but their ability to EMP units and reclaim them to death is pretty sweet. I'm not sure if I see them that much anymore though. Maybe on Koom.

[round knot]

consul and twitcher are too good

butler is good but more replaceable. sometimes you need to build t2 shit but it's expensive slow to get another t2 con

[round knot]

t2 air lab xDD

[vagrant portal]

That seems like it would take a lot of micro

[unreal token]

They actually automatically shoot air units that get close to them, so it typically doesn't take any micro for that. For the unit reclaim, there's a widget for that. #1174755505722363914 message

...

OH YOU CLEVER KITTY YOU MADE THAT WIDGET

[vagrant portal]

I didn't know anyone used it

[hollow valley]

how is the Tsar faring since the EMP slight rework ? It should be more immune to it now

before the rework, shurikens and stilettos would negate that unit easily, but that was true for all slow heavy units in the game

[unreal token]

It fares a lot better, but nobody in the OP lobby uses EMP rework anymore because it unintentionally makes shurikens even stronger. 3:

[sudden plinth]

Why?

[round knot]

because the shrui's have impact from the 1st shots

on larger units, even a 30% emp means like 60% reduced firing rate and 30% slow

a slow and a huge firing rate reduction is almost as good as a stun

[sudden plinth]

But how does emp rework buff shuris when it nerfs emp

Maybe I missed something about it

[round knot]

it nerfs the time which units are stunned per se

but the partial slow / massive fire rate reduction makes it very strong for partial emp

[gloomy musk]

another unforseen consequence of EMP rework is that some AA units get buffed when hit by EMP because they would usually shoot so fast that they overkill fighters and shuris but when their rate of fire is lower they just mow down everything only shooting ones per target.

[snow roost]

only if their current emp is between 1 and 25% and there's some specific breakpoint hit, otherwise they're just firing half as frequently or less, which literally can't be a buff

[unborn star]

so is EMP rework dead?

[snow roost]

no, but hornet is working on 50 different things, i only know how to adjust some basic pieces of the code, and there are constant questions between the 2 of us of "if x is even possible, is it worth y tradeoff?", so release versions are few and far between