I'll take credit for starting this Gimp spam trend.Evil4Zerggin wrote:Is it intended that the advanced shipyard does not leave a corpse when destroyed by torpedo bombers (not sure about other units or torpedoes)?
Also, in a few games yesterday I saw a lot of Gimp spam, which succeeded in doing major damage to several sea players. Some people complained it was OP; I myself am split on the issue. A non-exclusive list of points:
Arguments For Gimp Being OP
360 degree torpedo offsets its slower speed relative to subs.
Cheapest underwater unit with an attack.
Amphibious, so has some use outside of water.
Sea players often have a hard time defending against attacks; they rarely have chokepoints, and they must defend against air, hover, and underwater, of which no weapon can defend attack more than one of these effectively at a time. Once a sea player owns the sea, the generally-held assumption is that they no longer have to worry much about underwater attacks, but with the Gimp this is no longer true.
Arguments Against Gimp Being OP
Built only at the T2 Kbot lab, which is not terribly popular otherwise, and has less underwater capability otherwise, and by the naval engineer, which is sea anyway.
Gimp is not very good on land.
Vulnerable to torpedo bombers.
If the sea player owns their sea, they should be able to scout the enemy regularly and thus see the Gimps coming. If the sea player does not own their sea, they should have ASW anyway.
Other Issues
ARM has no equivalent to the Gimp.
Some other things to note:
- Gimps destroy sub-killers. They cost 1/3 as much, don't take bonus damage, and have about 3x the hit points.
- One on one, a gimp can often kill a t1 destroyer or submarine. It's much cheaper than either. The advanced kbot lab costs about as much as 4 or 5 ships.
- For some reason, gimps can attack floating radar towers but not hovers.
- Gimps are very vulnerable when entering the water. A cruiser or floating heavy laser tower could probably pick off about 6 of them. This is a good thing for balance, unless you're stuck with a very large coastline
Gimps are also the only land unit other than torpedo planes that can kill submarines. This is important, since otherwise a sea player can easily prevent an opponent from creeping back in by just having a few basic subs around the coast and picking off any t1 torpedo launchers or shipyards that attempt to get built.
Pelicans, on the other hand, are much better on land than gimps. Their included AA also provides a great defense for a common counter to surprise attacks from the sea by using planes defensively.
Currently, the gimp is a bit counter-intuitive. No one was really expecting gimp spam to work as a sea strategy - most people think it's basically a can with fewer hit points that can go underwater. In fact it's weapon is much weaker than a can, and its torpedos are quite strong vs the rather low hit point sea units.
One possibility I'd like to raise is to substantially raise both sub unit hit points and asw damage. It's kind of weird that a gimp has as much hit points as a battle sub.
