What units are most important?

[Caydr]

This is mainly about AA/BA but it can apply to any mod with similar concepts.

Suppose you have a bunch of bombers, let's say 20 of them. You know where your enemy's base is and what sorts of units he has. How do you decide what the best target is?

What priority would you attack these in? In this scenario, your opponent has light to medium anti-air and your bombers will not likely last more than 3-4 runs at the very most. If you want, say how many bombers you would assign to each target, and in what order.

a) factories
b) fusions
c) anti-air
d) ground defenses
e) constructors/nano turrets
f) commander
g) radar/radar jammers
h) metal makers
i) metal extractors

Personally, I would send half of my bombers to attack metal makers, then fusions, then factories. I would send one bomber to attack each of his radars, then factories. I would tell the rest of my bombers to attack constructors, then factories. I would probably ignore the commander since he would probably get micro'd to avoid the bombs.

What circumstances would cause you to change your priorities? What if you had a bertha instead of bombers, would your target priority change?

[FLOZi]

USGIRifle

[Beherith]

I would use custom formations 2 and carpet bomb all he has.

[Caydr]

Die in a fire. Any serious responses?

[Argh]

Fusions, in something that's actually balanced. Losing your E production once you hit T2 econ should be the end. That's the way it works in P.U.R.E., and it works as a tipping-point.

Personally, I think Real Men play Commander Ends, though.

[Beherith]

A, B, E, F, then the rest

[bobthedinosaur]

The one that kills the most effectively per cost of time to deploy and drain on resources.

[luckywaldo7]

edit: As far as *A mods go I mostly play CA and sometimes 1v1 BA, and only rarely the large BA teamgame, so my answer might not be accurate for one of those massively porcy BA/DSD games people seem to love too much. And AA was long before my time. /edit


The answer really depends heavily.


If you can kill all his aa in one run and then continue to bomb the rest of his base with impunity, then killing the aa is definitely worthwhile.

Also if you can kill his com that can be extremely worthwhile too as the complosion can kill quite a bit. All you need to do is micro the bombers a bit so that they all hit him at roughly the same time; that way his com is dead before the alarm starts going off (and also some luck that he doesn't see them coming ).

In my experience though both of those cases are special.


In general, like Argh said, its best to go for the energy. Cutting off only one of your opponents resources can really screw him over. Energy is the best because fusions explode nicely so they also take down everything right around them. Energy is also needed to operate things like defenses and radar/jammers, so losing energy kills much more then just production. Buildpower can be a good target also, especially because its really easy to start a nanofarm chaining. Metal I would say is generally a lower priority to hit because a lot of metal income comes from mexes.

As for the others, if there is decent aa then attacking turrets with air is generally not worth it. Radar jammers, meh, just scout his stuff with air you don't really need to kill the jammer. Radar isn't really that big of a priority either. Killing the factory can irritate your opponent but thats about the worst of it. If his economy is intact killing the factory is not going to slow him down much.

[JohannesH]

Wholly map and situation dependent. But go for comm if you got 20 bombers, thats quite enough. Try attacking something that blows up well, like adv fus or plasma shield if there is one. Antinuke is good target too if you got nuke ofc.

Carpet bombing is good though, attack tougher targets more and make sure nanos get hit too.

If its earlier game then nanos and wind farms are top targets.

And how you gonna micro a single bomber to kill his all radars?

[YokoZar]

Forget bombing the radar, just launch a Juno.

Always go for the advanced fusion as it will inevitably chain explode their whole base. Even if it doesn't it's a huge cripple. This is why I never build advanced fusions and instead try to have a more distributed base (including decoy fusions as arm). If you do it right you can make it cost far more $ in bombers than you lose in buildings.

[Master-Athmos]

Yeah due to the extreme power bombers have I also tend to never build Adv. Fusions. Might make you not having THAT effective eco but you pretty much also don't have the situation that a single bombing run pretty much kills everything you have...

Still I can't really say which targets to bomb first as it totally depends on the situation. Bombing a Commander might make sense if he's "wounded" and his explosion might cause some damage. Usually fusions are the most valuable target especially if they're advanced ones but it also might be a good idea to kill a nanotower farm. Shields, Big Berthas or Vulcans also are good targets (especially as they're usually near the front). In rare occasions it might also make sense to bomb a gantry with a nearly finished Krogoth but as I said things like that also depend on the situation...

I just can say that "bad targets" are radar & stuff, metal extractors, metal makers (especially the T1 version is too cheap to rebuild and the T2 version also might be a waste of the one bomb run you'll have) and constructors (also too cheap to rebuild). Every single one of these still might make sense though like when you see he has a giant farm of T1 makers all standing next to each other so you can pull of a single bomber of your attack wave to kill that then do this...

[BaNa]

Going for the metal makers as a first target is silly, if he has his e left after the attack then making a few MMM's will be a piece of cake for him.

I would go B - E - A - F - rest

unless its a comends game of course

[Caydr]

This is pretty much what I expected. Thanks for the input.

So by and large it goes like this:

Target 1: Any major resource producers
Target 2: Anything that will explode large
Target 3: Anything worth a lot of metal
Target 4: Other economy/manufacturing power

I was surprised that radar was not a more important target at first, but this is probably just since I've been playing OTA:AA lately and radar was somewhat more important.

[JohannesH]

Radar is important but its hard to target all of them and they are very easy to rebuild.

[Master-Athmos]

The bottom line is that you bomb what will do the most damage to your enemy. If you have a horde of bulldogs but your enemy has shields around his defenses you'll probably bomb the shields instead of e.g. Adv Fusions as those could be destroyed with the Bulldogs. Or you have a nukes and your enemy just one anti-nuke. You won't go for something else then...

So you cannot really do a precise list of in which order people bomb stuff. There are just certain buildings that have a higher probability of being good targets...

[Evil4Zerggin]

You forgot:

j) Anti-nuke

[CarRepairer]

Superweapons.

[Jazcash]

It would vary depending on many factors and variables.

If the enemy is spamming Krows, LLT, DDM, Penetrators, Snipers or other E draining units, I'd kill his E.

If he's almost taking me down with his flash spam, I'd kill his lab.

If I had a nuke and he had anti, I'd kill his anti so I could nuke him.

If his Com was right in the middle of a bunch of other important shit then I'd kill his Com.

I think you get the drift

[Caydr]

I purposefully chose not to include superweapons since I can't imagine anyone intentionally leaving them alive.

This is really a more psychological question than one strictly about gameplay. I was curious to see how people prioritized targets of opportunity, but the response is pretty much as I expected.

All other things being equal, the size of the unit's explosion and how difficult it is to replace are the two biggest factors.

This reasoning explains very simply and accurately, for instance, a metal maker would commonly be targeted before a factory, since it will likely severely damage or even destroy many other targets of opportunity with its explosion. For our resident AI programmers it might be a good consideration.

Just out of curiosity, if someone made a widget which highlights units which will cause the greatest total harm to the enemy, taking into account chain reaction explosions, estimated economic recovery time, etc, would you consider it to be an unfair advantage?

For instance, it might tell you to attack a specific metal maker in order to set off a chain reaction which attacking other metal makers in a small area would not. Or it might make it clear at exactly what proximity a commander must be before the unit in question will be destroyed by its explosion.

[Jazcash]

I personally have never and never will target metal makers.