Dan 49 the fearless
Merchant
I'm on board with hovers are too good in the ages above them... Just not that it's the hover's fault. I rather blame it on too many of the new age units being poorly designed and/or too dependant on special abilities the AI doesn't know to use right. Maybe losing reactive 4 wouldn't be the end of the world in FE - it'd primarily make exoskeletals a bigger threat to them which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but i don't think it'd be a complete solution past FE either. Losing stealth would make the hover useless in FE without an accompanying buff to their ability to ignore spotters and other hovers for some reason (the only thing you use them for regularly in that age).
I mean the fact that it dies to a hover tank certainly isn't the ONLY complaint we typically have about new units now. They're often boring or flat out bad ignoring that. I thought we'd learned the lesson that in later ages range 1 units have to be rather exceptional to be used at all via drone swarms being POS in FE. And yet one of the 3 new units we're supposed to be excited about in VF is range 1, and the only help it has for the fact its going to eat retaliations is that it has contact that'll only work against its clones, and reactive armor 4 which will allow it to soak up one more hit maybe - which it'll often be taking anyways from retaliation! It's like giving us dragon breath units and them not being entirely useless has led them to the bold conclusion : what if we took away dragon breath and tried to make range 1 units again. People like contact and reactive armor right? That should be enough!
How many of the 10 OF units do you actually use? What if you refused to use hovers, would that number change much? Is the problem really hovers or is it that so many of the units don't pose enough of a threat because of stat limitations or have stupid enough AI that taking 4-5 shots to kill them isn't a problem?
Railguns were too good in their own age in addition to being too good above it before they were nerfed. Hovers are not in the same position and any adjustment to them needs to be more careful. And that's ignoring the backlash they got over the well deserved railgun nerf.
I largely agree with what is said above. I don't think we should nerf the Hover tank. The solution is a balance to newer units. We don't fully know what the VF units will bring so it's hard to evaluate them yet. So far the new units are lackluster and would be easily defeated by OF units. But new age units being beaten by the age below is not the problem. The problem is that the Hover tank was never balanced against in OF properly. The OF tank is pretty terrible stats wise and it's the only unit in the age that can fight against stealth units. The medusa can too but rapid deployment renders the unit useless. Rapid deployment can be interesting to use as a defense but even 8 medusas would quickly go down to 1 Hover tank and 7 rogues. A unit using Rapid deployment needs to be able to withstand a tremendous amount of damage or hide. Medusa does neither. Had the OF tank not been so completely terrible both in terms of attack and defense and movement it would have stood as a good counter to Hover tank and then we would not be talking about the need to nerf the hover tank.
Inno should look at the units that they are releasing for VF and consider changing their stats. Giving one of them blast and getting rid of the range 1 unit would go a long way to improving the quality of the VF units and giving a good counter to the Hover tank.