I surely find GE easier now after drones were replaced my mantas on lvl 3 and 4. Noticing same tendency in guild also - GE battle scores seem to be lower now - meaning less battles lost/retreated.
Haven't tried them in attack yet but honestly don't plan to.
Subs and turtles work great against mantas so they can be countered pretty much always before they even get a chance to hit.
You're essentially saying here that 'a unit easily beats a unit it's boosted against'. For my own example, eels work great against turtles. Following your logic, that means turtles are bad. Is that true? Basically, you're not really making the right points when you try to argue about a specific unit being bad, because you're trying to say that a unit is unusable when it's weak to...its weaknesses. Does that make sense?
I agree that 7 rogues is mostly dead but that's really all about turturrets and the fact you eat a bit of stray damage if you include rogues... I have yet to use mantas on offense - on defense they are a bit hardier it seems taking 3-4 hits from a hover tank they usually can't reach instead of 2 - but still allows 8 hovers > all to continue to work (or at least it's never mantas that breaks it from working). So OF combat remains extremely boring...
My bigger issue still remains : there needs to be a (LARGE) goods sink whereby either many low age players all will want a set of OF goods for a GB - atlantis museum just didn't have wide enough appeal, or high age players will want to consume all the OF goods they can get their hands on (i.e. what GvG used to accomplish). I'd hoped you'd learned your lesson in AF with orangery saving the economy (which fwiw was an excellently designed building - both useless and appealing at the same time - everyone seems to want one even though most people really shouldn't be spending the space on it) and would have something in OF by now but here i am posting 200 OF goods for 100 AF goods and regretting ever having entered OF which in turn makes me not want to play my lower age cities because what are they progressing towards - ultimately a dead end or misery - why bother?
I don't think It's entirely because of turtles, though that's certainly a factor. It's also because there are so many different units and unit ability combinations now, it's very difficult for one unit to be able to handle everything on its own (aside from the separate issue that hover tanks are causing currently). In some ways this makes level 2 of GE trickier than level 3/4, where the AF units start getting phased out. And unless a rogue gets transformed before it gets a chance to move or is actually able to attack something while it's still a rogue, you would have been better off using a non-rogue unit in that army slot, because being able to attack is almost always better than skipping a turn (which is essentially what happens when a rogue gets to move before being transformed).
Anyway, in the time since my last post I've continued experimenting with mantas and find them to render dragon drones almost completely obsolete. In a nutshell, the only situation where using dragons instead of mantas is a potential solution is against an opponent with a lot of artillery and not much else, but in that situation you could simply use your own turtles and wipe them out first with careful aim. Mantas outclass drones against basically everything except for exactly artillery units. I should probably add in that I never thought mantas were amazing units, but they're certainly not as bad as people want to try to claim.
And finally, for a bit more opinion, I still think that subs need to have one of their abilities traded for flying. I guess I have it too ingrained in my head that anti-artillery units should be essentially immune to artillery or should at least be able to hit them on the first turn. With how powerful turtles are, I feel like subs miss the mark here on both counts, though at least they get to move first so they can spread away from other units to avoid the mortar fire.
