Giant unit balance

[a small rabbit]

I've been trying hard to make giant units work cause i love them and had some ideas/feedback on what i think the current problems with them are.

First off, i don't think they are completely unusable but they have serious flaws that makes using them very difficult.

1. The Cost
- They are very expensive to unlock, and very expensive to build. Now in some cases this is ok, as if you do some plain old unit testing, they tend to hold up vs what they should and trade even or up for cost. In practice however, this means that by the time you get giant units out, they are often already countered by what is on the field. Marksmen, Phoenix, Steel Balls and Storm Callers are all very common for dealing with other units, which means fielding a giant unit in the later rounds into that often just means a dead giant unit as it is probably entering the field into things that can already counter it and at an xp disadvantage too. I think a reduction in either the unlock cost and/or the recruit cost would help currently. Alternatively, the costs could stay the same if some other balance adjustments were made.

2. Focus Fire/Armor
- Being a giant unit means that unless you can keep a swarm of small units to distract things like heavy single target units, they are going to get focused pretty quickly. Now this isn't inherently a problem as a giant unit is kinda meant to tank. The problem is the amount of damage they take from everything being so large. Things that tend to "waste" overkill damage like marksmen or phoenix get full advantage vs giant units. Likewise storms tend to hit with all their missiles since giant units are both slow and large. Meanwhile smaller units already don't do much. I would suggest a bit of a reduction in the damage giant units take from single attacks. Keep things like steel balls or melting pots good against them with the ramping but reduce how easily marksmen/phoenix/storm callers can chunk them down without tech upgrades that are meant to scale against them.

Specific Unit Feedback

Fortress
-The fortress has a good selection of tech upgrades already, the only issue i really see with it is the armor tech. Rather then giving a flat 60 reduction per level, it would be better if it was percentage based instead. Keep the same effectiveness against lower damage units, but bump the survivability vs high damage attacks.

-The fang summoning tech should probably summon the fangs in front of the fortress rather then behind so they can soak attacks for it.

Vulcan
-Basically the same thing as the fortress, change the armor to reduce big single hits. It's already good against small units, the flat reduction is kinda redundant.

Melting Pot
- Probably one of the best giant units at doing what it should, and it has the range to stay farther back and live longer. Don't really see any issues with it.

Overlord
-Again, i feel like its in a pretty good spot, but could benefit from the armor change so it's not quite so easy to chunk.

Specialist Upgrades
-Giant hunter needs to go. It is a punish for using giant units that already die fairly easily giving more supplies to your opponent to make it even harder to use giant units. I see no reason this upgrade should exist in a game where it should be about counters and choices, and not "Oh you decided to use giant units? Guess i'll just get a supply advantage permanently now" The only way it would make sense is if it was a one turn power with a cd or something and not a permanent bonus.

[PrinzMegahertz]

I think giant units are fine as they are. Not every giant is for every match and it really depends on both teams compositions.

For example, today I had 2 Fortresses, each with three fangs beneath it's shields, artillery further back and steel balls at it's flanks. The enemy had Melting points with the 5 target upgrade.

In theory, the melting points should have beaten my fortresses, in practice, my steelballs kept punching through because the fortress shields allowed them to move through the enemies artillery and the melting points lasers long enough to reach the melting point and start to deal damage. Mechanical division after death ment the crawlers kept the enemy team busy so my fortress was able to pummel the melting points down.

Same goes for Vulcan. I had a player today who went all in on vulcans and phoenix. I really could not get a grip on this combo because the vulcan kept melting my antiair and chaff while the phoenixes shot down everything else I had.

[frank2351]

I usually start throwing giants down when i start running out of time to spend my money wisely. Did they have another purpose?
Eyeball the field lategame and throw a giant down by rule of thumb. How else do they work?
Maybe you could try to play a single one early to level it.

[puschit]

You miss one big advantage of giant units: They make good use of the unit cap!
Yes, during midgame they are hardly worth it due to the unlock cost and all the other things you need to buy and upgrade. But during lategame when you have a 4 digit amount of resources per round and your smaller units all have their cheap first upgrades they need, the limitation that you can only buy two units makes giant units more viable.

Apart from that, 3 of the 4 giant units do have snowball potential.
Melting Points: As you have said, this unit does what it is supposed to do and sometimes even more. The self-heal combined with how it's weapon works is a tough nut to crack once the MP levels up. With multi-beam and the built-in abilitiy to hit air they do not really have a natural enemy at that point.
Overlords: Thanks to the Wasp producing upgrade an Overlord spam, once rolling, is also hard to stop.
Fortresses don't snowball themselves but their shield upgrade empowers the rest of your army. Mass produced, Fortress can shield the entire front and some more.

It's the Vulcan that has no snowball potential and nothing else that elevates it beyond the main purpose of killing hordes of small stuff. Sure, it can set the gorund on fire but in many cases that will hurt your own units, too.

About the armour upgrade, this would make them even more useless during midagme because all the small units can swarm them now.

[MuskelBiber]

I think melting point and overlord are good because they are good even without level and upgrade.

While a naked fortress without upgrade does not much and I think the shield upgrade gets easily countered by stormcaller with EMP?

And there are cheaper units that do the same job as the Vulcan while being more versatile

I might be wrong, still new to the game.

[Flavalicious]

Eh. Most of the problem is people not buying giants at level 2 right away. Level 1 giants are very weak. The jump from level 1 fortress to level 2 fortress means stock mustangs at lvl 1 do 0 damage to them. The scaling is what makes giant units worth while. You get a tanky lvl 3 giant with 2 tech upgrades and an item equiiped and sometimes they can almost solo the other team alone.

People also dont bank upgrade parts for them. Everyones so quick to pick storm, or fire missiles, rhino spawn, etc. When i see a nano repair, or heavy armour card i grab that ♥♥♥♥. Be in turn 2 or turn 10. Every giant unit outside of very niche gimmick builds should be recruiting at level 2 and getting an upgrade part equipped. Otherwise your throwing yourself under the bus. Overlord with heavy armour shrugs off sniper shots like they were nothing. A melty boy with nano repair and life drain beam is damn near unkillable after level 2. Vulcan with parasite ammo is the most annoying thing on the planet to deal with. Lol