Answer to steel ball spam?

[KARAS]

Been seeing it in so many games recently, just piles of steel balls that even when you try to counter with marksmen they overpower them. Trying to counter them with air is also pretty hard because anti air beats that so easily. Any suggestions?

[CS_Kiel]

Block them with fangs. Work from there.

[BB-8]

Three to four rounds of sledgehammer spam and then support it with hackers. In the long run, sledgehammers win against steel balls in my experience. Ideally, you rotate the sledgehammers 90 degrees. In a frontal attack, the Steel Balls attack one sledgehammer at a time instead of attacking several at the same time. That buys you time.

[Svelte]

Main thing I've found if I'm losing to them is that while I dig out I need to avoid giving them exp so they don't get turned into 50k+ hp healing monsters. To that end I prefer either going:

1.) Carry arclight into them (levels fast and once you get the triple damage they do shockingly well while barely giving any exp until you've outlevelled the balls + counters a lot of their supporting unit as well as their crawler tech.)

2.) A mix of Air + Fangs. Either pheonixes or wraiths depending on how the enemy is set up. If they have heavy mustang in the rear but they aren't levelled up yet then you can get ahead of the curve with wraith armor and followup into degen aura while building towards carry fangs.

The enemy can pivot to counter both of these strats of course but usually when that happens the steel balls become an afterthought.

[Fadeway]

I had some decent results spamming marksmen with the fang spawning upgrade, but marksmen are pretty bad in general

[{sBc} Bane5]

Charged shot arclights (bonus points if you have EMP on your arclight too) sitting behind fangs/crawlers chaff.

Also in the late-game, hackers potentially are devastating to steel balls.

[KARAS]

Svelte původně napsal:

Main thing I've found if I'm losing to them is that while I dig out I need to avoid giving them exp so they don't get turned into 50k+ hp healing monsters. To that end I prefer either going:

1.) Carry arclight into them (levels fast and once you get the triple damage they do shockingly well while barely giving any exp until you've outlevelled the balls + counters a lot of their supporting unit as well as their crawler tech.)

2.) A mix of Air + Fangs. Either pheonixes or wraiths depending on how the enemy is set up. If they have heavy mustang in the rear but they aren't levelled up yet then you can get ahead of the curve with wraith armor and followup into degen aura while building towards carry fangs.

The enemy can pivot to counter both of these strats of course but usually when that happens the steel balls become an afterthought.

Yeah carry arclights seem pretty decent, as someone below you said i tried out charged shot with a few levels in and they were able to mostly handle it, but its pretty hard when they dont have levels. I've also found that fortress with fangs does well against them, but thats a very expensive answer that isnt really possible all the time.

Fangs into them as some of you guys suggested seems pretty solid too, im thinking maybe adding in some stormcallers to take them out while they're pulled and to help deal with their inevitable arclights as a response. Haven't tried out hacker too much though, so i'll give that a go too

[Kopernik]

i never had anytone use balls spam vs me :/ hakers, cravlers and fangs spam deals with them too easy i died to that too many times !

[Mimaneneko]

My go to is launcher overload/rocket punch forts. Mainly LO cause I'm super biased and watching a fort drop a 7k shell every second gives me a dopamine hit equal to M1 garand pings

[Commander Tom]

Counter them with air. It's not hard in fact it's easy. Phoenixes have the range and the damage. Why would u not use them ?

[PrinzMegahertz]

KARAS původně napsal:

Been seeing it in so many games recently, just piles of steel balls that even when you try to counter with marksmen they overpower them. Trying to counter them with air is also pretty hard because anti air beats that so easily. Any suggestions?

Hackers. They mainly exist to hack steel balls and rhinos. One hacker can shut down an infinite number of steel balls by hacking one, having the rest turn around to face the hacked ball and shoot it down while the hacker is getting the next one.

[KAMIKAZE FAZZ]

Hacker, Melting Point, Fortress (if you can spam fortress), Sledgehammers with EMP backed up by previous units mentioned

[KARAS]

I think Hackers is definitely what i need to try. I havent tried them very much but can definitely see how they'd be good.

Commander Tom původně napsal:

Counter them with air. It's not hard in fact it's easy. Phoenixes have the range and the damage. Why would u not use them ?

Yeah, air is the obvious counter, but its so easy to shut down pretty much any air unit with anti air. And then I have to try and counter their anti air, meanwhile all the steel balls are wreaking havoc on my other units. Was looking for a more cohesive solution, but I've seen a lot of people say hackers so im going to try that.

[Purple Sauce]

overlords with ground cannons will delete pretty much any ground unit including melts/snipers

If you are having a problem with any ground unit, this is your easiest solution since they also deal AOE damage to deal with small spam that they may use to protect their units as well. That being said, you also need to protect your overlords. While they can win most 1 v 1 scenarios, they are not going to win if they aren't targeting that unit to begin with.

[RagTagMonster]

Fortresses that have chaff mitigation near them decimate lower or same tier levels of steel ball clumps.

[KashanCzechs]

Vulcan with scortching flames. 99% of steel balls have chaff in front, scortching flames destroys balls and of course the chaff protecting them.