Early Vanguard units

[Toxic Toast]

Greetings,
I’ve been playing through the campaign and scenarios. Starting with Vanguard then moving on to other factions... in light of trying out these other factions I have become.... curious as to what the community thinks of the early tier Vanguard Units?

Thanks

[Andrastos]

In my opinion the vanguard is the worst race in the game. owl and pug are practically useless, the soldier is way too standard and easy replaced by other units. The only early tier unit from the vanguard that i could somehow recommend is the mechanic. He can repair mechanical units and set up defense turrets and the missile-upgrade makes these turrets very nice. Also nice is the additional accuracy the mechanic can give mechanical units.

The airship is somehow usable, but there are much better flying units than this.

What i hate about the vanguard the most is that they have no synergy with their weapon types. They have laser and projectile weapons, but the airship, the walker, the rocket-turret and the infantry-rocket-launcher-upgrade all do explosion damage that cannot be improved by projectile or laser upgrades. The walker is the artillery-unit of the vanguard and it artillery-damage type is rocket. Other races have artillery with specialised upgrades, some of them even have special upgrades just for the artillery units. Not so the vanguard. Other races have third damage-types too, mostly in meele combat, but they have upgrades these units can use to improve these damage types too. Like the Dvar with the shield-breaker-meele-upgrade.

The only good thing about the vanguard is that the units and heroes gain exp by standing idle next to a city.

[Sinsling]

Lol pugs are not useless so im just skipping past all that.

Really you just need to know what units are good at. Troopers are actually good, especially if you set up overwatch kill spots and bait enemies in to them. Grenades provide nice situational uses with aoe staggers, allowing stunlocks against susceptible enemies if 3 troopers can get on top of them.

Owls are a nice offensive tool with their targetting sensors, helping make sure all your other shots connect. They also pack a pretty decent punch themselves.

Pugs are great support units, coming with a heal, evasion cloud, and ability reset skill.

Bikes are a bit situational but preform really damn good bbn once you get the hang of them. They do amazing things if you evasion buff them with a pug before fmdriving them in the enemy.

Gunships are alright. They have evasive maneuvers and a rocket, along with a primary weapon that is a firearm, so there is a lot of potential there with the right mods.

The only early unit I hate is engineers. Calibration is ass compared to pug's evasion boost, and I'm not a fan of stationary turrets. Combine that with having a shotgun... ya, no thanks.

[Eclipse]

For me Vanguard is the strongest faction. In campaign I easily defeated 2 expert AI (one was Cyborg Hacker,another Psi Syndicate). On the other hand I had problems in Kirko and Dvar campaigns. PUG+Engineer is just too good. Drop smoke on engineer, run+create turret,reload,create another turret. This is 2 turrets with high damage that can be buffed for+30% accuracy. Add 2 or 3 soldiers with jet pack to the mix to destroy annoying cover or overwatch critical location and this is over basically. All early game is yours.

[MrNo]

Troopers in general are fantastic units, because they get access to the Firearms mod set which is currently the best in the game. Give 'em a range boost and they're quite good for control.

[Wintermute]

OWL is pretty good in combat for a scout.
Troopers are one of the best basic infantry in the game.
Bikes are decent early on.
Pugs are allright, but nothing special.
Gunships are awesome, because firearms.
Engineers are useless on their own, but extremely useful paired with lazor tanks, and can be modded in some interesting ways with endgame mods.

[aclyte]

I found them quite balanced.

Troopers have overwatch and greenades - so they're quite versalite.
Bike is very good flanking unit
Owl is scout but with good firepower and debuff
Pug is just support with heal and some buffs

Imo, vanguard is very good for beginners - they got "x-com like" units. As opposite, for example, Kirko, have melee heavy starting units which are not so easy to use for beginners.

[BBB]

A sign of a good game design is when you get 2 opposing absolutes on the same issue:

Vanguard is the WORST faction.

Vanguard is the BEST faction.

Wow! :D

My thoughts?

1 - listen to sinsling. He knows rather alot about the game.

2 - Vanguard are by design somewhat "vanilla" which means, to me, infinitely malleable, and not locked into any combinations.

Arguably no race is locked into a combo, but some are somehow, thematically or powerwise, just more natural, like Syndicate and Psynumbra, or Dvar and Promethean, or Assembly and Voidtech.

I personally have had great success and fun with massed Bikes. There have been a couple of threads disrespecting them, but for me they are cheap enough, fast, can take a punch (not very tanky) and can roll up and dish out damage.

I'm disregarding secret tech here, and thinking that a force of Bikes with nanite injectors is both easy to pull off and effective.

Vanguard are probably my 2nd favourite race.

It varies.

Syndicate number one.

Amazons in last place.

Everything else in between, Assembly being a strong contender along with Vanguard.

Later on, the laser tank is one of my favourite units. The secondary attack, overcharge (?) can get very powerful indeed, and these are indeed quite tanky.

I find one of those, with a PUG to recharge things, or an Owl to paint the target, plus 4 or 5 Troopers, is a solid stack.

A tank and a bunch of tanks is very hard for the AI to handle.

Bear in mind I haven't tried this in multiplayer yet :P

Sadly, I have to say I don't quite yet like the Walker, or the Drone Carrier.

[Sinsling]

That's okay BBB. The walker is practically a meme with how bad it is, along with the wrecker. And the drone carrier... yikes!

[BBB]

Originally posted by Sinsling:

That's okay BBB. The walker is practically a meme with how bad it is, along with the wrecker. And the drone carrier... yikes!

I believe Monsieur Wrecker is getting buffed.

Just for fun I am going to mod these 3 units.

I was thinking, and these ideas are probably swinging the pendulum too far the other way:

Walker: Make it more like a Battletech mech, and give it the jump jet mod but modified for heavy mechanical units. So this effectivelòy becomes a very heavily armoured trooper.

Wrecker: Doubling the HP (with Voidtech this will get stupid)

Carrier: Making it flying and/or making the summons one AP only.

[Andrastos]

See, 2 of the late tier vanguard-units are so underpowered that they became practically a meme and you say i'm wrong about them being the worst race in the game.

As i stated before: they have to many weapon types to be in sync with their tech tree.

To further explain, i usually play a heavy turtle style game with much focus on research. In tactical combat, i set up the army and lure the enemy in or bombard him with artillery behind a good defense line.

With a strategy like this i can turn around battles where 2 armies are against one. But not with vanguard. Artillery unit practically useless, overwatch is overrated because the enemy can determine when and where it will trigger, (yay, overwatch wasted on an enemy behind cover with 5% chance to hit). Grenades are to close combat to be effective and again explosion damage instead of laser or projectile etc.etc.

Take amazon and you have a blinding grenade with more range, ignoring cover with bows, flanking and shooting rider unit, nice anti air flyer and later arborean units that go really well with growth faction. Constantly heal your army with pollen and self-regeneration and drown in enemy corpses.

[Charlando[SunsOfStmChrts]]

Atleast the walker doesnt slow down you entire stack now.

My 2c: I've read people claiming Amazons are the weakest but for me its just the opposite. Especially their early game lineup, and especially compared to pre-patch vanguard where engineers were a joke.

[Sinsling]

Originally posted by Andrastos:

snip

Having a bad apple is not the same as being weak.

About 70% of assembly's units are relatively ♥♥♥♥. That doesn't stop them being a competent race.

You just have to know what you are doing with what you are given.

[MrNo]

Not to derail too far - amazon were generally considered the worst race until semi-recent plays showed that Lancers are actually incredibly good units and that the main issue was just massed huntresses sucking.

I attribute most of this discovery to orangelex, who I don't think uses these forums, though someone else may have come across the same idea.

Originally posted by Andrastos:

As i stated before: they have to many weapon types to be in sync with their tech tree.

They have 2 weapon types barring that one grenade ability on the trooper and the rocket turret.

Originally posted by Andrastos:

To further explain, i usually play a heavy turtle style game with much focus on research. In tactical combat, i set up the army and lure the enemy in or bombard him with artillery behind a good defense line.

With a strategy like this i can turn around battles where 2 armies are against one. But not with vanguard. Artillery unit practically useless, overwatch is overrated because the enemy can determine when and where it will trigger, (yay, overwatch wasted on an enemy behind cover with 5% chance to hit).

So your main issue with vanguard is that they don't have a good artillery unit. This doesn't make them bad, they just don't suit your playstyle. I imagine you have a similar opinion of syndicate?

sidenote - walkers are laughably bad. Laser tanks fill in as the proper range 9 artillery with that secondary fire of theirs. Engineers with rocket turrets also perform well.

Originally posted by Andrastos:

Grenades are to close combat to be effective and again explosion damage instead of laser or projectile etc.etc.

For the sake of autobattle alone, I almost want their grenade to be gone. In a player's hands it has its uses.

[Hieronymous]

Troopers are terrific but for the AI's sake I often wish they just had a longer distance grenade launcher attachment on their rifles instead

[Mad77oi "BiHo"]

Originally posted by Sinsling:

Originally posted by Andrastos:

snip

Having a bad apple is not the same as being weak.

About 70% of assembly's units are relatively ♥♥♥♥. That doesn't stop them being a competent race.

You just have to know what you are doing with what you are given.

!!! :)