Introversion

Even though I rarely venture into online multiplay, I still get games in now and then and a few of them lately I find difficult (if not impossible) to win given the circumstances that time in the game. Usually it's a combination of some factors, but sometimes one thing can make the game unwinnable from your perspective.

Lately game-breakers for me and some players have been unfortunate crates landing near the starting spawn points and doing damage there...usually in the early game. I was curious to see what players thought was the worst thing to have in 'the front yard' when beginning the game.

• Triffids launch a couple of eggs, then self destruct. They can, potentially, create soul destroyers, but there is no guarantee about that. As long as they don't create a soul destroyer, about the worst they can do is spiders, which can be taken care of fairly quickly. Even if triffids get dropped on you right at the beginning of a game, it is recoverable. They are a minor nuisance in most instances.
• Plague outbreaks (what you are describing) are fairly easy to deal with. You simply have to quarantine the infected DGs. They don't follow orders very well, and they move about randomly when you ignore them, but if you can get them far enough away, they eventually die off or get better. Plague outbreaks can be rough if they happen right at the beginning of a game, but are, again, a minor nuisance if they happen later.
• Dark forests can be a pain. They severely limit the number of DGs that you can produce, and getting rid of them (burning them down) generally leaves your spawn point unmanned. This can be especially brutal on maps where you might have two spawn points right next to each other. That being said, dark forests are relatively easy to kill (airstrike, turrets, meteor showers, squads, and hotfeet can all be effective), thus they, like the above, are a temporary inconvenience.
• Anthills are really easy to deal with. It costs a few DGs for a period of time, in that you need to line them up into one or two formations, but they aren't killed, so you get them back later. Anthills can be dealt with, then forgotten. They hardly rate mentioning. ;)
• Soul destroyers are deadly, and can be quite hard to kill. The only really effective method is a gun turret (rocket turrets can kill them, but are slow and inaccurate; flame turrets are useless; burning forests don't do very much damage; any other weapon lands on the ground, thus timing is very, very important). They can kill as many (if not more) DGs than a dark forest, and can also kill off other units (engineers and armour, for instance). On maps where you get armour as reinforcements, this can actually work to your advantage (get the SD to attack the armours, and it dies pretty quickly), but (a) there are not many maps with both spawn points and armour reinforcements and (b) it wastes your armour.

If I had to rank all of these, I would probably say that soul destroyers are the worst, followed by triffids (if only because they can spawn soul destroyers), then dark forests and plague in no particular order, with anthills being the least offensive.

xander

Plague outbreaks aren't that easy when your MWs manning the spawn points get infected, and then infect every Multiwinian coming out of the port. In this particular case, a Futurewinian suction beam threw some over near another spawnpoint, and the result was my entire territory becoming infected save one spawn point (on Field of unending dawn). At that point, with everything else going on (FWs, and a soul destroyer on the map) I didn't think it would be possible to win the game. My Entire MW force would have had to be wiped out to be clean, since you can't conquer anything with plagued multiwinians.

And this was from a crate that landed right next to my right most spawn point.

But I've also seen the entire AI army infected with the plague.

The AI tends to rout it's armies via the same waypoints, bunching them together to create a nasty chain reaction.

@xander I didn't know triffids self destructed! I swear i've had maps where they stayed the entire game. A possible way to make them more lethal would be to make them self destruct harmlessly but also spread like trees.

Hot Feet ignites trees? Makes sense but I've never thought of it. Must give it a try.

Infection is EVIL. When the battle is hanging in the balance, having a plague outbreak near your spawn can upset the balance completely.

Depends on whether you are using that spawn as a waypoint/rallypoint for dg's going into battle or not.

What xander said.

You're missing these elements:
-xander's troops
-Myst's troops
-Cyan's troops.

Oh, and early on Evilinian outbreak. But yeah, SDs are probably the worst. At least with an outbreak that just transforms all of your troups, you know you have lost and never stood a chance and it's not your fault.

Also:
-Futurewinians landing and you have no dg's nearby

I think I'm also missing Randomizer too, since it could put you in a bad place at the beginning of the game. Might chalk that under 'enemy multiwinians' though.

Randomizer usually isn't much of a threat, as the enemies usually kill each other in the circle.

dark forest.

Man, if you had just waited two more weeks, you could have bumped this thread on the anniversary of the last time it was active!

xander

bert_the_turtle wrote:You're missing these elements:
-Cyan's troops
-Myst's troops
-xander's troops

Fix'ed

Oh, and early on Evilinian outbreak. But yeah, SDs are probably the worst. At least with an outbreak that just transforms all of your troups, you know you have lost and never stood a chance and it's not your fault.

I like this comment ^^,
Good old times of harrassing your opponent to death!What a waistful times, with no one around to beat...

Also, I doubt this was much of a bump, considering how silent these Mw forums are.