Orbital exploit

lol

I'm on a tablet right now, tell me what happened

To be fair, that's @elodea and he can pull off any build he wants.

I know, but this one's a problem

Getting one orbital fab wins the game.

Basically this is a great example of why scouting is important.

I did, and *tried* to build a umbrella. It was reclaimed.

I'm having trouble loading the replay because I think one of you two is still in the game. I'll take a look once it becomes available.

Watching now. First, I actually think his build can be improved. The orbital fabbers get some small radar directly below them, so he should be going fab before orbital radar. That can at least start reclaiming mexes or random radar blips even before the radar moves in.

You scouted his orbital at 3:10 and kept building factories and lasers even after seeing what he was doing. His first reclaim wasn't until 5:30 so there was some time there to prepare. Knowing that he was going for the early base reclaim, you should probably have gone straight to umbrellas and then switched to dox/boom spam. Counter cheese with cheese, since you can be pretty sure he doesn't have much of an army defending his commander.

Really, just spamming booms would have won this for you because his build is so bad.

I had vehicle facs. He just reclaimed my factories if I tried to build them. he moved his comm into orbit.

But like I said, you had more than 2 minutes to prepare for this. That is more than enough time for the commander and a single fab to make an umbrella and deep space radar.

But the real question is;

Why are umbrellas so expensive?

I think it's "Why are orbital fabs so cheap?" They are a great offensive weapon, but they also invade planets and have a great build arm for assisting in something like energy production. I guess a possible fix would be to set orbital fabs to only be able to assist on things they can build or just make them cost more, but at the moment I'm enjoying experimenting with them.

I think making a balance thread in the general forum immediately after losing one game is premature. The build elodea used can be countered if you scout in time and know what the early orbital means. I have no problem with cheese builds as long as they can be scouted and countered. My problem is with builds that win the game before you even have a chance to know what is going to happen.

On a bigger planet like Meso, it might not even be possible to scout an orbital factory before it's made and reclaimed.

I could have scouted quicker, but I don't even think I could have gotten an orbital radar and umbrella by minute 2:30. And lol that smurf name confused me. He even talked like a noob @elodea

"Woah FUK There's only one planet!!!!"

"I want to escape before being rekt"

It was quite amusing

Well like I said, the deadline for the umbrella was closer to 5:30 than 2:30. It should take about 45 seconds to get one if the commander and one fab are working on it. Obviously this still means he can reclaim anything you built outside the protected area, but as you showed here you are able to kill his base and then he would have been forced to come back down and build a new base somewhere if there is an umbrella up. By that time, you have at least a small head start although he has the orbital fab to help assist the commander in building things.

I was estimating (lol), and the commanders landed around 1:15.

Elodea's probably just reading this thread and rolling on the floor laughing.

Here's something to make you all feel better.

What does this have to do with me? I have nothing to do with these dastardly troll tactics. This mr popo is really getting out of hand!

Ooh your smurf is revealed...