What are Cyborgs good for ?

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Bethrezen
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What are Cyborgs good for ?

Post by Bethrezen »

Hi all

I'm curious in campaign mode what are cyborgs good for because as far as I can tell they are largely useless they are only as durable as viper half tracks which would be fine if you are using them against scavs but against the considerably stronger units of the New Paradigm / Collective / Nexus they die too easy.

There fire power is also positively anaemic for example if you compare the damage per minute of the heavy machine gun to the machine gunner cyborg, the cyborg does only about half the damage

So far as I can tell the machine-gunner Cyborg is only using the original machine gun you get at the start of the game and not the more powerful heavy machine gun which makes no sense why would you want to use an inferior weapon like that which does sod all damage the same holds true for the cannon cyborg as far as I can tell its only using the light cannon the question is why isn’t it using the more powerful heavy cannon

The flamer cyborg is even more useless than the flamer tank its rate of fire is to slow the damage it does is so laughably pathetic that I doubt you could even kill scavs assuming you could get cyborgs right at the start of the game and considering how close you have to get to use the flamer it's accuracy is to low its got less accuracy then the machine gun at 40% to the machine guns 50%

I'm generally of the opinion that since flamers are close range weapons it should be impossible for them to miss and they should have a 100% hit rate and should not be doing impact damage but rather all of there damage should be coming from the burn

As for the Lancer cyborg this was also considerably weaker then its tank based counter part against a rookie scorpion halftrack with a medium cannon the lancer cyborg only managed to deal 720 damage per minute the lancer tank of the same rank against the same target killed it in 2 shots with each attack from the lancer tank dealing 600 damage per attack assuming that both rockets hit the target from this we can conclude that the lancer cyborg is only doing 1/2 of the damage per minute of the lancer tank.

now I will grant you lancer tanks are a bit on the overpowered side which accounts for why the discrepancy in damage is so big but even if lancers weren't overpowered lancer cyborgs would only do a fraction of the damage of its tank based counterpart and in order for cyborgs to be a viable alternative they need to be able to do comparable damage to there tank based equivalents and they need to be considerably more durable.

Now since cyborgs are supposed to be light units what I would do is to simply lower the weapon modifiers for every other weapon to 50% against cyborgs to make them less effective at killing cyborgs with perhaps the exception of machine guns, artillery and flamers which cyborgs are supposed to be weak against.

Also I'd make it possible for cyborgs to use every turret in the game, there's no need to be able to design cyborgs since there is only 1 cyborg body in campaign mode so instead I'd just add every other type of cyborg to the build list when you click on a cyborg factory pursuant to the player having researched the relevant turret first all of which would make cyborgs considerably more useful in campaign mode.
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MaNGusT
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Re: What are Cyborgs good for ?

Post by MaNGusT »

My opinion is that cyborgs are good for scouting bcoz of movement speed. You could make them cheaper, so they also could be use for hit-n-run tactic.
The main idea is a new player shouldn't mind to spend energy and include several cyborgs into his tank's stack or find another solution how to use them.

Another crazy idea is to add evade mechanic, so cyborgs will have a chance to evade damage of missiles and grenades or something like that. :-)
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IgorBrehm
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Re: What are Cyborgs good for ?

Post by IgorBrehm »

Well, cyborgs do less damage, but you put more of them on the same space that you would manage to fit a certain number of tanks, and they are also pretty fast.
In my opinion, they are good for large assaults (build a group of 50/60 of them and send them to the enemy base, attacking the factories).
However, I always keep at least a group of 30 tanks (20 frontline, 10 artillery) so I can have them not die and keep gaining experience during the campaign. So I would not recommend using them in any way where survivability is the priority.
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Tzeentch
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Re: What are Cyborgs good for ?

Post by Tzeentch »

Well, it appears that they aren't really used. I know one mission in Gamma where they are perfect when Nexus is taking over your units :)

I think that given the placement in the tech tree ( rather than cyborgs first THEN tanks ) combined with the important campaign mechanic known as XP levels, which encourages you to preserve units this are the two biggest reasons why they don't get used. I for one never bothered with them. Now if you made a few changes or were using some cheats i.e. all units ranked hero then that means spamming them is great. I would question how Cyborgs scale in usefulness when the gain additional ranked levels :hmm: perhaps it can be earned faster? What are the modifiers?

But you also have away missions and a cyborg counts as 1 for 1 with a tank in the transport. Now in my view I'd say 2 cyborgs = 1 tank space, but there you go. That is another big reason. Can you imagine only using 10 cyborgs on some specific away missions? :p
Bethrezen
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Re: What are Cyborgs good for ?

Post by Bethrezen »

think that given the placement in the tech tree ( rather than cyborgs first THEN tanks ) combined with the important campaign mechanic known as XP levels, which encourages you to preserve units this are the two biggest reasons why they don't get used.
this is why I don't use them either because I want to preserve my experienced units and cyborgs just die to easy, and there firs power is really really weak and doesn't seem to keep pace as you acquire new technologies.

If it wasn't for the way the story plays out in campaign mode I'd recommend letting the player get cyborgs right at the start of the game because the way they are right now they are only really a match for scavs and the New Paradigms light units and maybe there medium units if you use the lancer version, and superior numbers certainly I could see me using cyborgs for maybe the first 5 or 6 missions of alpha if I could get them right from the start of the game but beyond that they are neither tough enough nor powerful enough

Personally I'm of the opinion that there fire power should be increased as should there armour, and every other weapon save for artillery, machine-guns flamers and anti cyborg weapons like the flash-light should have there modified lowered

having said that doing this would present problems for the campaign given the amount of cyborg spam that you face later in the game right now this cyborg spam is more of an irritating nuisance than a real threat but if cyborgs got the buff they need this could change in a hurry and the rate at which they product would need to be lowered to stop the player getting overwhelmed by weight of numbers particularly on the harder difficulty settings

It's a shame you can't build factories on way missions because this might actually prove to be quicker them waiting for your drop ship and in that case maybe id spam rookie cyborgs just to keep the computer busy while waiting for reinforcements although to be honest I'm of the opinion the the waiting time for reinforcements on most missions is to long and if it wasn't for that you could in fact do several of the mission significantly faster.

A though occurs what about increasing the number of units you can get on the drop ship from 10 to 20 this would make missions a whole let less tedious because I know from my own experience there are some missions where I spend most of the mission time just waiting for units to arrive like Beta 07- NASDA Control this mission in particular has a really tedious 5 minute wait for reinforcements.

Beta 09 is another mission where it would really help to land with more then 10 units because I cant count the number of times I have been wiped out before my first load of reinforcements arrive due to getting set-up on by by lancer vtols and lancer tanks shortly followed by endless waves of cyborgs and heavy tanks all within about 90 seconds of landing, part of the problem is getting your LZ permanently blocked because you can't kill the enemy troops quick enough to clear your LZ before more arrive.

What are the modifiers?
I don't know if these modifiers are different in later versions of the game because I'm still running an old master warzone2100-master-20180204-051309-ab17b9b.exe since the latest versions of the game wont run on XP but anyway here they are the legged value is for cyborgs.

Question: why does the ANTI AIRCRAFT modifier have anything other than lift since AA units cant shoot at anything other then VTOLs ? and why do the other modifiers have a lift value when so far as I'm aware only machine-guns and scourge missiles can fire at VTOLs in which case I would assume those two weapons would use 2 modifier values one for ground targets and a second for aerial targets in which case machine-guns and scourge missiles should have a lift value of at least 100

Code: Select all

{
    "ANTI AIRCRAFT": {
        "Half-Tracked": 100,
        "Hover": 100,
        "Legged": 100,
        "Lift": 110,
        "Tracked": 100,
        "Wheeled": 100
    },
    "ANTI PERSONNEL": {
        "Half-Tracked": 75,
        "Hover": 100,
        "Legged": 125,
        "Lift": 25,
        "Tracked": 75,
        "Wheeled": 100
    },
    "ANTI TANK": {
        "Half-Tracked": 125,
        "Hover": 125,
        "Legged": 75,
        "Lift": 20,
        "Tracked": 125,
        "Wheeled": 125
    },
    "ARTILLERY ROUND": {
        "Half-Tracked": 100,
        "Hover": 150,
        "Legged": 200,
        "Lift": 100,
        "Tracked": 100,
        "Wheeled": 100
    },
    "BUNKER BUSTER": {
        "Half-Tracked": 33,
        "Hover": 33,
        "Legged": 33,
        "Lift": 33,
        "Tracked": 33,
        "Wheeled": 33
    },
    "FLAMER": {
        "Half-Tracked": 80,
        "Hover": 150,
        "Legged": 150,
        "Lift": 25,
        "Tracked": 80,
        "Wheeled": 100
    }
}
stegasaur
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Re: What are Cyborgs good for ?

Post by stegasaur »

I too do not really utilise the cyborgs much but I thought one day I might experiment with trying to get a HUGE army of them
to see if they have any advantage if they outnumber other forces by let's say 4 to 1. I havent got round to that yet but one day I hope to
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