What are Cyborgs good for ?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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 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]

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]

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

[Sibernethy]

Ten reasons why I use Cyborgs in the Campaign:

1: No movement penalty. Tanks often get stuck on steep hills because they struggle to climb upward if they are weighed down by their mass. Even on glitched-out cliffs that lack proper boundaries due to improper textures, I've seen them climb at the same speed as on flat ground.

2: Small size. They are the smallest thing in the game that can attack, other than Scavengers. This means they can hide in places normally unwise to fit tanks into. This makes them useful for ambushes, skirmishing, and highwayman-coded harassment tactics. They can detect, intercept, and distract enemy forces while disrupting their movements and delaying assaults on your base structures.

3: Defensive warfare asset. They excel as guards. They are the game's basic infantry. They draw fire away from your tanks. They integrate nicely with complex base designs because they can fit just about anywhere that's walkable. They support base defenses by absorbing damage while supporting defensive turrets. They can easily navigate concrete cornfields, giving them an advantage when fighting something substantially larger than them, such as a heavy tank with tracks trying to wade through a sea of caltrops or hardcrete wall mazes.

4: Experience. They gain experience and can be transplanted into more powerful units. They not only gain experience for each target they personally eliminate, they also gain experience every time they successfully hit a target. Over time, they rack up experience. If you know a predictable path for a Campaign enemy to send his units, you can farm for experience and recycle the Cyborgs for better tanks.

5: Patrol networks. If they have legs, they can march. And because they move fast and can practically moonwalk up anything that isn't a no-pass square, they can be used as metrocop-like forces, forming lines of traffic between bases to act as mobile security. I can practically monitor every unoccupied inch of terrain the enemy isn't deeply entrenched in with cyborgs that I send on patrols to absolutely everywhere. Patrols can be set to intersect with each other, too, so if an enemy is found, it won't be long until Buddy brings buddies. They also protect bunkers and hardpoints from those pesky Bunker Buster surprise attacks, should they emerge. The Campaign AI is not sophisticated enough for Bunker Buster units to avoid firing indiscriminately, so they'll waste rockets on a dinky little machinegunner just before being destroyed.

6: Concrete Anthills. Trucks are extremely flexible when constructing bases and outposts. One tactic I like to use is to build a concrete cube and fill it with cyborgs. If anyone has ever poked an anthill and watched hell fly out, they'll understand the power of Concrete Anthills. The main purpose of this trick is to stall the enemy and occupy the attention of their forces. A fun, more sadistic variant of this tactic, is to set the engagement behavior of each cyborg waiting in that structure to Pursue and their retreat threshold to Do or Die. If something draws the attention of the cyborgs hiding in that building, they will attack and chase anything they see, down to the last breath. The Cyborgs set to that behavior become the equivalent of fire ants, and if strictly left to watch them play themselves out, it becomes an interesting spectacle to see just how far they can go before they die.

7: Vulture Targeting. They can chase down retreating units. Assign a small group of cyborgs to a group and keep them on hand anytime you see conflict. If you notice an enemy retreating for repair, mark that unit down as a target to the exclusion of everything else. The slower and closer to death the enemy unit is, the better. This is especially handy if you're dealing with expensive heavy tracked tanks and can pop a few of them off the radar with a few Lancer cyborgs. Just make sure to set this group to Hold Fire and manually picking the target so you don't waste an opportunity.

8: Internal Base Sabotage. This is particularly useful against the Collective because of how they design their bases. The Collective tend to use densely-packed architecture and lots of artillery. You can send a pack of cheap cannon fodder directly into their bases at high speed and use incoming splash damage from their own artillery to not only damage their own base defenses and structures but also distract perimeter defenses from more dangerous targets, such as Heavy Cannon tanks and Bunker Busters because a lot of the Collective base defenses will be focused on what's already inside their base and fire at the nearest target, which in this case, is intended as a decoy. Once you have long-range artillery, such as Ripple Rockets and Howitzers, you can also CB their entire indirect fire cluster if you have a CB sensor nearby. In essence, Collective bases have a tough exterior but are vulnerable to sabotage once entered.

9: Uniform movement speed. All cyborgs in the campaign, to my recollection, move at exactly the same speed. This means they are generally easier to coordinate and send on complex attack patterns because their speed can be monitored and timed, especially using patrols to automate their movement cycles. Variation may exist in Skirmish/Multiplayer due to the presence of Heavy Cyborgs but this is the Campaign we're discussing, and at least as far as I can recall in the original release, there were only the little guys.

10: Fighting Artificial Intelligence with Natural Stupidity. There are ways to troll the crap out of that gloating braggart of a system virus. A good way to destroy a computer is to feed it to the monkeys and frustrate the digitized madman at every turn. And this exposes a paradoxical flaw in Nexus and his brilliant tactical coordination. One is to make a bunch of cheap decoys for Nexus when he tries to hack your units and buildings. Turn his randomizer against him by building a bunch of dummy targets and making it more likely that one of these useless cannon fodder creations ends up taking the hit than an important structure or unit. Cheap cyborgs actually might come in handy for eliminating targets that are deeply entrenched within Nexus bases. AA sites, artillery, VTOL pads, and squishy base structures that can be infiltrated easily due to Nexus base design logic. Nexus bases, unlike those built by New Paradigm or the Collective, tend to follow a design practice that doesn't seek to outright block access but rather create a hostile environment that makes it difficult to survive while inside of them. That being said, even cheap cyborgs benefit from all the armor upgrades acquired from previous campaigns, and this can be used to screw with Nexus battle coordination patterns and endanger his internal base structures. Computers hate chaotic disruption and systematic interference, and that is exactly what is being weaponized with the use of cyborgs here.