The Advanced Gunship/Scout Game

[ALaggyGrunt]

Everyone saying "Nerf scouts!" should read this.

 

We know a burst laser scout will beat a gunship 1v1 no problem, even without distortion field and evasion stacking-all it has to do is come in at an angle so the GS never gets a centered shot off. Once under the gunship's railguns, the scout with BLC/clusters wins the turning fight-there's literally nothing the gunship can do besides fly evasively and prolong the fight. I like power diving at the gunship, because that engine component will shoot your scout out from behind the rock and in the general direction of the gunship with a lot of speed.

In a real match, there's more than one gunship: the scout has to have evasion stat or it will get picked off very easily by another gunship when it's maneuvering for a shot at the first one. A good scout will have a good feeling for when the other gunships are lining it up: the scout has to make the kill or force the gunship to flee in a few seconds, or the gunship's teammates will kill the scout with massive rail spam.

There will also usually be a dronelayer with rail sentry and a few seeker mines scattered around, which gives the scout something else to think about.

 

If we rip evasion stat off of scouts, they become very bad at dealing with gunship walls. They're already pretty bad at this: if they attack the gunship wall in ones and twos (very typical when the scouts aren't all in voice chat), they lose to massive railgun spam. What makes it even worse for uncoordinated scout teams is these gunships' tendancy to be walked back to their spawn, which makes the scouts burn up a lot of time and engine power to get back to the fight once they've died-I've seen a few matches lost that way.

 

The other thing a scout can do is catch a gunship unaware and burst it down before it figures out there's a problem. A smart gunship won't let it do that-if the dogfight gets too close, it will move away. With range comes the relative safety of warning time and a lot easier time making centered shots against dancing targets.

 

Strikes don't fit into that fight: they can't seriously threaten scouts, and gunships can swat near-zero-evasion strikers down with ease unless the strike happens to catch the GS unaware. Unless the striker fits retros/clusters, it loses the turning match against the gunship because it doesn't have burst lasers or a tight enough turning radius to beat the gunship's burst lasers. Or, if the gunship pilot is smart, the gunship gets away from that fight.

 

 

Sloppy and totally new gunships will just sit there and let themselves be blown away one after another by an angry quads-and-pods scout and feed the scout insane damage stats.