Regardless of whether the tank has some marginal bonuses on top of the +3 damage over the Sentinel, the main problem with the unit isn't that another race has a comparable unit of a lower tier, rather the fact that the tank serves little purpose in its own racial tree.
...
The Assault Bike is better at applying thermal status and does almost the same amount of damage when firing at a group of 2 units. At 3+ units, it outdamages the tank.
Except you need to be in near-melee range, and the opponent needs to kindly stack up a bunch of units for your AOE pleasure.
The Walker matches the tank's damage and can get the same range, while doing aoe damage, with its primary and gets a free massive impact, 16 damage aoe every other turn.
Except the Walker is squishier, Cumbersome, and costs a lot more in research.
The Drone Carrier also matches the tank's damage and can attack once while printing disintegration drones with Reactive Armor Plating every turn.
Except it's a TIER 4 UNIT. Those things are supposed to be pretty hard carries because they have a cosmite upkeep... and even then, it's literally the same primary attack as the tank!
So a 30% more damaging attack does 30% more damage after applying the same boost to both the weaker and stronger attack, except here and there when numbers get conveniently rounded up? Fascinating.
I won't even touch the arbitrary comparison.
Sure, I didn't map out every single possible comparison at any given % modifier. The point is that 3 raw damage on a repeating attack will generally have a significant impact, which often scales disproportionate to the original damage increase.
Meanwhile, what are you gonna do to protect yourself from Positron Converter activation, all those Stun abilities and the entire Synthesis tech tree? You gonna have an army comprised mostly of Network Links so you can manage to protect yourself by the time operations become usable?
I mean, I've fought against armies of Network Links and the answer is basically "yes", although that says a lot more about how broken I think Network Links are than any weakness of the Laser Tank. More practically, if someone's teched into the entire Arc and Synthesis trees you should have won already via doomsday. Units matter in the context of when they're actually available. Arc Weakness is a weakness, but it's hardly crippling or gamebreaking. Don't complain when you tell someone you're going to play rock and then they play paper; Vanguard has other units that can handle arc just fine, as do the secret techs.
It lasts 3 turns and has a 3 turn cooldown, it's up during the most important part of the battle.
This whole thing with trying to spin its ability to give this shield to another unit into anything other than a positive is silly.
I'm not saying it's not a positive, I'm saying that you cannot
assume the Sentinel has 5 shields because there are many times it won't. I play a ton of Amazon PvP; I'll be the first to say that I think Sentinels are extremely solid units. They also have real weaknesses. More practically to this discussion, I find in practice that they very often won't have those shields because something else really needs them. I'm talking opportunity cost here - the ability is always and obviously a net positive, but
where it goes has consequences that are ignored when a person blithely says "Arborians have 5 defense stats". They don't, they have 2 plus a support ability that they can self-target.
Movement bonus along with the Scan is just me pointing out that Sentinels are backed up by a better kit.
I disagree. Or, to be fully accurate, I disagree on the notion that anyone could just claim the Amazon kit is strictly better than the Vanguard's. I'm willing to discuss relative merits but at the end of the day the difference is very minor, and depends on so many variables in opponent/situation/playstyle that it's effectively erased into the noise.
Overwatch helps them deal with melee units, the type of unit that bypasses their defenses.
I mean, not the
only type of unit... remember those Laser mods you were so derogatory about earlier? Or what about snipers? Or artillery? Sentinels aren't doing a whole lot against those units, are they? Whereas Laser Tanks are a lot more capable at moving to engage with those threats. The tanks aren't out-
shooting them anymore, because tanks shouldn't be beating artillery at their own game, but that doesn't mean the tank is at a massive disadvantage now either. And that's not considering that...
then we have +1 range on Prime rank from the tank while Sentinel gets bypass cover, well I'd say that the tank got a better deal there if it weren't for the fact that even cumbersome units get 1 free movement hex.
... Laser Tanks are
still able to get to 9 range. It's almost trivial for the sort of game I gather you play, when things go long, you can farm XP, and tech costs are not a huge issue. What astounds me is that you're complaining about an extra range up, which is almost certainly the strongest Prime upgrade possible (and before you say it, yes, I did quote that "while range is an extremely powerful stat in the game, it's not the solution to all problems" - that just means range is not outright broken as a prime upgrade, not that it's not the best one). I don't really know what "even cumbersome units get 1 free movement hex" is supposed to imply, because the majority of Cumbersome units are really hoping to
run away when in range of a Laser Tank and one tile isn't going to help that much.
The tank is a waste of cosmite.
So I get you're mad that this unit got changed. The thing is, most of the change was just that - a
change, not a nerf. It needs to be handled differently, but it's still a
very good unit. It fits a solid role for the Vanguard as a late-game all-rounder, capable of engaging just about anything at just about any range as the centerpiece of the army. Not every race gets one of those. Just because it's no longer the mega-sniper extraordinaire with zero effort doesn't suddenly make it useless. In fact, it can still become that mega-sniper with only a little effort.
