The problem is map control. If you can't hold a resonable proportion of the map safely you'll lose in the long run. As Bentguru says you don't have to charge insanely in to be effective. All you have to do is ensure that you end the initial part of the game with a significant proportion of the map compared to your opponent without having lost much more than them.

People who argue that deleting the FOB is a solution aren't really understanding the problem. To rush you don't need to end up in his starting sector. Simply denying him a significant proportion of the points on his half of the map is enough.

I'm kinda of the opinion that rushing in general is a bit strong. Looking at the top 20 in ranked I'm fairly sure at least 5 of them go all out rushing pretty much every game. If this is happening then I think something is wrong with the game. A lot of people dismiss rushing because a lot of new players try it and fail badly. This is often due to the fact that new players are bad though - most seem to simply fast move to the enemy's FOB and go AFK.

I personally think there are a lot of contributing factors as to why rushing works well:

1) The 5% thing that Guggy points out above makes a big difference to low accuracy units. 15% hit chance at max range for a VTS1 when still. 5% when moving. Ok, so that's a 3x difference, but with enough of me we're going to take apart any non concentrated force without slowing down. Make them stop to have anything over 1% accuracy and it slows the whole thing down a lot, as well as increasing the amout of micro the rusher has to do! I don't really understand why this minimum cap is in place to be honest. I can't see any reason why it shouldn't just be removed and I'd be very interested to see how this effect rushes. I really don't understand how you could hit something 2km away while travelling at 70kph using an unstabalised innaccurate gun 1 in 20 times anyway. Heck, I think hitting something at 200m would be hard enough! This might be the perfect solution.
2) There is very little time to counter a very large force of a very small amount of unit types. It's possible, but you have to be quick and correct. Even then by the time the reinforcements have arrived you've already given a lot of ground. Only helicopters can really come quick enough to provent a huge amount of ground loss.
3) Quantity seems to matter a little too much over quality in the morale system.
4) When doing actions quickly it's very easy to turn the rear armour of tanks that wouldn't otherwise be hurt by the enemy towards them.
5) All the guys around you can be dying and you're morale is calm.
6) Play to counter rushes and you get destroyed by conventional strategies.
7) You'd think that going after the command post might be a solution. Trouble is, they're pretty easy to hide out-of-sector.
8) Light units don't seem to suffer quite enough from being hit by a large tank shell.


Bringing this back onto the topic of the VTS1 - I think it's currently the most imbalanced unit we have. It's amazing how 2 armour on the front and sides makes you much stronger against most Pact ATGMs (2 armour vs 10 hp = 9 damage... so two ATGMs needed for a kill), without mentioning small arms fire. There are plenty of Pact units that are cheap, can do damage, and can take a few hits back, but most are 50kph, so unless you start with them they're going to be arriving too late to do anything useful a lot of the time. We then come back to the problem that if you play anti-rush against somebody playing conventionally you're putting youself at a major disadvantage.

And like I said, if you look what the VTS1 was in real life, it's just impossible that this thing can actually fire on the move and on a 360 degree axis. And anyway, I'm not even sure that with a so awkwardly placed gun, you could fire more than 2 or 3 round/minute. Sorry, but it's unrealistically powerful. Or you fix it so it's realistic, or you erase it from the game. A T-55 would be 10 times superior as a war maxhine in all parameters except in road speed which the VTS1 wouldn't be able to exploit properly as I said before.

unbalanced as the VTS1 is, there reason massing it works is the same reason massing anything cheap works.

1) The morale system encourages quantity over quality. A single ATGM will panic an expensive battle tank, drastically cutting your effective firepower. But if you have 5 cheap units, only one is affected.
2) Since there's no health difference between anything with armor, you're better off with multiple low armor units than a single high armor unit
3) You have more overall firepower with many cheap units than a few expensive ones, particularly against soft or lightly armored targets.
4) Mass fire, of any kind, will rout opposing units. Even if they are in no real danger.

They're the same reasons aml 90 spam worked in beta. The quantity nerf to the lynx didn't change those reasons, it just hid the problem for a while. Similarly, restricting VTS1 availability or price won't fix it either. Until there is an actually good reason to buy expensive units as opposed to cheap ones the metagame is just going to be unit spam after unit spam.

I've already found several suitable replacement vehicles than can be spammed to devastating effect. The only difference between them and the VTS1 is that it's simply better at it than anything else atm.

You do have a point there, the morale system doesn't favour expensive units.

If you have the Mi-17, the HE 3 rockets are generally pretty nice at taking down the Marders. Much better than just relying on HE 1 rockets on pretty much any other chopper, at least.

The morale system needs some serious adjustment apparently,if not removed.A panic unit can never recover if you chase it with move attack,even its a 160$ heavy tank chased by a 10$ unit.Rush is almost not possible to stop since its no way for you to know its coming before you spend most of your point at the beginning,and a balanced army simply cant beat the rush force so the rush guy get early advantage for sure.

Tweaked and improved perhaps, removed never! I always tought that it's stupid that when an army is decimated that everyone fight to death as if they were fanatics ... And generally, the morale eliminate some cheasy tactics like rushes of weak units (which suffer a lot and flee). I think that the units should be more frightened when fired by superior units and when they suffer heavy cassualties in a short period of time.

The thing is, there IS NO LONG RUN.

My average game clocks in at under 5 minutes running rush, in 20 games I've yet to see a single person beat it. I don't abuse the VTS1, but rather run infantry (about 60-70 APC's inside of 1500 points, plus certain supporting units). I don't doubt it's beatable, but besides throwing down the specific counter that would get thrashed by another army (most likely composed of hordes of equally cheap units), it's just not going to happen.

They shred cheap armor, they shred light vehicles, (expensive armor has absolutely no chance, it doesn't fire fast enough). I have AA to take out choppers, and best of all the APC's all move 90km/h or faster and require no fuel to get to an enemy base. Flamethrower tanks are effective at stunning APC's and routing troops, but usually the backup units knock them out, or there's just too many APC's with rocket firing troops for them to live long.

Maybe I just haven't played anyone good, but tbh I would have normally lost at least ONCE by now. It's just retarded how well the cheap units rush works.

and if your competent you split your APCS from groups of 4 on route and when you hit those flame tanks you can diverge groups of your apcs in different directions off the road and dodge the aoe stuns and goodbye flamer.

Buratino is ultimately your biggest fear, larger AoE stun...

Which is why facing infantry rushes as Nato is not fun at all. I spend the whole game thinking "A Buratino would rape face right about now".



Thats true. Cheap hordes definitely fare better than expensive units.

I favour a high/low mix (like Nato did with their jets). Most of my units are cheap and relatively expendable, with one or two more powerful/tougher units mixed in, to steady the line/force a breakthrough where nexessary. More than once the ability of a Challenger to hold tank several times it's number while backing off has allowed me to redeploy and counter attack.