Azue

Mayhem Inc

Arm, lvl3 Railgun

Buildpic: Well, I quite liked the buildpic on the Mayhem site. Then I launched TA, and met this ingame. Gagh. The unit is in an utterly awkward pose. There should be either some hollow area in the barrel or some kind of lighting around the thing [2]. The background is nice, although it seems a little to light at the top [2.5]. However, the unit\'s back end seems to merge with that mountain behind them. And while some parts of the gun barrel show darkening, there are no shadows to back up that theory. [0.5]

Buildpic: 5

Model: The model, while not being entirely OTAish, is still very cool. It does use a lot of faces, but no matter how hard I looked I could not find any downward or inward facing ones. However, the 12 solid black faces puzzled me. [3] The texturing is well done, but again, why are there those black faces? No CD:3D present either. [3.5] The corpse is certainly wrecked, but why does it have colored faces? Also, no faces from the original model have been removed, when quite a few could have. I'm going to give it a [0.5] because it is a corpse.

Model: 7

Script: Nothing especially interesting, but it does spin the barrel really fast when it sees a target. Takes forever to slow down afterward though.

Script: Not counted

Balance: Now the hard part. This unit costs about 25% more energy and 75% more metal than a Bertha, its closest cousin. For that, it gets just under half the range (2000 to 4096), less than half the damage (800 to 2000), just over double the armor, and a longer reload time (10 to 7). However, it gains line-of-sight attacks, and nonexplode. Testing this in-game proved to be difficult. The first one got overrun by a trio of AKs before it was built because I stupidly forgot to build any other defenses. The second one decided to fire a warning shot over the top of the incoming army instead of hitting in dead on. After that they worked fine though. The powerful cannon will pulverize any level one and most level two units in one hit. It has 100% accuracy and is very fast moving, so the only thing it can't hit is air units and maybe the Weasel. Plus, it can kill more than one unit in a single hit. However, the incredibly long reload time, and the fact that it cannot fire immediately, sort of balances it out. In its present state it does seem to make a Bertha useless if you can afford the extra resources needed to build one because it is so much more accurate, and can gain veteran state quickly. I'd suggest you cut the extra armor, and increase either the buildtime or the costs a little. Its main problem is that it can withstand a lot of punishment compared to the Bertha. You're on the right track, but not quite there yet.

Balance: 6.5

My score: The script animation is cool, but why does it take so darn long to spin down afterward? I suppose it's the same thing as the Maverick holding its guns drawn, but for that amount of time running the fast drop to no-spin looks.. odd. I love the concept, and if you can fix the balance issues this one's a keeper.

My score: 7

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