CNC Zero Hour

Welcome to the 66th TotW written by myself in response to a previously written tip found here. Now that you've had a few months to let that one sink in I'll be telling you the best way to deal with these near unstoppable forces of destruction. Aside from microing, that's your department! PS: Many thanks to StefanDeath for help with the video and screenshots!!

As you all know, pre-tech bikes must make contact with vehicles to do their maximum damage, just blowing up near by only deals a tiny amount of damage to vehicles although it rapes nearby infantry. When facing pre-tech bike spam early on in the game, there are a couple things you can do to make the bikes more or less useless and what not to do.

• Travel in pairs: A single bike can take on a single quad/gatt/tank on it's own. But if you have 2 or more of these units together, the bike won't get close enough to destroy your units. If your opponent sends bikes in pairs to counter this method, unless they are very well timed, you'll still have at least 1 unit left and will have come off slightly better in the encounter. Guard mode/attack move is your friend here.
• Infantry are cheap: Similar to what you might do with RPG from a tunnel to help kill a dragon (Putting them at a distance from either side of the tunnel) you can stop bikes from getting through. The bike user could sacrifice said bikes to destroy your infantry, but you'd come off better.
• Mines: These are destroyed when the first bike goes over it and detonates, however it still kills one bike and make end up saving your structure. Mine drops are also pretty effective at stopping enemy bikes as they move to quickly for the user to react.
• Air units: This should go without saying, but air units rape bikes because of their low armour. It also forces the Demo to make some quads, forcing him to mix those in makes your ground-force a lot more effective.
• Dragon walls blow: I've seen people try to stop bikes with dragon firewalls loads of times. Unless the dragon tanks flamethrower spins at exactly the right moment, you won't catch the bike. It's definitely not worth wasting them.
• Don't be over-confident: In the case of vees, you'd think unupgraded bikes wouldn't pose much of a threat due to their waypointing but the vees only have to stop for a second, and since they are so tightly packed together generally, it's hard to avoid a few bikes from different directions.

Now, post upgrade bikes can prove to be a huge problem as they only have to die near a unit to destroy it. The only thing you can safely do before killing the bike, is to get it away from your ground units or stop/slow it without destroying it immediately. Here are the most important things to remember when dealing with bikes,as they are much more potent post-tech.

• Travel in large groups: If you have an army such as Tank and you have a sizeable force of units it's pretty safe to let them wonder around with attack move. Gattling based weapons won't kill the bike before it gets into owning range, but tank shells are more than capable of taking out bikes before they get anywhere near close enough. Given that you have a slow-moving army, splitting up your force would cost you a lot more units.
• Use X: Splitting up your units is an effective tool when you have fast moving units like Humvees. Sometimes, the Demo player won't target a Vee and instead just tell the bike to run into the middle of a group of them and will assume that your Vees will destroy it and kill themselves. However, hitting X will ensure that even if he did lock on, he won't kill more than 1 Vee and if he didn't target the Vees, he won't hit any.
• Evacuating: When a bike is locked onto a unit, it follows the unit if it is travelling in a straight line. You can use this to your advantage with units such as Vees or BattleBuses. If you evacuate just a single RPG/MD it will slow the bike, it will have to manoeuvre around the infantry unit to get to your units. At which point you can escape while your infantry unit deals with the bike. If a lot of bikes are following you, disrupting the front bike will slow them all down.
• ECM tanks: These are extremely effective at dealing with bikes and I would suggest you always have each ECM under different numbers during this matchup. If you can stop the first bike, the rest will be trapped behind it. If not, you can always trap multiple bikes, then kill them when your certain they won't get to your units. Note that vChina ECM tanks don't auto-disable, and you should place any ECM tanks on guard mode as they react quicker.

^ What do you guys think about adding videos into TotWs? I'm going to start using them (With proper editing and voice overs) in the future

This post has been edited by Flamzypants: Jan 23 2008, 20:07 PM

Nice tip Flamzy! I'm sure lots of people learned a lot from this (even though i knew everything )
I loved the video thing at the end.. and it was good quality too We should have more of those in the next TotWs...
I think we should add one to the "countering stealth comanches" one, since I'm still really bad at hitting "scatter" (x) at the right time..
You should have showed a video of the other things you mentioned in the tip, not only the vees, though. The rest was perfect

Me like the videos

Nice tip - it had to be done after the Pandora's Box you opened with your Demo Bike tip

To be honest, 4 different clips, have to watermark them seperatly before merging because the program I use doesn't like WMVs which is what Windows Movie Maker uses I'd have done others but I was taking up Steffys time too

Since I finally got Fraps registered, I've tossed the idea around of making TotW videos. However, I was mostly thinking remaking old tips, not a from-here-on-out sort of thing.

M4573rful tip btw, Flamzy.

i like the video idea

Everyone is forgetting about my cartoon idea now

Good tip btw

Ye nice tip, it will help me as u r teh bike S9aM3r

Not to sound nooby but, what is an upgraded bike ? Oo

This post has been edited by -ViTTeL-: Jan 24 2008, 22:54 PM

It would be nice to have them both mixed to make one big tip. It is very time consuming for the people to do that, but if you got the time (could be team effort) think about it then. I wish I could record sound when I made the videos... tip

It's a terrorist-combat cycle under the effect of Juhziz's Demolitions upgrade from Palace. They boast a huge blast radius and activate their weapon on death rather than their attack, making them much easier to micro and harder to avoid.

This post has been edited by Daishi: Jan 25 2008, 03:30 AM

Agreed
awesome to see this more often (*hint hint*)

ok thanks ^^ i didnt even realise they changed...haha 3000+ games online and i dont no this

Not enough people use bikes I've seen loads of people tech up with demo and spam overprices buggies and buses

thats because of everyone being of the "pro rules" mentality flamzy

no, it's cuz it's actually pretty easy to counter demo bikes, i'd rather build a "bomb truck with demo upgrade stealthed as a drone"

I remember a game where gatts counter demo bikes.

i personaly dont like bikes, think there lame but thats mo

if you press X you should manually order the vees closest to the bike back :0

in the second clip from the video, where you had the MDs evacuate the vee, the bike blew up right near them... how come they didn't die ? o0"

I was wondering that actually The bike must have been un-upgraded, even then it should still have killed the MD.