Hello fellow Tiberium Wars players! My name is
Sh0ckTr34tm3nt and I am going to be providing the Tiberium Wars section with a question and answer series where I take a question that a player has and then do my best to provide an in depth answer.
The first question that I will be answering is from
Pileca who asked how to stop attack bikes in a Nod mirror match-up.
The Solution
The key to stopping Bikes is making sure you have good scouting. If you are able to see where the Bikes are coming from before they arrive at your base you will be able to set up the appropriate counter to them. The best thing for this is to have Militant Squads sitting at key locations on the map to give you vision and to inform you if Bikes are incoming and whereabouts they are coming from.
The right units to build against Bikes depends on the situation you find yourself in. If you have two bases compared to your opponents one then they can constantly drag you from base to base and try and catch you out. The best thing to do against this is to get some Rocket Squads and position them at key locations where Bikes will be incoming. You will also want to have a Bike & Buggy mix of your own that you can use to counter attack and follow the other Bikes around the map.
One thing to be rather careful with is that if you build too many buggies then your opponent will be able to transition into Scorpion Tanks which will completely obliterate the buggies. You can tell if he is switching to Scorpions if you do not see the bike mass increasing in size. No more bikes means that he is building something else. This will mean that you will need to transition into Scorpion Tanks yourself after counter-attacking with your own bike mass or get a switch to Avatars and Obelisks at the right timing. The key for the Avatar switch is that you need to keep pressuring your opponent with your own attack bike/buggy mix to keep him in his base allowing you to get a good mass of Avatars up.
As is key with most match-ups; scouting is really important, as is making sure that you do not let your economy fall behind. Try to scout how many War Factories your opponent has and count the number of Harvesters and Refineries. The idea of Bike pressure is to allow you to get a Harvester/Refinery lead on your opponent so you can expand/tech much faster.
A good example of dealing with Bikes would be in the game on
Tournament Rift in the tournament that I played against
Bike+Rush+Ownz. You can see from the replay that he positioned Rocket Squads very well at key locations in his base and went for a mass of Buggies that chased the Bikes down cost-effectively. This allowed him to build up an economic lead and expand/tech much faster than me.
Thanks to
Pileca for the question! For further discussion on this subject, and to submit your own questions, please head over to the discussion topic!
