Official BOTW Discussion (31/10 - Triple Treat!)

[Death Eye]

^Then I suppose I should post this here.

I just finished doing a bunch of battles with a Normal Knight (and a bunch of similar Borgs behind it to take up space).
Of course, by "a bunch of battles" I mean the first "Training with Kakeru!" mission repeatedly, so everything I say here is based on one-on-one combat with the CPU without any game-changing adversaries like fortresses or dragons.

I have come to the conclusion that Normal Knight isn't all that good.
All of his ground attacks except for the basic walking attack are extremely laggy, and his air attack is hard to hit with and can be a bit laggy as well. The shield takes effort to actually block with, effort that you're probably too busy to make if you're on the offensive since you have to precisely position the shield, a task that's next to impossible when you're approaching your target.
However, the shield is not by any means useless; personally, I could accomplish nothing with Normal Knight until I figured out how to really use the shield.
Throw it.
Basically, don't use your sword unless you just threw your shield or got a hit with your sword.
Then once one of those conditions has been met you can either wait a bit after landing to do a normal combo, just do the landing slash, or do the Normal Ninja Combo (that was the thing where you do your basic aerial melee repeatedly by jumping immediately after landing, right?). Or, if you happen to have a charged Cross-Shape Slash, you can use that without a problem.
While I'm on the subject of the Cross-Shape Slash, it can be used somewhat safely without throwing your shield if you feel like it, but I find it difficult to hit with it outside of a very close range, especially if I'm above my target, so I wouldn't recommend it, but it is an alternative option.
(Personally, my favorite alternative option is to just go with a couple of level 10 Death Borg Gammas or a level 10 Gamma II. )

[Stove]

^Thank you! Finally, someone understands how to use NK's Shield correctly besides me!

[Frozazen]

yes, that is the NNC ^^ (yesh i coined a term :3)

For a 180 cost borg, Normal Knight doesn't really have much going for him, as the metagame is full of borgs that can utilize long-range moves. I think I'll split my response according to the different rulesets.

1v1:
Here his shield is best used to protect himself, as others have said before. It is important that he use his shield to block shots until he can come in close to hack away at his opponent. However, all shields have their drawbacks, like how they do not block all the damage from explosives, as the explosions reach back past the shield to damage the player. As for combos his are close range, consisting of NNC and the shield throw, usually ending with the cross-slash for the final attack, but alas, our little orange friend cannot match the speed of the other more light-footed borgs, provided that they have projectiles, meaning that even Normal Ninja has the upper hand when fighting Normal Knight. Lots of lag on many attacks, which can leave him open a lot of the time, and thus his matches usually end with a nice purge of light-blue light.

2v2:
Here Normal Knight, as I see it, could go for a more supportive role, as he can utilize his shield to hide his ally, nullifying the heavy damage and taking residual damage while the ally goes in for the kill, or spams from behind. Yes, this situation looks like Normal Knight really will be the knight in shining armor, as he glows every time his shield activates. However, this does not necessarily mean he is bad. In fact, he has the cheapest large shield in the game, as Death Borg Gamma's shield is about half that size. Here Normal Knight and his partner will be going 2on1 against the more annoying opponent, before going against the opponent's ally. This could be dangerous, as the opponent's ally will continuously be spamming your team while you are fighting the other one, but good distancing, movement skills, and team work can really pull this off. As Normal Knight acts as the shield, it would be better if the opponent were long-range, as it would make a sort of bunker for your team, where you could spam without being spammed upon, but the ally could also be close-range, as the two of you get closer and closer to your opponent, blocking the shots and even the physical attacks if you're close enough, and proceed to double-team the opponent with melee.
*i'm not sure if you can put your opponent into an infinite combo if you and your ally time your attacks right, but having two of you go in to attack sure does increase the liklihood of a hit landing.

I don't think i can say much for story mode, because you can pretty much beat story mode with nearly any borg...

[Death Eye]

^I actually did notice that the shield can block a Normal Ninja's bombs without taking damage. (I forgot to mention it in my earlier post.)

[njayhuang]

I actually made a Tier List thread a long time ago that was active for a while. It was more of a tier list of the top 50 or so borgs.
I guess for this you're doing an all-borg-encompassing tier list? A problem with that is it's hard to assign tier placements one by one without anything to compare it to. Is Normal Knight really Bottom Tier? On par with Roach and the Death Borgs? It's hard to say since there's no Middle Tier or Bottom Tier to compare it to.
Also, if you make it no repeats, then low cost borgs really have it tough since their main attraction is that they're cheap and you can spam lots of them. A single Death Borg Sigma II probably can't beat a Sirius. 1000 GFE worth of DBSigmas may have a chance.
When you get into no repeats, you get 1 Sirius against a DBSigma II + 820 potential GFE. The usefulness of DBSigma II would have to depend on what the potential energy is spent on, and then it becomes a force tier list. A possible solution would be to assume the force is filled with a theoretical "best possible combination" of borgs from Top Tier, but then it makes low cost borgs Top Tier since they have a lot of potential GFE.
For example, you could argue that Death Eye is the best borg for VS since at only 10 cost, it has the most potential GFE and the best theoretical best possible combination.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's very tricky to make a Tier List with a game like Gotcha Force. I'm overthinking this way too much...so uh, back on topic.

Copy/Paste from when I did a Knight-only runthrough:

Normal Knight is alright. He lives up to his cost, which isn't much. Shield takes care of stuff from the front, but you have to get right up close to your opponent to attack. Still, he works great as random filler when I don't have enough energy for anything better.

^I wasn't trying to give a complete review of Normal Knight, so that's kind of vague. It's also in the context of using only knights. Obviously, the last sentence doesn't work as well when you remove the knights-only limitation since there are many borgs cheaper and better than Normal Knight.

IIRC, Normal Knight's aerial is one of the worst things ever. It's slow, freezes you in midair, and has no vertical hitbox, meaning you have to be level with the target when the sword comes out. Unless you have amazing luck and timing, if you're trying to hit a borg in the air, they'll drop below the hitbox before it comes out. (Thanks a lot, Gravity .) The only thing you're going to hit are fortresses and dragons.

I don't know why you have the shield throw listed as one of his cons. I think it's actually one of his best moves. It's his only range attack, it comes out fast, and it stuns. Since Normal Knight isn't particularly fast, you can Shield Throw stun to move into melee range, and Shield Throw stun to a follow-up attack. It's the most feasible method of attacking so I would call that a pro. Of course, this only works for an aggressive Normal Knight.

Pro-tip: To use the shield like a pro, always walk forward. Because of the game's targeting system, the shield will always point towards the enemy borg. It'll pretty much block everything from a distance since no borg can move so fast that the shield angle will have changed a considerable amount. I can't remember if ground dashing moves the shield or not, but I've had shield trouble when air dashing. I'm guessing it's because if the enemy is on the ground, the shots will come from an angle below and miss the shield.

[Frozazen]

It's true that you can't really place a borg into a tier yet, but that's why we have to put all of the borgs in order first, one by one, until we have a list of borgs in relation to each other, and then find lines where you could definitely divide the borgs into tiers.

As for the no repeats, in my opinion there will always be something that seems off. The one borg only was only for the sake of a good versus match, or the metagame as a whole. I won't argue your logic that a bunch of death borg sigmas will take down a Sirius, because that's completely true. Different rules will change the metagame, like how in yugioh some cards are limited or outright banned even though technically there is a 3 card limit for each card. It's for the sake of the metagame. It doesn't really matter which set of rules we adopt, because the metagame will form around such rules, and the most fun set of rules is the one which allows players to utilize the most diverse play styles. I'd like to have some kind of restriction before someone waltzes in with a team full of Garuda, or a team full of Death borg Sigma IIs which spam the heck out of everyone. It gets boring in my opinion. With the 1 borg limit then people would be forced to use different borgs, and the choices that they make will in turn make the game more interesting, because it breaks away from only using the top tier borgs, and when that happens then this is when we see the differences is people's play styles. If we really want some repeats, then I suppose that the limit could be 2 borgs instead of 1, but I still would hate to go up against 2 garudas... 1 is annoying enough. But what we CAN do is loosen the limit for borgs with a cost of 200 or under. That would make the best borg here be Orange Fighter, and going up against 2 orange stikers isn't that bad. OR we could make the game even more intriguing by giving each borg a borg limit, so that as long as you build your force with the borg limits in mind, then all should be fine, because Normal Ninja focuses on doing lots of residual damage, and sometimes using melee, and you need a lot of them to do any good (like 3 or so), but on the other hand I could easily settle for having a 2 borg limit on Death borg sigma II, even though he is only 30 cost more than normal ninja, he can fly and spam, which equals broken, but his poor health bar makes it so that he's not limited to 1.

you know what? this borg limit idea sounds really fun actually. i say we do that.
DUDE. i just realized that if we do that, then it would add more depth to the game, turning the hack and slash gotcha force into a strategic fighting game. ITS SO EXCITING OMG

Oh, and can we all agree to the rule that Stratosphere is BANNED? That camera angle abuse is just... wrong...

I'm glad that we can talk about the versus rules like this, so we can all adopt a solid set of rules that will have the least number of flaws possible. If someone disagrees with my ideas then by all means tell me off, I don't mind one bit It is when people are too afraid to admit their discomforts that the game becomes no fun ;D

[Death Eye]

Oct 17, 2011 21:54:46 GMT Frozazen said:

It's true that you can't really place a borg into a tier yet, but that's why we have to put all of the borgs in order first, one by one, until we have a list of borgs in relation to each other, and then find lines where you could definitely divide the borgs into tiers.

As for the no repeats, in my opinion there will always be something that seems off. The one borg only was only for the sake of a good versus match, or the metagame as a whole. I won't argue your logic that a bunch of death borg sigmas will take down a Sirius, because that's completely true. Different rules will change the metagame, like how in yugioh some cards are limited or outright banned even though technically there is a 3 card limit for each card. It's for the sake of the metagame. It doesn't really matter which set of rules we adopt, because the metagame will form around such rules, and the most fun set of rules is the one which allows players to utilize the most diverse play styles. I'd like to have some kind of restriction before someone waltzes in with a team full of Garuda, or a team full of Death borg Sigma IIs which spam the heck out of everyone. It gets boring in my opinion. With the 1 borg limit then people would be forced to use different borgs, and the choices that they make will in turn make the game more interesting, because it breaks away from only using the top tier borgs, and when that happens then this is when we see the differences is people's play styles. If we really want some repeats, then I suppose that the limit could be 2 borgs instead of 1, but I still would hate to go up against 2 garudas... 1 is annoying enough. But what we CAN do is loosen the limit for borgs with a cost of 200 or under. That would make the best borg here be Orange Fighter, and going up against 2 orange stikers isn't that bad. OR we could make the game even more intriguing by giving each borg a borg limit, so that as long as you build your force with the borg limits in mind, then all should be fine, because Normal Ninja focuses on doing lots of residual damage, and sometimes using melee, and you need a lot of them to do any good (like 3 or so), but on the other hand I could easily settle for having a 2 borg limit on Death borg sigma II, even though he is only 30 cost more than normal ninja, he can fly and spam, which equals broken, but his poor health bar makes it so that he's not limited to 1.

you know what? this borg limit idea sounds really fun actually. i say we do that.
DUDE. i just realized that if we do that, then it would add more depth to the game, turning the hack and slash gotcha force into a strategic fighting game. ITS SO EXCITING OMG

Oh, and can we all agree to the rule that Stratosphere is BANNED? That camera angle abuse is just... wrong...

I'm glad that we can talk about the versus rules like this, so we can all adopt a solid set of rules that will have the least number of flaws possible. If someone disagrees with my ideas then by all means tell me off, I don't mind one bit It is when people are too afraid to admit their discomforts that the game becomes no fun ;D

Maybe it's just because I have no experience with tier lists, but I think for the purposes of judging Borgs the best way to compensate for the weak low-cost Borgs is to, when comparing them to specific Borgs, balance out the costs (i.e. in the case of comparing Death Borg Gamma and Normal Knight make it 2 Gammas, but in the case of Gamma II and Normal Knight either only have one of each (because 2(110)=220>180) or increase the numbers until it's even).
Or just find the lowest GF value at which you can have even costs with forces full of the same Borg no matter what two Borgs you're dealing with. (I might calculate that later if nobody else has already done it, but it's obscenely high, I know that much.)

[Frozazen]

Well you see if the limit was based on cost, then borgs like Death Borg Sigma II will be everywhere, since they're easy to use, dangerous, and low costing. Granted it would open up some possibilities, but if you went to a tournament with these rules, looking to win, I would bet that there would be so many people using teams with 1 garuda and a million Death borg Sigma IIs XD

How do I know? In yugioh, there is a card called Legendary Six Samurai - Shi En. This card was incredibly broken, as it had high ATK, could be summoned on almost any given turn, and could negate your opponent's spell and trap cards. You could honestly win on your second turn, I've tried :3 The week after that card came out, there was a tournament. 9 of the 16 competitors ran Six Samurai decks. The winner had a Six Samurai deck. Now nearly all of his support had been limited, the card itsef had been limited, and now six samurai are still relatively good, but not the godly level they had when they came out.

I mean, we could also just make an Uber tier like in pokemon, and those borgs wouldn't be allowed to use, unless someone here can think of a good counter to Garuda. All I can think of is Demon Wing if you're lucky >.> <.<

[Deleted]

I generally think that G red/black is a good counter to garuda.
If garuda is already in battle and in the air when G red comes out, red has to spam his charge B buster beam which should hopefully hit and more importantly knock down garuda after a while.
If G red is already in battle when garuda comes out, red simply dodges his attacks and then meles and shoots garuda to stop him getting up.
It works for me when fighting sarcasm most of the time anyway.

[Death Eye]

^I wasn't saying use those rules in a tournament, I was just saying use that for the formation of a tier list.

Also, Demon Wing is horrible against Garuda. Way too big to dodge anything.

(EDIT: This post is directed toward Frozn.)

[Frozazen]

loving the sarcasm Alberenza xD

waaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiit a second, isn't the tier list supposed to reflect how good a borg is when you use it in versus mode? I thought we said that we'd make 3 tier lists: one for 1v1 versus and one for 2v2 versus
Oh yeah, and one for story mode, but I don't really get why we'd need one.

Somewhere back there I described why we need a set of rules to go by to make a tier list ;D

also I think that Demon Wing (might) be able to dodge a Garuda flare bomb thingie... maybe. does Creeping Soul still home in from further away?

[Deleted]

Oct 17, 2011 23:49:20 GMT Frozazen said:

loving the sarcasm Alberenza xD

Sarcasm= colonel sarcasm, a member of this site and a real life friend of mine.
And yes, your right about the tier lists.

[Frozazen]

Oops sorry about that

The thing about G Red's chest beam is that all you have to do is air dodge to the side. Usually you can pull off a beam attack if you wait for the opponent to dash first, since they can't change their direction, but the thing with winged borgs is that you can air-dash cancel it by jumping again, so you can easily dash again, because the homing system for beam attacks rely on a constant movement, which explains why acceleration ninja can get nailed during Ninpo Full Throttle. if you just dash again, then it throws off the homing.

While Garuda has godly dodging capabilities, G Red does not. Actually, he has the worst possible form of movement, the Jump Gauge. Once you run out of jump and touch the ground, it is almost impossible to dodge the flare bomb thingie that Garuda shoots, and so you then die :/

[Deleted]

^ thats what G Crash is for. Despite the fact that it leaves you vulnerable in the air, I use it for dodging and more importantly closing the gap between me and my opponent.
Of course, all I need to do about the chest beam is time it right while garuda dashes, and 80% of the time I time it right and hit the sucker.
Of course, that may just be colonel's skills.

[Frozazen]

True, but either way you can't hit Garuda, since he's always so high up. So the G Crash would have lag, and you'd use the chest beam to cancel the lag, and Garuda would dodge it, and let loose a bomb.

And I would think that it is colonel's skills, because you could dash left immediately after dashing right because of the dash cancel. Also it makes things easier to time the dash cancel by looking at your opponent's screen. I would think it difficult to focus on Garuda's dash while dodging his bombs at the same time.

I think colonel was just being nice to you if he was flying low enough to be G Crashed.

[Death Eye]

Oct 17, 2011 23:49:20 GMT Frozazen said:

also I think that Demon Wing (might) be able to dodge a Garuda flare bomb thingie... maybe. does Creeping Soul still home in from further away?

The Creeping Soul, like (most, if not) all other attacks, only has homing abilities in the homing range. I presume Demon Wing's homing range is really long, though.

Also, it can't dodge the flare bomb thingie... I may have been doing it wrong, but I'm pretty sure it can't.

[Deleted]

No, I never try to G crash him, thats suicidal against garuda, but I use it to get away and shorten distances in general.
And, he isn't kind enough to lower garuda like I do for him. He sees garuda as a trump card he must use to stand any chance of matching me and my garuda and ultimately stand a chance of beating me.
In truth, my G black vs his garuda is always close. And, I dont screen peek in gotcha force. Far too dangerous.

[Frozazen]

screen peeking is pretty useful to see that one frame when you actually have time to dodge. expecially against a borg like cyber hero, whose hadouken has quite literally 2 frames or so of startup lag.

BACK ON TOPIC.
so how is the borg of the week + tier list thing going to work?
perhaps we should bring back the borg tier list thread, and since we have different people who actually seem to care about this kind of stuff, go through each borg one by one in order to complete the tier list. so theoretically, there should be three tier list threads, 1v1, 2v2, and story mode, right? it would make things more organized, and we can add to the list, instead of discussung both the tier list as well as the BotW in the same thread.

[MeAmCryzor]

Oct 18, 2011 19:23:26 GMT Frozazen said:

BACK ON TOPIC.
so how is the borg of the week + tier list thing going to work?
perhaps we should bring back the borg tier list thread, and since we have different people who actually seem to care about this kind of stuff, go through each borg one by one in order to complete the tier list. so theoretically, there should be three tier list threads, 1v1, 2v2, and story mode, right? it would make things more organized, and we can add to the list, instead of discussung both the tier list as well as the BotW in the same thread.

New tier list thread to be made soon (i.e. some point today) and yeah, those three tiers are it basically. Anyone wondering 'Why story mode?' Welp, if people are new to the game it cvan help them out, and it can also be used as a sort of hierarchy thing for when fighting GE (since that's probably the toughest bit of Story)

The borg of the week for this week will also be announced later today when I can get time to rng everything and stoof.

EDIT: About people saying 'But the coooooost' to the borg tier list, well once we've sorted out an order, I was thinking of splitting it into further tier lists (i.e. x<200 cost, 200<x<600 cost, etc.). To be honest, the cost doesn't matter too much since we can all say whether a borg is worth it, and then think about how it compares to other borgs. I think those people saying these things are overthinking stuff way too much. Either that or I'm underthinking. We'll see when the time comes.

EDIT again: Courtesy of Njay;

I don't know why you have the shield throw listed as one of his cons. I think it's actually one of his best moves. It's his only range attack, it comes out fast, and it stuns. Since Normal Knight isn't particularly fast, you can Shield Throw stun to move into melee range, and Shield Throw stun to a follow-up attack. It's the most feasible method of attacking so I would call that a pro. Of course, this only works for an aggressive Normal Knight.

It does very measly damage, is actually quite slow and has a horrible range. Not only that but it strips you of your shield, essentially making you a Death Borg. When I tested it out and did a few story mode battles, I found it worked okay against physical weak CPU enemies, awful against anything big (like Garuda) since the flinch didn't happen at all, not even a little push back, and eh against CPU gunners (since it did make them flinch but most of the time, they just shot at me as soon as I threw it). When testing against human players, I failed every time. They dodged it with ease (and this was people who have played the game very very little before) and it left me open to them in both 2v2 and 1v1.

So yeah, if you know you're going up against a team of physical CPU death borgs then it's great! But against anything else, it's really, really bad. It would be okay if it didn't strip you of your only protection.

[MeAmCryzor]

Double post because otherwise it looks clustered.

Borg for 23/10/2011 is Killer Girl!

Discuss away, but remember that if you want any strategies editing in, send them to me via PM or post them in the actual thread when it's up!



On a lighter note, I've decided that if you post something really decent in here and I have time, I'll edit it into the article anyway, even if you didn't think of putting it in there, because I'm kind like that :3