What's wrong with the veggies??

[Gavin Wins]

Thanks for the praise on my veggie game with Sir3. I didn't play as well as I could have that game. I made a couple mistakes that would have allowed me to end the game much sooner had I not made them (in particular on turn 35, if I had switched the placement of my scout and vine, my heavy would have lived). But overall, that game represented the style of play that I like with Bramble... very aggressive and suffocating with its vines.

That said, I think that the "buff" of the Bramble's vines to 3hp isn't actually a buff at all. It should never be wit efficient to kill a vine. As awpertunity mentioned in a previous post in this thread, all the buff has done is changed tactics that good players use against veggies. Now, against veggies, I spawn more snipers and heavies than I normally do. This effectively neuters the effectiveness of vines because I can remove them for free, while it costs the veggie player a wit to spawn them.

The most glaring problem with the new 3hp vines is against Bombshells. The biggest problem with vines previously was that they were weak against Bombshells. Well, now they are even weaker against Bombshells because a direct hit on a vine will refund the wit, and the splash damage will drop an adjacent vine down to 2hp, allowing a soldier to kill the adjacent vine for free with the wit return.

In my replay against Sir3, I would have certainly lost if Sir3 had gone heavier on snipers/heavies earlier in the game instead of using scout/soldier combos to kill my vines.

The Bramble, while still great in 2v2s, is deficient in 1v1s even after the 3hp "buff." It should never cost a veggie player more to create a vine than it costs the opponent to destroy the same vine. The wit refund simply must go, or the hp of vines must be increased such that a 1-hit refunded wit kill isn't possible.

I like the idea of vine entanglement, which was mentioned previously in this thread, but I'm not sure how feasible that is in the game's programming. Another thought I had was that vines could displace enemy units by spawning one under the enemy unit, moving them off the tile, but that might be too powerful.

But, I am happy to see that OML plans on tweaking the Bramble a little more.