Ive been thinking alot about spam in RTS games , and having read darths waah waah post. Is it a problem , is it not a problem?

Spam itself isnt a bad thing in Empire at War as for a long time (patches 1.0-1.5) it only had one unit worth making - the corvette . However the game made this unit so fun to use and raid with, that with one single unit the game had bags of variety. So this made me think of an analogy.

Boxing

In boxing - you cant kick , headbutt , bodyslam etc. Its ridiculous however to say Boxing sucks because your only spamming punches ,because we know the variety and depth to the sport is involved in how you use your punches , block those punches , dodge those punches.

However I liken Illums/LRMs to bitch slaps. Its a like bitch slapping contest. You simply try to slap harder then your opponent. No skill involved , just slap as hard as you can.

Which is why I draw to an interesting point of debate. Cobalts arent like bitch slaps , they are more like punches. Cobalts vs cobalts , theres more decision making about retreating because they have the armour to do so and less firepower . Chasing is more of a challenge because of the narrow arcs. Targetting can be managed, since lasers make it less ambigous to which ship your targeting. Cap ships are dominant too and play a more important role , rather then get ripped on and chased away.

Now during the very early beta , cobalts were spammed. This was due to lrms having no bonus afaik ,or they werent that powerful or it might just be people didnt discover the LRM . I cannot be too sure . Even though the cobalt was the predominant unit in the game and it was spammed in the early game, nobody ever complained that the cobalt was "spammed" , which is very very interesting.

Now it really is Ironclads call , but they should have a think about it.