3. Damage order of operations with partialy damaged boosted tough and pre-healing

Damage order of operations with partialy damaged boosted tough and pre-healing


  • I'd like to run through a scenario to check that I am calculating the damage correctly and if so then I have some follow up questions. I was able to find some answers in this old thread and hopefully it isn't out of date.

    Healer creep composition: 13T, 10M, 27H (all tier 3 boosted, in this order from front to back)

    • Heal Power: 1300
    • Total Health: 8030
    • Tough Health: 4330

    It is within range of 6 turrets at max damage (3600 dmg).

    If it pre-heals itself while all of its tough parts are full health then it can overpower the turret damage with 4333 healing adjusted for the tough parts, although maybe I should be thinking about this differently as things get complicated when we have some damaged tough parts.

    Let's imagine that we didn't pre-heal. We'd take 3600 damage. Heal Power: 1300 Remaining Health: 4430 Remaining Tough Health: 730

    Now if we heal ourselves with turret damage at the same time.

    • -3600 from turret
    • +730 of it can be pre-healed for only 219 of our heal power
    • +1081 remaining heal power healing un-boosted tough parts
    -1789 total damage

    Now that this healer has been damaged far beyond his tough parts, he'll never be able to out heal future turret damage and he's done for. Is all of this correct so far?

    Now for some of the ramifications of this. It seems as though that a boosted healer must pre-heal himself every tick if he is within range of max turret fire or else he won't be able to recover. If that's true then he won't be able to run the risk of healing any other creeps. I was under the impression that an active creep defense was necessary to fend of teir 3 boosted creeps but I now suspect that all a bunker base defending player needs to do is to wait for the invading force to get within max turret range and then fire on the creep that isn't being pre-healed. Simple random focus fire would eventually do this. Am I missing something where you can guarantee the safety of a boosted healer/attacker combo pair under max turret damage w/o any extra damage from active creep defense? It seems as though a sieger would need 3 fully boosted healers (with the composition described above) in order to recover from non-pre-healed turret fire. This doesn't seem right based on what I've seen from other people's siege compositions, it would also make swarm attacks (10H part units) not feasible but I know people have done that. I must be missing something here..


  • Your analysis is correct. Healer/attack combo is not enough if you're close enough to the towers to take 3600 damage unless the tower code is bad. Fortunately against many bases you can avoid being within 5 tiles of every tower. Even then, 2 creeps vs 6 towers is often a losing battle.

    Swarm attacks with many weak creeps were never feasible. The only reason you may want to swarm is if there's no ramparts keeping you out.

    1 Reply

  • @tigga when you say "no ramparts keeping you out" do you mean a base that doesn't have the exits zoned out? If so, I had also thought that boosted swarm attacks were more effective against bunker bases but now the turret damage seems so high. IRRC @bonzaiferroni had used boosted swarms on bunker bases before.

    If the scenario that I described above does lead to "2 creeps vs 6 towers is often a losing battle", then 2x healers + an attacker also loses and it would take 3x of these healers + an attacker to withstand full turret fire. And of course the healers have to sustain adjacent positions, and their TTL have to stay in synch long enough.

    I've seen @o4kapuk use siege squads of three with a full healer in between and his leader and tail gunner have 10 boosted tier 3 heal parts each. But they can't be pre-healing all of the time in order to perform other actions like dismantle or attack. Frankly, I'm a little disappointed that tier 3 boosted attacks like these can be so easily countered with random focus fire as active creep defense should be more or less required for the counter. Maybe I just need to watch more sieges but I'm surprised at how any siegers out there are taking bunker rooms down, especially if they dig into bunker bases, especially with active creep defense


  • Overmind bunkers have a habit of running out of energy. You'll also find that the 3600 number is pretty rarely hit in practise. In general I don't see the value of attacking anybody with a reasonably defending RCL 8 room with anything other than quads. They have the advantage that all creeps can heal all other creeps. If you use RA+Heal combos you can stack enough healing to be able to tank towers. Tough can actually be counter-productive in this setup as pure heal is better when the pre-healing fails (you lose more on the target creep, but the three other creeps have much more to heal it back with). I tend to go for a few tough parts but not nearly as many as 12.

    I'm not really sure what you mean by a boosted swarm. For me a "swarm" is lots of small creeps who attack with the aim of overrunning the towers before they can all be killed. That requires little/no outer walls and isn't really compatible with boosts. If you just mean "lots of creeps" then yeah, that's going to work better than sending 2 or 3, but is also a lot more expensive.

    2 Replies

  • @tigga said in Damage order of operations with partialy damaged boosted tough and pre-healing:

    You'll also find that the 3600 number is pretty rarely hit in practise.

    Tigga is correct on this, I've only seen spots where all 6 towers are in maximum damage zone in very very few cases. Notably my dead-end room, and some of Taki's megabunker entrances.


  • @tigga @Orlet Thank you for your responses.