The Weasel - Alternative to the Jav?

[Dameon Angell]

In a basing scene that is based on the time the flag is held over points, games can come down to touching a flag and holding it off for a few seconds. The Weasel can be one ship to give you those few seconds with stealth.

Lets look at what the ship has to offer. The "old school" Weasel is used in ?go base (ie: not the tiny 1 tile ship)

- 1 Repeller
- 1 Rocket
- 1 Stealth Radar
- 1 Cloaking Device

Then, one night in ?go base, I was bored and got to thinking "Why doesn't the weasel work?" I know people think it can't be done, but I think people just don't know how to use it yet.

Take the Javelin now. What does it do exactly? You take its bomb, rocket at the terrier and let loose, trying to take down the Terrier or just cause as many deaths as possible in one bomb.

Now, take the Weasel. You take its bullet, rocket at the terrier, or closest person and let loose. Now, you have a repel. What to do with that? You can be a backup shark of sorts when both of your main sharks are spawning in from an attack. You can repel mines that are near the entrance of the flag room into a crammed group of spiders without them knowing you were ever there.

The weasel isn't gonna be racking up ass loads of kills, but what it does do for you is squeeze out those vital few seconds of flag time. You're in the flag room, you're also a weasel. Your Terrier dies and its you and a shark left. What do you do? Cloak and wait. Just sit and the team will leave the FR, there you can strike the Terrier, take the flag and get 10+ seconds. Even take over the flagroom til your team arrives. Or if you're sitting outside the FR and then there goes all the people out of the flag room and YOU GO IN! Take the flag for some more seconds.

The possiblities are constantly growing. Discuss.

[Adamant]

any terr that knows a weasel is being used will have x on. i think that most terrs leave x on anyways to prevent accidental warps so the hiding idea just wont work.

[Stabwound]

You aren't looking at the Weasel's weaknesses:

The old, big weasel has a max of 1300 energy. Compared to the 1500 of the warbird and the jav, and it's a lot weaker. It may not seem like much, but consider it's recharge rate. The weasel has very bad recharge rate initially, and with either cloak or stealth running it's recharge is almost brought down to nil. If it doesn't have completely full energy, it will die in 2 spider bullets, which each do around 620 damage a piece. When you attach you have almost no energy, and it will take you around 5-6 seconds to reach full energy again.

The weasel also has a terrible turning rate and speed. It would have a very hard time even getting into the battle for more than a few seconds. If you thrust you are going to die in 1 or 2 hits.

A team is going to have a hell of a time making up for the lack of kills from the weasel. The weasel has a terrible weapon, which takes almost all of it's energy and has almost no propulsion on it's own. In a heated battle you are only going to get 1 of these shots out before you die, which will not be likely to even kill anything. It's shot is comparable to a single, slowly repped burst.

Without some major tweaking, the cloaker is not a suitable ship for basing.

[Sleepy Weasel]

Not every ship has to be a basing ship. Some people just like to fly around in pub looking for lame kills and I say let them have a ship too!

Actually I don't really care.

[schope]

if they put the small weasels, same as pub weasels, on go base they could be tried, if your team need 20 secs of flag for example, they could weasel someone and the terr would have to keep covering sides, instead of covering cram. would be cool to watch and play.

[Gemfire]

come to think of it, the small weasel could help hurt the cram - the terr would have to have a portal up top to guard the tops, like schope said - maybe even use a burst for the top two...it would make for more interesting flag room battles, and less crams, which can be boring if one sided, throw in a weasel and itll be easier to break crams.

[Sleepy Weasel]

Even if the weasel let you break the cram, you'd just get mashed once you got into base and realized your weasel is now basically worthless. Squads wouldn't even have to bother to cram to beat you.

[Stabwound]

The small weasel may be useful for disrupting the defense, but it's usefulness stops there.

EDIT: Too slow on the draw for this post.

[Erathia]

But the weasel working in conjunction with spiders for cram breaking would be incredibly useful. The terr would have to be drawn out of position to kill the weasel, because otherwise the weasel could just go take the flag and then ships would have to be sacrificed from defense in order to retake it.

[Dameon Angell]

You can have one player be reserved as a weasel specialist and swap him for defensive to offensive positions.

[Stabwound]

In TWLB you can't change your lineup. If you start with a weasel you have to keep it the whole game.

[Rion.]

I don't like the old Weasel as much because you can't pull off as many tricks with it...

If the new 1-tile-Weasel was implemented into ?go base / TWBD/L, etc... That'd rule. :up:

[Dameon Angell]

I do so much more with the old weasel. Like I said, you can pull jav and shark duties at the same time while sneaking the flag for those precious seconds.

[schope]

In TWLB you can't change your lineup. If you start with a weasel you have to keep it the whole game.

i've never played lb, but i think switches and changes (mainly) limits could be raised, i dont see a point why you cant for example, jav someone when you dont have base, and warbird this same guy when you dont have it.

so, weasels could be used strategically on some moments of the game.

[Pixelsong]

Giving the weasel antiwarp in ?go base might bring some more diversity in lineups