By land, by air, or by sea?, What type of creature mobility?

[Lemming 1545]

There are three main types of creatures in Imopossible Creatures: flyers, who can cross over any terrain unrestricted, land creatures, who can traverse the ground but can't cross over obstacles or water, and aquatic creatures, who can swim freely but who can't crawl onto land. There's also the amphibious creatures; crosses between land and aquatic who can both walk the earth and swim.

Now, on the face of it, flyers would seem to be the primary choice, as they can basically go anywhere, and can't even be attacked except by ranged creatures and other flyers - ground- or sea-based melee creatures are at the flyer's mercy, unable to fight back.

However, flyers have one main, unique weakness: the anti-air tower. Soundbeam towers can attack any variety of creature - land, air, or sea - but they are notably weaker against flyers. Anti-air towers, on the other hand, can ONLY attack flyers, but they're extremely effective against them; moreso than even a soundbeam tower against a land creature by quite some margin. Although anti-air tower attacks don't carry the same side-effects that soundbeam towers do, such as flinching and the slowing of movement, they more than make up for it with sheer damage output.

A majority of possible (or at least useful) flying creatures can be taken out in just one or two shots from an anti-air tower, and the towers do attack quite rapidly - a little less than two shots per second. Since adding to a creature's health and defense stats doesn't do a lot to protect against anti-air towers, a flying creature's greatest asset is, obviously, it's attack power, followed by the number of its fellows in the area - in other words, damage and quantity. If there are enough flyers in a group, and their collective attack power is high enough, their first goal should always be to eliminate all anti-air towers in the area, leaving them relatively free to wreak havoc on the enemy's forces. Hopefully, if the numbers and power were high enough, there will still be plenty of flyers left, with enough health remaining, to get the job done.

The only other possibility is to eliminate the target quickly enough that the number of anti-air towers doesn't matter. A tactic like this usually relies heavily on the numbers - Colo, for example, once eliminated my lab in one fell swoop using an extremely large group - upwards of eighty, I believe - of some variety of flying lobster. He had enough that they were able to finish me quickly, meaning that the number of anti-air towers I had was negligable. Combined with the fact that flyers can get over bramble fences without having to stop, unlike ground creatures who have to fight through them and end up being severely weakened by nearby soundbeam towers and ranged forces in the process, you would think that a simple group of decent flyers would be enough to penetrate defenses and win, every time.

The problem with this idea is that an opponent who has been taken down in such a way once - such as myself - is unlikely to allow the same thing to happen to themselves again. After that first game with the "Lobstorks," Colo tried the same tactic to eliminate me the next two or three games, as well - but I was wise to him. A greater number of anti-air towers, as well as greater preparation in the form of scouts to warn me of an impending attack and having my lab hotkeyed with lab defense, ready to be initiated at a moment's notice, allowed me to defend against the swarms with reletive ease - with lab defense, the Lobstorks were unable to destroy my lab in one hit, and once time came into play, they were picked apart by my anti-air towers (using air burst and with some backup from ranged troops) almost effortlessly.

To basically sum up everything I just said, flyers would be a lot more useful if they weren't totally shut down by anti-air towers.

Pure aquatic creatures aren't particularly useful, either, because of their inability to reach land - the lab itself is on land, and that being the main target in any game, a creature's usefulness could be somewhat based on it's cabability against a lab. Aquatics can't usually reach the lab to attack it, and their use, therefore, is quite limited.

Land based creatures, on the other hand, have the opposite problem - they're free to land hits on anything on land and, if they have a ranged attack, anything in the air or sea, as well. However, what if there's a body of water between them and the enemy base? Unless you have the time and patience to carry each individual creature over the water, one-by-one, with a gyrocopter, or the amount of sneakiness necessary to constuct a creature chamber WITHIN the enemy base, their usefulness pretty much ends at the shoreline. Even hovering doesn't help them much - even if it's an option, it makes them vulnerable to anti-air towers, meaning that they're not likely to get too far.

So we're left with the hybrids of hybrids; the amphibious creatures. Especially if they have a ranged attack at their disposal, amphibious creatures seem to be the most versatile of any option. I've tried many combinations, many armies, and many tactics, but every game I play, the same thing seems to happen - flyers get shot down, aquatic creatures aren't used, land creatures drop out of favor after about research level II, and the amphibious creatures come out on top. Am I wrong here? Do amphibious creatures seem to have a major advantage over all comers, or is that just me?

[Colo95]

I did in fact, create a creature to solve this problem. it is amphibious creature with hovering, and works quite well. my tactic is simply to attack, heedless of water and land, as most anything else would, then once i am overwellmed, my opponent thinks: ha i can kill them all!, then, quite suddenly, i fly more over a cliff, surround my opponent and kill them off, or in extreme cases, fly them away over said cliff to their brethren, they have regeneration so they are fully healed when they are caught up to, i fly behind them, they get pinned and die!.