@cheeseberry said in Novax needs to be nerfed, here's why.:
It's not op because you can shield every mex and your air grid on setons for the same cost it takes to build a novax, but you can do so multiple minutes later, making it effectively much cheaper.
On Setons, Novax takes to move from air spot to first mid mex about 1 minutes 15 secundes. And air spot to air spot 2min 15sec.
t2 UEF engie, without move time, needs about 1 min 40 sec to build shield.
Novax gets through t2 UEF shield in 45-60 sec, depending if it was "loaded".
To protect all mexes on (half) of Setons, with two shields, you need about 77 t2 UEF shields. With more than six t3 power generators to power those. Let's say seven pgens.
77 shields at 46200 mass, pluss 7 pgens 22680 mass makes a total of 68880 of mass. Notice that we need to add shields for protecting power and the price of engineers all over the map. And 77 is kind of perfect putting in place. With other buildings, we probably need more.
We need about two times more mass to counter Novax passively, and we need it very fast. Depending on how much mass we waste on engis, we need to start building shields before novax is ready.
And as already expained earlier, Novax would still find some units to target and would still be able to scout.