I feel happy with my loadout vs bugs. Spray and pray is easy to understand. Run and gun. I’m not as confident with bots.
Loadout: Armor is medium with crouch aim bonus. Base gun, the Adjudicator (assault rifle) from Democratic Demolition because of its armor pen. 2ndary is Autocannon and ammo backpack. Strategems are orbital laser, eagle airstrike, and mortar sentry.
All the advice I read is “go slower, avoid patrols, etc.” and I’m fine with that but everyone I play with does the opposite. They engage EVERYTHING. I feel like I’ve got OK damage per shot, but everyone is getting there faster and killing things faster because they got there earlier. So I end up feeling like I’m not pulling my weight.
If you’re willing to spend SC on armor, try to get the FS-38 Eradicator armor from the rotating shop. To my knowledge it’s the only light armor with the Fortified mod (“Further reduces recoil when crouching or prone by 30%. Provides 50% resistance to explosive damage.”). I think that’s the armor mod you’re already running, just in light armor. I don’t find 50 armor makes much difference, but the extra mobility really does. The recoil bonus is whatever, with that armor mod vs. bots the explosive resist is the real juice.
For clarity, the Fortified bonus to explosive resist doesn’t require you to crouch or go prone to get its effect, you only need to crouch to get the recoil bonus. With Fortified you can sprint around and get hit by a rocket, or run over a bot mine, and not die if you’ve got full health. There’s a separate bonus vs. explosive damage from crouching or going prone, but that’s universal and not tied to any armor mod.
Could be because they were wearing light armor. Armor seems to provide a really poor rate of return in this game, but light armor’s bonuses to speed and stamina regen pay sizable dividends.
My go-to primary vs. bots used to be the pre-nerf Slugger (RIP sweet prince), now it’s the JAR-5 Dominator. In both cases it was because the weapon could handle Devastators. If I run out of AC ammo while facing down Heavy and/or Rocket Devastators, being able to switch to a primary that can stagger and kill one can save me. JAR-5 does take some getting used to though. It’s 3rd-person handling is poor, but it’s tolerable in 1st-person so that’s generally what I use with that gun. The JAR-5 also has relatively slow bullet travel time that you have to account for. Now that I’m used to it though, I don’t find any other primary as effective vs. bots.
I’ve never found the mortar sentry all that effective vs. bots, they don’t seem to clump up as much as bugs do. EMS Mortar can be a pretty good option for crowd control though. Personally I run laser (for major objectives or Eye of Sauron towers), Eagle Strike (for small bases and patrols) and Eagle 500 (mostly for tanks, walking factories; AC can take out tanks but oftem it’s just quicker to 500 it).
I agree with most of this. Laser is a great get out of jail free card.
I tried the Dominator but I didn’t really like it. I went back to the Scorcher. I can still kill devastators by spamming and also scout striders by shooting them ~4 times in the front armor plating.
Redeemer secondary handles berserkers in a clip.
OP: It’s worth noting that bigger units can have their arms or legs removed and sometimes that is easier than headshots.
Impact grenades also handle scout striders easily, and help with devastators, and you can still do factories by threading the needle into a vent - usually aim at the bottom of the vent opening - or by chucking one into an open door.
AC can do the same by ricocheting shots off of the vent cover into the factory.
That said, I just got stun grenades and am trying them out with precision strike.