Tempo Sledgehammer Flank Pull

Guide by Cast

Introduction

This is an aggro Sledgehammer carry build where the Sledgehammers are your tank, chaff clear and main DPS or secondary DPS unit while using Crawlers as the chaff. It’s played from a Tower range position, meaning that you deploy your main army behind your Towers, as you would in a standard game. You also deploy a Crawler and a Sledgehammer on each flank to lure a part of your opponent’s army to a location where it’s not useful, while you isolate a part of their main army into smaller pieces and expose their Towers.

Tech loadout

Sledgehammers

Field Maintenance: Gives Sledgehammers a good amount of tankiness against units that deal medium damage, helps them survive better against some spells such as incendiary bomb and missile strike. Combined with a Tower Defense Enhancement, it puts them above 5000 health to survive missile devices, which can be important because you can’t always keep chaff in front of them in this strategy.
Mechanical Rage: Increases the DPS and chaff clear speed of the Sledgehammer. The movement speed can be very useful too to reach your opponent’s army early and potentially snipe a Tower while your distractionary flank is still being cleared. The extra movement speed can be a detriment because you can’t always keep chaff in front with this strategy and your army might not be able to keep up, so be careful.
Armor Enhancement: The tech is especially important to drastically reduce the damage Vulcans deal to Sledgehammers as long as the Vulcans haven’t outleveled you and/or don’t have the Scorching Fire technology researched. Useful against Fire Badgers and Mustangs too, and even against Wasps sometimes, especially if they’re Mass Produced and defending the flanks.
Range Enhancement: On top of being a good tech in fights to keep your Sledgehammers at a safer distance, the +40 range you gain allows you to close the gap between your opponent’s army and their Tower quicker, enabling you to get more use out of the flank pulls in a similar way to Mechanical Rage. Due to the longer distance and reduced clumping the Range Enhancement provides, your Sledgehammers can be used to beat units that would otherwise counter them, such as the Scorpion.
Damage Sharing (optional to replace mechanical rage, armor enhancement or range enhancement): Gives the sledgehammers a massive HP increase, especially potent as a finishing move when combined with Field maintenance, potentially even outhealing low DPS compositions. Can make your Sledgehammers weak to units like Melting Points and high level Scorpions with doubleshot or other overwhelming sources of damage.
Armor Piercing Bullets (optional to replace mech rage, armor enhancement or field maintenance): This tech turns Sledgehammers into heavy-hitting DPS carries, combined with range they can take out bigger targets very quickly, but they become worse at clearing chaff, which can result in a problem. If you only play sledgehammers in the carry style, you can consider replacing one of the health technologies with this.
Electromagnetic Shot (optional to replace armor enhancement or field maintenance): In this build it’s usually better to make sure you somehow deal enough damage to eliminate big targets, rather than disable their techs. If your opponent plays Scorpions, you stop them from dealing damage to you by having more chaff and chaff clear than they do, it doesn’t matter if the scorpions have range or not if they’re only hitting chaff. As for countering Vulcans, it is nice to remove their range tech but more importantly you just need damage to kill them, and most of the time you’d be shooting at their chaff or a Vulcan in the front while the Vulcans in the back still have their techs working.

Crawlers

Subterranean Blitz: Useful to add extra survivability against units that require extra shots to kill tanky Crawlers, making your chaff unit much better. Useful against ground fire effects too.
Loose formation: Spreads out the crawlers, useful against chaff clear units that will always one-shot Crawlers, no matter what. If you click this technology too carelessly, the opponent could counter your low HP Crawlers with Mustangs, which are single target damage. The tech is most useful when you think you’re able to close out the game quickly.
Acidic Explosion: Useful extremely rarely with this strategy to counter things like Mountains placed near the mid-line.
Replicate, Mechanical Rage and Impact drill: These techs are almost never useful in this strategy.

When to play

The strategy relies on the flank pulls being effective, and because of this it only really works against standard positioning, meaning that the strategy can’t be used to defend against aggro but it can be used against any standard players who deploy their army around and behind their Towers.

How to play

This strategy is great with Sledgehammer Marksman, Sledgehammer Void Eye, and Sledgehammer Crawler openings, but doesn’t work that well with Sledgehammer Arclight, Sledgehammer Fang or Sledgehammer Hound. The strategy is flexible because you don’t need to decide on round 1 whether you want to play aggro with flank pulls or standard. But once you do go for this tempo heavy strategy, you’re committed to try and win early. The Sledgehammer is only a mediocre chaff clear, tank and DPS unit in principle, but since you only need to focus on getting lots of packs of this one unit, your opponent will struggle to catch up.

Round 1-4:

You deploy in a standard formation, and during these rounds you decide if you want to go sledge carry and flank the enemy or play standard. If you go for the flanks, you have to sell your turrets at this point, because the flanking units need to be closer to your opponent than units in your main deployment area, which include the turrets. Also turrets are not useful in the attack. By round 4 you should usually have 4-6 packs of Sledgehammers and 4-7 packs of crawlers and perhaps a couple of DPS units. You tend to want to level your Sledgehammers when you can, especially if you get a HP item on them. You can save some of the levels for later though if you wish, as you will usually have enough levels available and high level Sledgehammers can often be countered by Scorpions too easily, even if you might temporarily survive an extra shot with a breakpoint. You should usually get some levels on your DPS units too and consider giving them damage items

Round 1 it can sometimes be good to add even just a single DPS unit if you start with none. Make sure you don’t deploy your units above the Tower.

A good way to position the units on the flank. The 4 squares gap from the top wall is the biggest you can have, while keeping the Sledgehammers safe from Missile Devices.

Then because the Crawlers are placed 4 squares away from the wall, the Arclight defending the Tower sees them as the closest target.

Small differences in Sledgehammer position (and the flank Crawler position) can change whether the defender is pulled to the flank or towards your main army, meaning that by adjusting the position, you can make a tactical choice as to where you want your opponent’s units to go.

Rounds 5-7+

The strategy can start to fall off in the later rounds, so at this stage of the game you hope to start dealing massive Player Damage to the opponent to try to close out the game. Picking offensive spells can be useful. Likewise using Temp Speed and Temp Range from the Command Center can be effective. Make sure that your board has sufficient balance of DPS, HP chaff and chaff clear. Usually if your opponent builds tanky units, you might need to add extra DPS to support your Sledgehammers. Good options can be Phoenix, Overlord, Wasps. Occasionally even Raiden, Abyss, Farseer or Phantom Ray. It is useful if your DPS units are Anti-Air, long enough range to stay safe and also move at a comparatively fast pace to keep up with Mech Rage Sledgehammers (if you researched that tech) and your Crawlers. Usually you want to make sure you have grabbed some levels on your Sledgehammers and your DPS units. If your opponent has units that clear your Sledgehammers too quickly, you might consider adding units like Rhinos with Armor Enhancement into the mix (especially useful against Vulcans that are getting out of control). Beside spells, you can beacon big units like high HP Rhinos or Mountain to the enemy Towers to finish the game. The later the game goes on, the less useful your flank pulls become, because you won’t kill the opponents main army and Towers in time, but your flank pulls make your opponent’s chaff travel a longer distance, granting them late chaff which is actually good for them and bad for you..