Orbital Strike Relay

Overview

 * The Orbital Strike Relay is a heavy long-ranged tower. It calls upon a vertical laser beam at the target's position that stays for 5 seconds, continuously dealing massive damage to all enemies in a small area around it.
 * Available to players with The Last Stand DLC at rank 35+, therefore being the final tower to be unlocked.
 * The tower can target & damage only ground enemies, like the ACP. Even if flying lumes visually pass through the beam, they will not take damage.
 * This tower can damage Hoverers like most other damage towers, if it hits their backs.

Notes & tactics

 * The laser deals damage for every 0.5 second, therefore one laser shot hits each enemy for up to 10 times. For example, an enemy can take up to 15,000 damage from a laser by the Orbital Strike Relay at rank 1, 12,000 for an Armoured Heavy considering its armor.
 * The Orbital Strike Relay is the most expensive tower among all, followed by the Violator. However, it may not work well alone compared to some other towers with similar cost and players should consider it mainly when abundant resources are guaranteed or a decent defense grid is built.
 * Since the laser stays in place and needs enough time to deal sufficient amount of damage, it can barely hurt a separate fast enemy, but is best against slow enemies in crowds, e.g. Armoured Heavies with large hitbox, Heavy Pups since they're slow and usually appear in groups, Spore Keepers especially when they pause for a charge, and Rhinos when they gather together at a twist.
 * Moreover, A higher rank Orbital Strike Relay can also handle situations where the lightest enemies come with heavy ones, since they also take fatal damage while running through heavy ones that are suffering from the laser, even if they're exposed to it for merely 0.5 seconds.


 * Due to its property, the Kairos, Slow Field Dispenser & Mind control spires can be effective assistance to the Orbital Strike Relay.
 * Overcharging the tower gives 70,95% of the damage, gained by building level 3 Orbital strike relays. This reduced overcharge efficiency is one of the reasons why having more in numbers of these towers often can be preferrable in the mid/lategame scenarios.
 * This tower is among the ones, that tend to feel beter if being more in numbers/combined with other towers, like even 6-12, depending on the scenario, before overcharge and even before upgrade, although both of these have between moderate and good overall cost efficiency. The reason lies in the low attack speed of the tower, although it can also function well as a sole tower if there are enough many other damage towers and support ones. It is fine to combine this damage tower with random other towers, but one should be careful with numbers and positioning if using Focus or Gatling, since they are highly susceptible to sight obstructions and Orbital Strike Relays can easily serve as such to them.
 * In the table with the calculated DPS:
 * "Overall" means if taking in account the fire interval. Lvl 1 & 2 towers will fire beams in 1/5 of the time and therefore will have 1/5 of the DPS during strikes. For lvl 3 towers the strikes are in action 1/4 of the time.
 * The DPS during strikes is simply the damage per hit, multipled by the attack speed during them (2 hits per second)
 * Like all projectile-using towers, the Orbital strike relay canot act properly if it sees blocking obstructions in its sight - in its case, it will simply not fire a beam.
 * Like the the other projectile using towers & the ACP, if a player is sitting on the tower, when it fires, it will push and move the sitting player.
 * The upper part of the tower can be shot through and player & enemies can pass through it.
 * Amp spire correlations
 * Adding an Amp of any level makes for more damage per resource than overcharging and makes for a bigger damage gain if being put before overcharge.
 * Overcharging the Amp has the same effect as overcharging the Orbital strike relay above 16000 damage and from then on, maximum damage gain goes by putting equal amounts of resources in both towers.
 * These correlations are valid for the damage, reached only via upgrading & overcharging, without Tinkerer, Engineer, Core-tower synergy or already existing Amp spire. If any of these buffs is in action, it is needed to calculate the damage, gained by pure overcharging/upgrading (or to remove the buffs) to see the real efficiency stats. These 4 mentioned buffs stack additively with each other.
 * The attack speed (in this case strikes' occurence) of the tower in-game is converted into strikes per second this way: One in-game speed unit is 1/60 shots per second and therefore come the calculations:
 * level 1 & 2 Orbital strike relays have 3/60 = 0,05 strikes per second (=3 per minute = 1 strike every 20 seconds) => 20% of the time strikes are dealing damage;
 * lvl 3 ones have 4/60 ~ 0,067 strikes/sec (= 4 per minute = 1 strike every 15 seconds) => 25% of the time strikes are dealing damage;
 * during the strikes hits are clearly 2 per second = 10 per strike. For level 1 & 2 Orbitals this means 30 hits per minute, while for lvl 3 - 40/min.