At some point you guys are going to need to make crabs not free. For 30z you can wipe out pretty much anything on the ground, and with enough mouse clicks anything below ground also. What am I talking about? Why, the crab bomb of course! I posted about them a while back but pretty much a crab bomb is

Any ship except the drop container
As many crabs as you feel like packing into it

Just try it in a skirmish. Put like 20 crabs or so, grab control of the craft as it's midair and hit scuttle. Crab rains down on everything, and the particles usually travel fast enough to gib everything aboveground.

Interestingly enough however, if you load up enough crabs, apparently you can even damage items below ground even in a steel and concrete bunker without any of the crab particles getting inside.

Give it a try. It's pretty fun, sometimes when I'm bored I'll just put my brain in a tunnel then put say 20 crabs in a rocket and just rain crab down on the enemy. If you put enough crabs in you don't have to bother with scuttle, the rocket automatically tanks into the ground hard enough on its own.

It's not exactly an overpowered ability, it's just abusing the nature of the game engine. If you feel it is spoiling your game, don't use it.

well what other purposes do crabs serve? many a 2 player game has had the person sitting next to me when I make a mock speech saying "general! we've been overrun..... you know what you must do... summon the crabs"

Actually, it works with the drop crate, it just penetrates a ridiculous amount first...

crabs are a breed of something the game needs more of: ambiance. there is a wild crab running around the tutorial bunker, making that area of the map more fun. they probably wont be purchasable in the final game.

Crabs wouldn't be purchasable in the full game. I'd assume you'd be limited to buying from whatever faction you select.

Why WOULDN'T you be able to buy crabs in the main game?

Specifically because of the subject of the entire thread perhaps?

if they make them unbuyable, you can just go into the code and change a 0 to a 1.

Considering you can easily mod any free uberweapon or probably solve any difficult map with sufficient use of digger, I think the game comes with a certain amount of "if you cheat and get bored it's your fault".

And there's a good chance with a large crab bomb you will gib your own brain through 20 ft of concrete do to the glitchy nature of high velocity crab meat.

This is because cortex command can only handle so many actors on a scene at one time. Crabs are actors. Ten thousand crabs suddenly appearing basically kills everything else.

Same with any object really... if you load up enough riot shields all of the other weapons on the map spontaneously turn into terrain.

You can do this with crabs, grenades, zombies, diggers, anything.

I don't get why you would want crabs to not be free, it's not like you're being made to make crab bombs.

Don't do anti-mass bombs.

Or using Zorneus Bombs instead of crabs.