We forgot to announce this, but thanks to Hornet’s deep dive into the mechanics of it, the Liche no longer dives its target if you use the attack command with it, instead of set-target. This removes a “trivia check” for successfully using the unit, while still keeping the set-target functionality as it was before.

Historically, as I understand how we got here…

1. The Liche weapon was originally coded as a missile, not a bomb, to allow for this set-target functionality. This necessitated the weird dive attack. Or maybe the dive was just something cool someone wanted to do, and admittedly it did look pretty cool.
2. Okay, but now my Liches dive the enemy, and they don’t just expose themselves to enemy fire - if you have two or more diving the same target, they’ll damage each other and even happily blow each other up (at 6+, if I remember correctly)!
3. That’s okay, we’ll just slap a 10%-to-VTOL (also known as air units) damage modifier as a bandaid. What could go wrong?
4. Well, a lot can go wrong in a game with as many mechanics as ours! In this case, impulse (also known as knockback) is calculated based on the base damage, not the modified damage. This means that if you can find something that survives the nuclear bomb’s damage - say, an air scout, bomber - you can give them a rather large boost. Here’s an example of the “Liche unit cannon” exploit we started seeing in moderation reports this year.
5. On the mod team, we decided that this is indeed pretty funny, but it does look like cheating, we don’t want to waste time looking through these reports, and we can kill two birds (the annoying “you need to know about set-target or the Liche is awful” check and this unit cannon) with one change.
6. We floated the idea to the Game Design Team as this started spreading. It was agreed that the dive attack doesn’t make sense as for this huge AoE unit, Hornet came up with an implementation, and here we are! It’s been gone for a good few weeks now, but we forgot to say anything. ^^’

And here we are today! If you don’t have the APM to micro the Liche with set-target, try it with just the normal attack command! If something is amiss with how you use the Liche, please report that in the #support-bugs channel on Discord.