Bomber Spam.

10p FFA on a 750 Radius Planet.
This guy wiped half the players out without breaking a sweat. Most of us had focused land.
Killed me at about 15 minutes in.

T1 Bombers can cross the map quickly. By overlapping above their target they can drop many bombs at once.
This means anybody can get an insta-kill and win if they spam bombers early enough and hard enough, before we can start turtling behind flak, or build enough mobile AA and fighters to support a Land army.
Anybody who tried to match this dude's strategy on land could be overrun if an opponent were close enough.

My quickfix solution would be this:
Bomber's projectiles could fall slower.
Or the Air layer could be higher up.
This would mean that if we're watching carefully and had Radar intel, we could move our Commander out of the way as the bombs were dropped, and avoid an insta-kill being dropped on our heads.

FFA's are always full of cheesy snipes - you can't expect someone to always use an entire land force to kill you in a conventional way as they would usually lose their force in doing so.

scout more, get AA, profit

The stacking thing is a bit iffy but you need to scout and then get some interceptors up when you see someone going air.

What good would it have done me to scout this guy spamming Air Facs on a lake? I was busy fighting other people.

This guy had his own fighters in numbers nobody with a land army could match. No amount of T1 AA is going to stop a straight line of stacked bombers.

Then you know to set up a little navy base and interceptors.

Sorry Geers but being forced into a single strategy as a binary response is not acceptable. That's bad balance.

If I had seen he'd gone full air - then 100 boom bots would've arrived at his commander very shortly. Bombers can't touch boom bots...

In response the post you just posted - you say its single strategy counter. AA, Naval, Orbital, Boom Bots...

His Commander was in the water, and he bombed anything that came close.

Besides, Boom Bots are just as cheesy as Bomber snipes. Why can't we have gameplay which is conducive to massive land battles?

You can't balance a game around FFA's

Not the entire game, just Bombers and the way they can insta-kill a Commander.

I gave an example of one strategy. That doesn't make it the only strategy.

Terrible idea. That makes it even harder to balance. "Accepting" manual dodging and kiting as a legit tactic was what led us to this fucked up situation in the first place. Bombers are currently balanced around the miss-assumption that fragile units would usually be able to dodge their attacks.

Problem is, that the damage output of bombers was scaled with the health of buildings, while the health ratio of units to buildings is way off. Fixing that by increasing the amount of micro might appear like a solution if your play style is micro focused, but that also enforces short reaction times and violates the basic design principles of this game.

The game must never be balance around "what would be possible if I spend 100% of my attention on that one unit", but instead "what will happen if these units are only given high order commands". Any discrepancy between these two outcomes is a significant problem and results in an heavily distorted gameplay experience depending on your type of focus.

Terrible argument.

The fact is that your Commander is always going to be a micro-intensive, high value target. We are always going to have to expend some of our attention on the Commander if we don't want to lose to a snipe or simple assault. The Commander has build speed bonuses and a special ability. It is a micro unit.

I'm with you on the fact that the game should be about high-order commands. It's a macro game.
But let's face facts: People aren't using high-order commands to win here, they're manually defining a single unit which is already micro-intensive. And that's how the game is won.

Except they can't, because the bombs fall too quickly.
It's not an unfair assumption to make, it's just not currently working as intended.
Besides which, the Commander is not a fragile unit, nor is it particularly mobile. It cannot move out of the way.

While I'd also be in favour of ground units having a HP buff (as I love ground Combat) and Bombers having their damage nerfed, that wouldn't solve the issue at hand, which is mass-bombers being used to snipe slow-moving Commanders.

Would you explain why you think slowing Bombers' projectiles would be a problem?

Yes, it's not working as intended. But the HP ratio isn't the only discrepancy, there is also the issue of bomber run DPS not being properly limited since there is no collision or to be more precise: 3D evasion maneuvers and a resulting no-fire condition. And we have the issue that bombers are just way too fast in relation to the planet size, just like many other units so reaction times are too short, especially in FFA where you can't specifically adapt to a specific opponents build. With bombers, you don't even need to care about securing supply lines or anything like that.

Rush in, ignore the defenses, snipe the target. Difficult to intercept while on an appraoch vector, only a single (working) hard counter (fighters, since defenses are failing against larger crowds on the air layer respectively not being able to shoot down the target BEFORE it runs the first attack), no natural DPS limit.

It's not like they had a choice. Dox dancing and a static build order is rewarded far more than a good strategy. Your commander is forced to be on the move permanently to avoid snipes from attacks which mostly ignore defenses, and your most effective combat strategy with your commander is to manually place was in the line of fire - while under fire.

Before this becomes a flame fest,

Why not just make bombers not stack? Rather they go side by side, this means that destroying land armies is easier, but sniping is harder.

I think the pathing system for air units is not capable to do so. Push mechanics are disabled in the air layer, so moving "side by side" is enforced by the flocking algorithm at best, but approaching the target for a bombing run precedes the flocking. If collision was reenabled, bombers would also need to be taught how to perform 3D evasion maneuvers, or it would start to look ... weird, with bombers stopping dead midair upon colliding with other air units.

But it's not sufficient as a counter measure, at least not alone. Even if you could no longer instant-snipe targets, linear bombing runs would still work fine. Slightly lower DPS, but same outcome. There's also the issue of air units being able to "overwhelm" the corresponding defenses by having an almost guaranteed shot due to their extreme speed in comparison to base size.

This was the end of that particular line of argument.

There's nothing to fix, and I the vote results are going in that direction. Air is arguably extra important when playing on a large planet. You need it. Don't forget it!

750 Radius is not a large planet.

Good thing that @scathis is no longer responsible for balancing. Just saying.

Besides, he is exaggerating, 3D evasion maneuvers aren't that difficult, it just needs wide enough spacing between air units (yeah, no flying with wings almost touching) and leave the rest to the flocking system. You just have to realize that the flocking system can not only make units steer towards an uniform distance, it can also make units choose different elevations if movement vectors are entirely incompatible and then let the adhesive properties of the algorithm construct independent layers from the chaos.

Of course it will fail (or at least take while to stabilize) if you try to model a 3 way cross-section, but then again: Why would you wanna do that? It's not working with ground units either, not even remotely.

And the timing issues where air units are forced to back off? Yeah, they only happen if you try to attack a small target with too many bombers at the same time. That's not even a problem, but actually the intended effect.