eXodus eSports presents December Deadlock - 1v1 with £50/$78 prize

To be fair, vanilla spinners are designed as a hard counter to air. You'd expect them to punch well above their weight in numbers, certainly more than 1.2

Absolutely, the positioning and defending expansions is a huge issue like you said!

Definitely in the current meta air is a problem in that if you don't have air control you have big disadvantage. But it is perhaps not because of combat metal efficiency. What we think is the root problem will affect what might be a good solution.

I don't think the uber solution of target prioritisation will work in the long run is all. There will possibly need to be more unit redesign done to how air interacts with the land sphere, how fast it moves, and at the least some normalisation of hummingbird hp/metal ratio.

Anyway, i type too much. Basically, i think that while we can buff aa, we also need to look at the air side too.

i played a few PTE games last night and from what i saw it was not all bad, the prioritization of bombers makes basic bombers weaker yes but they still have giant dps. it also made advanced air more relevant because advanced bombers have longer range then all AA. fighters are no longer meat shield but full interceptors which make people not mass them to block shots but now you need them only to kill enemy bombers and gunships. also if they could make gunships prioritize antiair vhecs then i think interaction would be even better. gunships wipe spinners out really well once you get 10 gunships you can take on a good 20-30 spinners if they prioritized them or if its just spinners vs them without the aiming priorities.

Well think about it like this. Current strategy of fighter swarm and few bombers becomes redundant against land aa because bomber is efficiently countered and fighter goes to waste, so you then use that fighter metal to spam more bombers. Let's just assume at this point that uber have managed to balance bomber vs land aa.

Now your opponent builds just 1 fighter and your bomber spam are gg'd. So you need to build +1 fighter to protect, and then he needs to build +1 fighter over you, and so on so on. Which brings us back to our original predicament of fighter spam. But that's starting to sound slightly familiar.

What you get is a snake eating it's own tail. A meta that will most likely evolve to no-one really using bombers much at all. And if no-one uses bombers, no-one will use fighters.

As for t2 air, the problem mostly is the cost difference. Rationally, you should never build a t2 combat air unit because your opponent can use that same metal to build just 1 fighter and a bunch of extra land units. The metal efficiency ratio is off. Reducing t2 air metal cost will pull it out of line with the t2 model of the other units, like having different timings/decreased power, and will end up needing some re-design thought.

Or some games will have very little air and others will have a lot of it. What you describe sounds like a game where you can surprise a player by building something they don't expect and they need to scout to see what you have and start to counter it. Sound familiar? The problem is that scouting in SC2 is actually more of a challenge than it is in PA right now. You can just build one cheap little scout, fly it over them, and know everything they have. An eco balance with more expansion makes scouting more of a challenge. In the old days it could get really hard to scout a whole base because you had to fly over half a planet of base to get to the middle. Fixing the air balance can be combined with an eco balance that favors expansion to give us a game with a lot more depth.

This is another point I wanted to make. Bombers can do much more than just killing anti-air whereas the sole purpose of anti-air is to kill air, and more importantly bombers. This means one AA should be able to effectively defend around 1.5ish bombers (somewhere between 1.5 and 2 bombers, if not more). If they literally have one purpose, they better be damn good at it. I think perfecting that number should be a way to balance the AA and not just bomber prioritisation.

To everyone else's point, it would be cool if bombers were faster than fighters and were much weaker to give them a hit and run type of role. Instead of their current role of flying tank which instantly dies when you have less fighters than your opponent. But no one likes micro in this game

i like micro and that sounds like a cool way of using t1 bombers.

The current t1 bomber style unit should really be t2 with more hp and dps. Also we should have slow moving heavy HP gunships that can rek undefended t1 and give them a little AA defense of their own so they could handle a t1 fighter but not much more. then also bring back peregrins but with slightly nerfed AOE than they used to have and things could be fun

I kinda want a plane that can drop nukes......

I want t2 to invalidate t1, huge investment should be worth it after a certain window of time

Semi-Final 1 - Match AL. Voted match of the tournament by eXodus eSports.

I'm watching the rest of the games, and everyone is assisting their first fabber before building first mex. Is this the new thing now?

I experimented with this a few builds back. It's pretty much only efficient if there is a long walk to your 3rd mex (commander capping two)

Lol I think I started doing it cus I saw you or some other high level player do it. Even though that was months ago, for some reason it stuck. Now I think ppl do it cus I do it? A lot of people watch the replays of the top 3 players on ladder and the top 2 do it even though I don't know if it is the best opening or not. I have found that I am usually up a mex around like 4 or 5 mins. But I have not verified this or even truly tested it.

I see what you did there.

I really liked DD-R5, but it removed from System Sharing, can someone upload it?