There is still no cost effective ground based aa solution. How is the current stance on air? After having no chance at all vs people who just go 90% air I feel either I am doing something wrong or the removal of the aa bot still is an unfixed problem. Mainly the problem is that you can't defend your ground units without your own air due to the fact that the aa vehicles range is so small that your opponents two dozen bombers will drop all their bombs before you even hit them. EDIT: To further explain the problem as I perceive it: AA units may have a direct chance in a fight with equal metal invested in the AA unit and the air units if it goes lucky for them. If the ground army is unlucky then the bomber splash of one flyby will completely obliterate the whole army. Even if equal metal aa wins vs air you never have equal metal aa. The point of air is that it can easily move the whole force to a single fight. The ground aa units however are slow and shortranged. So they basically have no chance in hell to cover any ground because they have to spread out and when they spread out they just die to the concentrated air force.
That explains it. Although the AI doesn't air spam as much, so it's not an issue I encounter all to much. (They love to tech rush.)
I don't think aa on t1 should have AOE. Air does clump up even more than ground, so AOE would basically make air pointless. No I think what is needed is exactly what the old aa bot was. Compare the AA solution "stinger" in its last available version with the current spinner: http://pa-db.com/compare?u1=aa_missile_vehicle&u2=bot_aa&cat1=vehicles&v2=68767 Back when that stinger was in I felt that by spamming it you could control air. The reasons for this are mainly due two the cost. The spinner may have a little more hp, but both those hp values are neary useless vs more than 1 or two bombers. The stinger was a faster unit that gave more dps per metal than what we have now. I think if the spinner would be buffed without a speed buff it would need a -considerable- range increase as well as a price reduction. If it gets no range buff it needs a substantial mobility buff at which point it would be better of being a bot. Basically when you have a group of ground AA units then it has to be unreasonably expensive for t1 air to get rid of it. At the moment it seems more that the t1 bombers stack so well that the larger the armies become the more effective the mass air play can trade. Imho a tech to t2 air should be required to do the "mass air" play that currently is possible on t1 bombers.
One more thing about air balance: That exploit where you can get a bomber through some command on the target (assist or something like that?) to stop in the air above and nonstop bomb should be fixed as well.
Remove the aa vechile and add back the aa bot then. All for differentation, but taking away the good aa unit and letting the bad one stay was a bad choice back then. Though some random thoughts: Could the Icarus be made into a defensive AA unit? It would need to be a) very good vs air and b) be not very good at attacking. Not sure how to get b? Make it cost energy for movements? Make it slow and shortsihted?
Either the AA vehicle is too much of a weak slowpoke or the bomber is too powerful. Cutting the t1 bomber hp in half probably would solve this as well. My stance is pretty simple: The t1 bomber should only be any good to attack targets that have no AA at all. If you want to kill AA you should need a very large force and still not win in trades. For heavy air play go t2 air.
hrm.. on the legacy maps it's kinda like the old days of air spam. But i didn't find that you could spam bombers to carpet bomb everything like before. It feels more like building fighters to prevent the other guy from doing it, and then building few bombers as opportunity. And him likewise. If you spammed the bombers, then the other guy would end up having more fighters. In addition to that, I don't think aa is that weak if you are keeping up some fighter production to limit his bomber numbers. Also, on the new platform maps it feels like air spam is not as dominant. I remember spamming air against @cola_colin on one of them and it didn't exactly work in the end. He just moved his land units the short distance and killed me even with 50+ metal disadvantage. It is a problem though that there is a need to keep up roughly same number of air factories as opponent where that rule doesn't hold relatively as strong with bot/veh. Don't think it's an aa problem but that air has always moved too fast, being able to be alot of places at once as well as threaten to attack anywhere in force. You lose alot of the positioning gameplay depth. Maybe bombers could drop like 1 less bomb or something as well. Alot of it goes to waste on single targets anyway. Probably could also reduce air fabber build power to same as bot fabber.
Slow bombers down. Have fighters keep same speed would be fine. Then ground aa gets off more shots. I find now that if the enemy spams air I spam enough bit factories to harass him in 3/4 places and then build up a large tank army with loads of aa to roll into the base. For every 2 fighters he has you can easily afford one spinner, once his main air blob had lost its bombers he most likely dead. Air is risky like that, especially mid game. Early game can be defended with some aa turrets around key expansions. When the opponent reaches the stage where he has enough air to one pass aa turrets you should be ok.
I've been asking for the removal of the spinner and the reincarnation of the stinger for quite a while now.. But I always got shot down by pretty much anyone else here on the forum.
I think the main argument against this is that the whole thing hinges around the fact that the stinger was 'better', which is purely defined by balance. If the spinner sucks because of cost, speed / dps then why not just rebalance it so it's better?
I don't understand. Tanks are supposed to be the heavy hitting army while bots raid. Why would the raiders have the aa while the heavy hitters didn't? Why are there all these calls for stingers to replace spinners?
The idea is that AA units need to be fast to keep up with air. "Fast" is associated with bots. Sure a very powerful but slow AA is also a thing. The current vehicle AA however is only okayish and rather slow.
I get where you're coming from, but wouldn't giving dox the ability to defend themselves against bombers make an already strong unit OP? I mean they can already patrol to really mitigate damage and they have their own potshot AA which is already really annoying when you're trying to defend your expansions with air (the only viable defense right now).
We used to have a separate bot aa unit. We can have both I suppose. Bots with less dps and health, but fast enough to dodge aa. Shouldn't be as fast as dox or that can be a problem. Remove dox aa
I could agree with this. Except bots dodging AA. I don't know what that means. Do you mean dodging bombs perhaps? I always thought that was annoying micro and would really prefer bombers to drop fewer/one bombs with more AOE so as to make dodging impossible. We already have dodging though so I would be happy with the inclusion of a slower then dox weaker then spinners, stronger then dox AA bot and remove dox AA if the price is that we keep Bomb dodging as it is now.
It's impossible to come back from mass air sniping mex just lost a game because I didn't spam air like my opponent.
I don't have any air problems in my games ( with the exception of late game t2 air). Just build as many air facs as he does, then go pure fighters. He can't keep up metal for metal. At the tail end of that, you could go t2 air to capitalize on your air dominance haha
