So now what: Competitive Balance of the Future

so making air entirely useless? nope

ground aa is for area denial not for airsuperiority this is not how it works

So why is air superiority also ground superiority? honestly air is way too powerful

no, making them not mandatory, which is different

orbital are uselesses because you have avenger? no

navy are useless because you have torpedo? no

and so on

i just don't want to be forced to go air, if my opponent have air superiority, because at that point who has more air win, boring, it was the same problem with every other game like this, TA air spam fest, supcom, same ****

it's so hard to deliver a strong anti air, but still have air be relevant? seems so...

make them simply equal in power, 1:1 ratio, problem solved

one good example is Broodwar, there air, are strong but are counterable by ground without much problem, you are not forced to go with air yourself, or you're screwed, which i find extremely silly

Actually I think the ability of air to shut down ground is very over stated.

I played a series of games against @clopse not long back where I won air superiority and had more map control.

In these games he focused all his resources into tanks with a good proportion of anti air and only built fighters for his air.

End result: I lost as I had to much resources in air that couldn't effectively attack his tank force. Now I think a key to this is he did have a bit of air (specifically fighters). That prevented me switching my air to pure bombers which would have been stronger against his tank force.

Hard air is great for map control, and is very strong against bots but it crumbles against a dedicated tank push.

Where air starts to be op is when you have a very large map. As then you can't get tanks into range early enough to pose such a threat and air has more time to chip away at any poorly defended forces.

it isn't .. you CAN defend against air from ground in which you have six options against it dox, gil-e's, spinner, storm
galata and flaktower ..

funny enough in other threads we are discussing how useless hornets and wyrms are facing off against certain groundbased aa leaving the airplayer with only 3 effective offensive airunits being the bumblebee, the kestrel and the zeus ... and even then kestrels can be taken out with flak .. effectively leaving the bumblebee and zeus ..

Because you can't.

I've talked about this a bit more lengthy in another thread (you may find it in my post history), but the executive summary is that you simply can not balance air vs. vehicle for all map sizes. It's that way, because the damage you can put into a given area scales differently for land and air. And even worse this applies for other movement types (like sea and orbital) as well.
The lower starting point here is com-boxing, where you see no air at all - through small maps like forge which can be played with less air - up to giant planets where air becomes mandatory to control area efficiently.

You can not get rid of this relationship unless you change air drastically.

BTW:
It works for Starcraft, because the scale of the game more or less is fixed (compared to PA). You only have finite resources, units are limited to 200 for each player and although the map sizes varies, it isn't the range in which PA maps can vary. For example, a 1300r planet in PA has roughly 42 times the surface area of a 200r planet.

The bumblebee is just way too good with its carpet bombing, the problem with Ground AA is that it has no range to actually counter air.

galata and spinner do have plenty of range
so do gil-e's

For original PA, I agree that the T1 bomber is a little overpowered.
But for Titan, I don't think so.
We get the T2 AA vehicle storm which can kill the T1 bomber spam very effectively.

I have a 10 player FFA game which can prove this.
One of my opponents killed another one by T1 bomber spam,
but this trick failed to me due to the T2 AA vehicle storm.
His massive bombers force just got erased in no time.

I can post some picture later.

I'd like to post some thoughts about a completely different game.

Many of you (I hope) will be familiar with the tabletop hobby game warhammer, and how games workshop (creators) abandoned it. They replaced it with a much smaller scale game with new miniatures which aim to replace the whole of the old system.

Thus, the older gamers who have been around for 40+ years who want to continue playing have had to create their own balanced rules. This has created a fractured player base with no center. The game is slowly dying without any light at the end of the tunnel (for now).

At least when GW was around semi supporting the game (not really) there was a centralised set of gameplay rules everybody could work off. Now this doesn't exist and everybody is doing their own thing with 3-4-5 different rules out.

Any game that is to survive needs to have some kind of critical playerbase around at least 1 system.
Admittedly, PA never had that on the same scale as other big title games but is already fracturing with all these other mods?

I think a compromise is necessary, with all of these mods helping each other instead of doing their own thing.
A good compromise happens when all parties walk away from an agreement a little dissappointed.
It'd help if Uber and community could work together somehow.
At the very least, we can offload alot of the excess work Uber struggles with onto volunteer coders who are giving up their time making mods anyway.

But nomatter what happens, we need the orbital overhaul mod in the game since those guys behind it add much needed flavour and tactical variety.

Food for thought.

owom with titans basicaly is already in .. only thing that´s missing would be mines and the OP ioncannon

the towerdiversion owom has is imo not neccesary


owom itself howeve showed a severe problem that is also shown in titans which
@mered4 mentioned .. which if you produce surface units lategame instead of orbital then you lose especialy if a opponent has a planet to himself ... there need to be units that keep surfaceunits viable allong with orbital .. or ballancetweaks

then change it drastically, for example i would get rid of the whole rock paper scissors with air, i would do a single unit that fuctino as a AA and AG(fighter + bomber in a single unit), and i would buff the bomber part of it enough to not be countered easy by a stronger new anti air ground unit

Getting rid of the rock, paper, scissor mechanic would be a bad idea. Look at the pre-Titans Avanger disaster for an example how _not_ to do it.
Besides this, it is the wrong place you are looking for a fix.

The inherent imbalance between ground and air is based on the differences in movement. And this isn't trivially fixable all. I won't go into all depth here, but I will show you two points of what I'm meaning.

1) Try to calculate a upper bound of damage per second a given area can output.
a) For ground against air.
b) For air against ground.

In fact, a) is pretty easy. Just take an anti-air unit with high damage and take the area a_unit it uses. Take the given area a and divide it by a_unit and multiply it by the damage a single unit can output over time: (a / a_unit) * dps_unit.
If the area is a half circle with the radius of the weapon range of the unit in question, then this is the maximum damage output this unit can produce under any circumstances. (*)
On the other hand, for b) this is not possible. Air units stack unbounded. You can place as many bombers as you like on one spat. Therefore the damage output can be increased arbitrarily.
Over time a Galata turret will always loose against bombers, you just have to wait to amass enough bombers to kill it efficiently.

2) Consider an obstacle free map. Try to estimate the area where damage can be placed by a given unit.
a) For a structure.
b) For a ground unit.
c) For a air unit.

a) is an easy case again: A structure can not move. The area it can put damage on is the circle with the radius of the weapon range.
b) and c) are equal for an obstacle free map. The area depends on the movement speed of the unit itself and the time you have to move the object. (**) One should note that the area is proportionally to movement squared. So this is not alinear relation ship. If you move at twice the speed, you will cover 4 times more area.


Both points scale with map sizes. Usually army sizes scale with map sizes. So point 1) will allow a play to target down anti air defences more and more easily with increasing map size.
If the area you have to defend against an opponent increases, movement speed will get increasingly important. Because as an attack it will let you choose the area you attack faster, and as an defender you can react more quickly to an attack. That is why dox raiding is viable, even if dox won't trade equally against tanks.


All this influences the balance between ground and air. Coming back to your last half sentence:

It shows that such a statement implicitly sets for a certain map size. we can balance air for a given map size, say the average map size. But it will be always off balance for maps that are smaller or larger than average.

There are ways out of this, but they are not easy:
*) Make air unstackable like ground units. (see question 1)
*) Change the movement speed of air units to match ground units better. (see question 2)
*) Increase the speed of anti air units. / Increase the range of anti air units. (This is same as the previous, but the other way around.)
*) Add obstacles to the air layer, like high mountain ranges. This will allow map makers to influence the connectivity of the air layer the same way you can change the connectivity of the ground layer. (see question 2)
*) Add splash damage for every anti air unit. (see comment (*))
*) Splash damage when an air unit dies. (This is basically an indirect splash damage for all anti air weapons)
*) Narrow down the range of allowed planet radiuses. (Well ...)

Note that this is more or less a catalogue, you may pick and choose several points. Some of them may be unpopular (like the map size restrictions). Some of them may be hard tom implement (the high mountain ranges for example). And not allwill solve the problem, but shift it towards another balance point.




(*) There is the exception of splash damage. Splash damage multiplies the damage that is output by the number of targets. This is the damage increases by target count. If the target count is unbound the damage output is unbound too. This is the reason why anti air units in PA should have splash damage.
(**) Weapon range also matters, but for very large terms of movement (=time x speed) the weapon range can get arbitrarily small.

I am for the community taking over the balance of PA. Ofc there are fears of splitting the community but if the balance is good enough then it will grow in popularity.

I have created my own thread about this - https://forums.uberent.com/threads/new-balance-mod.70926/

The main reasons I am for this is because A) the balance is what put me off the game in the first place and B) Uber has failed to address problems with the balance time and time again.

As many know Team Burning and a lot of the clans have severally decreased in community activity over the past year. I do feel there is hope to revive these clans of old but I feel the best way to do this is balancing around team games. Also giving the clans more input surrounding balancing. A centralized balance mod that is only about tweaking values and not trying to drastically change the way PA is. I think we can overcome the balance issues with crowd sourcing the solutions to these problems.