Land Units Shooting Air, Realistic Interaction but Rebalanced.

Units used to be able to aim at anything it seemed reasonable they could aim their gun at, and attempt to fire. This used to make large masses of anything really able to be used as somewhat effective AA.

It was removed because it was too decent.

I was wondering, is there any way to bring this back? I know I am not the only one that wants it.

Suggestions are: Lower accuracy when a tank interacts with the air layer and fighters interact with the ground layer; Lower range when tanks interact with the air layer and fighers interact with the ground layer; Both.

I wouldn't mind if tanks couldn't shoot at planes until the very last second, that way the perk of using the "correct" unit is non-nerfed attacking, being able to attack from a reasonable range. This way tanks would only barely trade or just outright miss and die to air attacks, anti-air vehicles would be able to shoot at land but only after they have to get much closer than the tank did to shoot back, and fighters could take shots at land units and hit only on occasion.

I and others just liked that they attempted to shoot back. I wouldn't think it would be too upsetting a workload to add more parameters for how units interact, instead of units having a single range and a single type of target they have one range for one target and a much lesser range and accuracy for another target. I would bet this would be a case of "detail that pays off in gameplay value".

I'm surprised anyone would want more of this.

what's all that "refinement of technology" for then? that specialization?

I can't see it's color.

It's dumb too because there are tons of ARBITRARY RULES with this which I seem to remember one more person around here was against.

Tanks can't shoot air... at all. but bots can.
Destroyers can't at all but anti-air boats fend off land sufficiently enough to pay for themselves if you go all out anti-air.

(don't get me started on anti-air turrets ... still the best unit in PA followed closely by the catapult then the nuke by a small margin.)

I think bringing this back in any form makes air units completely invalid. Get a large enough blob of ants, it doesn't matter how inaccurate they are, the air units will get hit. Especially if it's a large blob of air units coming in.

Just build stingers, spinners, peregrines and hummingbirds.

There are so many people playing this game that just want one unit that does everything for them, so they can spam it and make everything else obsolete. Please. You're given the tools to build antiair. Use them.

<brings up, for the fifty TRILLIONTH TIME, that TA's Battle Tanks could only hit air units at the peak of their projectile's arc, and so it was balanced because the window of engagement was so small on moving or high-altitude aircraft, but pretty decent on landed units and transports>

Yes, plasma cannons looked goofy, but THEY WERE BALANCED!

Edit:

Imagine this as TA's Tank-bullet projectile arc. That red dot at the top is the only position at which the projectile could hit planes; this limited the effective range, accuracy and damage potential of the projectiles based on how high up the plane was, how big it is and how fast it is moving; which is exactly what we want, right?

This.

One unit that does everything means there's no variety and no strategy.

Are we talking about Peewees taking down Brawlers?

No, more like Stumpies/Raiders taking down Brawlers. PeeWees had a shot in hell to take down an airplane, and when they did celebration would be in order.

Storms/Rockos also had a similar chance, though their rockets were linear and so were more heavily affected by target speed and less affected by target altitude.

It's only really a balance thing for Transports, so your Commander isn't randomly abducted (which is an AWESOME feature and should be included!), your tanks can shoot the blasted things down while they're still. Aside from that it's mostly for flair and humor.

Brian noones advocating a unit that does everything. at least not effectively. Lets go play TA. you built only bulldogs and stumpys. ill build Shadows and Hurricanes, build as big a group of tanks as you like, you wont make a meaningful dent in the bomber swarm.

Though i agree if implemented as it was in alpha then yes, its rediculous and needs amending.

What people are really asking for here is a generalist combat unit with soft anti-air; not for having tanks use their main guns on aircraft. Especially with respect to aircraft, there shouldn't be this hard distinction between "ground only" and "anti-air" such that you MUST have serious dedicated anti-air to be able to do any damage to aircraft at all.

Despite the fact that TA did this by allowing various weapons to attack air, a better solution is just to design soft anti-air expressly into units on purpose, and not jerry-rigging a weapon meant for something else.

Certain weapons just don't make sense to use against aircraft. Having Berthas aim at aircraft? An annoying waste of everyone's time. Tank main guns are probably in that category of 'don't bother shooting aircraft' due to slow turret turn rate. But there's no reason why a generalist tank can't have a secondary weapon that can shoot air, and which actually makes sense to use against flying units. Such as a machine gun.

No, I was pretty much asking for tanks to fire at planes, and have a 1/50 chance of hitting.

I mean what everyone else means. In RA2, it looked ridiculous that a group of 4 tanks let a single rocketeer minigunner jetpack overhead and take its sweet 5 minute time killing them without even attempting to defend themselves, like they just obediently bent over and let him find them in the alps. This too was ridiculous balance considering anti-air missile tanks and flak tanks could pop ground units albeit low damage and scattered accuracy and poor range.

Everyone else references TA, which tanks at least didn't look completely oblivious and defective just standing there while very slowly drained for health by planes, they fired back and then died, and on 1/50 occasion in a rare 1v1 the tank might hit the jet and actually win.

What I am saying is I would almost prefer for there to be no chance of the tank hitting air, maybe even exactly no chance of it happening, but the tank still fire and not look like its just rolling over on it's belly.

Really, the only balance consideration is making it to where 50 tanks isn't a good counter to 10 aircraft. By not a good counter, I mean 50 don't beat 10. In those odds, should 1-2 get shot down? They might should have a chance of hitting just 1 or 2, and only when it's too late and the planes released their bombs. What does this mean in gameplay? That a group of 50 tanks can trade hits and win with 2 planes while losing a 5-10 tanks. If you sent 2 planes after 50 tanks, then you sent a rocketeer after RA2 tanks, and should not be rewarded for it like RA2 would. AND YOU WOULD STILL BE REWARDED BY TRADING 2 PLANES FOR 10 TANKS, just not rewarded with that lone plane getting 50 free kills.

I realize no one is advocating quite that far. But still. Having the Ant... I don't see a way of making it balanced.

I do- we make a generalist tank that can is good against ground and weak/mediocre against air units because it has two different weapons. Which can even have different properties, like range, damage, rate of fire, accuracy, and so on. This also allows it to have two more specialized weapons, such as a tank cannon for use at range against other tanks, etc., and a quick-turning, high rate of fire secondary weapon to protect against large groups of small units up close.

The functional purpose of having tanks use their cannons against air is to act as soft anti-air for a unit that would normally be defenseless, but it is a workaround. It would be much better to make the tank actually use its weapons properly, but give it actual soft anti-air capability.

The two-weapon approach is much better than just using the same weapon even in cases where it is patently unsuited. And taking that philosophy that all weapons should be used against all targets leads to some very annoying places; like having long range artillery that turns slowly (like Berhas) trying to destroy gunships or other silliness.

It makes sense to have units intelligently select targets that they are actually likely to hit, and to simply not try in cases where there should be basically no chance of success.

True, according to physics simulation, if such a shell did hit an aircraft, it would deal damage. But that doesn't mean it is a good idea to have the unit AI target aircraft with its tank cannon, or that the gameplay is improved by making that behavior standard.

I agree that Ant's should have a turret mounted weapon of some form that is capable but not particuarly effective at taking down aircraft. Similarly anti-air land units should have some sort of anti-land weapon, even if it has rubbish damage and fire rate. They shouldn't however use their main weapons to do this, as this allows for bullcrap moments such as a loan scout disrupting your tanks weapons long enough for enemy tanks to wipe them out.

Aircraft however don't need this variability, unless more units are introduced, you have your fighters and your bombers, and reasons to build both.

The more generalist a unit is (effective against more types of units) the less efficient it should be. More specialized units (effective against fewer unit types) should be more efficient in their role (you get more bang for your buck).

Therefore, you can have primarily ground combat units that can attack both ground and air (i.e. main battle tank; e.g. Abrams). And you can have primarily anti-air units that can also shoot land units (i.e. self-propelled AA guns; e.g. Vulcan). But these units will be less efficient than dedicated specialists. A dedicated anti-air unit (i.e. SAM launcher; e.g. MIM-23 Hawk) can have more power per cost because it only acts as anti-air, and contributes nothing against ground units. Indeed, such a specialist unit would even be more specialized than just "air units" in general, but might have high range and high-damage weapon with a low rate of fire, making it most useful as an air deterrent and good at destroying few, high-value aircraft, and not a large group. In the same vein, greater specialization means greater efficiency. You are trading flexibility for raw power in just one dimension.

But such specialist units are (naturally) inflexible. This makes it very difficult to use such specialists in large quantities, because of the possibility of miscalibrating your forces and ending up with an enemy force you are poorly equipped to fight. A force composed entirely of specialists is extremely powerful and efficient, but is brittle, and susceptible to being overwhelmed in any one particular dimension. This effect is especially problematic once the group of specialists begins suffering casualties. For example, if an army composed entirely of specialists lost some or all of its SAM vehicles, it might no longer be able to deal with bombers at all.

A large army of generalist units does not have this problem; it is well-equipped to fight a diverse variety of enemy forces, but it will not do so exceptionally efficiently. Which is why you should supplement such an army with certain specialist forces, to add special capabilities to the group. Their presence in the army gives you more strategic flexibility, and creates tactical options that a huge monoculture of generalist units does not have.

And at least for me, this is why the current placeholder advanced units are so disappointing. The Leveler is literally just an Ant with all its stats multiplied, and with a correspondingly vastly increased cost. I was anticipating having generalist, main combat units in the basic factory, and with a variety of powerful specialists in the advanced factories.

TL;DR- where appropriate, give generalist units actual anti-air capability instead of relying on silly weapon usage in inappropriate circumstances.

But you could build 49 ants, and a spinner, and trade 0 tanks for 2 planes.

Which is the entire point. You have anti-air. The game isn't unbalanced or unrealistic. In real life, a tanks coaxial machine gun cannot shoot down aircraft unless the tank is insanely lucky, because the tank can't raise its barrel to the right elevation. Likewise, the M1 abrams tank does not have a weapon intended for use against aircraft.

It is perfectly realistic for a vehicle which does not have any antiaircraft capability to be unable to defend itself against aircraft.


I do see what is being said - in Earth 2150 you had multiple weapons that could only attack ground targets, and then you had weapons like the chain gun and the rocket which could target both air and ground. The chain gun was low damage, high refire rate, high ammunition capacity. The rockets were high damage, low refire rate, low ammunition capacity. The important balance was the ammo system that game had. It didn't matter that much if a chaingun unit overkilled, but wasting ammunition with rockets was in many cases a deadly mistake. Besides, a chaingun unit could do some damage to land forces, and support the dedicated antiground units (or support the rocket units)

However, as far as I'm confused, it rewards lazy players who don't respond to what their opponent is doing. If I spend the entire game sniping deathballs with bombers, there is some point where the opponent should stop thinking "I wish I had anti-aircraft guns on my tanks", "I wish my opponent would stop relying on bombers" etc. and start responding to me by countering him. If you just give 50 tanks the ability to shoot down a bomber 1/50 times, then each pass the bomber is likely to be shot down, and so the player learns nothing, and is rewarded for their lazy play. Likewise if you make units that are both anti ground and anti air. And then we have the opposite issue - people would be complaining because their weak antiground units are being destroyed by the dedicated anti-ground units.

The reason I'm against the idea is that there are so many players who just spam one type of unit, and don't use the full unit roster. If this was a thing (you had balls of chain gun units which did low amounts of damage to both land and air), players would just rely on those balls, ignoring stingers/spinners entirely, and possibly ants as well.

The bigger issue is that it is actually fairly hard to create a mixed unit army at the moment, due to the UI. I'm hoping that they give us the ability to do infinite queues, but Cola_Colin made a change to his hotbuild mod at my request, which allows me to loop the production of 2 tanks, 1 spinner, 2 tanks. (i,e. 1 spinner to 4 ants). But ultimately the game doesn't encourage creating mixed unit armies.

You're advocating to turn a specialist (the Ant), into a generalist catch-all unit, rather than relying on countering the opponents units with the appropriate counter in the appropriate circumstances.

I guess you missed the part about the Ant being a basic unit, and therefore it is already supposed to be a 'generalist'.

I see the Ant as being a specialist antiground assault unit. The spinner is a specialist antiair assault unit. All this is advocating is turning both of them into the same unit.

So you're advocating putting the Spinner into the Advanced factory then?

No... I'm advocating not putting a weapon on the Ant which would cause spinners to become completely redundant, and instead building spinners. Or hummingbirds.