Land Units Shooting Air, Realistic Interaction but Rebalanced.

OK.....lets take this is a different direction.

Could it be a cool idea to allow mobile AA units to one again hit ground targets, even with their damage scale being rather ineffective against Ant's?

I know people have reservations about having anti-ground units shoot air due to how anti-ground weapons do damage that totally decimates aircraft.

But with AA weapons like the static AA, the damage is small enough that without support from a static artillery (I saw it mentioned that static AA with artillery replaced static lasers for them, when really it is just the artillery that defends them with the AA killing the survivors) or lasers they are very ineffective in a 1 on 1 battle vs other ground targets and can only be considered support weapons.

As generalist units the Basic mobile AA should have the capacity to shoot ground targets, and would made a good choice for a 'jack of additional trades' unit.

I agree. I think they should follow after the slasher from TA. That would mean greater range, less damage, and less rate of fire. People would be much more likely to ground AA. At the moment its useless.

I agree, but we must be mind full of the problems TA faced when spamming this unit type.

What about the idea of the rockets only tracking against air targets, having them dumb fire against ground targets?

I dunno....an AA with no planes to shoot at is like a tank in a water map. Yes, it's useless but I don't know that this means we need to make tanks float, just so that they can be useful on maps with a lot of water.

Sometimes units just aren't useful in a given situation.

Yes, a "general use" missile truck can shoot at ground units.
And a "general use" ship can walk on land.
And a "general use" tank can shoot at planes and float.

Are we sure we want a lot of "general use" units? I think you have to be careful about giving paper a way to sometimes be useful against scissors. If anything, T1 should be specialized and T2 should be super expensive "general use" units that are rarely cost-effective in any one role but can shift roles, like hovercraft and walking ships.

"General use" ship:

That is mixing unit movement types and unit weapons.

I am not saying we shouldn't have units that are so defiantly specialised, that actually what I want the advanced units to be all about.

But with the basic units, why not have units that can at leas assist in most situations.

A unit with a laser would be perfect for this role, but a missile unit could be just as useful for a massed solution to a problem better solved with a specialist.

People are kinda touchy with the Ant tank, and considering it's effectiveness in actual ground combat, I cant really blame them.

So I suggested a unit that even as it stands, is a little worse for ware as the AA truck and AA bot are usually completely ignored in favour of building a few fighters, and so are generally a unused unit beyond the AI.

So I do, in fact, suggest allowing all of the surface mobile AA the option to shoot at ground targets, to at least complement their already minimal AA ability as it is.

Your exaggerating our opinions to a stupid degree.

So do you want to build specific units to counter other specific units. To me, I find that dull and uninteresting. What I would like are units that are good at filling one rule and ok at filling other roles.

Now that doesn't mean you get boats that move over land or tanks fly. It just means units that can be use effectively or poorly, but not a binary win or die.

you can very easily have specialist basic units. I am pretty sure that everyone would be happy if they brought out a vehicle with a machine gun which can shoot at everything whilst not being good at anything. There is nothing wrong with units that are specialists.

I'm sure we'll see amphibious units and SupCom had a walking ship, so.....yeah. Not much of an exaggeration at all.

And I'm not even saying "we shouldn't have walking ships". I thought the walking ship was pretty cool. But a unit that's designed to do more than one type of thing should probably be inordinately more expensive. Generalizing is expensive.

Consider the following units:

Tank:
Anti-ground: 10
Anti-air: 0
Health: 100
Cost: 100

AA Gun:
Anti-ground: 0
Anti-air: 10
Health: 100
Cost: 100

Missile Tank:
Anti-ground: 10
Anti-air: 5
Health: 100
Cost: 200

I feel like that may be fair. I can build 1 Tank and 1 AA Gun for 200 cost and come out better than your Missile Tank in every way. But I have to balance my production and actually manage two different types of units and risk having too many of one or the other based on what you send at me while you get 1 unit that does everything and can fight anything I send at you, but is not as cost-efficient.

That might be an interesting tradeoff.

Simply replacing the Tank with the Missile Tank doesn't seem that interesting.

Eh, not really. A tracking missile doesn't mean much against a target who's movement pales in comparison to an aircraft.

The biggest weakness with Jethros vs. ground was dealing with 2 things: Terrain and Wreckage. The former isn't getting much love because map generation continues to change. The latter also has little importance because of how awfully fragile everything is. It is easy to understand that an urban/hilly/rocky/forest environment will not favor a unit that demands long, direct, uninterrupted range.

It makes no difference whether you change the Ant, or you add a new unit that is like the Ant but more generalist, or if you make any other series of operations and end up with a different system. Each game system is a discrete entity regardless of any previous design or balance; it makes absolutely no difference which changes were made to arrive at that system.

Anyone saying "leave the Ant alone" is not actually engaging the argument here. Fine, we leave the Ant exactly as it is and add a completely different unit with such and such properties. Heck, add dozens of them with different characteristics. Saying "modify the Ant" is just a shorthand for saying the unit is mostly like the Ant, with certain significant differences. Furthermore, the "Ant with anti-air" is really only an example of a mechanic of making a unit that is generalist with different effectiveness against different unit types. It seems like a reasonable example to me, but is hardly the only application of the idea of having softer unit interactions.

I think it is important we not get stuck on individual units. Units may interact with each other on the field, but they don't specifically 'counter' each other. They have roles which make them strong or weak in certain ways, and their interactions with other units emerge from that. Designing a literal counter-network for every unit is a fool's errand, and grows exponentially more difficult with each additional unit. This is not Starcraft 2, where "Use Banelings to counter Marines!" is literally a fundamental mechanic. Role differentiation is a completely different animal, where it's not entirely clear whether infantry bots counter artillery or whether artillery counters the infantry bots. It depends on a lot of factors, not just a baked-in deterministic result of a direct battle where the units just plug away at each other.


Anyone who wants all units to shoot at all other units (or, as in the title of the thread, wants dedicated ground fighters to also shoot air units) needs to reconsider their position. There are a lot of unwanted side effects from having everything shoot at everything which are unnecessary to accomplish the same goal. It would become very difficult to determine the actual effectiveness of such a weapon usage, and it becomes almost impossible if it actually has different properties when used against a different target. And you get the annoying cases where units are shooting at dumb targets, which just annoys players and prompts micromanagement.

But we don't need to have units use weapons in ways that are highly ineffective or silly; we can accomplish the same goal by actually implementing a feature that has the same effect. The goal of having such a mechanic is to have more generalist units that, while primarily ground units, also have some limited anti-air. As many in this thread are complaining, it seems a bit silly to have a large group of main battle tanks get shot at with total impunity by anything that flies. I think we generally agree that those air units should have the upper hand in the situation, but not total impunity indefinitely. It appears that we have a hole in the unit roster for a generalist tank with limited anti-air capability.

But using an inappropriate weapon to do this, much less giving it a completely different set of properties, is overly complex and will be hidden from the player. It makes much more sense to make it 'official' that this unit has some soft anti-air, and give it a separate weapon with completely different properties in cases where a "soft" generalization is desirable. Such as in this one case where a main battle tank (e.g. the Ant, or a new modified Ant) should have some soft anti-air.

But it does mean something when you are not firing at a static target.

Bots in particular continue to dodge shots, even if not intentionally.

Hmm. Maybe?

One thing that I don't see mentioned about TA is just how important LoS was for making these interactions work. Most short range units gained a HUGE advantage because vision matched their gun range. Long range units suffered because they could not make full use of their ability without front line scouts. Radar targeting was something added in Supcom and beyond, and the bonus it gives to long range battle is undeniable.

Absolutely agreed that TA battles were made much more interesting than anything in SupCom because of the very short vision ranges and lack of (available) radar targeting. Long range units really needed spotters to actually use their range, and this made units with short weapon ranges efficient to use alone, and made large groups of long-range units both potentially powerful and also huge liabilities. Something which SupCom very much lacked, where range basically trumped everything due to how cheap and convenient all intel was to acquire.

Removing radar targeting has its advantages and disadvantages though. In any case we should not copy TA's radar targeting, which was a paid structure. Radar targeting should either be in or out. Or possibly in, but with caveats, like radar wobble to seriously reduce accuracy.

Uber should at least experiment with the idea of just removing radar wholesale. Players would have to rely on unit vision, and Uber could pick up the slack by giving players a variety of effective scouting options for line of sight instead of universally relying on radar. This opens up quite a large realm of the design of a wide variety of recon units, and different ways they might be mixed into a force and utilized in the intel war.

For the most part, in TA the only advantage radar provided was information to the player. Radar targeting was an expensive luxury item, for when your economy was booming. The result was an oppressive fog of war that forced you to actually scout if you wanted to know what was going on, or if you wanted to use long-range weapons.

As yet another possibility, radar could just be completely focused on air and orbital units, and could be made useless for detecting surface units. This is a good middle ground because of the incredible mobility of air units, necessitating early detection and long-range anti-air. And of course this creates the need for stealthy planes to force the enemy to get line of sight. Likewise, for orbital units it makes sense to give inexpensive long-range detection because line of sight is not really that meaningful in the orbital layer, and weapons like surface anti-orbital emplacements need to be able to detect targets in orbit to shoot.

But honestly, land warfare is much more fun without such inexpensive long-range enemy detection and targeting. It creates an intelligence war as well as inefficiency of otherwise dominant long-range weapons without scouts. And it creates the potential for deception and mind games that don't cost resources, which are far more interesting than crap like "stealth generators" just to get around the fact that your radar is way too strong.

I do find that in PA, radar range is a little short for the bases I build, so there is that.

If radar didn't work on land units, it would be much cheaper to get a lot more coverage area.

And if radar can't be used to automatically target your long guns, those long guns can afford to be much cheaper, since you can kill scouts to deny enemy vision and reduce their guns to blind fire, which is unlikely to hit anything. But if you outmaneuver your opponent's scouts with your own forces, and get your own scouts into position, your (cheaper) guns can wreak havoc.

This also raises the possibility of certain types of weapons being radar-guided, such as SAMs using radar coverage to extend their effective engagement range, where a normal land unit's machine gun (or whatever) could not.

Radar Wiggle might be a good thing to introduce to the game. Units under radar, but not in LoS, have their visible position wiggle a certain amount, directly proportional to distance squared and inverse to "size". So, D^2/S, or something like that, it might require tweaking.

This was one of the thigs I liked about TA Spring.

First of all, I'm wrong about the inaccuracy thing. I misremembered the preferred targeting system as an accuracy thing, I believe.

Stats are from rev31.gp3, the CC data file. Most weapons look like this.

Well well, that is interesting. The K-Bot Missile belongs to the Crasher, which is the official AA kbot of the Core. In fact, nearly every dedicated AA weapon(even fighters) has a habit of dealing roughly 2.5x damage against aircraft. Non AA weapons do not have this trait. It quite fundamentally crushes the assertion that TA didn't use damage types. (go here.

So what does one do with this? Should AA weapons get their special type, and just deal the bonus damage? Should aircraft health be divided by 2.5? Is another way of making it work, or should we look at the original and realize that even they couldn't figure something out?

Only Salens can do this.

TA did use damage types. But very few interactions were actually forced in this way.

The two biggest arbitrary damage type interactions are that LLT's do less damage to commanders, and a few different things having to do with anti-air weapons. There are actually several weapons that commanders take less damage from, but LLT's are the most significant. And as for AA, certain anti-air does less damage to ground units, i.e. Flakker shells hitting land units aren't ridiculously imbalanced as a rapid-fire, splashing anti-ground weapon. Also, I think that is the Crasher, the AA kbot, not the Storm rocket bot.

TA definitely used damage types in the engine. But compared to the number of units and the number of interactions between those units, the damage types didn't really have much of an effect.

Zero-K does away with the notion of damage types completely, and PA should as well.