Land Units Shooting Air, Realistic Interaction but Rebalanced.

Strange that it's not listed on like, the only site that even has TA weapon stats. What happened with that and when? I thought it was a fan patch or Spring thing.

The site shows in no uncertain terms that all AA weapons had a nearly equivalent damage bonus against air. The only exception I could find was with flak, which was so absurdly good that it could never be allowed to attack ground. But perhaps it is mistaken, I certainly don't have the source tables.

I think this post is the most productive post I have seen in this thread. I agree with the idea that T1 units should be more diverse in use but proportionally less effective in specific situations. The idea of the Ant having separate ground and air turrets is a great idea. Then at T2 you can produce the AA specialist or the ground specialist. With this basic structure to unit design the T1 units never become obsolete and the investment in specialised T2 units forces a tactical choice to be made by the player.

This concept also eliminates the need to create arbitrary damage restrictions or vulnerability settings to create a classic rock-paper-scissors mechanic. It is inherently in the design of each unit.

Nanolathe, I am beginning to come around to your way of thinking. The idea of T1 units being general purpose, one size fits all, but inefficient is making more sense as I think about it.

What is the saying? "Jack of all trades, master of none." I believe that is it.

One more convert is always welcome.

Flak in TA actually has no damage modifiers, it just has a min barrel angle that makes it impossible to hit ground units.

I think another major thing to consider is that it seems aircraft fly pretty low in PA compared to TA, well within a moment's turning from an Ant as was the case in previous patches. In addition, aircraft got a lot less acceleration and turnrate since Supcom, so gentle curves are now the norm, where before it would be a line, then a sharp turn, slow on the part of bombers, but still a near 180 without much curve at the end. The high speed, high altitude, and relatively low amount of vulnerable time made air units pretty safe from standard ground units. To counteract this shot velocity for missiles was REALLY high.

I'm not suggesting the turn rate be increased again (nobody wants to see Hawks turning on a dime again, that was silly), but it's a serious difference from TA and other games.

So you guys are asking for a single unit, rather than multiple units for T1?

Don't be silly, it is easy to come up with a variety of units that are interestingly different generalists.

If anything, it is harder to come up with a large roster of extremely dedicated specialists because you basically get down to one unit type per category of target. Mixing different capabilities to various degrees potentially creates far more unit types, even ignoring features like movement speed, attack range, HP, and so on.

I would say the opposite. Its far easier to find specialist units than many units that are ultimately the same but different. I just dont like the idea of only needing to build one type of ground unit the whole game.

As opposed to how the game currently plays you mean?

I dont understand your point. Currently, you cannot just spam tanks, spinners are required to be in the army aswell.

if this game is worth being played, it would be able to make general units and armies of nothing but still lose.

I mean, ra2 again, nobody built nothing but ifv just cuz it shot at everything, and whoever does didn't win a game against the ai even.

In ta, unit diversity came from units being better at anti air or ground, but different in areas like turret move speed and splash damage and fire rate/shot damage/dps.

This game could use units with different speeds, types of rates and damages, ranges, aim speed... all relatively balanced with each other.

I certainly dont remember IFV's being that powerful, but then again, IFV's are not the main battle tanks that you are wanting to be able to shoot air. There is no correlation between these units. Tanks will need a severe anti-ground nerf if they are to shoot up, which defeats the purpose of them being a tank.

Personally, that's why I am suggesting that we allow the mobile AA the ability to shoot ground, rather then the Ant tank the ability to shoot air.

Slow down the turret rotation and the projectile speed, problem solved. Do not remove the ability for tanks to take potshots at air units. That is a bad idea and the easy way out.

I thought this was all a complaint about a dedicated anti-ground unit not being able to shoot at air?

It was a complaint, and I hate sounding like Nano, but it was a complaint about not using something that worked from a game who's mass exodous forms this game's community, that point of origin of which I speak is Total Annihilation.

And generally, it worked there. How? Most of the time, not by damage modifiers or anything. By the weirdest thing! Turret characteristics! The angle at which a unit could aim it's turret, how fast it's turret moved when targeting, the arc and ranges it had torwards different units. Those replaced the "can only shoot land can never shoot air" attributes.

Tanks couldn't just simply aim at a plane and fire. Anti air couldn't simply aim across at a tank and fire. Anti air might "lob" missiles at tanks unguided and at half the range of a tank turret. Tanks might slowly aim their cannons up and be limited at a certain angle, where their shells could shoot down a plane but without guidance and not if directly overhead and not until it takes 5 seconds to raise it's turret. What happens in practice, when planes vs tanks and tanks vs antiair? Planes beat tanks but one might be shot down, tanks beat anti air but the tanks might suffer chip damage.

I am again, not asking for tanks to be decent at shooting down air, or anti air to be decent at killing tanks, or any all purpose unit. I am only still posting here matter of factually because it technically is getting quite off topic everytime it gets to "all purpose unit" conversation. However, I suppose what has been discussed is about all we have to show for this topic, so people can continue to talk about other ideas or opinions here. It isn't the biggest gameplay mechanic on the table, just a nostalgic suggestion.

I would like that as well. Hell Id like every unit to be 'able' to shoot at all targets that are within range.

But Ants are very good at their current job, so why change that when units like the Spinner are outclassed by fighters and the like?

It is more of a compromise, as I can see the arguments towards not allowing units like artillery to target planes, and that the AA of the spinners, the AA bot and the ship all are kinda weak.

So this could give them a secondary use, especially to complement less flexible units and weapons.

You know, gameplay wise, the Spinner really could use doing "something" in terms of damage to enemy vehicles.

Currently, they are better than nothing and fair enough vs t1 air, but in groups of tanks they are usually cannon fodder and shot sponges. You either rather build ants and just 5 spinners in a different group following close behind, or you rather keep spinners sitting in random places in case you quickly move them in when air gets involved. Spinners in an ant fight water down the firepower of their owner so that wouldn't be a terrible side effect to buff them.

Honestly, they need to bring back flak too lol.

Well as I see it, when you have fighters (Which isn't hard to do at all) they are so much better then spinners ever can hope to be.

As for flak?......Well......what about using all of the missile barrels on the current AA instead of 2 at a time?

Not in TA, it didn't. It was quite a surprize when Xagar brought it up. TA apparently uses damage modifiers on every anti-air weapon, causing it to deal roughly 2.5x damage against air. A value like that is simply too big to ignore. While turret characteristics played the most visible part in unit interaction, this secret, hidden modifier is what really did the trick.