Air, Orbital and Nukes Vs. Land, Naval and Big Guns - What is the core of PA?

Uh, that depends on whether you played LAN or Internet. Bombers worked every time on the Internet due to the way the net code worked. Any swarm of bombers hit its target with 100% success, you couldn't defend against it unless you intercepted them with a large enough number of fighters ahead of the target.

The core problem with TA air units was simply that they moved very, very fast. In conjunction with their special target profile making them extremely difficult/impossible to destroy with common ground weapons, aircraft become increasingly dominant as maps get larger.

I am with eroticburrito that air warfare needs the most change from TA's system. Making air units more valuable, fewer in number, and more individually powerful (and vulnerable) is the correct way to do it. Giant swarms of aircraft should be extremely hard to muster, and very risky to use.

Instead of becoming exponentially more efficient with increasing numbers, as in TA and SupCom, aircraft in PA should be designed with high individual firepower and strongly diminishing returns from increasing the size of a swarm.

IMO, The problem with air in this game (and almost every RTS for that matter) is that you can bunch them up and stack them like no other unit can be. This allows for almost an infinite amount of firepower (either AA or anti-ground) to be concentrated into an incredibly small area and moved around the map at very rapid speeds. This means you can fly your concentration of bombers over any target you wish and bomb it into the stone age, and any air resistance is met with a fist of air superiority fighters. Some games fix this by adding in powerful AOE AA weapons, but I think this is only band-aiding the problem, as air can still dominate where ever these weapons are not present (plus it punishes the player for accidentally stacking their air even if they didn't mean to).

The real fix is to give air units large footprints to prevent them stacking in the first place (which I imagine must be difficult from a coding standpoint otherwise lots of games would have done it already). Flying balls of units doesn't look good at all and creates a lot of problems. I know formations are coming but it should still be impossible for a player to manually bunch up their air units to send them in as a fist. Plus a formation of bombers flying across the globe will look awesome

While you are correct, krakanu, I think the fundamental underlying issue is that almost all RTS games make the mistake of drastically underestimating how valuable movement speed actually is. Planes are often fairly comparable to normal ground units, but have such incredible movement speed and freedom to move for very little significant downside.

Even if air units don't literally stack directly on top of each other, they still "stack" because of how quickly they can attack a target in succession because of their movement speed. A group of these highly mobile units can attack or defend anywhere which is tremendously more efficient than building units or turrets to cover such a huge area, and you can bring all of it to bear on a single point if you wish. An option that is unavailable if you waste your resources in assets that actually have a stable positional nature.

Extremely high mobility requires immense downsides to stop the extremely mobile units from dominating the game. And air units are not only mobile, but have a special target profile, which makes them even more effective.

In fact, I would say that mobility is FAR more powerful than even a large amount of raw damage. The efficiency gains from having a very fast unit can quickly overcome even having very low damage. So instead, aircraft should have high damage and be expensive and vulnerable enough to pay for that power. Large alpha strike damage also makes a lot of sense for air units, since fixed-wing aircraft are so fast they cannot actually sustain constant DPS on a single target for very long.

Ideally this makes air units expensive, valuable strike units that are far fewer in number than common ground combat units. Air support, not a massive cloud of planes swarming a base like the Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Planes need extremely significant disadvantages to justify their movement speed. Pure cost is just going to make such expensive units that you can't even use them much. Giving them weaknesses like needing to refuel and/or re-arm on an airbase or carrier would be one approach. Other methods of giving planes major downsides to keep their cost down from prohibitive levels despite their awesome mobility might also work. Still, I think a much higher price point that ground units is necessary to make them fewer in number than common ground troops.

Uh. What.

All you're changing is the unit scale. Unit scale mostly matters against splash damage. It doesn't do anything else that you describe. The fact that you seem to think this is a real solution is deeply concerning and liable to lead the devs down a bad direction.

Mobility == power. This is not a new concept in the RTS world, though it is more inclusive than a unit's sheer speed.

If you want to destroy fast units, then you need mechanics that punish fast units. Supcom fuel did not limit air the way it was supposed to, so it is a bad mechanic.

Here's one for free: Traps. Fast units cover more terrain, therefore they are more likely to run into traps. So if you place a trap, it is more powerful against fast units. Taa daaa.

Can you quote properly so we can follow the conversation.

we should just get T2 AA defense structures. what we have now is weak and its both ground and air defense.

So, ideas on what downsides to give air units to balance their speed and mobility?

Fuel didn't work. The ammo system, being a kind of derivative of it, doesn't seem like it solves the problems either, and it certainly doesn't help at the moment. Giving things a long reload time would be one change to consider, but I think you would run into problems of remembering which of your gunships have enough missiles or not, for example.

As I said earlier, extreme fragility was TA's solution, and at the very least it's functional.

Also, I'm not convinced this is really a huge problem that needs to be solved. Air control has always been extremely important in the 'series,' and the multi-planet gameplay softens some of the impact of an overwhelming air advantage on one planet anyway (correct me if I'm wrong, but there aren't any plans to let aircraft use any sort of planetary transit system).

Should be:
Land/sea units: Main attacks. Focus of game.
Defensive structures: To give your land units time to respond to attacks and to provide some backup when they do respond.
Air units: Sniping, especially of structures but also of commanders if they stand still long enough.
Nukes: For uprooting stubborn positions that are resisting your ground and air attacks and for thwarting forward fire base constructions.
Orbital: For accessing other celestial bodies.

Currently is:
Land/sea units: Early harassing and killer of noobs. Otherwise mostly useless.
Defensive structures: To make land units irrelevant. Also useful for "tower creeping".
Air units: Sniping.
Nukes: Chief game winning solution to all problems because anti-nukes are hyper-expensive rubbish.
Orbital: Extraordinarily annoying mini-feature featuring stupid one-dimensional combat and a great way to make a 30 minute game drag on for 3 hours.


I have a deep seated faith that the current situation is due to us playing the game with placeholders that were thrown together quickly just to get us something to test game bugs and mechanics with. Once that's all sorted out, all existing units will be hurled out of the window with great force and all new units will be invented. Models and mechanics will be re-used but stats will be totally revised from the ground up.

P.S.
I also firmly believe in the power of complaining endlessly about balance until such time as balance is fixed. Not even being sarcastic here.

Seen way too many games where people kept repeating "lol it's beta don't worry it will be fixed before launch" and no, in fact, it wasn't fixed before launch. It's basically my rule of thumb that whatever a game is like in beta is fundamentally what it will be like on launch because that's how it plays out 9 times in 10. It's rare to see sweeping changes happen during a beta. (Traditionally, what a "beta test" is supposed to be is a test run of a product that is largely believed to be complete and ready for shipping. The beta test is just supposed to discover perhaps a few bugs -- the feature list is supposed to be complete. What we are doing right now should probably still be called "alpha test". If new features are still being implemented or major systems are still in a rudimentary state, it's in alpha.)

I'm all in favor of making air units extremely fragile, after all when you're flying at mach3, even hitting a duck can cause severe damage and even make you crash, so a bullet or a missile...

and maybe anti-air turrets should have a way longer range too, but maybe i think that because i like turtle-ing.

also, an idea i had is maybe not all planets should have air. i mean, a lot of planets have no seas, and planets with too much water make land units pretty much useless, so why wouldn't there be planets where air units are unusable ? that would make sense on moon and metal planets, no atmosphere = no air to support flight (except rocket-like flight)

this way the type of the planet would really affect gameplay, since for now it doesn't change much.

As long as we have good siegeing units, and possibly more variations.

Id love to see better static defences.

Pretty much. Balance at this point is something Neutrino calls ' Functional '. Reading too much into the current balance and selection of units is an exercise in futility...

However that's not going to stop anyone from doing so if they choose.

Air is mostly right in the game, as of now, with only a few problems.

T1 fighters: No problem. Fragile, good against enemy air, cheap to mass produce.
T1 bombers: Bloody useless. Should probably be converted into carpet bombers, good for massed T1 units.
T2 fighters: Good balance but we need to address the problem where they can land on the ground and still shoot at enemy air units but enemy air units will not return fire.
T2 bombers: Good, but I would consider removing their carpet bombing and leave them as a solid pinpoint killer.

They did some change a while back that made T2 bombers almost useless at killing moving units, which actually works out great. It's VERY hard to assassinate a commander that's moving, using T2 bombers, but you can destroy critical structures fairly easily. If I'm on the ball with my scouting, I can almost always stop my enemy from successfully building a nuke.

Probably the only problem T2 bombers cause is that they can snipe your super-expensive anti-nuke facility but I think that's more of an anti-nuke balance problem than a T2 balance problem. The T2 bombers do their job. Making them fragile would ruin their usefulness.

That said, the OP was discussing future direction, which is much more constructive than discussing current balance

I had another listen to that balance discussion meeting we had a while back recently, and was surprised how relevant a lot of it still is - again we were discussing high-level stuff and applying concepts for the vision for the final game.

I think that's what separates the constructive balance topics on this forum from the not-so-constructive ones. So far this thread has been quite constructive

Fuel didn't work in SupCom because it was far too generous with the amount of fuel compared to the size of the map, and the penalty for running out of fuel was relatively minor. Fuel was not an effective leash on distance. All it did was make 10 minute long air patrols require the additional step of adding air pads.

Air needs a hard leash by some method. Ammo works in Zero K very effectively, and makes bombers exhibit the interesting behavior of flying into enemy anti-air to drop bombs, and then return to base to re-arm before heading out again. Each bomber also hits much harder because of the added time delay and exposure to anti-air. This is much more interesting than the huge independent air swarms you see in TA and SupCom, where each air unit is relatively weak, but when you have TONS of them in one place they just crush everything.

It looks like PA is going to use some kind of energy-based ammo system which air units will likely be able to replenish at an airbase or aircraft carrier. Based on its current implementation, it also appears that aircraft will slowly regenerate energy on their own.

Bobucles, traps are not a good solution to highly mobile units for the same reasons that turrets do not work. You would have to place traps in so many places that it becomes uneconomical. The mobile units can be everywhere, and a group of mobile units can focus on a single location while your traps or turrets have an impossible amount of area to cover.

The best way to deal with highly mobile units is with your own mobile units. This is why fighters will always be the best counter to enemy aircraft, even if they are more expensive and carry less firepower than ground anti-air. Ground-based anti-air should be absolutely brutal to air units because of its limited coverage and low mobility. The air units will always have the initiative against any ground-based anti-air, and can decide to avoid it or to engage and there is nothing the anti-air can do about it.

Making air units more expensive and higher-firepower doesn't just change their scale because I didn't say their HP should also be increased. When you buy an air unit you are spending a lot of resources on something that is extremely mobile, and can get a lot of kills when kept alive and used carefully. But which dies very quickly if you just fly it into an enemy fighter squadron or anti-air network.

This turned into a longer post than intended and i might be stating the obvious here.. But maybe it's something. If nothing else maybe just a reminder? Ah well, read on and i hope you enjoy.


What i really liked about TA was that it's obvious core was economy. "Should i build more resources or more units?" was the gamebreaking question. To this day the question i ask myself in my head when i'm thinking of investing (be it time, money, emotions or whatever) into something is always "will it be worth the metal?" since where you spent your metal was how you played your game in TA.

PA, as i'm sure all of you know, doesn't have metal makers and thus won't let you build resources the same way. However i still feel that economy should be the core of the game. Where do i put my metal? What do i do with the resources i gather?

And if economy is center of attention primary balance issues will be about balancing resources and making sure the symbiosis of energy and metal, both possible incomes and spendings, has a natural flow to it. Are there natural transitions between productions tiers? Is the gap between power gen, adv pwr gen and orbital pwr gen (what's it called the satellite) big or small enough? Should there be more reclaimable metal on maps? Why are there three tiers of energy but only two tiers of metal? How many metal patches should a standard spawn have? etc etc

Obviously i don't have the answers here but that's where i feel focus should be. If air has a too short range of some turrets turns too slow that can always be patched. Making sure economy has a nice flow to it and is at the same time challenging enough without being overly complicated should be the goal.

If you agree with me on this notion then the game structure is just going to be about providing the player with as many valid alternatives of investment as possible. Air should be good, sure. But so should naval, bots, turrets, nukes and everything else. Making all options valid so i have no safe way of knowing what my opponent does other than to scout and find out.

I guess i just wanted to take it back a step and say first things first. Are we happy with economy before we move on? Build the balance from bottom up.

Personally i haven't played for a while so i can't say too much but i still wanted to bring it up and see what the rest of you think. Hoping to be back in beta soon though...

I find that the economy ramps up rather significantly.

I find it hard to predict how many T2 factroys I should be building compared to T1 form an economic standpoint (And a strategic standpoint based on the effect of units).

But that might just require more experience.

I really don't see where air needs a leash. I'm a guy who typically builds 8+ T2 air factories and it's pretty rare for me to actually win a game with air. It doesn't take extensive defenses to make it costly to do a lot of damage to a base. I mean killing a single 2700 metal T2 energy structure is probably going to cost you 5 bombers in losses against modest defense by the time you make sure they can all get in there, hit the target and get back out, and that's assuming you've swept all the enemy fighters. T2 bombers are for hitting critical targets -- they are rarely cost efficient.


Ammo I don't like either because it's difficult to plan for. I don't know how many passes my bombers will need and it's not clear to me when I should pull them out to "recharge", or how to quickly grab the ones that expended all their ammo and get them out while the ones who didn't need to drop on their first pass can pick a new target.

I think ammo may be a good way to restrict artillery, but I don't like it in planes.

Ammo in PA currently is more like a long cool-down between firing rather then actual ammo.