Two Beta Builds, and a Partridge in a Pear Tree (58678 & 58772)

No one mentioned the new water graphics?
I love it because it makes the coast line much easier to read.

PS: i don't have HDR on because it is still buggy for ati 47xx cards

Why do people think that is a nerf?

I don't know, maybe they're talking about a nerf that I missed.

The only change to the commanders in this build was to the weapon, it appears to seek now.

Tanks are slow, bombs are slow. Mix up your ground units with bots. And as everyone else is saying.. fighters.

I love T2 bombers now. Or least, more than I did before. OPsonsofbitches that they were.

It's too bad that the bombs themselves don't even pretend to inherit any inertia from their source aircraft. Then again, the way aircraft fly, they probably don't have any inertia to begin with.

Err..... how can they inherit inertia?

The bomber writes it in a will, of course.

I believe the new T2 bombers are too strong OR it's time to implement commander cloaking.

It's basically coming down to air superiority and then sniping. The previous iteration of T2 bombers were just about worthless if the target commander just ran around in circles -- they wouldn't seem to get a firing solution and would just buzz around overhead. The new bombers are far better at dropping on him regardless of movement, which basically means that if you can beat down someone's air power, you can kill their commander fairly easy.

Commander cloaking would solve that problem.

Or some flak cannons.

I wish the T1 bomber and T2 bomber were not the same unit. It's obvious the T1 bomber is useless while the T2 version is a more extreme version of it.

The balance of the units aren't crucial right now in development, but the roles need to be better for it to be any fun. Otherwise, T1 bombers will never be built, and a rush to T2 will happen.

Isn't this partially related to Air never being the first factory? Bots and tanks are built en masse in T1 because a large number poses a significant threat and needs quite a large investment in military spending to deal with.

A large number of bombers gets eaten by a solitary fighter.

Exactly. This requires you to continually scout so you can make sure you counter whatever your opponent is doing. A few fighters can ruin a very large investment in bombers.

I just want to report that PA is currently not working for me anymore under Linux.

I was able to workaround before with: --software-ui

This no longer works, I get a mouse pointer, music, and black screen.

Slackware64-Current MultiLib
ATI Radeon HD 5650
Tested with 13.20 beta and 13.251 proprietary drivers.

Very sad.

Software UI VSync is quite broken on all platforms, but you still can force it to refresh if you enable performance info using Ctrl+P.

Which is like "RTS 101": scout thy enemy.

Though I usually just send in my bombers right behind a huge wave of fighters. Aside from killing enemy fighters, they soak up surface-to-air missiles while the bombers do their business.

The T2 bomber is going to get hit with a nerf again for sure.

Though I'm actually not too sure how best to nerf them.

I don't want to ruin their purpose, which is a high-cost way of reaching into someone's base to kill a high priority target; but we need to do something about the fact that the high priority target is often "the commander".

I think he needs his TA-style cloaking device.

Simple: make them rubbish against mobile targets again. They should be taking out high priority targets like nukes and anti-nukes, or defence lines to leave a commander exposed. Air is too mobile to ever be balanced properly if you let it attack commanders.

A large turn radius and needing to shoot well in advance, both will really purpose them against structures. This would be a great differentiation between Basic/Adv Bomber, Mobile targets vs Static targets.

For some reason my performance is now even worse...only get 10 FPS from begin on