Missle units (in particular air craft)

That wasn't his point.

Here's my two cents: It's all about balance and making the game interesting and dynamic. If we wanted to be logical, then it is reasonable to assume that technology could eventually be developed that would enable a missile that could hit any target from any platform... but like Brian pointed out, if there were one unit that could do everything... why build anything else? In my opinion it is already sort of annoying that missile defense towers can hit ground units.

This is true, I over looked this in my post. Thanks for all the responses to this. I feel people don't think that it is a good idea because of balancing and "if you had a unit that could do both, why would you build anything else?"

Air craft in TA were weak, especially the T1 fighter. Three missiles could wipe it out, and the missile truck and towers could take it out in one pass. The fighter could shoot the ground but either cause of extra HP or armor on ground units, it would take either several passes or 4-5 fighters to take out 1 tank. Not efficient use of resources for sure. A fleet of aircraft could, theoretically, take out a large army of tanks, but if you're building tanks, throw in some missile trucks and you're likely to walk away with a lot of dead fighters and still have many tanks left to defeat an enemy who wasted too much money in the air.

It's true that balancing it wouldn't be as easy as saying, "fighters only purpose is to shoot down bombers and other fighters, so don't worry about it", but the game won't be nearly as interesting as having multi-purpose units.

This is a good point. And really, we do have that already with missile cruisers. In TA, the missile cruisers could hit a target in air or ground from a relatively long distance. Not the best weapon, but it worked. The reason that it could work but people would build other units, is that aircraft are weak in comparison to a tank. Tanks can do more damage, take more damage. A player could, theoretically build a fleet of aircraft only, but their forces will be much weaker than yours and probably much more expensive.

TA managed to strike a decent balance between anti air weapons and ground pounders. And that was a game where everything could shoot up. So it's definitely not impossible.

My thought exactly. And with only one race this time, it should be much easier to balance than in TA. Unless we look at the past and see that the only unit ever worth building in TA was fighters, I think that people will still build other units than a fighter that can also hit the ground

The biggest thing I liked about TA was almost all units could shoot at anything. Tanks could even shoot at planes. There were no stupid rules like so many other rts have. This was also my biggest complaint with supcom, you had to build multiple towers everywhere, one for air one for ground one for ships one for long range....

And I don't understand all the naysayers "it wouldn't be balanced blah blah" bullshit.
Like in TA you make air much weaker relative to land units. So missile towers can one or 2 shot fighters, but gonna take more for tanks. Fighters could take out a column of tanks, but very inefficiently.
This changes most the early game, as you can build missile towers to defend both against early air scouts and land scouts.
The laser towers should be a much higher dps tower, capable of shooting up aswell, but extremely poor accuracy relative to MTs.
On a similar note I'd like to see a more TA style artillery, inaccurate long range and aoe.
I'm not a fan of the pin point accuracy pelters, they shouldn't be sniping moving targets at long range.

First post

Well some people do make the argument that we did indeed all only build TA fighters.......

There were a lot of reasons that fighters kicked *** in pretty much any game. In TA, fighter spam was pretty easy to deal with even if they could attack ground.

The hard thing in any TA game or clone was trying to attack with a ground army...

I'm continuously seeing people state that the ground AA was the best units to spam, and outdid all other ground units and that's why they only shoot air now. Then I see people saying you just spammed air via gunships, bombers or superiority fighters and that was good game. Duh fok? Make up your minds or don't, but the way I see it, it's constant contradictions on a self-destroying topic that gets nowhere.

To be honest, I really never saw any of the problems people keep bringing up on the subject of tanks shooting at aircraft, gunships being too op, ground AA being the best units. Just.. really? I won't lie that some of the units should have been slightly weaker, and I do realize that balance isn't going to be a 100% guaranteed thing but this huge overpoweredness problem that is brought up every time someone talks about TA is really not as bad of a thing as it's implied.

- First off, flak ate gunships alive. Problem goddamn solved. I've sent over 600+ more than dozens of times into the mouth of simply 4 or 5 flak spread out. Even if I targeted the flak first before the main target, I lost the entirety of that airforce in a given.. 4 seconds. If that. Sometimes they never even arrived at their intended target at all. It's definitely something for undefended areas. You wouldn't sink that many resources into gunships just to run them into a deathwall. That's inefficient to the point of stupid. Gunships may have been a bit too powerful on damage output, and that's a fair argument in my opinion, but they're flying glass cannons. Not really sure what you expect otherwise.

- If your ground force is dying to gunships, you lack flak. If it dies to bombers, you lack flak and/or general AA. If you're dying to hundreds of superiority fighters, you're doing something very, VERY wrong. The idea that AA ground units are supposedly this be-all-end-all unit of better than everything else, then there's no reason to have such a problem with fighters if kept with mobile flak dotted about. A major ground force should be shadowed by aircraft for protection anyway, irrelevant of it's unit makeup. A lot of minor losses like this can easily be blamed on balance or design, but are realistically nothing more than bad tactical decisions and/or poor strategic planning.

- AA ground units (vehicles) did jack diddly in damage to other ground units in comparison. They had large hitboxes, didn't have a lot of health, and when turning or stationary, they had bad acceleration to balance their high top speed. If gunships aren't an answer because of flak, throw a bunch of fast moving units like the Panther. Core has more tanky units like the Can, Sumo, and Goliath to soak damage while their faster units like Mortys eat face. Sure, the ground AA could have been a bit slower and/or did slightly less damage if both were needed, but this is a balance issue, not a design issue. Unit speed, health, and damage can be modified.

- Air fighters doing a lot of damage were definitely very powerful, but this was, again, a balance issue, not a design issue. Giving them superiority in the air while not being overpowered compared to ground unit health isn't that big of a deal. It's balance by damage and health numbers, not design.

- Tanks shooting air and missing was at least somewhat balanced with the mechanics that plasma bullets moved slow and didn't hit fighters and some bombers. Their turret rotation speed was also slow. They did a lot of damage to anything stationary though, like gunships or construction aircraft since most aircraft in the game have low health in comparison. I see this as a perk, not as an imbalance. They didn't even bother aiming at aircraft that flew over too fast unless the turret rotation speed was fast enough to track it. Things like Sentinels had really fast turret rotation speed, so they were guilty of tracking the aircraft but only firing when the aircraft was slow enough. Their inability to lead the target to hit it could be either a bug or balance by design. I don't know to be honest. I'll probably never understand the hate of tanks shooting aircraft, but obviously fast bullets create the problem that we saw earlier where AA units weren't even needed, irrelevant of how bad they were at their job, and air units had no purpose against a blob of tanks. This is a problem with shell speed, aircraft speed, targeting, leading, turret rotation speed, and hitboxes.

The idea of trying to "fix" any type of balance issue by removing it completely is just simply preposterous and lazy in my opinion. I completely understand decisions to not waste funding, but tweaking a few numbers on objects that already exist won't cost nearly as much as creating an entirely new setup where air and ground are completely separate and trying to balance that all over again.

Balance in itself is a fickle thing. Opinions are as far and wide as the userbase itself. It doesn't help that people can be swayed or convinced, change their opinions at any time, and be completely unpredictable. It's a good thing we have hard-coded numbers for things like health, damage, speed, and other such stats to effectively balance the game as close as possible. If it were like the users in the forums, it'd never be balanced because you can't balance something that's never the same thing twice.

I think the major part of this is that all the weapons in TA were physics based (or what passed for physics at the time, I'm not sure about how the game engine handled things back then). I can't count the number of times I watched a tank or other ground weapon shoot at one air craft, miss, but hit another one!

If I were to go out and suggest a way to "balance" AA being able to shoot at the ground, I would start with having AA weapons (missiles, flak, etc) do very little damage. Like 10 hp per shot or something. Since the game doesn't really have armor types at the moment I think that adjusting HP would be the way to go. Now give fighters 20 HP or something. Two shots to take out each fighter. Now, give tanks or what not lots of health, say 100 HP. Now, fighter strafing runs at tanks would do damage, but overall, it would take 10 passes, or 10 fighter craft, to take out a tank. This would go for AA missile turrets that could shoot the ground as well.

Now, if you had 10 tanks trying to bust down your door, would you build a bunch of fighters and hope they don't have a couple AA trucks with them, or would you rather build tanks to fight them off? I think that everything in the game can have a niche, but I think allowing for a unit to be usable outside this niche can be beneficial to the game for fun and creative strategies.

Yeah, something like that. You'd have to test large swarms of fighters versus large swarms of tanks, though. If it's more efficient than bombers, then it may be a problem. Though, I don't know how fighters will react when they start implementing the mechanics to make columns of tanks less blob-like and more spread out. Not sure if that's going to be more efficient than if they were packed together like they are now. Fighters in TA had splash with their missiles, so they could hit multiple units. I don't think this is a bad thing, but I can see how it would be extremely powerful. Then again, if you have a swarm of aircraft above your ground forces with no AA to speak of, it isn't even a fair fight to compare balance to begin with.

Either way, remember that the game isn't even being balanced seriously yet, so we may still see the return of everything shooting at everything with a more fair damage ratio this time around. Just because something may be too powerful and abused doesn't mean we should remove it entirely. It just means it should be tweaked so it CAN be used equally.

TA definitely got the mechanics right. It just needed slightly better balance and an adjusted damage ratio. This was a very long time ago though, so you can't expect everything to be perfect. The fact that it's so close is amazing to me, yet people still take these mechanics out completely.. it baffles me.

Looks like it's time to mention this again.

In TA, all AA weapons did 2.5x bonus damage to planes, and most ground defenses like HLTs, etc. did about 0.5x damage to gunships. It has almost nothing to do with physics-based gameplay, except that in general AA projectile velocity was much higher in TA. AA weapons lost a lot of velocity starting in Supcom, likely to allow bombers to make at least one pass before blowing up.

Let all units shoot anything in range be them air, ground or naval. Balanced. Done, that was easy In all seriousness missiles, lasers, shells, they should all be able to shoot anything. Some things should just be better at some things than others... Have AA-only units is such a ham-fisted way to do balance

Except it isn't balanced. That's how it used to be during Alpha. Ants used to be able to shoot at air.

With that being the case, air was completely invalidated because a group of ants would spam out so many shots that it was impossible for bombers to fly over an ant blob.

You didn't need anti air. You couldn't use bombers. Ants were the one and only unit.

Everything shooting at air means air is now worthless, and unbalanced.

So... in short. You're wrong.

If you raised bomber altitude and perhaps lowered Ant max turret angle I don't think it would be so much of an issue, since their ranges are spheres.

Fixed. Not the same as being able to shoot air.

I don't see the issue with this. Bombers are meant for static targets. You shouldn't be able to effectively engage ground units with them (which I think was in the latest patch notes. After reading that I let out an audible cheer!). Doing so made bombers less of a catch all air vs ground unit that was great for commander sniping and more specialized as they should be. It's really a genius way of dealing with the com sniping problem and Uber should be commended for that brilliant response to the issue. The only reason that was an issue in beta (and might still be now) is the huge lack of unit diversity.

I have nothing against general purpose units as long as there is some advantage to building specialized units. The idea of basic units being generic units and advanced being specialized appeals to me. There is nothing wrong with a unit like the samson or slasher if there are advanced units that perform the separate anti-land and anti-air roles much more effectively. Those advanced units will then have weaknesses against anything they are not specialized against, allowing them to be similar in price to the basic ones.