Advanced air units

I am really starting to get annoyed with this air thing.

It is not a war of attrition right now the way the rest of PA is - its closer to a nuke war with how binary it is. You just sit there and wait for the enemy to pound you into dust as they spam air units. There is no static defense you can build to defend against it, and unfortunately, a mass of air units only delays the inevitable. Once an enemy turtles and puts all of their eco into pumping out t2 air, there really isnt much you can do, especially in a FFA

In 1v1s, its quite balanced if both players play the air game - had a fight against another player that was this way, it was a ground+air war the whole game. It was fun and entertaining and interesting and HARD. It was DYNAMIC

But whoever had air superiority completely dominated each battle. Without fail.

I think Bombers need their speed cut a bit, and fighters their acceleration cut down. Might help alleviate the problem. Right now though, air blobs are so fast that it isnt two blobs annihilating eachother - its two galaxies colliding and slowly whittling eachother down. (look it up if you dont understand this)

I do not know if that is a change that would solve the issue - and it might not even be the end goal of aircraft - but thats the way it is now.

Further EDIT:

Air is really difficult to balance properly - its like trying to balance a watermelon on the tip of a knife. You could hit it just right and be perfect - or you could fail in any number of similarly hilarious ways.

For the air game to simply be PLAYABLE in-game, until they start balance iterations with the full unit roster, I think the t2 bomber carpet spread needs to be increased and total damage dealt lowered to, say, 3/4 of what it is now.

After that, we can go in with the full unit roster, and figure out what works and what doesn't. Trying to do so now is like trying to hit a nail with a telephone pole.

You should always be playing the air game though? Think about World War II - that was won by air superiority.Modern Warfare. It should always BE a ground and air game. Even T1 air will do a lot of damage. It is a war of attrition because you should be constantly scouting and attacking their airforce.

If you don't play the air game, instead only relying on ground, and they rely on air and ground, you lose.

I do agree with a change to bomber speed - at the moment intercepting fighters can't intercept them. A bumblebee travels at 83% the speed of a hummingbird.

The Dornier 17 traveled at 67% the speed of a Spitfire.

It helps to have the fighters slower, though. If they do get in range of a bomber flight, they can trail it and kill the entire group without overshooting. Edit: That may actually be a reason to make fighters faster, as a single fighter is just too dangerous to a large group of bombers.

In PA, it's already rocket tag in a sense. The only match-ups that aren't 1 shot involve the T1 fighter ("hummingbird") vs. adv air, or the missile defense turret.
Well, and fighters vs. factories. I'm surprised stormingwiki thinks it's a, for lack of a better word, legitimate threat. It's not something that occurred to me.

I personally liked in SupCom how you could click on the towers and upgrade them to T2. I think they should bring that to PA. The same with MEX. Instead of using a fab to essentially go and upgrade all of the MEX to advanced MEX, I think it would be more efficient just to click on them and select the upgrade.

As for as who gets what first to prevent the other player from being able to do the same thing is part of the game and not a balance issue, In my humbly honest opinion

Basically if they have removed your airforce to the point that you have been beaten back to your airfield, you're kind of stuffed completely. I see it as the fighters making strafing runs on grounded aircraft and fuel dumps.

Yep. It's called Air Supremacy.

I am always playing the air game to a certain extent - even in my most ground heavy matches I always have at least 3 unassisted/assisted air facs pumping out hummingbirds. The part I am annoyed at is people who go all air to start - no ground game - who I am unable to attack or scout properly before they get 25 t2 bombers and 100+ fighters, then go to town on whatever I throw at them. This includes armies of hundreds of land units, with a mix of t1 and t2, and some very heavy air cover.

I've been pumping away cheerfully at the 20 minute mark, having half the planet in map control, when suddenly I get attacked, then slowly eaten and deteriorated down to nothing by this turtle dude on the other side of the planet running nothing but t2 bombers.

If I get extremely lucky, he will be in a sizable lake with pelters and a couple of bluebottles. Go figure.

I have, however, started using even more of my eco to go for air facs as of late - so instead of a starting build of 1 bot, 2 air, and 4 veh, ill go 1 bot, 3-4 air, and 2 veh.

Suddenly I can overwhelm air defenses in seconds.



Also: In WW2, enemy airfields were tens, if not hundreds of miles away, often deep within enemy controlled territory. Unless you are playing on a size 4000 planet (how.....I dont even want to know) this really isnt realistic. It takes our aircraft seconds to reach an enemy base, compared to a 20 minute warning from radar.
This doesn't negate your point - not by any means, but it does stand to reason that we could use more of a warning when an enemy air force is on the way. A slower speed would help this (not significant ofc, maybe 25%) and larger radar coverage or larger vision for AA too.
EDIT: Oh, and some t2 flak. THAT would be fantastic.

Yeah that's true...

I do think that T2 bombers are kind of incomparable to anything really. T1 bombers are balanced with fighters and AA, but well, T2 bombers just aren't.
Don't forget about accelerated scale in RTS games - the distance between Northern French Airfields and London is 306km. A Dornier travels at 400km/hr. That's a 45 minute warning in real life.

In PA, the airfields are unlikely to be 300 "km" away from a target (that's just over a pelters range) and bombers travel slower than that, comparatively. PA actually gives you more reaction time.

I agree it could be achieved by slower speed. I'm happy to wait and see.

I know how and why it happens, but it seems like a bug, because fighters aren't otherwise capable of attacking ground units and the damage fighters do is incredibly high only because they're not allowed to attack ground units in the first place.

Also, can fighters even attack grounded aircraft? Last I heard, grounded fighters couldn't be attacked, but they could still shoot up, making grounded fighters even more dangerous than flying fighters!

Am I the only person that feels that, no matter how balanced/unbalanced, that air units are just not fun to play?

The damage fighters do is identical to the health of a bomber. They do the same amount as damage as a dox would. And well, it's kind of better than them just camping your factory forever. It forces you to do something about it. Besides, if they have fighters over your air factories, bombers would soon follow anyway.

I do agree that it is dumb. There is also an issue with the hitbox of a fighter. I killed a fighter with a bomber.

No they can't. That's why they don't attack the fighter until it starts flying off the factory.

Of course it does mean if fighters catch your fighters landed that your fighters actually stand some chance.

I agree. The question is, what should be done about it?

I would like to see an aircraft implementation that uses surface (or orbital) support structures or units like airbases and aircraft carriers. An individual aircraft would be a high-cost, high-firepower unit with limited munitions before it should resupply. As a result, aircraft have strategic considerations that involve taking ground.

This can be done using the current energy mechanic by making the energy recharge quite slow without air resupply, and by giving other air units energy bars, such as bombs for bombers and missiles for fighters or ground strike craft.

I also think air units should be more expensive, more powerful, and fewer in number (and less expendable) than ground units. But they should die easily to dedicated anti-air. Their strength is acting as highly mobile fire support for ground forces, such as eliminating a specific target behind enemy lines. They are fast, and largely impervious to a variety of ground units' weapons. But they pay for the privilege in high cost and fragility to anti-air.

I agree. I think fuel component. They fly until they reach bingo fuel, then they return to their base.

That would solve any problems you have about "fewer in number" - it's harder to support a large amount of them without having the ground control to match.

I kind of agree with the fuel idea, but I kind of don't like it at the same time. Almost all my experience comes from TA, so sorry if I reference that a bit, but I think that aircraft were done really well there. Fighters took a couple shots to take down (missile turrets fired fast enough to take one down in one pass usually), but that meant that two fighters didn't knock each other out immediately. A dogfight would happen (which I think was my favorite part of TA, over ocean, large scale dogfights were fantastic).

Advanced fighters weren't tougher, but they were faster and fired two missiles, making them more deadly as well as harder to hit. While not being much more of a threat to the ground (as fighters didn't do much damage against ground units, they were much more devastating in the air than normal fighters, which is where I'd like to see PA move towards. I'm also a big fan of aircraft being about to hit both air and ground targets.

I'd like to see fighters be a more support unit for both air and ground. Able to strike small units or single buildings on the ground in a "get in and get out quick" fashion. It'd make building fighters more worth it to me, other than being an AA fighter craft only.

Supcom fuel failed to address any problems. It is more concerned with how well you pay attention to a thousand fuel bars than it is with limiting any realistic range or capability. It is even worse with a streaming economy, because units are produced in a steady stream. That means units will run out of fuel in a steady stream as well.

I know you would like to think that's what happens, but it really doesn't.

- Range limiting structures act as central sniping targets for artillery and bombers. They do not stop air from being powerful and it creates a huge design hole of what happens when the bases are destroyed.
- Fuel does not limit range in any meaningful or correct way, as proven in Supcom.
- High cost does not make a unit strategic. Cost only matters indirectly, to create a value for a unit that determines whether it is worth using or not.
- High firepower does not fix any issue with bombers. If anything it only serves to make more issues.

The only thing that kind of sort of worked was ammo. Ammo allows a unit to have high damage in exchange for a severely limited DPS output. As such, targets must be chosen carefully. Unfortunately, PA has some blatantly high value targets that require top notch protection (I.E. Commander, nuke defense). Bombers will always be choked by their effectiveness against these key units, unless they can manage some other sort of defense.

Have you ever played C&C games? In Generals - there was Air General. All units had their ammo so to speak. 4 rockets for normal general, Air general could got up to 6 rounds. After each raid they had to go back to air field to refill ammo. This was great. There were even tactical nuke's in Chinesee General ! I loved that game. So much that now when searching for a good video - I dived into one movie for whole 40minutes! LOL!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iRi0HGmNrVU#t=97

I agree that the SupCom implementation of fuel is a bad idea. However, my specific views on that is that fuel was 10x to 20x too abundant than what it should have been.

I think that SupCom air was able to project damage at;

1. too great a range, and
2. too great in number.

One minute flight time before refuelling (compared to 16.7 minutes for T3 ASF) would have been a lot more interesting to see.


I'd like to see a reduction in the number of air units, but Neutrino has said that was never going to happen for Orbitals, so I highly doubt it's going to happen for Air.

This is true. I've played a couple of the C&C games and the ammo system really wasn't that bad. Air craft did significant damage to units in the air and the ground. But in exchange, it took a few seconds to land the aircraft, reload them and relaunch them.

What is also nice here, and someone talked about his concerns regarding this in the "mass game" was that returning to base was automatic. So in the zoom'ed out view I would see that my army of bombers denies attack and goes back and instantly I'm aware that they are going back to town for a refill. They could also (T2 maybe) activate their stealth technology to be immortal during comeback and than again when attacking they would be visible again. They could be also using some kind of hot flares to manouver against enemy rockets (be a little less fragile to enemy fighters). On the other hand I would like to see their weapon to be heavier and with huge output power. Like in Generals, make them "point" killers, not carpet bombers.

Earth 2150 did do it very well - because it limited resupplies to ammunition (fuel was infinite) So units could only attack units for so long...

It was good that it didn't limit range. But it did limit time between attacks.

Of course, there is the danger of just making them TOO weak.