Advanced air units

This is completely wrong. It wouldn't even be difficult to make air units function as air support instead of as a straight up attacking force in huge numbers.

Make aircraft have relatively small payloads before they need to return to an airbase for more munitions. Make aircraft substantially more expensive and valuable than ground units. Make anti-air lethal, and make aircraft attacks against ground units lethal. You only need a few aircraft to guarantee a kill on a single target or on a small area of bomb splash, but it only takes a few anti-air units to kill those very valuable planes.

What happens is that air units will be used continuously in small actions. Some birds will be flying out, some returning, and others re-arming or on standby. Advancing with your ground units secures more land, clears the area of enemy air defense and allows you to deter the enemy from flying through that area with your own anti-air, and allows you to construct an airbase there.

True, you could just get an overwhelmingly large number of aircraft and fly in and wipe out the enemy base in one pass. But if they are constrained by re-arming, the sheer cost of so many planes to do this, and the inefficiency of doing so, strongly discourage it. Because aircraft are more expensive than ground units, are more vulnerable, and do not deal damage at the same relatively steady rate, you are paying an enormous premium for the mobility of a huge aircraft blob. If you have so many planes that you can straight up destroy an entire army or base and care nothing about the inefficiency of losing valuable planes to anti-air, then you could easily have used those resources to win using any other method. Including a more powerful, but slower, ground army.

Correct.

You are still describing the current state of the game.

I'm no expert, but to me it looks like giant masses of air units winning everything all the time.
Building AA units is literally useless. They are a waste of metal. What ledarsi was describing very obviously stated that that should not be the case, so you are very wrong in your response.

"Make Anti-Air lethal"

Idk... maybe I am just a lazy player, but I want the game to not be the same reactive air blobbing that happens over and over.

The plague of locusts happens as a result of two factors. Firstly, relatively durable air units that take a significant amount of damage from anti-air before dying. And secondly, air units that do not need to leave to re-arm (or refuel). In conjunction with their speed, these features make air units an exceptional attacking force to completely pick clean a huge area one sector at a time by consolidating the player's entire army investment on a single highly mobile point.

Durable air units makes them much more feasible to fight with together in large numbers. You are stacking HP together, which means a fixed amount of anti-air will need more time to kill them. If you have enough air units, it will simply take the AA too much time to destroy them, and the AA becomes largely useless. You can't cover everywhere in sufficient density to match the size of the air swarm. The air swarm can clear one area (including its AA) and move on to the next area.

Instead what should happen with air units is that sending a large number of air units all at once is exposing a lot of air units. You do get more firepower, but you are also risking valuable units that could easily be cut down very quickly. Sending more planes than necessary for a particular mission should be a really, really bad idea, since you are risking more than is necessary in order to destroy the target.

And the fact that they do not need to leave means you can blob up a large group of them and use it as an independent primary attacking force. If they have to leave to get more missiles then you can't actually just attack anywhere you like. A plane that flies out and drops its entire payload on the first enemy it sees has to return to base. If you want to hit a distant target, you have to fly past enemies along the route, potentially including anti-air. Because of this limited firepower, air would necessarily act as flexible, powerful support, and could not just completely annihilate an entire army or base in one pass, unless you have truly overwhelming numbers (more planes than he has targets).

Of course, planes should be extremely powerful. It's just that it should be much more efficient to use a smaller air force, with each plane making many trips. You definitely can bomb the enemy into the stone age beneath an unending rain of explosives, grinding his base to dust one bombing run at a time using a lot of planes. That is sustained strategic bombing, and we should have units tailor-made to do exactly that; the B-52 of PA. But strategic bombing is very different from a cloud of planes that moves into the area, swiftly wipes it out, and moves on- that is how a ground army works. Planes making multiple trips means you have to obtain and maintain control of the skies as well as an air corridor to reach the target base. And it takes more time than parking an army of bots right in the center of the base, which is offset by the fact that the planes can reach the base very quickly while the bots will take some time to arrive.

Under normal conditions, you should use planes to chew on the edges of the enemy's air defense network. Because you will have to fly over anti-air, and also fly out again, you must exercise extreme caution before making a large attack deep within an enemy's air defense grid. You would lose a LOT of planes on the trip in, and might completely fail to reach the target. Pushing up your ground forces, and establishing advanced (as in forward) air bases will give your air units more safe airspace, and greater reach.

If aircraft can fly anywhere and carry an unlimited amount of firepower they can just attack-move freely and wipe out everything in their path. More planes means more firepower everywhere, and it doesn't have to peel off when spent or hold its munitions and risk being shot down with a full payload.

No, I am right in my response. I can back it up through actual experience playing the game. Ledarsi's proposed changes aren't enough to change the gameplay.

Firstly, Bumblebees and AA units kill one another.

There is no unit which is intended to counter the Hornet.

Anti-air is lethal. It is lethal to fireflies, hummingbirds and bumblebees. If you have one bumblebee, you will lose it if you attack near an AA unit. In addition, mobile AA can't be hit by BBs if the mobile AA is moving.

The Hornet doesn't have a counter. Any counter. Other than hummingbirds and peregrines. Oh, and the Stomper, if you get lucky, 1 shots it. Anti-air is perfectly lethal. That wasn't the part of the post I was commenting on.

This is current game state.

• Bumblebees take 30 seconds to build, ants take 15. Hornets take 45 seconds to build, Levellers take 15. Hornets and bumblees are both substantially more expensive in terms of energy than their land counterparts, and energy is a scarcer resource than metal.
• Anti-air is lethal, so are aircraft. You only need a few aircraft to guarantee a kill on a single target, but it only takes a few anti-air units to kill those very valuable planes.

There is no T2 anti-air. There is no anti-air which was ever intended to kill Hornets, except for the Peregrine.

A perfect description of the T2 bomber snipe. Or in fact, any attack with bombers. Bombers aren't meant to fly away home.


Earth 2150 has ammunition - if you wanted to preserve aircraft HP, you flew them around AA. If not, you flew them directly at their target. They attacked, returned to base to rearm, rinsed and repeated. Eventually you get to a stage where you can just blitz the defender. Sure, they disappear back home between bombing runs.

Rise of Nations has fuel, time in the air is limited. And still locust blobs are a problem.

It's unavoidable, you can't get around it. The simple and unavoidable fact of the matter is that fireflies, which are the weakest air unit and the least durable, will eventually reach locust-like swarm size. It doesn't matter what changes you make to the system.

Watch Clopse's twitch tv game. There is one where he does use his bombers in small little groups. Right up until he gets enough T2 bombers, and then he goes in for the snipe. It's unavoidable, it's part of the game, and the whole point of locust-like swarms is that actually, when you've reached critical mass, it doesn't matter if you need to hang around target or not. If the enemy has fighters, they might even destroy your retreating bombers. Critical mass means you destroy the intended target despite the AA defending it.

Air factories as vanilla rearming stations, dedicated (consequently more capable) rearming stations/air repair pads, carriers as mobile/highly capable rearming stations, T2 land air rearm/repair crawlers.



Excuse the crap drawing. Air repair pads always seemed sorta optional anyway, and ledarsi's solution would definitely make carriers more pivotal.

What about something similar to the AC-130 gunship of the U.S. Marine Corps?

That is essentially a gunship is with the gimmicks of fixed wings and flying in a circle.

Mike

Well, one key advantage of gunships is they can potentially stay out or on the edge of range of AA in a base, instead of having to fly right into it just to attack. This makes them very powerful, and they have to be balanced, reducing speed and attack power to the point where they essentially become flying ground units, acting exactly the same. If the gunship has to fly in a circular path around the target, this advantage is removed, and the aircraft is more unique. Yes, it's on the verge of gimmicky, but I think it's just on the right side. The gunships in FA would circle targets to some extent, and it helped balance I think.

TA had it's T2 bombers have an additional laser turret on the top.

In the lore it was supposed to help them shoot down enemy fighters but in reality it was much better during a turn to shoot some of the really weak metal extractors or radar.

The problem is that you can work around that gimmick with micro though.

Mike

But that's fine, isn't it? At some degree moving your troops personally should always make quite a difference on the battlefield. Otherwise where is the fun?

Yeah sure it's fine to a degree, but the mechanics at work for such units are too susceptible to larger micro payoffs.

Mike

The more I dominate with air, the more I actually think the balance isn't that bad.

It's just that 19 out of 20 players are doing it wrong, so 19 out of 20 are easy to smash.

THINGS THAT GIVE ME TROUBLE:
Massed missile towers (double or triple lines of them) + massed fighters
A healthy mix of anti-air vehicles in your ground attack force + massed fighters

THINGS THAT DO NOT GIVE ME TROUBLE:
Massed fighters alone
Massed missile defense of any type, alone
Fighter patrols (unless the entire patrol route is well contained inside ground-based missile defenses)

Basically if you try to out-fighter me, it's a binary situation. He who makes the most fighters wins. If you make "quite a lot" of fighters and have them backed up with ground based missile launchers, then I'm in a pickle. If I engage your fighters, I'm going to take a lot of extra losses from those missile launchers. If I don't engage your fighters, I probably can't bomb you. So I have to make more fighters than you, by a large enough margin to also account for the ground based defenses.

Usually I end up trying to nuke their border defenses so that we can have a nice fighter duel in the clear.


I do agree that bombers, in particular, and maybe fighters, should fly slower.

I also think certain structures, namely anti-nuke launchers, should have more hit points.

But basically I don't think air balance is terrible so much as it's just that most people are woefully under-prepared for it. People who combine ground missiles with fighter balls are what convinced me that all of my bomber attacks should be backed up by a plan to also do artillery creep at the same time. Most people die to the bombers but those who are prepared require some sort of backup plan.


Incidentally, I also think land factories take WAY too long to produce units and those units are too slow to walk out so that another unit can start. I've tried backing up my bombers with ground units but man, you need SO MANY FACTORIES to produce a decent ground force in a decent amount of time, even with a full green economy.

I maintain that part of why air is so good is because it's just "relative to ground" and ground is so slow and weak right now (whereas anti-ground defenses are quick to build, long range, very accurate and basically super awesome).

Oh, it might also be nice if fighters could somehow take longer to kill each other without impairing their ability to kill bombers. Maybe if the flight time+speed on their missiles was reduced so that they tended to still hit bombers but may fizzle out against each other?

This would make ground defenses count for more because I couldn't quickly swamp your 50 fighters with my 150. We'd have to slug it out for a bit, giving you more time to bring in another fighter group and giving your ground based missile launchers more time to be useful.

It would be even better if we weren't seeing 50 vs 150 fighters at all, most of the time.

Suppose each fighter carries, say, six powerful air-to-air missiles. Once it has fired all its missiles, it might have a secondary spinal-mounted gun or something, but most of the time a spent fighter is going to want to fly out and re-arm. Instead of a huge blob of 100 fighters all in one place, you are instead going to have some fighters currently on station, others returning to resupply, some currently being resupplied, and others flying back out again.

In order to have 100 fighters continuously on station in a particular area, you need several times more than 100 fighters since not all of your fighters can be present at once, assuming the area is hot. The quantity you need will depend on the distance from air staging; more distant air staging means your planes need more time to fly there and back. In practice, you are going to have far fewer aircraft on station at any given time.

Furthermore, the total output of those aircraft is actually limited. If you have 10 birds overhead, and each is carrying six missiles, then you have a grand total of 60 missiles in the area. Even at one-shot kill with perfect accuracy, you actually cannot eliminate more than 60 targets instantly. You are going to have to make multiple trips back for more weapons and unload several times.

I also don't see an issue with giving such aircraft a limited internal regeneration rate which means you don't actually need air staging, but it should be hugely beneficial when it is available by drastically reducing a plane's downtime.

I don't see what you're trying to accomplish here. It won't help change the "50 vs 150" problem. It will just mean that when I have 150 to your 50, I really have 75 out there fighting while the other 75 are rearming and you only have 25/25 for the same reason. The rearming thing doesn't help that much either, I think, since I would just build a rearming station nearer to your base. And the limited ammo actually hurts the guy with fewer planes even more since even if he's winning he doesn't have enough weapons to account for all the enemy planes.

I don't see where "150 vs 50" is a problem that needs solving though. It's no different than being attacked with 150 Doxes while you only have 50 to defend yourself. You have to outproduce your enemy, outflank your enemy or lean on defensive structures to even the odds.


The only issue I see with fighter duels is that they happen so fast, there's not much time to call in support.

Think about the effect that having to stage your fighters has on the number of fighters you can have in the area. First of all, two players with an equal number of fighters will not be able to reach into deep each others' air space with their full strength. Even going by your fairly conservative reduction of 150 to 75, fully half of one player's birds are returning to base or flying back out again. While the defender's birds are right next to their air staging, and need far less downtime to re-arm.

But an uptime of fully half of the plane's life seems very, very high to me. If you want to be highly efficient with your aircraft, you want them to fly in, unload their weaponry, and leave immediately. Time spent flying around with munitions on board is time wasted, and time where you are exposed to enemy anti-air without doing damage. Planes want to unload and get out as quickly as possible, both to maximize their weapon efficiency and also to minimize the chance of death. As a result it seems to me that planes will spend the majority of their time flying to and from air staging, and relatively little time actually flying in a hot zone dropping bombs and taking fire.

Furthermore, you say you would "just build a rearming station." But that structure or ship is actually a huge change because now surface control is integrally involved in exerting air power. It's not as simple as "just build it" because the enemy can find and destroy it. Taking control of land to build an air base matters, and seizing control of an enemy's land being used for air staging also matters.

And it is important to remember that air staging is a limited resource, not a binary presence/absence going from zero to unlimited immediately. In order to continuously resupply more planes, you have to have more air staging capability in the area, which costs resources. Even if you have a lot of planes, if you have relatively limited air staging infrastructure nearby their downtime would still be quite long. This means larger groups of air units are more effective closer to areas with more air staging infrastructure, and get less effective with distance since they spend more time flying back and forth. Building just a little in the front will obviously help, but it doesn't automatically give you unlimited license to use an arbitrarily large number of planes there.

T2 bombers are OP. Two of them can wipe out a 30 unit ground force instantly.

Ok, this is kind of...weird....

I was thinking of fighter swarms and dogfights, and I remembered playing Star Wars EaW a year ago.
In that game, tactics were focused around large capital ships and fighters. But, instead of annihilating eachother instantly, fighters went into long and complex dogfights in which there was no clear winner. It let bombers scoot around fighter screens by sending in a few fighter units to engage the enemy. Sometimes the opponent would react in time, but mostly he would not. Fights usually ended within 20-30 seconds or so, but there was always one or two fighters left on each side.

Maybe if a similar mechanic were implemented for t1 and t2 fighters? It would be as random as the fights are now, but not as focused on numbers for a quick victory.

Also, things that really annoy me: my mid-game for matches now consists of the following build:
T2 Air, T2 Veh, SPAM T1+2 AIR. I dont even build more than ten vehicle facs anymore.

It is kinda depressing If I dont use air, someone else will and I will lose.



Anyway. Just my two cents