Advanced air units

What troubles me about your post is not what you said but what you need to have a good anti air defense. From what you describe as a requirement for having a adequate air defense is quite large in stature, and only for fighting off air units. Maybe i'm not thinking big enough in respect to what should be built in a base for defense and for offensive capability, but the requirements of : build a sizable missile tower fortification/armada of anti-air + Fighter support just to defend properly against air is not a good solution.

I'm not saying that building both is ludicrous and unnecessary, but being forced into this hole where if you don't build both, you're just setting your self up for defeat.

I do think Ground Anti Air should have more Air deterrent then the current form where the missile trucks and bots basically spaz out rockets in a form of defense after a T2 bomber has dropped its payload on top of them. Who has lost more?

That's not fundamentally different than if I was spending all of my economy on Levelers and Doxes. You aren't going to be able to casually stop a group of 150 Levelers rumbling towards your base. You're going to need some serious defense, probably planned for and placed well in advance. Nobody would say, "It's not fair that I have to build all this stuff just to counter your ground rush. Ground is overpowered!" Anytime someone builds a ton of X, you'll need a ton of anti-X to fight him off.

And I think it's reasonably interesting that fighters > bombers > ground missiles > fighters.

That's why you must have combined arms. Those Stingers are not meant to kill bombers. They kill fighters, which can't even shoot back at them. So your Stingers help kill their fighters while your fighters kill their bombers.

...which is why I think the real problem may be fighter vs fighter. As the Bomber Whore, I shouldn't be able to rapidly overwhelm your fighter force, killing them so fast that your Stingers barely have time to get shots in, and then send in my bombers. I think it would be better if our fighters had to dogfight for a while, giving your Stingers more chance to shoot, making it riskier for me if I send in my bombers -- clearing your fighter force will be a lot harder and costlier for me when your Stingers are helping to guard them.

I've used this to beat other Bomber Whores, too. I send in a large force of Doxes and Stingers with my fighters set to assist the Stingers (I usually queue up like 10 assist commands followed by a return to base, so that they move from Stinger to Stinger as they get destroyed, then fly home if all the Stingers are dead). When the enemy Bomber Whore sends in his bombers, my fighters get him. If he realizes I have fighters in that clump and sends his fighters, I get help from my Stingers.


I almost never see anyone else do that, though. It's always 100% Stingers or 100% fighters.

My fear is that if we adjust it so that Stingers > Bombers, then bombers will end up useless. We've cut them out of the "fighters > bombers > ground missiles > fighters" loop.

Good points. I guess I am biased toward the ground warfare being the meat and Potatos that will of course need solid defense to stop, not Air.

Didn't really look at the relationship in that fashion [fighters > bombers > ground missiles > fighters] having the fighters and stingers/missile towers ultimately act as laser tower/artillery for air engagements. I guess I don't mind the synergy that bad. Just heavily biased towards ground Potatos doing all the fighting with air occasionally saying hello to kill a defensive tower or so.

I guess my real deal breaker is when you have a nice 100-200 size army of bots/tanks whatever march to the enemy...with a reasonable amount of stingers.. get evaporated with adv bombs or T1 bombs. with little to no loss from the bombers even though they just charged face full into anti air, it was like it wasn't there to begin with.

Yeah, you must have air cover for your ground attacks if you think your enemy has any number of T2 bombers.

And I do agree that ground is not remotely threatening enough right now. The improvements in the next patch to build speed should greatly improve that. Ground was never able to be the meat and potatoes because it took way too many factories taking up way too much space to get a useful amount of production going.

But even so, you'd better build some fighter coverage! I don't think bombers are or should be a "must have" but fighters are, and I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that.

They are threatening enough if you spawn close. If the planet is too large though, you're better off sneaking small groups into the opponents base and putting more of your eco into bombers.

Do you bother with T1 bombers?

Not really. I assume everyone agrees they are rubbish and will get improved in a balance pass eventually. I personally think T2 bombers should be single-bomb, very high damage, small-AE, mainly for use against structures while T1 bombers do carpet bombing with enough damage to be a serious threat to T1 units.

I have, sometimes, built about 5 early T1 bombers just to send against unescorted enemy fabricators or rogue Doxes that I run into but I seriously think that Fireflies may outdamage them for the same metal cost. The T1 bombers have a really hard time hitting anything that's moving. 5 Dox being micromanaged will make a mockery of T1 bombers but a bunch of Fireflies can actually whittle them down.

I occasionally try building T1 bombers again to remind myself why I don't build T1 bombers.

Basically my Bomber Whore plan involves getting a T2 bot factory ASAP for T2 econ and after about 2 energy plants and a couple of T2 metal extractors, I start plopping down T2 air factories, usually about 8 of them, all queued to do bombers. Sometimes I'll set my commander to assist the first factory because it's vitally important I get a couple of bombers right away since that's pretty much my only defense.


Shorter range games are a different plan but I still get T2 bombers somewhat early if at all possible.

Really curious to see what the new patch will do to this way of playing. I actually prefer ground. I just gave up on it.

This...this is exactly what I think should be done. I played TA a lot, and one thing that I think it did pretty well was that the T1 bomber was pretty useful all the time. Yes, the T2 bomber could take more than 3 missile hits (the T1 was very flimsy) and the T2 had the laser turret on it (which was a slight deterrent to fighters, especially in mass quantities). It bothers me that it takes multiple passes from a T1 bomber to take out a T1 radar.

One thing that was mentioned earlier is that missile speed and tracking should be tweaked. TA did this pretty well I think. Instead of a swarm of fighters running into another swarm of fighters and everything being done in 15s, dogfights would ensue as missiles from T1 fighters ran out of tracking pretty quick but only took 2 hits to destroy. Just having a couple T2 fighters could help out a lot. They took 3-4 hits and fired a second, longer tracking missile that made a huge difference.

I think that adding ammo would make a world of difference. One person before was talking of C&C and I think that a system similar to that (though having limited aircraft for each resupply/repair pads definitely wouldn't fly with PA) would help out the balance a bunch. Make aircraft a little tougher than they are now (maybe not bombers as T2 can really take a beating I think) and make attack and fade operations more successful than sustained air control without ground support and I think air would be a lot better.