Balance of flack, and should it change

Id personally like air craft not to be able to stack like they do.

It is blatantly clear to anyone that aerial pathing is broken and any unit that doesn't take up any volume does not adhere to the physics model implied by real projectiles

Alright, so for that very reason you should stop arguing that AoE should only attack a certain amount of units. Air units are the noobtube of PA.

As a side note, for someone with a tag that is a flightless bird you sure love things that can fly... envy? (jokes)

The prehistoric Kiwi flew to NZ.

Eh? I was making general comments about splash damage. In general. Every "splash" attack does maximum damage to an unlimited number of targets in the area of effect. And splash damage isn't spherical either.

It's a problem inherent to the AOE attacks in PA.

Splash should thin out a formation, not act as an impenetrable wall.

Now, if you just greatly decrease the fire rate of the flak turret, the effect is that baiting a flak turret with a cheap air unit becomes more effective.

Currently a bomber will take two direct hits from the Flak before it flies through the field, which will kill it. That's not how Flak should work. Aircraft should always be able to fly through a single flak turret, because their main defense is speed. It should be the attrition of a deep network that kills them.

I think StormingKiwi has the best solution. Let the flack load up with 10 SAMs. One missile equals one kill but it must deplete all ammo before it can reload and the reload takes say 2 or 3 seconds. Now let's play it out.
the Advanced SAM is prepped and ready to go. A couple stray fighters come into range and are shot down. The SAM launcher still has 8 missiles ready but it cannot top off. After a bit of time passes it has shot down 4 more planes. Now it has 4 missile loaded and ready. Now the main force comes in. SAM launches its 4 remaining missile and takes out 4 planes but it has to reload now before it can fire again and the larger numbers overwhelm it's position and it goes down.

Additionally the targeting range should be at least equal to a T1 radar. If it cannot shoot before a T2 bomber, targeted on it's position, starts to drop it's payload it has failed, in my opinion.

Flack does need a nerf, but then every one will start crying about commander snipes. If flack is to be nerfed then the commander needs a cloak or something to keep him safe.

Also mobile flack plz.

So if flak gets nerfed , t2 bombers should get nerfed.

Flak weapons deal AoE damage to soften up enemy forces. If they are punching holes in the sky they are no longer a flak.

Plenty of potential anti air options have been suggested in older threads.

What you describe is no longer a flak. It is a standard issue missile AA.

What if the T2 AA was not an AoE Flak, but instead a very high speed, medium damage chaingun in the same vein as a Tunguska?

Blobs don't become ineffective in 3 shots from a Flak turret. And T2 Bombers don't utterly ignore all semblance of AA.

I don't really see the need for changes like this. All they need to do a put a limit on how many targets or how much damage a single shot can achieve. This doesn't automatically mean flak need a name change.

The best damage cap is to not do so much damage in the first place. The AoE anti air weapon is knocking the direct fire AA on its ***. There is simply no excuse for that.

But doing that would then make Flak entirely useless when aircraft stacking is eventually fixed. Unless of course the AoE is increases by a significant portion (and the metal cost too for balance sakes).

How would that work? My suggestion would only be a noticeable to flak when aircraft stack above a set number.

So are you in favor of weak flak and strong single target AA?

There is no favor involved. It is not possible to design useful units any other way. AoE is a damage multiplier, which allows a weaker weapon to quickly dominate over a single high damage weapon. You do not give one weapon the best of both worlds without killing the other.

There are of course a dozen other ways to deal with air on any level you damn well please. Pure damage is the simplest and least flexible of solutions.

I don't agree on there being no other direction, cost is cost.

However, if it has AOE it already has a use. At least, most other games balance that way.

In most RTS, if it has AOE or Piercing or Chain-hit, it usually has lower damage and thus is only used on groups but does more dps to any more than 4 enemies at once, while single hit weapons do higher damage but to just one unit, taking longer to kill more than 4 at once.

Example, the EDK Technovolt from Fall of Cybertron. That has like 15damage-per-hit, while the X18 Scrapmaker on the same class does like 40 a hit and is spread rapidfire. The difference, is with the scrapmaker, 1 bullet always lands on 1 enemy and it does that to 1 enemy, while the technovolt chain-hits off anything on impact, meaning if you get 4 guys in a group it does 15 to each constantly and an accumulative 60 damage total. NOTE: the other use of the technovolt, is to shoot the ground at a corner and get consistent dps against a hiding enemy, whereas the scrapmaker barely hits or not at all against an enemy hugging corner or hiding altogether.

Back to PA balance, I wouldn't mind if flak did half the dps of direct AA, but did uncapped damage to anything in it's area. Meaning, it could kill 20 aircraft at once, and just as well, but it does it in 10 hits while missiles kill in 3-6 each. Thus, single shot AA kills individuals faster and anything below 3 units faster, and flak kills any more than 3 units faster. One could get by flak with spaced out bombers, one could get by missiles with a blob. For a higher cost, players could use a couple of both or a lot of either one, but dat cost means just avoid it or kill it with land army.

And yet in the same post, you describe AoE weapons dealing 1/3 the damage of direct fire in exchange for being more powerful against 3+ targets.

Don't get me wrong, there are certainly other ways for battles to play out than flinging simple damage numbers around. But 3 kiloposts have taught me that those sorts of tricks can't actually be taught. Either ya know what they are and how to use them, or ya don't.

The devs have mentioned making certain AA weapons unable to target ground. Who can blame them? The anti air flak weapon deals an order of magnitude more damage than any anti-ground defense with less cost, more raw health, and no downside whatsoever. It is not possible to make this kind of mistake without simply wanting to watch the world burn.

Actually that's an interesting idea.

Picture, if you will...

A chaingun that's AA, deals 450 damage per shot, shoots 2 rounds per second, but is grossly inaccurate. If a single plane comes in, it might fire 20 rounds at it without getting a single hit. But if 50 planes come in, it's facing more of a "can't miss" scenario and its 900 theoretical DPS becomes a reality.

For that matter, maybe the flak gun could work like that. It fires AE air bursts, like now, but really inaccurately. This way it's pretty useless against 1 plane -- it tends to just keep missing -- but against 50 planes it's bound to hit something.

This might create an interesting dynamic where flak is useful for thinning the herd but is not that great at performing a total wipeout. It will quickly reduce 50 bombers down to 5 but will really struggle with those last 5 unless there's some high accuracy AA around to help.

Currently flak can wipe out 1 bomber as fast as it can wipe out 100. A double row of flak doesn't just thin the herd -- it might as well be a brick wall.

People seem to want their chaingun AA lol.

My post described the mechanic being discussed before, multitarget with less damage. I didn't say there was no other way. I am just saying, that is a common way to go. IE Technovolt VS Scrapmaker, Chaosrift VS RiotCannon, Burstrifle VS Diskshredder. Well, that last one technically backwards.

Generally, it could do as much damage as a missile turret and be multitarget and just not target ground. As long as it then doesn't completely overpower air using only small numbers. That would require a hard limit range, and then people should expect not to use them in blobs anymore, because right now almost everyone coordinates bomber attacks where they fly up inside one another's arse in a congo line, and flak has no problem killing 30 t2 bombers doing that. Not that it makes me sad, that. People who do that make me sadder, hurting them kind of makes me feel a little better.

With the current state of T2 bombers, I can't really blame uber for making flak OP. Right now it's more or less 'counter the broken mechanic with an even more broken mechanic'. It's not a good solution, but it solves the problem in the meantime.
I seriously doubt the balance of flak will remain as is; the damage is too high and it's far too cheap. I don't think that the flak mechanic is to blame, and I don't think it's worth it to suggest mechanic changes before more balance changes are made to the tower (and the units it's meant to shoot).

This has the same problems as flak. With the current air mechanics, bombers group up into small clumps. This is what makes flak OP (forget about stats for now). What you describe is something that will be weak against small clumps, but great against a more spread out flock of planes.