Balance of flack, and should it change

Or you could replicate that but simply having effective AA counters.

The problem is that air is too cost efficient as it stands. If an advanced bomber makes a single pass over a blob of units and gets shot down, its still a win for the bombing side. An advanced bomber only has to kill 6 Dox to break even.

If your about to say "but you shoot the bomber down before they attack you" then it would be too powerful a counter to air.

if the bomber shoots first, the bomber is OP, if you shoot first, AA is op.

HUUMMMMMM, QUITE THE PREDICAMENT I SEE.

Its almost as if what is essentially a bots direct counter attacks it, its overpowered.

I believe you are protesting too much.

To quote myself.

I do not belive that is a case you can make, when every other unit works in a similar way.

This is how counters work, you attack targets you counter to have a net profit for units killed to units lost.

And If you are about to say that this is the reason you should increase their cost, I say that you need either better AA, to split up your troops better, to take out enemy factroy's before they become a problem (The old nuke solution) or to scout better (A classic problem solver).

I am assuming that you mean the metal cost of units killed to the metal cost of units lost.

I want bombers to work in a way so that for most cases they need to attack several times before they break even in terms of metal cost to build the bomber and metal cost of the stuff they damaged or destroyed.

Now if you had good AA near the bombers targets, then the bombers last long enough to drop there first bombs, but they die before they can attack a second time. In this case the bomber hasn't done enough damage to justify the cost of building it. Therefore the AA worked well and efficiently countered the bomber.

It is indeed. You are stuck with a fast unit that attacks quickly, and the only permanent solution is to kill it equally fast. That's quite a problem, because victory snowballs very quickly in either direction.

Anyway, I got this one knocked out of the park. Here goes:

Hey look at that. It's good against bombers but not gunships! How unusual is that? It even has a secondary use that in no way infringes on its ability to work.

that's a rather complicated solution, and I can't say I agree with it. Right now T2 bombers are overpowered, gunships are underpowered and flak anti-air is overpowered. Once T2 bombers are nerf'd (and flak along with them), I don't think we'll need to add gimmicky units just to specifically counter one other unit.
My suggestion for the bomber would be to reduce the bomber's speed considerably, reduce the bomb drop rate to retain the same spread between drops, and to decrease the bomber's turn rate/maneuverability. Right now they hit extremely hard, have lots of damage potential and tons of mobility. I don't think they need their mobility to be so great. Sending out your bombers to a specific area should be an important tactical or strategic choice, even if the enemy hasn't built much for counters yet, as is the case with ground and naval artillery. They should be able to see it coming by several seconds with good radar coverage, and they should be able to ambush you with ground units if your bombers aren't in a good position to deal with them.

But it's NOT specific. It is ideal against bombers yes, because it takes advantage of how a bomber leaves its back exposed after the first major hit. What better time to strike? However the unit has additional utility, some obvious and some not so obvious. That's how you make a single unit with more than a single role.

It is literally an AA missile tank with a cloak. Please tell me, what is complicated about that?

In WW II heavy bombers were not used on the front lines. They were used tactically to cripple production. The gunships should be the goto for anti ground unit maneuvers and T2 bombers should be used to cripple production or economy.

And as it has been said before, this was for the most part, the same case in FA. T1 and T2 bombers had trouble hitting alot of the more mobile units (Sniper Bots etc) and for the most part, Strat bombers couldn't hit anything that moved without seriously good micro. Using this method of "Fast unit, slow shot" worked fantastically well and ensured Bombers had their role without it going overboard.

The problem with this balance issue is the fact nobody is quite sure what is the problem anymore. Is it the bombers being too good or is it now the flak being too good?

If you want to go down this path then bombers should do much less damage and spend half there time dropping bombs on fields.

You shouldn't try to emulate real life in every game.

What's wrong with making intel a more essential component of the bomber game? Clearly a missed shot with bombers is more significant and painful than with typical units.

I think the Flak is fine as it is, but I do like the idea of putting bombers in an automatic formation to prevent clumping. It's obviously silly that 20 or 30 bombers can all look like 2 or 3. A nice counter to flak is just to have so many that they are spread out in a huge blanket, blotting out the skies. The flak would shred through them but any weak points would let a few bombers through and it only takes 4-6 to get past the flak line to destroy your com or cause serious havoc. It would also encourage bombing in waves.

I wouldn't mine clumping as long as planes physically cannot be in the same place, possibly by having them change heights.

This would also mean that Flak could perform in the same manner as FA making it less about sniping balls of planes out of the air and more about AoE damage to aircraft.

To me flak has always been a gunship defence rather then a clumping countermeasure, as in previous titles flak projectiles were slow even if fired predictively, making T1 more sniper like guns good at picking off stragglers in that instance.

What you say is true in regards to previous Flaks but you forget in FA we had T3 SAMs that did the job of what T2 Flak in PA is doing right now, except it's AoE. On top of the fact PA T2 Bombers are ALOT slower than the FA counterparts.

If PA T2 Flak acted in the same manner as FA T2 Flak did, along with T2 bombers flying on seperate Z-Levels if they were clumped, we'd see alot better T2 AA/bomber balance.

Never liked FA Sams, They shouldn't need to fire clusters of missiles when one larger one should be doing the job.

As for the bomber balance, I don't feel like that the flak and T1 interceptors should be the only ways of dealing with them, as that simulates the technology race of SupCom, and is something I don't like in general.

As it stands they are better in almost every respect to the T1 counter part, and they really have the feeling of invalidating the T1 AA game altogether.

And that needs to be dealt with.

Surely that is the whole point of teching up? T2 Bots are better than T1 Bots etc.

The problem with the T2 flak as it stands right now is the fact 1 shot from it can destroy from 5 to 500 bombers instantly outside of bomb-drop range simply because of stacking.