POLL: Balancing Air - Continued!

That would result in some very weird behaviour. Bombers would essentially have to line up, so many would be forced to just float while waiting for their spot in line.

Also, what if you had two (or more) sets of bombers coming from opposite directions?

By all means, bombers should spread out from each other while not zeroing in on a target, but trying to prevent all overlap is just no feasible.

Depends on how well you set up your defences, really.

Why would they have to line up? Couldn't they arrange themselves in several ranks, with the width governed by a formation setting perhaps? Perhaps even three-dimensional formations? In regards to bombers coming to close to one another, it might be possible for them to perform minor evasive manoeuvers such as turning slightly when coming near other aircraft or changing altitude for a moment - of course this would be stacking in all but name...
And to address the efficacy of defense: While I do agree with you in general, I think that it also depends greatly on the speed of the bombers and the range of anti-air defense.

edit: I think I misunderstood your comment and mistook line-up for single-filing... my bad.

You didn't misunderstand; I did mean single file - let me demonstrate with my amazing paint skillz.



In the top example, the 5 bombers (red circles) will overlap with each other as they try to bomb the target all at once. They can't hit the target if they are next to each other, so columns or formations won't work. The only way then to avoid overlap is for the bombers to make their bombing run one at a time. Whether the units line up (will occur naturally if far away) or wait their turn in place, you are going to see some really weird behaviour. And this is only a small number of bombers, coming from one direction. Add other bombers coming from the other direction, or a large number of bombers and they are going to overlap. And if they are allowed to overlap then, it will be frustration/odd to not be able to at other times.

I see your point now. Do you think it might be solved by allowing bombers to not drop their payload onto an exact coordinate but rather an area centered on said point - with the size of the area being determined by the bomb's splash radius for example? Mind you, this is all just protracting the underlying issue but it allow a compromise between preventing stacking and enabling concentration of fire.

"Air units not overlapping, denying instant dropping of stacked damage on Commanders/Army blobs."
You are forgetting we are going to have formations. Units will be more spaced out so one carpet bombing will be much less effective. I think you are underestimating the gameplay effects of formations a lot.
And about bombing the commander, we can reduce bomber's direct damage but with a larger aoe.

And flaks melt stacked t2 bombers, just make some around your comm.

I agree that 'flying death' should be more valuable, as it is in a real military, through being rarer. However, the use of 100 bot engineers and holding half a planet will soon outmatch those stat adjustments to build times and expense, so this solution would perhaps delay the spamming of bombers, but not address the problem of stacked bombers' combined damage.

The column formation is realistic behaviour for bombers attacking a single target.
To build on vyolin's suggestion for AOE, and superouman's assertion that formations will solve everything, Air could be ordered to 'Attack this Area' in the same way that the new circle Patrol command works. They might then attempt to stay in formation and carpet bomb things.
The fact is, a column attack is much more balanced and realistic than 50+ bombers dropping their bombs on a Commander simultaneously.
I get the concerns over unit behaviour, but bombers could take off when their place in the column came; imagine a line and funnel, except everything in the funnel waits its turn without pushing, just chilling on the ground or maintaining a small patrol. That's if you choose to attack a single target, however. If you chose an area, several V formations could make the annihilation progress much quicker and more realistically - Air shouldn't mean insta-death for one particular target, it should mean devastation over an area, with weaker stuff like bots going first.
Some overlap/dodging through adjusting altitude momentarily (not player controlled) may be necessary in convergent attacks, but this is liable to lead to somebody setting up several lines of bombers to attack a single target. Better to deny the option of bombing a target you're already bombing. You could always send gunships or land or naval or rockets or lasers or nukes or a KEW in to help finish the job, after all.

To those saying Flak will solve all this - it shouldn't have to. Yes, it's great to have AA, but your Commander should be able to walk about and blow stuff up without fear of being hammered into the ground the moment he leaves his bunker. I'm not saying the Comm shouldn't be defended/should be invincible, I'm pretty happy with him as he is. It's Air's unrealistic dropping of a huge payload on his head that cause problems. Besides which, having your entire airforce of several dozen, if not hundred, planes shredded by Flak because the game put all your Air on the same pinprick is absurd.

They already can do that by using the area attack command. That doesn't help when you want to take out a single target though.

"Realistically", those bombers would be miles away and all capable of firing their missiles simultaneously. The bombers in PA are styalised, World-War-2 era bombers, who's targets were wide and allowed many bombers to drop their bombs simultaneously. As for balanced, forcing a column formation means it's trivial to set up enough AA to be immune to air strikes. You only need to have enough AA to kill one bomber at a time, after all.

A solution that involves going against all the established gameplay mechanics and requires artificial restrictions is not a valid solution. You even identified an exploit around this, which is inevitable when you start doing arbitrary things like that.

If your commander is caught in the open he's dead, regardless of whether by bombers, gunships, land units, ships or orbital units. Scouting, intel and having a defensive fighter force are all solutions to this "problem" other than flak. Furthermore, your solution doesn't actually stop this, it just means you need more bombers to do it, which is still a trivial thing to do.

raevn what would your solution be to prevent bomber runs ending games?

Fair enough then, realistic for a WWII Robot Bomber! It's still more balanced than a dozen instant payloads, even if it's not "Realistic".
Also denying multiple column attacks (which may not even be the most efficient way of formations attacking a single target) isn't messing with established game-play mechanics through artificial restrictions. There's a very practical reason several columns couldn't converge on a single target: either they would hit each other, or their bombs would hit their own aircraft.

Your Commander isn't so unquestionably, instantly dead the moment he's caught in the open by any other unit. He can walk away from land and walk out of the way of larger projectiles.
It would still be viable to attack single targets with columns, it would just take longer, as opposed to killing things instantly.

I don't see it as an intrinsic problem (not saying AA/bomber balance is perfect, but I don't think the mechanics are fundamentally broken). A bomber run ending a game is perfectly valid. A massed gunship attack will kill you just as well. Flak can protect you in bases, and if it is considered to be a problem outside of them, then a mobile flak unit can always be added to the game. But keep in mind this - your commander isn't meant to be a front line fighter all the way through the game. The game is intentionally designed so that the longer you play, the more vulnerable it becomes - there's no difference between having enough bombers to overcome AA defences and kill your commander, and having enough ground units to overcome ground defences and kill your commander.

Also consider that you don't get the leaders of countries going into threatened areas in times of war. They stay in well-guarded areas.

When targets are coming one at a time, it becomes very easy to defend against. Imagine if land units had to walk single file to their destination. Would it be even possible to overcome even a small number of defense structures?

Overlapped gunships are just as ridiculous though! They not only look bad, they inflict unbalanced damage through their stacking. If you have a cloud of units inflicting more damage than a nuke in a very short time frame, of course the game is going to suffer. Massed Flak should not be a necessity, and massed bombers should not be the default style of gameplay. A bomber run ending a game is valid, provided that damage is dealt in a balanced way. Stacking cannot be balanced with PA's spamming macro gameplay. It takes all the damage of a manoeuvrable airforce and focuses it on a single point in an impossible way. Units should not occupy the same space.
I agree the Commander should get more vulnurable as the game progresses, I just think that no adjustment to his HP/Armour is going to prevent the potentially unlimited damage of stacked bombers. Also it's not just about Commanders, its about the fact that stacked bombers decimate armies and make it impossible to traverse the map. And as Ground Units occupy a fixed space and can't stack, stacked Air is impossible to balance with finite ground defences. And when it is 'Balanced' with Flak, the ridiculous power to destroy an entire airforce concentrated in a single spot arises.

This might open an avenue to addressing this problem! At the moment we have bombers with the precision of a dive-bomber and the damage potential of a heavy bomber. How about making the T1 bomber a heavy bomber with less precision but good area impact and the T2 a Stuka-style dive-bomber - complete with different flying altitudes and attack patterns. The former would not be able to deal pinpoint damage and thus they would neither need to stack nor be too vulnerable to flak. The second would deliver pinpoint precision but need to attack one after the other.

I currently think air Bombers should !move slower. A bomber and fighter should be noticibly different on flight styles and having them move as agile and quickly as a t one fighter doesn't fit correctly.

Fair enough, I get that you don't want to encroach on orbital. The system could be simplified by having a high and low (and maybe medium) altitude that specific planes used instead of ranges. Then you can still have AA that is more effective at lower altitudes (ie Flak: a this is a low altitude gunship defense Adv SAM: This is a high altitude advanced bomber defense) I'm not really a fan of super specialization though, I'd prefer AA (and air) to be less effective but not non-effective when they are used against units that they are not made to fight (I really prefer TA's almost every unit can hit everything with a lucky enough shot vs SupCom's this is AA and it only works against air system)

I certainly do see the appeal in this and would just reiterate what I stated before: Make T1 a high altitude bomber that is carpet bombing a whole area while being rather safe from ground based anti-air due to its distance (needs introduction of firing-randomness for anti-air to be possible but fits nicely with PA's simulationist approach); make T2 a dedicated dive-bomber that can reliably hit single targets but needs to close in ww2-fighter-style (see Stukas, Hawker fighter-bombers et al.) thus being more vulnerable to anti-air.
Would cause bombers to be truly distinct in style and usage instead of being different in numbers only.

I think one of the problems that prevents more dynamic air combat and manuring is the size of the planes relative to the 'depth' of the air layer and each other. The planes are HUGE, and as such, very quickly saturate an area. I think possibly reducing the size of the basic bomber, turning it into a focused dive bomber/building destroyer would be nice, while having the advanced bomber generally better at destroying units with a carpet bombing pattern would be a possible solution.

I voted for 1,2,3.

I don't know if making fighters weaker would go in the right direction. Perhaps all Air should just be more expensive.

Also, I deem boring to have T1 and T2 air basically do the same things, just better.

Not only this, it is also against the stated design philosophy of T2 being a specialist tier, not an upgrade.

Treating air as a solid pathing layer is even worse than having no collisions at all.

With just a little bit of splash damage, gunship stacking becomes a bad strategy and players who do it will lose. The problem solves itself.

It will never be possible to prevent allow air stacking because they have low turning rates and deceleration speed. What happens if a plane flies straight to an other one? It would make no sense that it just suddenly stop

Only the gunship can have this kind of behavior.
The feasible solution is to give air units the behavior to spread out if they are stacked, like in starcraft but much faster.

So long as air is null and void of all sorts of pathing limitations that exist with ground/naval units, it will be broken. They are already faster than everything, why should they ignore reasonable limitations too?

For reals, yo, air needs to not operate how it does. Thinking otherwise is like holding onto the earth being flat.