The T2 Bomber - Balance Suggestion Thread

Ow I agree.

There is a problem and I outright stated it.
They would do three times the damage they do now, to single targets.
They would do four to six times the damage to armies.

If you think T1 bombers are "hella balanced" now, that means they'd be "hella UNbalanced" with carpet bombing.
Just like T2 bombers.

This is another pretty random suggestion, but what if bombers' recharge rates were really low? A t2 bomber could be worth it even with somewhat weak bombs if it had a very high ammo capacity.

Only if they can stack their carpet bombs all on the same target instead of spacing them out over a wiser area.

And yes, the T1 bomber is very well balanced, it's mix of speed and HP gives a great amount of gameplay against it's counters.

I have to pretty much agree with what your saying here.

T1 bombers would still be useful even in late game harrassing armies. while T2 bombers are B-52's that snipe critical defenses or anti nukes.

You asked about T1 bombers having the carpet bombing of T2 bombers.

Back before bombers dropped bombs I sugested that T1 bombers drop carpet bombs which do splash damage, but T2 bombers fire AGMs which do point damage. You would use the missiles to take out key targets like commanders, t2 power gens, and t1 air defenses, and the bombs to take out unit swarms.

Maybe the other way around might be better though, with T1 bombers being missiles and T2 bombers being bombs.

At any rate, right now the situation where swarms of units are vulnerable to bombers but bases are not is kinda silly.

Direct point damage is super effective against Commanders. It may not the best idea for T1, but then again wiping out entire swarms of AA is pretty damn powerful as well.

Well, aside from nerfing the unit itself, it's production cost should be brought in line with the other unit types.
Type cost t1 t2 Multiplier
Bot. 600 5500 9.02
vehicle. 600 5410 9.02
air. 720 3300 (WTH) 4.583
Sea. 840 6600 7.857

The unit needs to drop half the bombs, with half the radius, over the same distance, with half or even quarter the damage per bomb.

Anti air units do not even come close to be decent counters to the bomber. With no t2 mobile anti air and production cost grossly favoring the air factories, the state of the bombers/t2 air ensures that any land army is meaningless.

Essentially with bombers being so much stronger and more effective than any of their mobile counters, game play is completely limited to the skies. There is no rush that will shut down a t2 air rush with the current cost that can prevent several bombers from getting out and demolishing you beyond recovering.

At most rushing t2 and getting a flak cannon before they hit if your lucky will defend a small area. The enemy controlling the skies will control the planet and resources and there is nothing you can do about it.

after reading this thread there are some issues I've noticed no one has really mentioned. I believe these issues are the root cause of why the t2 bomber is so powerful and why air is so powerful as well.

Air units suffer no disadvantages for being air units. They maintain the same properties as land and sea units, that is. Infinite ammo, infinite fuel, they also gain one other very important characteristic that is not shared by any other unit. Immunity to all land, ship based weapons.

This game has forced a Hard rock paper scissors element on the game, the T2 bomber exploits this. To counter it they simply created an OP flak gun. Never solved the problem.

Land based units can not properly retaliate against air units. I see no reason why a laser cannon can not be angled upwards and shoot at an air unit.

If they do not change the design of these units, and take away air crafts immunity to nearly 3/4 of all weapons in the game. It will never be balanced properly.

A single soldier with an rpg can take out a gunship, but not in this game. Basically put the concept of the units is flawed, u can try to balance it as much as u like in its current state, but you won't achieve balance. You will either make air useless, or completely OP. Nothing will change until u change the actual design of the unit. At the moment the T2 bomber and air units, are nothing more than flying bots or tanks.

please uber, design your units better. Don't keep adding quick hard counter fixes like a flak cannon. We need more general based units. Less immune to all weapon units except specially counter units.

I maintain that non-AA ground units shooting at air units is a bad idea. Once things are balanced I don't want my ******* tanks all having their turrets pointing the wrong way when driving into battle just because a scout flew overhead.

I don't think boosting mobile AA resolves the bomber issue because firstly that's a pretty dull binary solution, and secondly it means gunships are still rendered irrelevant because bombers are filling the role gunships are supposed to. Bombers should be your means to remove strategic targets like nukes, anti-nukes, etc. Meanwhile gunships are your means to harass or punish an opponent who doesn't have mobile AA mixed into their ground force.

Simply by removing the bomb chains, AoE and decreasing bomb speed to ground you immediately change the bomber's role and clearly differentiate it from the gunship. You also resolve the commander snipe issue because bombers now suck against mobile targets.

Air should fill a supporting role because as the primary force in a game its mobility makes for a dull game.

I'm not really sure you need fighters and bombers at T1 and T2, it seems like a pointless duplication. Note that TA never solved this problem, you used the T1 bombers (in suicide runs) and the T2 fighters and T1 fighters were pointless outside the opening two-three minutes on very particular maps while T2 bombers just plain sucked. I think you're better off sticking fighters in one tier and bombers in the other and ditching the duplication.

To summarize:

• Get rid of the T2 fighter
• Get rid of the T1 bomber
• Change bombs (not bombers) to be slow
• Make bombs a single entity rather than a chain
• Remove the bomb AoE
• Increase bomb damage as necessary

On an unrelated note:

• Remove the stupid missiles miss and damage the factory cheese
• Introduce mobile flak
• Does mobile AA even serve a purpose? It seems to me mobile flak will always be better for a ground force as gunships are their enemy

I like the idea to drop the t2 Fighter and T1 Bomber - but how about we replace the t2 bomber with a torpedo bomber?

Not ridiculously powerful - maybe its torps are dropped from a distance and they arent perfectly accurate. Better against groups of naval units than anything else. This would keep the air spam down and limit the usefulness of air to kill everything all the time. And naval has been crapped on for long enough - lets bring it back into the fray as something useful.

And ofc Flak.

Flak needs to be the short ranged, high powered AA. AA towers need to be the generic long range, short vision AA. Both at about equal effectiveness, with Flak at t2 and AA at t1. Flak would be expensive and used for defending key structures, while AA would be used to chew through swarms of fighters quickly. Maybe keep it the same in all areas, except to increase the range (at least 2x) and nerf the vision a bit.

Flak will need a bit of a nerf, but not too much. The biggest nerf it will get is a bigger price tag. It needs to be few and far between.
And also, a buff: MAKE THE MODEL BIGGER.

If we keep t1 bombers, I'd like t1 bombers to have their bomb damage increased. But that is just me.

Actually, making t1 bombers the torp/missile bombers wouldn't be a bad idea. That way, the single-target role can exist, but not at a power level that threatens to snipe commanders every single game.

What if we switched the two? we give the T2 bomber a single bomb, but give it enough damage to not ruin the DPS, and we make the T1 bomber drop bombs in groups?

T2 could be more effective for surgical snipes, but less useful against armies. In addition, it would be easier to micro away from the bombs, to buy time. T1 on the other hand could see more use as a carpet bomber, but the damage output wouldn't be so damn ridiculous.

In real life, that's kinda how it fell out (heh). Modern bombers like the B2 carry fewer, yet bigger bombs, and are capable of delivering them accurately. Either way, it's worth a shot.

What problem is carpet bombing designed to solve though? It seems to me that carpet bombing is best employed against mobile units, but what's the point of the gunship then?

Why would that power exist at the T2 level but not at T1? Is there some kind of detail I'm missing?

The gunship is for destroying bases and armies, raiding mexes, base defense, etc. Their damage is more consistent over time, they aren't as ammo-dependent, and they don't make long bombing runs that can expose them to additional fire.

So what's the point of carpet bombing?

To carpet a target all at once, rather then raising single targets over time.

But the only place where things are placed close enough together for that to work are mobile units, and so we get back to my point about gunships.