Should change name to Dogfight Annihilation

I do not think that air should be an effective offensive tool on its own, ever.

It's to fast to be able to be reacted to. The only way to deal with offensive air is to already have dealt with it.

You can scout blobs of ground units moving, you can't scout a blob of air and have time to do anything about it. If it's moving at you then it's to late. Better be ready before it happens.

It can be a cleanup tool once the anti-air has been dealt with.
It can be a scouting tool for neutral lands and suicidal scouting for enemy controlled areas.
It can be an additional defensive layer.
It can be used for killing that defensive layer that is not your base.

It should not be something you can overwhelm your opponent with on its own.

And because of flak, air does all the things it should and not the one thing it shouldn't do. Current flak may be a hack job fix for the issue, but it's better than none.

Eh, usually if you are being attacked by an army, and you had nothing defending it, then it kills the stuff before you react.

Same with air, if you had air units or air turrets, it is whichever wins and losses are at least stifled. If you don't then losses occur.

Really, air is stronger than ground is all it amounts to. Imagine really fast moving levelers. t2 bombers pretty much have the effective health of levelers given the damage the antiair does. Flak is like a tower that does leveler damage to air though, in AOE. So it is overpowered too, but the game is not balanced so these are coincidences in numbers really.

When i find games trough Pa stats auto 1v1(mod) my opponents never hide behinds turrets and walls. It's important to build air a fast a possible though, but when you both build t2 air you kinda get in an air stalemate and ground units are still as important as always. And if you build t2 air too late, well, too bad for you.( You'll need to do it faster/get better) You can still build t2 anti air if you're too late, but your armies outside you base are probably screwed.

Because Anti-Air T1 is horrible v T1 air, and a joke against T2, so inefficient to have anti air units, because they do SO LITTLE DAMAGE and ground units have this annoying thing to bunch up unlike the supcom (never played TA) games where AOE was less effective because units could spread out!

I seriously have a problem with this massing t2 air thing still. it just wont stop... I'm so sad i just wanna play a fun game but its hard when EVERY SINGLE MOTHER HUMPING TIME every person masses ******* t2 air, doesn't move out of their base, like omg dude its soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo flipping boring. it seriously is guys lol. you turtl hard and when you think you've had enough fun sitting around staring at your little sprites moving in a circle around ur little shell you find the com, simply right click it, and bamo you got yourself a won game. now im gonna watch some paint dry while you mass some more air cuz apparently it's fun to do nothing until you wanna win. its like a literal hand out. and i've decided flak doesn't do ****... like ya it is strong, sure, ok, but if they wanna snipe you just do what everyone and their dog are doing and mass some more t2 bombers you'll get em

this is seriously every single game. idk what I'm doing wrong in my game searches, but this is, every, single, game. with no failure. is it even worth getting anything but air at all? cuz air can build all land can even tho naval cant.

That's exactly what I'm saying the problem is. I should not be PUNISHED because i don't wanna mass t2 air dude, i don't like it. And if every person is massing t2 air then you HAVE to, otherwise like you said you're screwed. other than flak any AA besides air units is 100% useless once u get t2 bombers out and guess what everyone is rushing to get out. I like when the land is an actual factor in an RTS and you couldn't just fly your ENTIRE army wherever, i like when there is variety when i get killed like a whole army kills me or bunch of nukes or a flippn' planet smashes my base to bits not just 2 units quickly flying in and bahh done. Like I'm not even satisfied, that's like you wait in line for 45 min to get the best ice cream in the world and then you finally get it and some big *** dude comes and slaps it out of your hand and now there's no more ice cream.

And iI DO NOT think that you shouldn't be able to snipe coms or anything like that with bombers cuz, hell I'm guilty of it too, but there just needs to be a better way, you should NOT be able to ONLY build air and easily sit back in your base and win

I agree that anti air ground untis should be better(or there should be other better counters), but the state the game is in now should not ruin your games. If they turtle you can grab the map and punish them with more air, nukes and ground units, which i think is pretty entertaining to do. Nothing is balanced yet ^^

Why is that not an acceptable answer?

I creep artillery to deal with people who are defending themselves overly well with bots and towers, why wouldn't I creep flak to deal with people who are defending themselves with air? (Realistically I artillery creep them both in pretty much the same way, just throwing up more flak for the bomber spammers.)

The feeling I keep getting is "forcing someone to take drastic action to deal with my bots is good and fair and balanced. Forcing someone to take equally drastic action to deal with air is bad and unfair and imbalanced" and I'm not particularly grasping the reasons.

The guy in that screenshot is begging to be artillery creeped. Whether by teleporter or air fabber or whatever, you get some fabbers to an island near him and drop 6 flak turrets really fast, he has nothing that can stop you from building Holkins and destroying him.

That's the weakness of air. It has a super-effective counter and once that goes up, you'd better have a plan B. That guy clearly has no plan B. He has nothing to drive out there and attack your Holkins with once the flak goes up.

Its hard to grab the map when they rush t2 air and keep me in base too. so basically what I'm getting from you is YES this IS dogfight annihilation lol cuz if u don't spam air its gg

tell me how to artilary creep a guy with over 100 t2 bombers and 200 periguins around his base that would WRECK anything he deems a threat near him

Tell me how you let him build all that stuff? And, yeah, i would say nuke it!

100 T2 bombers all die instantly to about, oh, what, say, 8 flak towers?

Flak really is that OP right now.

I mean worst case you'd have to build all the way from your base to his but most people are not that on the ball and you could build a teleporter from a space fabricator and then rush out ~10 adv bot fabricators and have that flak down in literally just a few seconds.

There are still changes I want to see to bombers (and anti-air) but you are far from helpless in this situation even with balance as it is right now.

Not helpless just wanted PA not DA lol

Rushed t2 bombers, and after that I could not catch up because they are so mobile and do A LOT of dmg. So once he got those.b bombers I was seriously fucked nothing I could do snipes my nukes or anti nukes and I SURROUNDED them in flak don't even try n say I didn't, still snipped em so idk. and once Ur behind like that there isn't much u can do but PRAY tha they don't wise up and att and HOPEFULLY ann start spamming air too I guess.. but again I don't want to fix the problem with...the problem lol

@uberpenu, double, triple, or even quadruple posting on forums is generally accepted as bad manners. Could you avoid doing it in the future?

Because that is using defensive buildings offensively. If that player had half a brain, they would also have artillery meaning that you couldn't build anything within a certain radius of their base anyways which means you either have to go in with units (lol) or you have to nuke them (which they probably have anti-nukes).
Now, in a 1v1 game the situation is a little different, but they still have a highly mobile death squad of t2 air where you trip up for just a second and you lose.

Isn't the argument against t2 bombers a bit like nukes. If you don't build anti-nuke or prevent the building of nukes you will get hosed by them. Same resources spent on anti-air in the way of t2 Fighters (because I can't spell Perguine) and flak seems to easily counter t2 bombers. Hell t1 bots are hard to defend against en-mass unless you have some laser towers or bots of your own.

There's always a few points in a game when a mass of units (no matter the type) will do the trick. If you time it right t1 bots can destroy or serverly hamper the opponent. I've won and lost at all stages in the game, so what if t2 bombers are a late game tactic, perhaps try and win before they are threat if you don't like them? Try a bot rush, or nuke them for example. And thats not even exploring the use of combined assaults or trench style warfare.

In my opinion, air should be powerful, scary, and deemed extremely dangerous. It should also be on the weaker side of the spectrum in some respect. The stereotypical one would be glass cannons in general compared to anything else. The full use of the term for anything fast, to semi-armored assault aircraft for anything moving slower, all the way to possible floating fortresses that teach the very meaning of doom to anything it decides to slowly float over. In a fair game, I think these do not have to equal.
damage =/= health/armor
damage =/= agility (maneuverability / acceleration / travel speed)
agility =/= health/armor

You should be able to have something with high damage and high agility (of some type), but the lower spectrum of health. (Gunships much) Something with high damage and high health would likely be decently slow or stationary. (Defensive towers / The Can / Sumo) I tend to connect higher speeds with lower mass, thus dropping health because of less armor. Things that are slow can have any amount of health. I imagine something fast with heavy armor exists, but I can't think of an example. (Inb4 freight train) Even heavily armored gunships aren't nearly as fast as lightly armored ones, nor are they as heavily armored as tanks on the field.

Yes, air seems pretty broken, and yes, it will likely be fixed. The damage? Maybe, maybe not. Everything is relative in how the field is designed. They could have all the damage in the world, but if the counter is too strong, their damage means nothing. I think eventually there will be all sorts of effective counters and strategies around those counters. Example. There's currently no real ground counter to massive mobs of basic bots right? Possibly a larger group of advanced bots, but by the time you'd spend the amount of resources you poor into a force that's able to kill an equal army, they already ran your base over. I think a group of, for example, the Leveler from Total Annihilation, would be an extremely acceptable addition. Low damage overall, but large splash. Average fire rate, armor and acceleration. Slow turning but above average top speed. The lower damage vs more heavily-armored units is made up for in it's AoE anti-bot mob design. Past examples of different, not better. Riot tanks at their finest. (Arguably, anyway.)

Like the Leveler in the days of TA, I think there will, or at least should be units of different roles. Mobile flak will answer all of the bomber woes in current standing, though that would be obscenely bad for balance if they were as powerful as immobile flak is right now. If you have 100 bombers and a severe lack of AA, then yeah, you should get wrecked. If you near or equal amount of anti-bombers to bombers, you should have an equal or better chance. It all depends on if you want the cost of 1 bomber = 1 Anti-bomber, or multiple AA to be equal, and the costs of ground AA vs air AA. Balance will come when the unit roster fills out.

So yeah, I dunno about Dogfight Annihilation. Yeah, air is a thing, but it's pretty recent. The lack of balance has been there since the beginning. So.. Imbalanced Annihilation? IMBA Annihilation! Double references! At least until more units are thrown in to disrupt everything.

Edit'd because Engrish ish hards.