POLL: Balancing Air - Continued!

You have a very narrow definition of good RTS.

Not only do you not like non-stacking aircraft, stating earlier that flak is the perfect tool to counter them, but you also dislike liberal use of flak.

Make up your mind please.

Aircraft stacking has yet to fix itself so it is silly to think and say otherwise. Uber needs to change the code when they get a chance and remove stacking entirely. That is the quickest solution to the current problem.

They're both true.
- Splash damage kills stacked units. Thus flak is effective against huge stacks.
- Bombers hit fast and deal front loaded damage. A short range reactive defense is not effective here. Thus flak is a terrible weapon against bombers.

Can you eventually stack up enough bombers that even flak weapons will deal huge amounts of damage? Sure. Does that make flak the right weapon choice against bombers? No. Flak is NOT an anti-bomber weapon. It is an anti SWARM weapon.

Why is this important? Anti SWARM weapons will annihilate ANY air unit. This could be fighters, it could be transport drops, it could be tanks launched down from the sky. Anti bomber units excel against bombers. They do not infringe upon every other aspect of aerial warfare just to deal with a single unit. Supcom shields had a similar issue of dipping into too many arenas just to deal with a single threat. They could not be balanced against artillery because their only ability was to defend against everything.

Stop shoving square pegs into triangular holes. It makes a mess.

Well. My definition of a good RTS includes units which work where and when they are supposed to, against the targets they were made to excel against.

Flak is not made to excel against bombers. It has no inherent behaviors that give it any kind of advantage at this task, while it clearly excels in a different area. So by that definition, trying to force a behavior that does not want to happen while ignoring what the behavior really does makes a bad RTS.

Spot on analysis, quite the eye-opener for me, actually.

Fun fact: They could - easily so but they just weren't! Shield deflection could be set to be selective, i.e. shield against specific projectile classes only. Strangely enough - and to prove my point - this has only been put to use in the xBox-Version that featured a UEF Anti-Artillery shield.

Sup Com (and TA, to a lesser extent), overcame this via unit speed & flak projectile speed - fighters were simply too fast to be hit unless they slowed down over the flak. Sort of like if Shields only protected against plunging fire - they would then mainly be anti-artillery.

Also, Bombers have a far greater tendency to stack, as they converge over a target. If air units tried to un-stack during movement (apart from bombing runs), then combined with the projectile speed, bombers could be made the key target of flak.

Genuine question, how do you have a non-reactive defense? Isn't defense by nature reactive? If it's a question of range, does a mobile flak unit bridge the gap?

I personally see Mobile Flak as something of a band-aid to the issue of stacking, allowing one unit to attack multiple units because multiple units are allowed to unrealistically occupy the same point in space. If UBER stopped stacking altogether then we wouldn't need to worry about the negative effects of Flak and balancing it with Fighter speed, because Air wouldn't need to be killed as a stacked swarm, but as individual targets.

I just came from a game where 10 people played, and it ended with two guys trying to send armies at each other and each getting utterly annihilated by T2 bombers.

SupCom didn't really solve the issue of comm-run bomber kamikazes, and Flak was an excellent way to destroy your enemy's Fighter force if you could lure them over your base, so I don't entirely agree with that statement that Fighters could avoid Flak projectiles. I understand Fighter speed as one solution for the issues that come with Flak, but forcing Air to obey the same spatial laws as other units would, to my mind, lead to an easier balance with other units. If a solution (flak) causes almost as many balancing problems than it solves, it isn't a solution.

The problem is one of kill speed. If you build counters to a unit you don't expect to trade more or less efficiently - you expect to shut that unit down. An anti-air emplacement of cost x should not only mass-efficiently kill a bomber of the same cost. Given an equal spatial concentration it should be able to completely deny any bomb drops in its area of influence. This could be achieved by giving it higher range than bombers and front-loaded damage high enough to kill the bomber before it is able to attack. This could then be offset by a long reload time so that said emplacements could be effectively though not efficiently be overwhelmed.

Maybe letting air units not completely stack, but not making them spread out entirely too so they aren't to blocky. That compromise to me sounds decent.
The altitude idea also sounds interesting. Although I didn't like it at first, I'm coming around to it. It would add more depth to this game.

To elaborate on my remarks from earlier on I think it might be useful to clearly define the roles of anti-air turrets and bombers before trying to balance them against each other. So what is the role of an anti-air turret? Its role is to shelter any unit inside its area of influence from air-based attacks. Its role is not to kill air units - that is just its mode of operation. The role of a bomber is to dish out as much damage as possible in as little time as possible. It is not to deliver damage in areas that area saturated with anti-air.
So that means that neither should anti-air be designed for countering bombers nor bombers for countering anti-air.
This in turn leads to my proposal of anti-air shutting down any mass-equal amount of air units completely - otherwise they do simply not fulfill their role. Since stacking air units make such a way of balancing very difficult I am all for removing the stacking mechanic.

If this is so, then anti-land defences should also shut down land. Anti-nuke should shut down nukes. Eventually, you have an impenetrable base. Units in this sub-genre aren't typically designed to completely shut down it's opposite; that's a form of hard counter, otherwise known as rock-paper-scissors, which is much more of a Blizzard approach to balance - Starcraft, Warcraft and the like, with armour classes and weapon damage types to further emphasize this.

Rather than completely shutting down air, their role is better seen through the eyes of the AI - as a "cost" for air units to move through or attack. It shouldn't completely lock down the area, just make it costly to attack or more though (a soft form of area denial). Then it becomes a strategic decision by the attacking player to weigh up the various approaches to try and formulate a strategy that gets the most gain at the least cost - this may still involve moving through/over defenses.

It's important to keep in mind too that Area of Effect damage doesn't care about stacking. The "cost" of an AOE defense unit rises per-attacking-unit, rather than per-defensive-unit, as in the case of non-AOE defences. If a flak cannon would normally destroy 1 bomber within it's effective range, then it would also destroy 100 if they were stacked. Contrast this with a 100 bombers attacking a basic AA tower, which would be (more or less) 100 times more effective. I'm not convinced that flak is that difficult to balance against a bombing run. That doesn't mean it's currently balanced, though.

This just means the current balance is broken. It doesn't mean the concept is - just wanted to point this out, as I'm not trying to say the current balance is OK.

When luring, the enemy fighter force would end up dogfighting over your flak - turning, slowing down and essentially presenting very good targets for flak. This is purely player error for engaging over them, much like attacking an enemy land force with yours while in range of their defences, when they did not need to do this.

Flak in Sup com had a very low horizontal range, and aircraft flew high - this meant they were only really able to kill aircraft after they had a chance to drop bombs. There's other ways of doing this though - low rate of fire, long range flak, for example. Very easily out-maneuvered by fighters, but bombers making a straight run would still get hit before they can drop.

Stacking I think is fine it is what happens after they drop their payload to be the problem. No consistency or smarts. I would like them to drop their bombs and then try avoid aa turrets on their long circle around.

The thing is, for me, a few Flak cannons should not be able to kill an entire airforce with AOE. It's imbalanced to be able to lose an enormous resource investment, just because your bombers all stacked up in the same exact spot. Flak is a second-rate solution to the problem of stacking, and creates the problem that you can lose huge numbers of Air units to a relatively small number of AA with AOE. I'd rather each Air unit had its own point in space. This way, even with Flak, you couldn't lose 100 Bombers instantly, because they wouldn't all cram into Flak's AOE.

Fair enough. Would it not be easier to balance if Air was limited to a finite amount of damage by not stacking?

The thing is, if an enemy's base is impenetrable to fighters because of Flak, they end up spamming bombers and putting them on patrol. The base then becomes both impenetrable to land and air, and you end up with nuke-spamming stalemates. Dogfights are necessary to allow a ground assault.

That's fair. But as I said above, the overlapped stacking-flak scenario is bad for both parties, as it means a large Airforce can easily be shredded by Flak AOE. Who wants to lose 100 Bombers just because they didn't have the sense not to all fly in exactly the same spot and make themselves a perfect target for Flak? It makes Air much more limited, only being employed in defending your base from oncoming armies, or ending games in a matter of seconds by dropping 100 bombs on an exposed enemy Commander before they can even move.

The ideal scenario is a formation of bombers, carpet bombing an entire area - like the Robot World War Two bombers they are. That way, only some Air would die at the start, as opposed to practically everything being destroyed by Flak, and also anything underneath the Air might not die straight away, giving mobile AA a chance to respond, and Commanders a chance to move or get repaired.
This would also mean people didn't feel the need to pump out 100 Bombers as the default defence against everything on land or sea. Air support might weaken or cripple an approaching army, but it wouldn't outright annihilate it, and you wouldn't need to completely annihilate the enemy Airforce with Mobile Flak before you had a chance of approaching the enemy base.

Flak is not the solution because it is the only solution when stacking is present - stacking is outside of other gameplay mechanics. If you don't have Flak, you're dead. Stacking is bad for gameplay.

I think that bombers should have different types of payloads because as it stands the current system the advanced bomber lets you carpet bomb entire armies yet only 1 bomb will actually hit a small building at sea e.g. anti aircraft gun, providing that it takes time to change between weapons, maybe even a fabber, but this way bombers will be much more specialised and won't simply be able to destroy anything on land in a few seconds, which is more than a little annoying as any large land/sea based army requires a lot of anti air to just have a chance to get to a base, slowing them down just before they drop might help. This seems to happen with T1 bombers, and does make them less effective. The lack of any T2 mobile anti-air might be unbalancing air just as much.

I've heard lots of people talk about gravity weapons to knock aircraft out of the air, but that seems overpowered to me, why not use barrage balloons live in the blitz, very weak but they require fighters to take them down first, making them large would stop people using them like walls too, or running with the idea the blitz, searchlight type structures that can help AA guns target faster.

Just a few ideas, what do you guys think?

I think there will be T2 mobile AA soon. Because now it impossible to attack someones base if he has paroling t2 air bombers in combination with t2 aa around their base. After T2 aa mobile units are in the game we should look more at balancing it all combined.

Just hope to see mobile T2 AA soon, it will change the balance of AIR completely!

All I can say with these threads is it seems like a bunch of people holding on to their imbalance crutch.

Allowing aircraft to stack by shifting their altitude is a good option to prevent the impossible blob. Allowing only the bottom most bombers to drop bombs would also make sure you have a realistic, simulation friendly behavior.

If T1 bombers fired a single Air to Surface missile once in range they wouldn't need to line up directly on a target, they could fly in formation and still share in the attack. If the formation gets wider than the range of the weapon the planes on the edge should move to the back to create a ribbon like formation several planes wide and as long as needed.

If T2 bombers remain a carpet bomber designed for area saturation they should fly in formation and all drop bombs together in formation instead of trying to stack over the target. This would spread the damage as widely as possible, this would make them even better at destroying hordes of small units while helping give a legitimate role to the T1 bomber as a single target sniper.

If you give an area attack order to a large (100+) aircraft grouping they should form into several formations of their own aircraft type and attack the targets as teams.


Gunships would follow similar rules. First try and encircle the target. If the circle is full start making additional stacks by flying above and below the other gunships. You could have a whole lot of units massing their damage without using broken a broken collision model. The game play and balance would be near identical to it's current, but without phase shifting into each other.

Flak could be re-balanced to use a larger AoE so that it remains effective against hordes of aircraft. Since they no longer overlap it's AoE needs to be large enough to hit most of a formation.


If you combine aircraft trying to spread into formations with altitude stacking you have none of the negative side effects of "impassible" aircraft while also preventing the worst elements of the air stack problem. Aircraft may end up occupying the same space occasionally, if you have more than can fit vertically, but they would also actively try and spread their formations, so it would be rare, and none exploitable.

It would look better, prevent damage stack exploits, and creates new combat roles for our units to fill nicely.

10/10 Would Play in Bed

The thing is clearly the vast majority of people see there's a fundamental problem in the way air behaves which isn't going to be balanced by the addition of more units, but by making it fly in three dimensions, as oppose to sitting on a flat sphere above land and overlapping.

Even with people's flak concerns I would prefer stacking. Yes bombers can be easily killed by the flak, but this will only happen if you choose to fly over the flak. Spread the bombers out and they not only make a bigger radar imprint but also increase the chances of flying over AA. Bad play shouldn't be a shout out for imbalance or changes.

Just choose the safest flight path for the bombers. If it entails flying over flak. Set up groups. First group of 2 kill the flak. Second group of remaining hit the target.

There has to be some skill involved other that clicking on a bunch of units and telling them to attack another unit.

My 2 cents..being murderd by somone that has done nothing other than turtle on the otherside of the planet and mass build t2 bombers from 1 factory is boring.. i dont mind being killed.. hell a good cat and mouse match is why i play..

yes granted flac / t2 fighter coverage does a great job of murdering them but if you have been figting wars all around you trying to survive you might not have had the econ to build up a good flac/ t2 air coverage even more so if its been mostly ground and you have good t1 fighter converage .. watching someone that you have never fought aginst make a bee line to your comander for a kill just makes the entire game pointless.