The reasons why T2 air is broken.

Hello!
Since I've lost finals of tournament vs Godde I've been known as T2 air abuser. Most of the times I literally make just pure air. I'm not a fan of air play, but read my signature . Anyways since getting T2 air at 5 minute mark isn't something rare for me and I'm a bit bored with going heavy air every game I'd like to break down the reasons why I believe T2 air is broken. I realize some of this is common knowledge but in this patch T2 air got even stronger so I think it's worth discussing it. The core of the problem wasn't the hornet actually.
"The only way to beat t2 air rusher is to rush it yourself but better" - Neptunio

1. T2 air is really really really really really fast
I think In Planetary Annihilation map control is absolutely the most important thing ever. You have unprecedented number of metal spots all around the map. The goal of most strategies is to allow you to grab as much metal spots as humanly possible. If I have problem in certain place I just brainlessly send my air units there and they are there in 3 seconds and then they can engage the enemy. It removes a lot of depth that ground play has with scouting, using radars, raiding with faster units, dropping, attacking in the places that your opponent has no army, flanking and all that jazz.

2. It's easily accessible
This patch made it even more accessible with cheaper mass extractors. In theory you could say the other side also benefited from this but I disagree. The problem is that it accelerated the rush (if you maintain reasonable economy) by about 30-45 seconds but it didn't translate into much more units from opponent's side because of travel distance.

3. It's very cheap
1 Kestrel costs as much metal as 3 doxes. 1 Kestrel is worth much more than just 3 doxes, especially because of mobility. You can snipe metal extractor at similiar speed but 1 or more Kestrels can just wipe out a lot of opponent's groups of land units. Not only this, dps of one kestrel is equal to 5 doxes. So in general you can compare hp/dps/metal efficiency with land units or they are slightly in favour of air but in terms of mobility air has huge advantage. You can get into numbers yourself, most of the times they are pretty favourable for T2 Air.

4. It's very hard to punish
There are 3 things you can do to the opponent that is rushing T2 Air.
a) Rush with commander with a lot of energy to spam uber cannon and kill him - This is strong but only doable on really small planets with close spawns. The strategy itself isn't too fun either.
b) You might harrass him with doxes early on - Yeah you can, so what? You might kill an engineer or two, you might kill metal extractor or two but you can't deny t2 air factory going up and you actually sacrifice a bit of eco in order to get doxes early enough to do damage.
c) You can kill air fabber with interceptor - It's nice but you only have 3-4 seconds room so there is a lot of luck involved and commander can kill interceptor anyway. After I begin T2 airfac I always assisst it with land fabbers to not get it prevented.
All kinds of other different rushes (except a)) come too late to do something significant. And then once there is 1 Peregrine and 1 gunship they can beat t1 stuff incredibly cost effectively. Defenders advantage benefits the T2 air rusher way more in comparison to advantages of t1 land rush because travel distance affects land much more than air.

5. T2 air makes T1 air completely and utterly useless
In this patch it has become even more so. 1 Peregrine is around 10 times more effective than 1 hummingbeard while costing just 2 times more. In previous patches the answer to someone rushing T2 air was to just spam 10 or 20 T1 airfacs while expanding yourself and with big economy advantage you were able to overpower him. That's no longer the case. In order to maintain air superiority you need T2 air yourself which brings us back to Neptunio's point again.

6. Land mobile Anti-air is terrible
T1 AA is basically just tickling T2 Aircraft. T1 bombers relation to t1 mobile AA is decent but even here I think bomber is too favoured because of its mobility. Still, people choose t1 fighters to counter t1 bombers usually. So if T1 bombers are already good, then T2 bombers and gunships are way way better. Basically if you loose air superiority, making land attacks is borderline impossible because of how much t2 air owns them and it hasn't changed even with hornet nerf. Even if mobile AA will shred air to pieces, it's again only land unit, it's very slow in comparison to air and it will still be inferior most of the times. We desperately need T2 mobile flak. This will allow us to do ground attacks without worrying that much about having air superiority in one place, but it will still be good to have air in order to be mobile and to be able to strike where land army is not.

7. Static Anti-Air Turrets are only decent.
Yeah they are not bad. If you make a couple of them per base and per metal rich spot then you might prevent Air from penetrating it. But still it's over a thousand of minerals to secure just a couple of metal spots. Usually on the planet there are over hundred of metal spots so it's still not really effective to rely on aa turrets to secure econmy, Launching attack based only on t1aa/flak turret push with big number of land units feels also very bad. AA turrets are not really reliable counter to T2 Air in case you want to defend all your expansions around the map just with them. It's common to be able to secure your main base with turrets but that's usually it. This usually promotes nuke play in order to finish someone off if he camped with a lot of t2 AA.

8. Static Anti-Ground Turrets with walls are very very strong
Although its not direct, it helps air a lot. If I want some very strong presence at certain point in the map, I don't really need ground army. If I make static defence, especially covered with wall, then it's very hard to concentrate big army enough to break them, let alone to be cost effective vs them. So assuming you have good control of air, a bunch of well placed turrets might grant you the map control that you might have lost due to being busy somewhere else or in case you lost air superiority.

9. Assissting is almost as effective as making factories
In Supreme Commander strenght of rushing to T2 or T3 was reduced by making assissting sifnificantly less efficient than building new factories. Now yeah, assissting is still slightly less effective than making more T2 air factories but it's still efficient enough to make the guy who does heavy assisst advanageous over the standard guy who decides to mostly rely on a lot of factories. This is also thing that favours guys who decide to rush because catching up with a lot of t1 airfacs is simply not effiecient enough.

10. Fighters can kill air factories.
Oh yeah this is pretty serious one. The problem is pretty huge. A couple (just 5-6) of T2 fighters with their insane 1500 DPS are able to snipe someone's else T2 Airfactory. So that's automatical advantage to someone that decided to rush T2 because he can just outright kill someone's else airfactory when he tries to catch up. To prevent this he is forced to make some AA turrets. Either way it's pretty big advantage to someone who got T2 earlier than opponent.

11. It gives access to T2 economy
What's pretty surprising it's actually comparably cost effective to stay in your base instead of expanding. T2 Metal extractor is comparable to T1 metal extractor, but T2 power generator is actually more efficient in producing energy than T1 power! So it doesn't really promote expanding everywhere in order to get most optimal economy. In Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance in order to grow your economy perfectly, you had to rely on map control and T1 mexes mostly because of how effective they were in comparison to T2. If you get just some T1 and then you get T2 fast enough you basically can rely on T2 economy in order to sustain your T2 air/nuke production.

12. Anti-Nuke is pretty ineffective
Land armies are pretty cost ineffective in breaking heavy turtles, it's much better to just nuke than to make big land army. This is really indirect but it's also factor influencing strenght of Air/Turret play. In order to break someone who is heavy on air and heavy on AA turrets, it's good to rush nuke. It's usually pretty binary - if I manage to get my nuke going earlier than my opponent then I can just nuke his launcher and base and I win the game. Something that would make air/nuke rush less prevalent would be making Anti-nuke more cost effective in order to have reasonable defense against nuke rush. Right now it's basically whoever claims more map control with air/turrets and gets nuke first. Again, it's not directly why T2 Air is good, but it makes the strategy of making turrets everywhere and relying on T2 Air pretty strong.

13. It allows to use Air transports
I'm huge fan of air transports, they are great, but again, in order to get access to them you need t2 air. If we also nerfed air we would see less fighters which would make air drops better which I believe is good thing because dropping someone with strong land units is one of the most interesting aspects of RTS game

In my opinion, in order to successfully balance relations of Land with Air it's necessary to change a couple of these things. One is simply not enough. I think it would be good to nerf 3-5 of these things, this way air would still remain powerful when needed but it wouldn't dominate midgame as much as it does now. It would be really beneficial for the game if land was dominant force in the game, because it's simply designed in much more interesting way. Most of good players that I've talked recently agree that they would prefer to play land heavy games with just assisstance of air units. I 100% support them.

What do you guys think?

Air should be the ultimate support and raiding force, but should lack staying power in any form.

Air should be able to hit a target, but staying there should always mean death.

To me the main issue with air is how crazy OP the Peregrine is and how there's little to nothing that can stop air aside from more fighters. There is Flak... But that is very easily destroyed or avoided.

Very much this ^

Even aside from the Peregrine issue, Air is crazy powerful.

I feel like the cool down and power recharge on the bombers should be increased, and possibly also applied to gunships.

I have to agree. You summed it up very well. I know in many topics we've taken nearly opposite opinions on what the future of the game should be, but it's reassuring to see even such opposing views can agree about the current state of the game.

Personally, I believe a simple nerf is entirely insufficient. I think we need to redesign how air units work so they become support units incapable of replacing ground armies.

Ideally, I think it would be nice that if you went X factory type only, you could still win the game. The strategies for each would obviously be different, but the diversity would be there so if you needed to counter some other factory type, you could. Mixing should allow you to do even more novel/unusual strategies.

This is why I'd like mobile T2 flak for example, as right now the only serious mobile counter is your own T2 air. If I'm building tanks and a nuke, I can't simply intersperse a few flak into my lineup quickly if I see my enemy is spamming air, I have to build a T2 air factory or two and crank out fighters. This forces a stronger eco and time disadvantage on me, along with limiting strategies, which isn't ideal.

I realize I'm agreeing with you there, but my point is I hope that via the re-balance, they still find a way to make air only a viable strategy, just way less OP. I think making T2 a bit more expensive, nerfing the brutal strength of fighters a lot and bombers a little, and expanding T1 air a bit more would be a good start.

Since PA is all about map control, for ground based defense to be viable it needs to be cheaper and faster-to-build than it is now. Comparing ground based AA to ultra-mobile aircraft...

Flak Cannon - cost 300, DPS 200, HP 1000
Missile Defense Tower - cost 300, DPS 40, HP 1000

Peregrine - cost 270, DPS 1500, HP 350
Kestrel - cost 270, DPS 100, HP 250
Hornet - cost 540, DPS 2200, HP 200

Let's say you have a Kestrel. Just one. For about 10% more, I can build a single Flak Cannon, if I'm also at T2. It will defend one small area, while your Kestrel just avoids it. I'd be better off building a Peregrine. It's cheaper and can hunt you down.

Thank you for making this thread/ text wall so I didn't have to

10/10 would read again

I have a huge respect for Scathis, and I'm anxious to see what he does, but I do hope its much deeper than nerfing T2 air metal cost or tweaking some weapons.

Two Words:
Air Stacking.

One word:
Flak.
Alternatively:
AoE.(which is technically 3 words but you get my point)

Lose your entire Airforce to Flak. Solution?
Lose your exposed Commander instantly to 50 stacked bombers. Solution?

Obviously T2 air needs some work / balance if it stays in the game, but why have T2 air at all ? Fighters and bombers effectively serve the same function as T1 but harder hitters.... I cannot see why we need to have T2, just make gunships a T1 unit but more expensive. Bring the battle back to the ground.

My view from the other side:

Imagine the air forces, which are very very weak (too weak).
Will be the air forces useless? I do not think so.
In my opinion, even the relatively weak air units will be very useful in terms of:
- their mobility,
- the possibility of fast intervention in critical areas,
- attacking and control of large areas of the planet,
- the ability to quickly transport troops
- scouting (one of the basic element)

All of these things we can do in a situation when air forces are very very poor.

What, then, we can not do?
We can not effectively attack the heavily fortified positions. We only lose our planes. Is this a bad thing?
In my opinion, it is not.

Air forces should not to have the ability to destroying strongly fortified positions.
This is the job of heavy tanks and artillery.

Notice how many functions are air forces, which are very weak.
How dangerous would be in the hands of an experienced player. Reconnaissance, transport and eco harassment.
Still it would be useful to have air superiority.

From my point of view:
"even extremely weak air forces" > "a little too strong air forces"

Lose your entire Airforce to Flak. Solution?
Don't fly over flak.

Lose your exposed Commander instantly to 50 stacked bombers. Solution?
Build flak.

Stacking isnt anywhere near one of the bigger problems we have.

Air unit can choose when to engage, and so in the right hands are never weak.

Also, flak is just straight up weird with T2 air right now, as you need to have it if they have T2 air.

And if they know how to use T2 air they'll prevent your T2 from ever getting up and thus trapping you without a counter.

Did someone say stupid?

Matiz's post was very good, thank you for that. Also glad to see Scathis has changes planned.

Just gonna throw out a crazy idea here: in reality an aircraft can't just reach anywhere, fuel is a big limitation. Now the fuel mechanic in SupCom felt a bit clunky, but there are alternatives. You could have airfields/staging point buildings that project a radius in which aircraft can operate. This way, you would reduce air's ability to strike anywhere, anytime. In order to be able to fly over the enemy base, you'd actually have to win ground until you can get an airfield close enough.

Perhaps a silly suggestion, but then it's just an idea and can never have too many of those.

Of course it is. It fundamentally makes quantifying the amount of damage Air can deal impossible, because an unlimited number of Air units can occupy the same spot.
Commanders and Armies shouldn't be utterly dependent on Flak - it should take more than a single Bomber pass to kill things.