The reasons why T2 air is broken.

Yeah I feel like aircraft do well with having burst damage, but should be well countered by extremely cost effective AA.

1o bombers vs 10 AA, what I feel should happen is that the bomber swoop in and kill 7 AA straight up, but are then very quickly killed by the remaining 3 AA as the bombers take time to reload.

AA should always beat bombers and gunships in a all out brawl, but this should be reversed in a competition of who can do more with one shot.

And Id love bomber to also have a ammo system, with a great mini gun burst of bullets, but then needs time to recharge and cool their turrets.

Maybe this is a time to reconsider forcefields. Could solve the issue with rushing air units at a targeted commander.

That's not much of an issue, as building wide enough bases already solves that.

BURN HIM!

In case no one mentioned yet.
t2 bot factory : 5500 metal
t2 vehicle factory : 5410 metal
t2 naval factory : 6600 metal
t2 air factory : 3300 metal

Who said peregrines were OP?

Again a situation which would benefit from no Air stacking. Ground AA is finite as you can only fit so much on the ground. We need Air to be finite because, reasonably, you should only be able to fit so much in the Air. Else this fine tuning of balance cannot be accomplished, because Air will swamp Ground AA, and the only balance to this is to make Ground AA AOE annihilate infinite Air.

I really feel Air should cost somewhere between Land and Naval. Around 6000.
Air should be a valuable investment, not something to be churned out like bots or tanks.

I see no reason why these various vehicles must be put on an equal footing. Orbital is not equal to ground units, so why do we consider Air as easily spammable as doxes? Air needs to be more expensive by some way than land in order to make land the more economically viable option, and grant land numbers the opportunity of responding to an incoming deathball.

Land combat is way more fun than Air combat anyway. Robots are frickin awesome.

Look. I also want air to not stack. I want airplanes to collide with each other but I also don't want air units to slide all over each other like they are oiled rabbits or something.
I'm not sure that there is a technical solution which could both satisfy me and have acceptable performance.

From a balance point of perspective, stacking air can be countered with AoE/splash damage. Flak turrets don't care if there are 1 bomber or a hundred bombers in the same spot. They destroy the bombers in the same time anyway.

If you look at the current balance, there aren't many targets where stacking actually matters. It is basically only against commanders and advanced factories that it matters but those are pretty easy to protect with flak once you reach t2. Most ground forces goes down in only 1 pass from advanced bombers.

In my opinion a single pass taking out a dozen or so units should be a clear indication that Air units should cost a lot more, or be nerfed.
The oily rabbits made me laugh. I'd envisage collisions between friendly and enemy aircraft lol.

That's the point of air? You keep it well protected until you reach critical mass and then do maximum damage at the right moment? The issue is that a blob of units is more effective than a small group of fighters spread out? I.e. when you have the air units on area patrol, you just move your blob of scout planes through the area in a sweep to clear a path and send the bombers afterwards.

Planes are designed to die. Play a game with a friend. One player builds a small amount of fighters, the other builds a huge number of scout planes. You have to achieve an absolutely horrific casualty rate to achieve anything in enemy air space. But wave after wave of scouts achieves something. With numbers, the scout planes start to take on greater numbers and win, but their attrition rate is still high. Do the same thing with Bumblebees - wave after wave will whittle down a base. As long as you can replace the unit quickly, throwing them away doesn't matter if they damage the opponent. But that's not as economically "cheap", because the metal cost and the time cost can be many times that of a tank ball/bot ball. Same thing with fighters vs fighters - fighter attrition rate is much higher than for other units. A 10 vs 1 fighter battle will result in 9 fighters walking away. A 10 vs 1 Dox battle results in 10 Dox walking away.

Unless the enemy is entirely unprotected. Then it's 6 eggs and half a dozen of the other comparing air and non-air.

Nup. AA is soft counter to bombers, and bombers are soft counter to AA. AA is hard counter to fighters.. 10 bombers and 10 AA units should always kill each other perfectly. (Unless you make your AA network deep, rather than wide. In which case it's 10 bombers that have to fly through the network to kill stuff.)

10 AA structures should probably resist an attack by 30 bombers, or so.

How do you trigger that bug? And where is the bug tracker task? I'll drink to that!

I've made my comments on balancing air in other threads - it should still cost 550 seconds for an air fabber to build a factory. Plus the 10% penalty air fabbers always have (metal cost 5445 precisely). Naval cost should actually probably be 5500 too, because now ship fabbers build at 10, not 12.




The reason why air isn't as economically viable as bots or tanks is because of its high casualty rate. Without air control, it is difficult to accumulate and use a fleet of 100 bombers. It is comparably easier to accumulate an army of 100 bots, even if you don't have land control. IT's easier to protect land than air.

I am personally of the feeling that AA should be overall better then bombers in a 1 v 1 scenario, due to the presence of the bombers being moving units, and being able to all be in the same location at once.

A smart bomber player will avoid as many AA as they can, and so will almost always be outnumbering the enemy AA.

I disagree, I think it's more a design problem with air in the TA "series" that hasn't been solved, leading to air being used this way.