Gamma T2 Air

Really? in all the games I have played t2 air has been countered by big armies of AA bots or flak or other t2 air. You just need to play the game better. I will agree that peregrines do seem a little bit over powered.

You just got beat by a better player. Plain and Simple.

I had plenty of T1 fighters. If he had just used gunships, I could have destroyed them and proceded to either kill his com or rampage through his base. The peregrines are game breaking.


If T2 air is being countered by AA bots, then the person is using T2 air badly.

T2 air being countered by T2 air is not acceptable as then you're just forcing the player to spam it himself. You have several counters to tank armies or bot armies or T1 bombers. For T2 air, just one.

While flak can counter it, it's T2 and a good user of T2 air will prevent your T2 from ever going up, invalidating it as a counter.

having a t2 fighter that is just plain better than a t1 fighter is forcing people to go t2 air as well basically.

I'm wondering if the addition of mobile flak would finally balance T2 air out. Stationary flak does a great job protecting your buildings but as many others have pointed out does nothing for land armies. Perhaps a slight buff to the T1 air so it remains viable and a T2 tank/bot unit that is essentially medium range mobile flak. This would force other players to try and target down your flak units in land skirmishes, or have massive air superiority, before they could effectively swarm you by air. Air is best as a support or lightening war kind of unit, putting a lot of focused damage on undefended areas and catching your enemy off guard.

Have you even used them in the new patches? In large numbers t2 bombers and gunships cant even get close.

And t2 fighters are supposed to be better than t1 (that's why they are t2). Maybe not extremely better as they are now but better nonetheless.

As far as that game went he just put his eco where it tactically mattered more, sure it may have been a "lame" way to win but it still is was tactically superior.

I am not excited about mobile flak, I have a feeling it will be op and make air useless in late game. however like you said air should be a shock and awe type unit and should be established early to have air supremacy.

Gunships are fast. Once you've got T2 up, you can spam the things and immediately send them to the enemy base, where you can take out their T2 easily unless they've done nothing but spam flak since getting it up. It's OP.

In other words, instead of massing huge armies of tanks and bots to win just rush T2 air to become invincible.

derp double post

No. Just don't expect your com rush to go well if you have not scouted, and are not prepared for situations that could occur.

I was as prepared as I could be without having T2 air. However, the only way to counter T2 air in early mid game (the first 2 or so minutes after a T2 factory is up) is with T2 air. Flak takes time to set up.

OP t2 air is necessary since there is no concept of decent radar in this game. Countering t2 air is easy as well. Simply have way more t2 air. =P

At least fighters don't seem to blow up factories any more.

yeah... dang it, I actually kinda liked that. =P

Actually... I always got results with flak. Then again, I also invest in early air defence too because as much as people deny it they will rush t2 air and scout, but if they see an opponent turtle they will use t1 air to harass, because they know damn good and well they can't efficiency enough on t1 air early game to out turtle and they can be harassed before establishing t2 air. Quote how fast you can t2 air all you want, one can have more mexes and t2 before air gets t2 if they use bots and SOME missile antiair because bombers really are desperately bad most the time.

Generally, these are all still placeholder numbers anyway. It is to make the game closer to balanced, so people won't use air all game every game, so Scathis can even see what the other balance issues are. Because nobody believes the gil-es are overpowered because it isn't air.

I don't get this...

In my experiments versus the AI... 4 gunships get killed first. Not the comm. AI must be better at the right micro.

T2 is just better, T1 doesn't kill T2 for cost and won't kill the commander without assistance from T2. Every T1 unit built doesn't give the cost benefit that it could have been faster T2 unit production, every T1 factory built could have been more T2 factories, and T2 units in general are just better than T1. So there isn't any incentive to build t1 once you've formed a shield of T2. Once you have gone T2, you never go back.



That will remain the case until T2 is balanced to be not just strictly superior to T1.

Sure, T1 spam can pass you by, so you create a shield Of T1 against a sword of T1. For a bit. But you can not win the game with it unless you gut your opponents power. It's just faster to go T2 rather than faff around figuring how to do that.

And T2 gives you more bang for your buck. Unless the game is going to end in the short term, you are so much better off rolling back on T1 production and building more T2.


You have seen my description of the cost effective T1 shield I presume? I.e. why it was worth building Ants and Levellers at the same time?

Now two Levellers will win over 1 Leveller and Taffis cost for cost. That's the point. Cost for cost you are so much better going pure T2, because cost for cost T2 will hold the line against T1. It's only when you are putting more into T1 that you come out ahead. Short term, T1 pays off. Medium and Long term, T2 pays off.

Not even taking into account future possible mods, such as targeting priorities, where T2 units could be focus fired, pushing the pure T2 - Mixed Tier matchup strongly in favour of pure T2.

Com auto attacks the peregrines, which can't be hit.

Yeah, ground units which shoot air need some sort of target priority system. I hate watching my mobile AA fire on the peregrines while gunships blow them to pieces, and good luck with your manual targeting!

I prefer not to believe in luck, but instead mods.


As it stands you have 3 seconds to focus fire the leveller and you win by a large margin. Human reaction speed is 0.3 seconds. As it stands two Levellers vs 3 Taffis and a Leveller results in a win for 2 Levellers everytime, without micro focusing fire. Micro turns it from a Leveller for Leveller and 3 Ants exchange into a damaged Leveller for a Leveller and 3 Ants exchange.


Except for that freaky time where 4 Ants kill 4 Levellers.

Another big reason t2 air rushes are superior to anything else is because the com can uber cannon them like t1 or t2 ground rushes. If you have 5 gunships and a couple peregrines to distract the com, no t2 air dies... If you engage the commander with only 10 units on the ground with the exception of OP sniper bots then commander will win.

But I don't think getting the com to be able to uber t2 air would even help... t2 air is so versatile that if attacking the com is out of the question it can be used to restrict all growth give the player that owns the sky complete map control early on. t1 AA isn't the answer either as every t1 AA you build is essentially 1 dox you haven't built and you will then lose the ground encounters as well.

The t2 air rush should not be killed off entirely but I feel it needs a higher risk to it so that it's not a go to strategy. T1 fighters also need a fighting chance vs t2 fighters... or t2 fighters should just be removed, that would probably fix it.

I don't know, I didn't come out of the tournament feeling T2 air was OP, it felt like a good compliment to my forces but was never the sole factor. I still think mobile flak is needed because a player looking after their gunships can take out your mobile AA too easily and use Peregrines to confuse ground units. But I never felt like T2 air was carrying a game, it was always complimenting fights happening on the ground. Missile towers are really solid though, I like the balance of them at the moment.

No, to me the big imbalance is that Peregrines still render Hummingbirds irrelevant. It's not as bad as it was, but really once Peregrines take to the field you need your own T2 air. I think all the interceptor planes are too fast though, which makes doing hit and runs against an opponent without sufficient intel near impossible.

I did only win one game due to T2 air. In the naval one stingrays were too effective for gunships to be useful and in the others except for the lava one the enemy simply had too many fighters to counter with a reasonable peregrines to gunships ratio of 2:5.

Except for the desert one, where I went air first but didn't build a t2 air factory (lost that game to sniper bots because of it). Derps gonna derp.
I probably would have won the tourney if I hadn't derped that game, challonge being the derpy thing that it is.