Possible T2 air balance fix...

Here is a balance idea for air I have been bouncing around for a little while.

First: Give anti air the ability to target using radar and extend the targetting range to 50% beyond its vision. This will give AA more time to react to incoming air units.

Second: Reduce the Hp of all T2 air to about 50% more than their T1 counterparts. I would leave the other aspects of T2 air the same.

That is my suggestion using the current state of the game. Now for the what if part.

I have said before that stealth and radar jamming would be wonderful additions to the game and here is one situation it would work wonderfully in.

At the T2 level include both a stealth fighter and bomber option. I would make them cost the same as their T2 non stealth counterparts but have Hp in line with the T1 fighter and bomber. Their tacticaladvantage would be that they can only be targetted when there is vision.

I'm fine with those.

Except get rid of the Peregrine. The Hummingbird should be the king of the skies. If the Peregrine must stay, reduce it's rate of fire down to a quarter of what it is.

I'm... kinda fine with a stealth fighter, but not a stealth bomber. That would promote way too much micro for such a macro oriented game.

Come on, we all know what the best defence against air is:



I still think it would be a good idea to combine the Peregrine with the Avenger, but make sure that it's a jack of all trades, master of none, leaving the Hummingbird (get a more menacing name for that I mean really) "king of the skies" and Avengegrines as a way to crack planetwide lockdown.

HAHAHAHAHA
No.

I've said why elsewhere. I'm not explaining again why that would break orbital.

Agreed brian. I did fail to clarify that stealth in my concept is passive. Always on for stealth and radar jamming units. This would not create any additional micro.

It does create extra micro in that it adds a major element to the game where you have to constantly visually look at all areas of the planet to look for stealthed units.

You can't feasibly do that when you're fighting battles on three planets.

Yeah, it would require more attention and scouting would be a lot more important with stealth on the field.

I say leave the avenger and make it kill peregrines 5 to 1, but still would be nice to have some interplanetary air.

From what we last heard you eill be getting what you want. T2 air is getting nerfed again, but the question is do we really need that? I've been watching the top 10 duke it out and I havr brrn playing myself and what I have found out usvthat T2 air is easily countered by goups of T1 AA. Basically mixing spinners and stungers in with your armt pretty much renders it immune to air attack so I've been thinking that such a huge nerf isnt necessary. I still agree that perigrine should do no AOE. It looked good in paper but that was a bad idea. Anyway back to non-fighter T2 air. Like I said I don't believe that T2 air needs such a complete nerf. T2 bombers might need a slight buff even, since they have disappeared and are never used because gunships are safer. They stand still and are more agile. As for issues with gunship air sniping rather than a patchwork fix by nerfing them fix the targeting on ground AA so that it always targets ground attack units first and then fighters.

Why? Stingers are excellent against air, and AA turrets are ok. Remove aoe on peregrines and it's fine. The real problem is t2 vehicles which don't have any real counter.

Peregrine AOE is fine in my opinion. The problem is the fact that they have extreme rapid fire as well as AOE. I think the extreme rapid fire will prove to be the worse problem.

Sure that could also work, but I find the aoe makes things micro intensive - you can't group units together, you have to micro engagements of units apart so you aren't subject to aoe.

Yeah I see what you mean... I've always imagined that's because sooner or later, Uber will add an element in the UI that allows you to set the spacing of formation on the fly. . . but maybe I'm wrong.

This is more or less what I was saying. T2 air is actually fine, because T1 ground AA is good enough. I just said that they need to bring bombers back, they need to remove peregrine AOE and they need to fix targeting priority on AA and that's it.

this is true with a lot of things, nukes and ubercannon as well. Ubercannon is by far the best example of needing to micro distance between units.

So, it would stand to argue, that there should be a control for unit's spacing between each other, or a command to request units keep distance.

Lastly, the Ubercannon should autofire and track-fire (as in the AI fires at a target using the ubercannon attack), and thus also be able to hit air. Because that would be a great air nerf, preventing t2 bomber stacking from one-hit-sniping the commander via uber-cannon-takedown of a bomber cluster.

the best thing I've found so far is to area patrol over the units you want to spread out (normally to get away from a nuke)

It is almost perfect to space out stingers for instance. However, getting them to walk thus way while retaining spacing, would be ideal. If you could evenly space out a t1 army, they would actually be able to kill a commander, especially with the upcoming 4 second cooldown they are considering with the Ubercannon.

It would be good to tack this onto a "bind units" toggle, where they share a single strat icon, they click-one-click-all, and they retain their exact position relative to each other with minimal navigating around obstacles.

Id would be nice the have Age Of Empires style formation buttons.

Can you screen shot?


Hmmmph.... During a less tight purse string month, I should invest in AoE HD.