hummingbirds need to be fixed

Just got back to playing PA after vacation.

And my first 2 games were air snipes. There is something wrong with building 150 hummingbirds that take ALL the damage while the bombers/gunships fly right through and snipe the comm.

Not even flak can counter this. (unless, ofc you have 50 flaks sitting right around your comm)

This game is not supposed to be about commander sniping, it should be about winning fairly and without cheese. I remember in SC there was an option for different modes, one where you would have to destroy every enemy unit to win. That is so much better imho.

People keep saying "scout more" and i usually tell them to f**k off because my scouts get lost in the humming bird swarm before i can even see the whole thing.

Yes i'm mad because i lost, like everyone, but i'm furious that i lose from the stupidest snipes. It's like trying to go through WWII again, when you could have just sniped Hitler with B52's.

Please nerf hummingbirds, or bring back peregrines.

EDIT: thanks for the move to the balance thread.

Missiles have a hard time hitting their targets for some reason.

And ground to air units/defenses really need to target bombers first, rather than fighters.

Hummingbirds don't need to be changes, and bringing back Peregrines won't fix this, just make it worse.

Right now the best strategy against air snipes is building hummingbirds of your own IMO. Always have an airforce presence to help the ground defenses. Some spiners on the ground with some humminbirds in the air plus a few towers make airsnipes really difficult.

Supremacy is a confirmed addition to the game.

Simply put though, I think flak cannons need a buff. Not to damage, they deal enough but to AoE. Its AoE needs to be bigger and needs to be able to at the very least take out any T1 plane. It'd also be nice if their was some sort of bomber priority thing in the game.
Also, MOBILE FREAKING FLAK.

Also, the forum fought for months to get rid of the peregrine, and with good reason, too. Unless it were to become a lot less insanely overpowered, no one really wants it back. Currently the only way to win the air game is to build more AA fighters than the other guy, this is a huge, HUGE problem and with the peregrines it was the same problem, just with a T2 unit.

Id prefer (Although I have stated the opposite in the past) that the missile AA actively target bombers when they move into range, but have flak target "blobs of opportunity" first.

Well that's good news.

I see why poeple wanted the peregrine removed but i still think there should be some sort of T2 AA for air.

I'm all for specialization but sometimes an improvement is good, at least a specialized improvement

The problem with the peregrine was the same problem that we have with the vanguard, too many excellent stats piled on top of each other. More range than hummingbirds, fires a massive amount of missiles in a second, the missiles have AoE, etc. If we remove any two of those stats then it becomes a balanced unit.

I'm not 100% against the return of the peregrine, but if that thing even comes close to coming back its role will need to be completely rethought.

If I recall correctly it used to fire something like 7 missiles every second, with AoE, which is just crazy.

Maybe if it were a slightly upgraded hummingbird (same damage and fire rate, but with a little AoE (A. LITTLE.)) I'd be fine with it, but a steroid injected hummingbird was a bad idea from the beginning.

I would like to see the peregrine returned. Altough I would make it so that the hummingbird stays single target high dps AA fighter and the peregrine a lower dps AoE fighter. Later in the game you have huge airflocks bunched together. The peregrine would shine. To counter it with hummingbirds is to spread them out.

So you get 2 diffrent fighters which shine in diffrent stages of the game and in diffrent situations. just my honest opinion ^^

Well, I called hummingbirds having too much hp about a month ago.

Air snipes arn't a balance problem though with the new commander aa missile.

The commander just targets the hummingbirds when the snipe comes in, (i'm talking about hundreds of hummingbirds and bumblebee snipes) it never really has the chance to react anyway.

Anything is powerful if you build hundreds of them and the opponent has nothing but a commander to oppose it.

true, but there are counters to a large army of tanks, just build shellers.

I guess what i'm trying to say is that it's impossible to counter a huge flock (lol) of hummingbirds with bombers/gunships, without building an entire sea of flaks.

Bomber spam takes so much longer to get enough air units to overcome the new commander. You can't really cheese opponents with it anymore because there is alot more time to figure out whats going on and respond accordingly.

There is plenty of time now to build hummingbirds of your own (which you should be doing anyway to protect against just normal bomber usage against fabbers). If he builds 3 air factories and makes bombers, you only need 2 air factories to make hummingbirds. Then the third one can be a vehicle factory. So him going bombers in any large number really only means he's handing you both air and land advantage for free.

If you've left your opponent alone long enough to get 150 humming birds + T2 air (as you mention gunships) and you don't have a sizeable air force of your own.... I'm not sure what you expect?!

I'd hardly call it a balance issue- you let them overpower you, simple as.

The main issue I have with having only one fighter is that the only way to beat mass hummingbirds is to build more hummingbirds, imagine it as a land army instead where there were only ants available to build, the only counter to large amounts of ants are... more ants. There needs to be more clever aircraft than we have currently, multiple types that deal damage in various different ways and no one aircraft beats all. One could fire one large rocket that does a big aoe yet little damage, another could use a machine gun yet have much higher fire rate, and so more dps if it can hit the enemy, and etc...

even then having more hummingbirds only takes a longer amount of time to destroy the bombers or gunships.

My issue is that the hummingbirds absorb all the damage while everything else destroys the base/comm

And that's the core issue.

Default, static target priorities suck.

The problem is, that as a player, you only have a static priority list which is insufficient. Sniping fighters sure makes sense if there are only few since this ensures survivability of your own fighters (that is if there are any!), but it makes absolutely no sense at all if fighters are being used as a meat shield for a anti ground attack.

And even if it did prioritize bombers, it would still get stuck on the fighter it had locked on previously do to the lack of the ability to re-target.


Seriously, that's the case where a proper unit AI is necessary. You can't micro this ****.

150 Hummingbirds can go down quite easily if one spams around 10 Flak Cannons.

Best solution to counter Air Snipes from 300 Bumblebees now = build 30 - 40 Flak Cannons near your commander.

It does make me wonder: if your enemy can build up to 150 - 300 planes, it would have been in the very late-game, which, if your economy scales as much as the enemy, you can easily have the manufacturing capacity to build 30, if not 50 Flak Cannons to counter them.

To ask for a simple fix whereby 10 units from a small economy can take out 300 planes from a larger economy player is not exactly balanced.

Oh, anyway, so this was why the Peregrine was removed.

it's actually quite easy to build up a large army of air in maybe 15 minutes, even less if there is more metal.

It's also very hard to deal with multiple people on an 8-10 player FFA.