Bomber Spam.

Just for context, I basically allied everyone and then revoked ally just as my bombers were above their commanders. Stawos was the only one smart enough to revoke alliance before i could get bombers to him.

Dirty tricks ftw

I wasn't allied to you, but had been committed to a ground war so had practically no AA.

Well no, but it isn't small either, and it is larger than the planets most 1v1 games are played on. Now you mention it though, it is basically irrelevant - air units and/or anti-air capabilities are important.

You can't balance a free for all.

The very nature of the game adds more variables then can be accounted for in simple balance.

Air stacking aside, there are preventative measures you can take against bombers.

Filling your controlled territory with lines of AA turrets does a lot to thin out and warn of incoming air strikes, but defense is not meant to stop all attacks outright. They're meant to increase the critical mass needed to break through. If your t1 AA measures can stall long enough to get some flak going, you're basically safe.

Other countermeasures include hopping planets - as air can't be transferred, and sacrificing masses of bombers against a single non-Commander target rarely pays off - and taking the war to other fronts such as orbital or heavy, heavy vehicles laced with 33-66 percent AA and fighter support.

Flak is easy to outsmart. Force movement with "hold fire" of the bomber swarm atop the target and queue attack command. Costs maybe half a second more, but ensures that Flak becomes unable to deal AoE damage.

Too bad that the Flak has been "balanced" around air units stacking. Yes, they will eventually stack with above tactic, but not before it's already too late for the defender.

The problem with T1 bombers is that they do way too many things well.

They demolish armies
They do tons of damage to large structures
They can snipe coms
They're cheap.


T1 bombers of the T2 spam days and prior couldn't demolish armies except in massive numbers. Making it so that they don't do quite so many things so well is needed if they are to be balanced.

What we need is greater area of effect with weapons. If someone wants to stack units then a single projectile should be able to kill all of the stacked units. We also need units formations, i.e. line attack, square or circle, spread or compact, etc. Homeworld is a game which did formations well.

A good example would be a weapon like the seige tank in Starcraft 2. If you don't spread your units then you will be obliterated. This means people need to think about their unit formations. They can go in tight and snipe a unit, but risk being hit by slow fire rate but big AOE units or go in with a spread formation.

what we need is less people moaning about balance in FFAs

I'm not moaning. I was just making a suggestion and it was a general comment about the game, not just FFAs.. I don't even play FFA, only team games for me. What we need is less people getting their panties in a twist whenever people make any comments about the game.

Given that bomber snipes seem to be a pretty controversial thing in PA, I think it might be a good idea to actually see what it takes to counter bomber snipes.
Time to do some testing. *opens PA*

What we need is a mode in which killing the commander doesn't end the game, seriously why is this still not a thing?

But i would be game for bombers to have less damage and more AOE.

I miss the days when bombers dropped a line of splash bombs. It was really cool looking and made for fun gameplay. That's all I have to add. Also surely there has to be a halfway hack for the ugly and poor gameplay of air all stacking. Have them form into columns of 5-6 or something. Jeez i'm glad Scathis isn't balancing PA anymore, he was such a jerk.

I miss the vote option: Its clearly your fault you did not scout.

Flak cannons mate.. They work wonders

As other pointed out:
Flak kills T1 bombers swarms like nothing else. Thier AoE effect is the bane of stacked bombers. Everything that makes T1 AA bad against Bombers is what makes the Flak gun good against them:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/my-take-on-bomber-snipes.65267/

750 radius is pretty small for a 10 people FFA.
Moreover in a 10 people FFA the chance to loose is about 90%. Because only one out of 10 persons can win, that means you only get a win-chance of about 10%.
This especially happens if you loose sight of one enemy, wich is what FFA games are notorious for.

All the players "he wiped out without breaking a sweat" had according to the OP overfocussed on one type of defense/combat style. So he was simply abusing the weakness in thier defenses, wich is a very legitimate technique for FFA's/multi faction games.

In order to feed those 20 Air factories (12 Metal and 675 power each) in the picture he needed quite a amount of T1 MEX Eco. So you really let him expand quite a bit without contesting him. If nobody contested him he could build up enough masses in peace.
Before you can "use" the land you took from any enemy by sniping his com you have to expand to that area first.

Regarding the eco and his expansion - he was in a lake. It's difficult to threaten bases like that with ground focused units. He had enough eco because metal spots were maxed out.

I'm not saying using a weakness in defences shouldn't be possible, I just disliked how he was able to rush for that strategy for a quick cheesy win. It's not fun.

Just putting it out there - you could have typed in chat something like

"hey this guy is going to kill us all if we don't do something about it. Let's put aside our differences, form an alliance, and kill him first".

Seriously, it's an ffa. This is like saying death lasers are imba because everyone else is fighting everyone else and can't stop the one random who turtled a metal planet.

Or some random built a nuke because he never got attacked. Or some random who rushed t2 because he never got attacked.

And it's silly to say "his stuff was in the water" because you don't need to attack him with ground units. Planes can fly over water.

Not to mention commander torpedos are OP as hell.

That is the thing with FFA and somebody using a tactic that makes him too likely to win the game: Suddenly he becomes the 2nd enemy in "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".