Rethinking Air Combat

In TA: Twilight, the anti-air turrets were fairly brutal, with anything from high aoe flak cannons to long-range anti-air artillery rockets. (And some of these concepts carried over to ZK.)
Also, low tier planes, like the Freedom Fighter were better anti-air than high tier planes. The Hawk and Vamp had more powerful weaponry, but flew slower and had a lower fire rate. The result was that massive air had a lower dps per cost ratio, and were quickly countered by the cheap, low tier planes.
That didn't make them useless, just more situational, and there were an enormous variety of planes that could be used. (Where the Arm had one gunship before, they now had 3.)

Hell I recon even some kind of AA plasma flamethrower could do the job, incinerating large clusters of planes that group up to attack, but with a relatively short range and slow turning speed it could work as a way to cleanse the sky of blobs of aircraft.

Yeah, it was a Core turret. Tended to be VERY effective against standard gunships. (For long-range gunships, however, it was no threat.)

Was that a mod?

What one?

And as long as we don't have a gunship that out ranges it we wont have a problem right?

They already have unit cannons that launch k-bots long distances. Additionally, they could do something like a teleporter structure that gets linked up with another teleporter, and moves units 1 at a time across huge distances or to other planets.

Logistics are a huge part of real warfare. Asking players to think about logistics a bit to get the most out of a better bang-for-buck ground army sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Isn't the idea that you just build new factory's at the location?

The problem with the air blob in supcom is that the best counter to Air superiority fighters was more air superiority fighters. In general whenever the counter to a particular unit is the unit itself you will get blobs of those units, the simple solution is to have an effective counter against this blob of units.

In this case there are sufficient solutions to this without adding fuel, ammo, range or unit limits. Eg.
-effective AOE damage.
-stoping/reducing overkill of a single unit in the air blob.

In the game I'm looking forward to I don't want to see fuel, ammo or a lack of range limiting the carnage I can cause.

This is essentially one component of what I am suggesting. The flip side however is that managing fuel is extra work for the player, so reinventing the way the player interacts with his planes is required. I'm proposing that players take a step back and have a more measured, plan-first approach, rather than a micro-heavy click fest.

The simple fact is that if you need to micro each air battle in order to win, then air blobs will never go away - the player simply does not have the time to micromanage more than one air battle at a time.

Flak / more effective anti air does not solve this problem in the slightest - it simply allows players to block off areas against air, and the air singularity moves elsewhere. Requiring players to invest a large amount in defenses just to expand promotes turtle warfare.

Pawz while we may largely agree that things like fuel and ammo are necessary to curtail the airblob, I think you are incorrect on a few points you use to justify it.

Firstly, the amount of micro required is not relevant. The problem is that it is ideal from a tactical perspective to blob your air units, not a lack of ability to split them. If this were the case then a player which was able to split their units for greater effectiveness would do so, and would likely win, all other things being equal. No player does this, or even tries, because having all your firepower in one place is very obviously optimal since it inflicts maximal casualties and minimizes your own casualties.

The core way to fix blobs and deathballs of all varieties is to alter this fundamental equation where maximally-dense clumping results in maximum effectiveness. Nothing else will suffice. Any method that makes spreading away from the densest possible arrangement can work, however. Reduced stacking effectiveness when large groups fight together, lack of universal independent mobility, presence of asymmetric force multipliers, and also obvious factors like weapons that are more effective against clumped enemies; splash damage.


Additionally, you are again correct that making anti-air extremely strong doesn't solve the problem. However you are wrong about the gameplay reason for why this is.

If anti-air is made very strong, this will simply prompt a player to build less of it in response to any particular air threat. And a sufficiently large and powerful deathball of air units may be able to overwhelm even a significant amount of very powerful anti-air, because the deathball of air units is their most utility-maximizing arrangement. The air units need to be more useful to their user when spread out than they are together- that is the only solution which will effectively solve the airblob problem.

Don't get me wrong, I support anti-air being extraordinarily cost-effective against planes. This is primarily because planes can win the game- they destroy stuff. Anti-air's only function is to prevent the enemy planes from destroying your stuff- it cannot win you the game. As a result a 1:1 investment ratio MASSIVELY favors the player making air units, to a preposterous degree when you factor in that air units are highly mobile, and anti-air is not. Indeed, even battle resource effectiveness ratios of 5:1 may be insufficient for anti-air against planes. 10:1 or better may be necessary for the anti-air to even justify its own existence.

But this type of anti-air effectiveness is a design feature independent of the need to design planes so that they are straight up more effective when spread apart than they are in huge groups. There must be diminishing returns as the air blob gets larger; even as the absolute strength of that force increases, it does so at a decelerating rate.

That seems to be a recurring trend with air superiority fighters across all games. The light interceptor is never really an issue, as it ends up easily destroyed and managed by ground units. The problem always happens with the "Heavy" interceptor. What defines the heavy interceptor? In all titles, it was an interceptor that gained extra speed, extra endurance, and extra firepower.

That's a huge problem. Increasing ALL of these features together is a blatant violation of the Dragonball Z trinity!

For two units to be equally valued, they must make tradeoffs between speed, power, or technique(more exotic tradeoffs not included). Therefore, an interceptor can not have the speed of its lighter cousin and the firepower of a heavy fighter at the same time. Increasing every attribute at once would demand a HUGE increase in price, at the very least. Even so, the unit does not serve any real purpose beyond being a blatantly superior interceptor.

A proper heavy air killing unit would look more like the Aeon Restorer than anything else(minus anti ground). It would be a "gunship" class flyer that makes huge sacrifices of speed to gain powerful air killing weapons. Being slow makes it more difficult to secure air space, and being a gunship may make it additionally vulnerable to ground units. That's the price of equipping raw power.

Specialty interceptors might incorporate other features like stealth systems, space travel, or even something exotic like underwater access. In this case they are paying extra to gain technique.

That is ideal, for a proper full scale invasion. However, it's much less trouble to build a base if you can get at least ONE army there first.

Invading enemy territory is always going to be a challenge. Getting a base up is just the first step for a long haul.

While it's true that AA is mostly defensive in nature, that's not all it does. AA shuts down powerful support tools. It kills flying engineers and transports, slowing the enemy down. It kills ground units that have been given flight either from a cannon or jump jets, securing land control. It can play a large role in nuke defense. And as TotalA showed, AA units function decently as all rounders, superior against air but not entirely helpless elsewhere.

AA can not directly win games because there are no flying resources or strategic targets. Extractors, generators, and factories are basically built on the ground. Commanders hug the ground. The only way to change this is to put more interesting things in the air. You can drag things down from orbit, adding more things for air to do. You can fight over purely air themed worlds where everything floats and there's no land at all. Or you can use another layer entirely, perhaps plunging air units into the deep sea where these things already exist and are worth fighting over.

Ledarsi, those are good reasons, but I wouldn't dismiss the factor of player micro time. Think of bombers - people have been clamoring for bombers that can automatically bomb multiple targets, and good players split their bombers into several wings and assign targets individually when they can.

ASFs however move way too fast for the player to effectively manage multiple groups, and moreover they have guided missiles that do not require the player to specifically target the enemy to make them fire at full efficiency.

So yeah, Bobucles you're right in part as well, its the combo of speed, strength and firepower that made the ASF the dominant air unit in the end game.

However, even if you were to remove the ASF from Supcom, you would STILL have deathblobs of aircraft, so while I support your overall balance concepts, I don't believe they will affect the fundamental problem of airforce singularities.

Never played TA, but I feel like these following reasons make Supcom air units such a dominant force:

1. Speed: Most air units in other RTS games are, at best, 2 or 3 times faster than your average ground unit. However, in SC, this is way out of wack. The speed of planes make anti air less useful as they'll at best only get a few shots off. The high speed also establishes map control too easily compared to land.

2. Front loaded damage: Bombers in supreme commander - fly in, drop a bomb that deals a high amount of damage at once, fly away. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a very strong mechanic. Not having to actually "engage" the enemy to do its full amount of damage makes air even more versatile.

3. Air is countered by more air: more of a balance issue than anything, the best counter to a ball of ASFs shouldn't be a bigger ball of ASFs.

4. Air units' ability to stack: Although having 100 planes on top of each other makes them susceptible to aoe, it also significantly improves their movement versatility.

Can I ask what is the real world counter to doing this?

Is it just logistics or is it become of enemy AA?

Air is ******* expensive.
Its a logistical challenge.
Airplanes are if hit in most cases dead. Hell there are airplanes crashing because they suck bigger sized birds in their engines.
There is nothing like a flying fortress that could survive some AA rockets if hit.

Though nowadays air is one of the most important things in conventional war. Because of their speed, stealth abilities and fighting range AA up to 100 km afaik.

One big key to change this that is currently developing is passive radar.

The biggest counter to the "bomb everything" strategy in modern time seems to be the amount of outrage generated over bombing an entire city, which doesn't really apply in PA.

Also cost and logistics, yes.

What about antiair shooting at land targets? You don't not use your AA machine gun in the defense of a position from a land assault because it's "not meant to shoot at land targets" and therefore is supposedly physically incapable of having less than a 40 degree barrel angle before shooting.

While cool, TA kinda howed what happens when a rocket AA unit can shoot at land.

One could always go with the somewhat annoying original SC method of "aircraft are ultra low health", but to a lesser degree.

The original SC also had "AA with extra low damage", and nothing else could ever shoot up. There was no net effect when everything across the board was divided by 10(or 20, or some insane number). Well, almost everything.

The broadsword gunship could still use its anti-ground weapons against air(if by accident), scoring 1-2 hit kills against other aircraft. Every other anti air weapon dealt 2 digit damage at best. This was likely part of the original reason to boost air health in general. Naturally they went overboard, creating opposite issues with overly durable air.

There were numerous glitches as well. For example, not every AA weapon got buffed with the health change, still dealing old SC damage. This made hilariously useless weapons against the revamped air:

http://supcom.wikia.com/wiki/UEF_T3_Heavy_Gunship
http://supcom.wikia.com/wiki/Cybran_T3_Battleship

Real life planes' interactions depends on the era.

In WWII, operational range limits and small payload weight limits were the only real reasons why you couldn't simply build an all-flying army. Ground to air weapons were deterrents at best. In order to actually get kills on enemy planes, you needed fighters. And to some extent there actually was ASF spam- for example in the war over the English Channel between the British RAF and the Luftwaffe.

It is also interesting to note that, at the time, the operational range of bombers was considerably longer than of fighters. Which meant in order for the British to bomb more distant German targets, the British fighter escorts had to turn around halfway to the target, leaving the bombers completely undefended. Germany did not have this limitation as they had captured or hastily constructed many airfields along the northern European coastline, and had the ability to put fighters in the air over England.


From the Cold War era onwards, the low cost and incredibly high lethality of extremely long-range surface to air missiles makes using planes extremely risky. Using large numbers of planes for an extended period of time in a single operational area is outright suicidal, as the enemy is going to put some SAM's in range of that area and wipe you out.

Radar and extreme long-range anti-air missiles then led to the development of stealth technology to allow very small numbers of planes to operate even in areas with significant air defense relatively safely.