[Suggestion] Rethinking Air Units (Fighters/Bombers)

I am of the opinion that the current dynamic between T1 and T2 air doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Right now we have the problem that T1 Fighters and T2 fighters both can't shoot ground. So one is strictly better than the other, but more expensive.

Similarly, T1 bombers and strictly worse in terms of fire power than T2 bombers, but T2 are more expensive.

My suggestion is simple. Leave one type of strictly air-to-air fighter and replace the other with a fighter-bomber type unit, one which can shoot at both air and ground, but as well as a fighter at air and not as well as a bomber on land.

Now leave one type of bomber, and change the other to make it an area of effect ground attack unit that does much less damage than the regular single unit bomber.

So now we have the following units:

Fighter: Great Air to Air, No ground attack capability
Fighter-Bomber - Weak Air-to Air and Air-to-Ground
Bomber - Strong Air-to-Ground only.
Carpet Bomber: Weak Air-to-Ground, but are of effect (covers a larger area).

Now we have different aircraft with different roles that are no longer duplicative. Thoughts?

So why can't fighters attack ground, again? It was the lack of bullshit restrictions that made TA so cool.

é_è because it's of no use? (also probably not an alpha priority)

Irrelevant. It can shoot, and ammo isn't an issue, so why wouldn't it?

When swarming fighters against the AI, I've seen nearby buildings get blown up from the stray shots of all the fighters (as well as T2 factories dying b/c of their super large hitbox). So fighters are by no means worthless against ground if they could attack them.

My thoughts:
T1 fighter - decent against slow bombers, but not fast and accurate enough to quickly deal with other fighters.
T2 fighter - fast, and good against scouts and other fighters (especially T1), but too weak to quickly deal with bombers.
T1 bomber - a bomber.
T2 bomber - larger damage per bomb, but even larger reload time, resulting in lower overal DPS.
Carpet bomber is a separate unit(s).

I would be hesitant to Judge the balance of aircraft until we get more information on all the air units Umber plans to include in the game. But I think that is well known that right know Peregrines and Hummingbirds, and to a lesser degree Bumblebees and Hornets, both fill the same role.

Agreed. TA fighters could always attack ground units. It's realistic that if a fighter can target an airborne unit it can target something static on the ground. If not, it's just an arbitrary rule.

I'm certainly for this being its own game, but one of the best things from playing GOW (Gods of War) was a fighter (Avenger) start which came down to a dogfight at the centre of the map. 4/5 hovering ground shots and you took out a mex (metal extractor) and could damage production. TA allowed games that required massive armies, but also games that came down to 1 on 1 dogfighting. It'll be hard to produce that again.

We're only in Alpha right now. We're a long, long way from any kind of final build. I'll bet they've barely begun balancing anything. I know we always wait until most of the game is actually written before we balance stuff.

I have had fighters shoot at a factory before.

Hawk swarms. I don't know of any way to stop advanced fighters becoming OP without breaking something else about the air game, except for restricting their targets.

Look at Supcom, the ASF has always been the most overpowered unit even without the ability to shoot ground. Except FA 3599, where the Restorer broke every large game, primarily because it could target ground and air.

I found that it was very rare to lose to a Hawk swarm, they were very resource intensive and mobile Flak along with some Reapers and Cans could walk almost unmolested anywhere they pleased. Having spent so much on the swarm usually made the opponents base very vulnerable.

Flak, both static and mobile in your main base also helped.

Well having 2 weapons(AA and Anti-Ground) certainly didn't help, I thought the main issue was that Restorers only required a T2 Economy to start pumping them out, meaning that by the time you could start 'countering' them with ASFs, the enemy had such a headstart on building Restorers you'd never be able to build enough ASFs to clear the skies.

Also SupCom and FA were somewhat lacking in terms of T3 AA options and due to the tiered nature the T2 defenses/mobile units could compete with T3 Air.

Mike

The main issue with Restorers is that they had to fight ASFs, which were by far the most powerful units in the game. OP can only be fought with OP. The moment a unit had to deal with both air AND ground, all the balance-spaghetti was doomed to fall on the floor.

The opposite issue was seen in Vanilla, where broadswords would accidentally cut swathes of interceptors out of the sky because of the 1:10 ratio between ground and air. Even though the weapon couldn't target air, it would connect with interceptors that blocked ground units. The end result was equally hilarious.

Basically, don't let the Supcom balance guy touch PA.

You must be imagining things, because hawk swarms really weren't that bad. TA had some decent balance, even if ground units struggled against the pathing of the day.

I remember brawler swarms to be bad but hawks? Even if manually controlled they had to pass over whatever they were attacking which brought them into range of AA that killed them well.


As for air units, you can have massive variations.

Single bomb with low damage and massive aoe. Think fuel bomb. Good against bots but not really enough damage to destroy anything by itself. Damage gets blocked by buildings, terrain features, wreckages, etc. (Ie. Stuff behind it doesn't get hurt.)

Fighter/Bomber with multiple guided missiles that attacks multiple targets at once. Slow missiles and the spread out damage prevent it being able to destroy faster units, high hp targets.

Napalm. Fire doesn't hurt PA units much but even they overheat eventually. Leaves a damage over time field for a short time.

Ground attack fighter. Shoots multiple unguided rockets in a line while strafing. Bit hard to hit fast stuff. Good against clumped up air too but wouldn't be able to beat even a scout in 1v1 as its accuracy is pretty bad.

Flying siege unit. The gun of a pelter welded to a transport plane. (Hey, even perfected warmachines get desperate ideas. ) Very inaccurate but very mobile artillery. Any sort of AA easily blows it out of the air though.


Anyway, the idea is to have additional mechanics with the individual units instead of only tinkering with dps numbers.

Going to completely agree with this 100%.

There's no reason why fighters can't shoot ground units just as much as they shoot air units. Their missiles lock on, right? So what makes that tank so astronomically impossible to target? The word of god? Please.

FA wasn't balanced for Air because the HP / damage ratio was completely off in every way, shape, and form. There was no way to let ASFs attack ground units or they would be the only thing anyone built to attack the enemy.

At least in TA, your fighters did very little damage per missile, and required quite a bit of them to do decent damage. They were extremely fast, though, but I think this was so you could micro out of tracking missile fire. (Ever slowed the game down to -5 and micro'd a scout over a base with several dozen SAMs? Same thing.) With the slowed missile speed in PA, the fighters won't need to go as fast, resulting in having a similarly effective ground anti-air, a buffed flak, and air able to fire on ground without being broken.