Why no Advanced AA?

I was wondering why there is effectively no T2 (Advanced) anti-air units? I recently played a 4 player FFA game in which the last player left was untouched for almost the entire game on a mid sized planet. He did nothing but turtle his base up with tons of every defensive structure available, as well as build T1 and T2 bombers and fighters. By the time I got around to dealing with him, and trying to crack that nut, he had built a few hundred Fighters/Bombers. In anticipation of a counter offensive to my ground and orbital based assault, I built a few hundred Spinners, T1 Missile Defense towers, and T1 fighters. When the time came, he rolled through all of those defenses like they weren't even there. Then after completely destroying most of my 900+ units, he strolled in and wiped my Commander off the map like he was stepping on an ant! If he was closer to me in the beginning, I would have crushed him due to his strategy of going 100% Air, as it should be, I think.

So, my question is, should it be that significant Air power can only be countered with matching Air power? That doesn't seem very balanced to me. No other strategy seems so one sided, and every other unit type has T2 defensive structures to counter it.

I don't think your problem was a lack of advanced AA. If anything, a high cost singular structure would be even MORE vulnerable to bombers.

I understand him since we have nothing like air or naval.
Its only all about zerg ground .
Hope in future we have something.

I think these "missing" balance units will come soon,
From the info's i have read, current units will be on every team, some units in development now will be dependant on the faction/commander you pick out of the 4 that will be available.
so hopefully in the end we will have 4 teams with the same base units and slightly different extra units that still balance out in the end.

Actually, I think it will be exactly the opposite. There will be about a hundred units that are all available to every "faction". However, the only thing that will differentiate your faction from another is your commander type and your faction skin. There won't be any other unique units between factions.

I doubt there will even be any 'faction skins' at all because one of the largest (if not the largest) costs involved with a new faction is the Art Assets.

Mike

As of right now, there aren't any faction units. Or at least from what we have been told. It will be 100+ units given to all players for use. For a small developer it is much easier to create and balance. But all 100+ units willl be able to be used by everyone.

The only unit that does not fall into this are the commanders, and from what I know there will be a multitude of them to choose from. I do not know absolutely if they will have the exact same gameplay, but I suspect so. Though there will be commanders that are quad-pedal, tread based, wheels, etc. There will be ALOT of variety but expect them to be the same. Now whether those commander types relate to factions I'm not sure.

Along with factions, most factions will be player clans or communities, so in a way you could have specific commanders for a faction

No T2 AA means that T2 bombers have a place in the game. it forces you to not neglect your air superiority.

Need some good old fashion T2 flak cannons to rip through those massive T1 air fleets

Trust me, I don't mean to suggest introducing something that renders T2 air useless. I value Air Superiority! I just think that we need an alternative strategy to countering it, beyond just forcing everyone to do the same thing. T2 flak could be made a very expensive option, for example. However, it would be more interesting to have that alternative option, than not to have any.

I feel like doubling the range of static AA would make them much more helpful in defence.

But ATM, is there really a need for a more specialised AA other then to have one at all?

I'm just not sure buffing T1 AA is a good solution. Although Spinners could possibly use one. It just seems a bit boring to only have one option, which is build a LOT more T2 fighters than the other guy has so you can kill all of his T2 fighters/bombers. Where is the interesting strategic gameplay decision in that?

For the ground war, you have several options...tanks/bots/artillery/laser defense/nukes. That's missing from the air war.

Supcom had experimentals to fill that gap. What will PA have?

You could have an anti-air turret which shoots multiple enemies simultaneously, but does low damage per volley. Or, you could have longer range and less damage as an option. There are options other than what we have now that could be implemented and would not be duplicative of the current T1 Anti-Air.

There should definitely be a T2 AA Turret, Air is already naturally more powerful by not being limited by obstacles. Of course bombs should be still powerful enough to keep them useful even if you loose some or most in an attack.

Or at least make the bomber a bomber and not a air-ground missile launcher to give basic AA a chance.

I think we should be talking about AA weapons in general, because if advanced units are supposed to specialized I have to ask why the Basic AA unit/Weapon is a tracking missile?

Thus I present the Anti-Air weapon trinity;

Basic Direct Fire is usable in most situations.
Flak is an Advanced weapon that trades some raw damage and maybe overall range in favor of doing AOE damage and being very effective against clumps/swarms of Air units.
Missiles are an Advanced Weapon due to it's potential for hit Hit Chance(Tracking), long range and high damage leaves it unable to completely replace the other AA weapons but complements them nicely.

Mike

Totes,
I think alot of us have agreed that an AOE flak cannon would be ideal. Not sure which would be better: Stationary Flak or mobile Flak. We already have the mobile missile launcher truck, which i would not miss if it dissapeared or got replaced to be brutally honest. The main point stands, that an AOE weapon that widdles down an airspace rather than direct fire would be an interesting gameplay addition.

There isn't any reason to NOT have Mobile and Turret versions of all of them, heck, there is even some room for more than one version of each if you get creative and design the versions accordingly.

Tto give some context here are my AA Suggestions from the Official Unit Idea thread;


Cougar
Primary Traits: Basic, Tank, Direct Dire, Anti Air

The Cougar would replace the current Spinner to accommodate my views on the Anti-Air Trinity of Weapons*. The Cougar is Equipped with Twin Gatling Cannons that would have a high Rate of Fire Low Damage, Medium Range and high Turret Speed. The Higher Rate of Fire allows it to function well in single targets and multi-target environments, not using much overkill on targets, the High Turret speed allows it to still adequately deal with the potential for faster Advanced Air units.

Possible Adjustments;
-Short spin up time on Gatling Cannons, but not requiring it between targets within a certain time frame.
-Increasing damage slightly and having the Gatling Cannons fire in Short-to-Medium length bursts.




Fusillade

Primary Traits: Advanced, Tank, Anti-Air, Area of Effect

The Fusillade is and Advanced Anti0-Air Tank that has a series of Flak Cannons with Short-to-Medium Range, Low Damage, Large Area of Effect and a Medium-to-Fast Rate of Fire. The Fusillade is great for dealing with formations of air units due to it's Area of Effect being able to damage multiple targets at once.

Possible Adjustments;
-Exchanging Area of Effect size for Damage.
-Increasing Range but lowering the Rate of Fire.

Unfortunately I don't have anything off hand as an example for the Missile AA weapon. These two are extremely complimentary tho, the Cougar is useful against single targets and mostly effective against many targets because of it's low amount of overkill and the speed it can switch targets but it'll never be able to beat out the Fusillade when it comes to large swarms because it can't damage multiple targets at once just like how the Fusillade can't out perform the Cougar when it comes to a single target.

The Missile unit fits in by providing 'guaranteed' first strike on incoming Air forces. Imagine if the Missile weapon could one hit any bomber type unit, and it does it at 2-3 times the range of the Direct fore and/or Flak AA but had a 5-10 second cooldown, you would be doing damage and providing fewer targets for the rest of your AA, but you couldn't reliably use them exclusively because you would need to match or exceed your opponent's Air force in raw numbers, and it''s hard to fit 50+ of a potentially large turret in a base right?

Of course all that being said it's hard to say exactly how it could work because in a game like PA everything is interconnected so even a small tiny change elsewhere could have a big effect on how the AA weapons need to work so it's really hard to say, I do feel this system is a good basis to start from though.

Mike

Already exists in the form of TANKS. Competent ground forces are more than capable of dealing with air.

Missiles were a basic option in TA, and it was perfectly capable of handling the random T1 strike. The supcom T3 system is not needed here.

Quite possibly the most dangerous solution there is. It was tried in Supcom, and we know what happened. Flak straight up ruined air play. When you didn't have enough to kill gunships, you died. But when you had enough to kill ONE gunship, killing 10 became trivial. Then it became easy to kill 30 gunships, a hundred gunships, infinity gunships without taking so much as a scratch. Flak didn't scale right, and in a game designed for thousands of combating units, proper scaling is everything.

Find another way. There are plenty of ideas that have been suggested in the past. Pick one. Pick them all. But most importantly, find another way.

Decoy buildings.....cheap design give you a margin of a chance