In Current State: PA Should be Called "Build Hornets or Lose"

Really frustrated with the current state of PA – particularly: Hornets.

Hornets are WAY OP.

Right now, the best (and easiest) way to win is to spam out fighters and build a bunch of Hornets. Hopefully this week's patch re-balances them. Or maybe adds Advanced Anti Air with flack to take care of the massive swarms of fighters.

Some ideas for fixing Advanced Air:

1: Lower Hornet Damage so they can't destroy Ants with one bomb, shrink the AOE, and lower the health so they're more like glass cannons
2: Add advanced Air Defense Towers with Flack to cut through the 100 fighter spam

Honestly, I'm pretty much done playing PA until Hornets are fixed. It's boring to play with only one strategy – a strategy I don't like to do because I don't like using cheap OP moves. I'll probably play on smaller planets, but I'll spend more time playing BF4 or something until this is fixed.

What's everyone's ideas for fixing Hornets?

I'd start with lowering their health and removing the ability to micro their bombing runs.

Another possibility is dramatically increasing their bomb recharge time.

Or reduce the recharge time and reduce the bomb capacity, so they have to use the circling around to recharge for a second run.
Fighter spam is a tricky one, from what I remember neutrino wants that epic scale and to make you build fighters, but you do need a flack system. Maybe airburst missiles as advanced anti air?

There are already some things done in the next build to help address this. It's not 100% of the way, but they are harder to micro, and while powerful, will require a little more thought to use.

There are additional changes needed to really fix them, but it should be a step in the right direction.

Welp. I'm outta here. Good luck.

just play more 1v1, I have not seen them as a big problem there so far
but yeah in games with more players they are crazy

I'd start by removing peregrines temporarily until they can be fixed and make air fabbers useful (obviously they shouldn't be equal to bot/vehicle but right now there's no reason to use them) so that people have a ton of extra air factories pumping out both fighters and air fabbers almost as much as bot fabbers. A good part of the problem is that people never get a lot of fighters in the first place because air fabbers suck and that even if they do go mass fighter peregrines kill them with impunity.

I do think flack is critical, especially given the scale of PA. There will be matches where there's hundreds of fighters. That's a given. That's PA. Large scale. That's fine. However, there MUST be a counter aside from "build more fighters than your opponent."

My two main clashes with Bomber spam have been on 1v1s. That's mostly what I play.

With the reduction of micro, that won't fix their main issue.

The main issue is the only way to reliably win the air war is to build more fighters than your opponent.

I should reserve my judgement until the patch release, but I don't have my hopes up.

Agreed! Spamming hornets = boring ( although it was fun winning! )

Either I need to start playing more again or you played too big a planet. A few hornets wont change a lot and before you have a big swarm you should die to ground attacks.

... I think

The most recent instance is when I joined someone else's game and it was a really large planet. I generally prefer planets smaller than that one.

My opponent had a &*$# ton of fighters, since that's what they mostly built. Even though I had more units, more map control, and was destroying my opponent's expansions, I realized his move too late and no matter what I did, couldn't build enough fighters to counter the hundreds of fighters he had.

The thing is, just a few hornets, due to their large AOE, can take out massive armies with ease.

I can't really say anything to that specific topic (if it is op or not), but i think these kind of threads are pretty "toxic" overall. People will always "whine" about stuff they lose to (even if it is just fine) and in the end stuff gets nerfed and "more boring" that way.
In PA this is even more dangerous cause there is no matchmaking (yet?), people with different skilllevels will play each other and sometimes it feels "unfair" even if the opponent was just better.
I don't wanna say this is the case here (i just don't know), but "op threads" are in my experiance mostly biased and don't really help.
I think the developers should have access to data that shows the state of balance way better and more accurate (don't know if this is the case here though).

true, we need some sort of ground to air unit that can deal with hornets in a cost effective matter or we need to somehow nerf the hornet.

@acer1791:
I agree in general but I think so far we are on a pretty civil level in this discussion

Nah I think we are all agreed hornets are over powered!

That's another good point, I think in some situations hornets are indeed so OP that nobody would possibly not agree with it. I am only wondering how you reach those situations in a serious 1v1

Yeah i am just trying to say that for example in the sc2 communi

Yeah as i said, i don't wanna say this thread is unnecessary, i just have seen many op threads in other forums and what they have done to the game, i didn't like it there^^
If Hornets are really too strong the question is if they are overall too strong or if there is just no counterplay, i think the better approach is "buff counterplay before nerfing stuff".

This community is a good one, not quite like anything else I've seen.

I've held off on making this, but after playing and watching so many matches... it needs to be discussed. Especially since casters talk about "Hornets or Lose" and it's also a universal sentiment in the IRC.

Yes they're OP. There's not really much argument over it because they are insanely cost effective at their job and there isn't a real 'counter'.

At almost every stage of this game since the beginning of alpha there has always been something OP or something definitively efficient that has caused stagnant gameplay. Proper balancing hasn't started, and Uber can't afford to waste too much time with balance that becomes obsolete a little later. You will just have to wait until they really ramp up the balancing phase.

Since you play arranged games against competent players in the IRC, then just organise a no t2 bombers rule (or a limit) and play with the rest of the game!

There are no tweaks to health or damage in these changes. All the changes are in combat/attack dynamics.

Give it a try once the build goes live. It WILL need additional adjustment, but it should move us in the right direction.