Air, Orbital and Nukes Vs. Land, Naval and Big Guns - What is the core of PA?

False. Bombers have to fly directly over their targets. In contrast, most units come in through the front door, or kite around their target. Not only is the coverage area for defending a bomber relatively small, the bombers cover such a large sweep on their passes that you can't screw it up.

Bombers are literally a "charge in, drop bombs later" kind of unit. They're practically hard coded to run into traps, and not just any number of traps. I mean ALL the traps.

I mentioned this before. It was one of those- oh what did I call it- oh yeah it was one of those STUPID mistakes.

More damage and less health is a DPS race. You can't fix bombers with a DPS race.

When the rooster is almost done, orbital properly woking and not dragging on with unitflightpaths, units not get stuck on objects
And all units beeing viable on almost every situation

I'm unsure whether this is temporary bombing run behaviour, or intentional. I don't see why they should need to fly over and then bomb later, especially when it seems it's possible to micro out of that.

^^ You're not going to find a unit that is a bomber and doesn't fly directly over its target(turning after the strike isn't that important).

You can avoid flying over the target by not being a bomber, of course. I think it's called a gunship.

Who are you talking to?

Great OP.. lots of food for thought. I am inclined to agree that ground combat is the core of the game, ground level is where the base building happens and in general ground gameplay is the most fun and involving..large part of this is interaction with the terrain, just like OP said. I think air and orbital should be at least to some degree support units for ground maneuvers.

From what Ive understood the game is moving in this direction, with orbital play being more about moving smaller planets into orbit around bigger planets to stage planet invasions with ground forces. I got this understanding from the recent vanguard newsletter. Sounds great to me.

It seems to me that this thread is slowly turning into an "I don't like your opinion so I'm going to say nasty things about your opinion" thread, however I haven't read every single post.

IMO, I think that air and orbital could use a bit of nerfing, but I also think that perhaps t2 should just be generally nerfed, so that instead of being more powerful than t1, they're just different. For example, in a t1 vehicle factory, you can have all the stuff there is now, but in a t2 vehicle factory, you could have the artillery tank and other units which don't exist yet, which gives you an advantage in combat, but isn't overpowered like levellers.

I agree. Obviously there's some balancing to be done but the whole point Uber removed the T1-T2-T3-T4 model introduced in SupCom was to avoid units becoming obsolete. At the mo, Levellers do tend to level Ants through their greater range.

I'd like air and orbital to be high value investments, not necessarily any weaker - just not spammable clouds which reduce the awesomeness of ground combat.

As for this thread, I'm trying to keep up with the reading - it got better once I changed the title but let's try to stay constructive guys ^^ Synthesis!

I agree with your assessment of bombers - the problem is that bombers are cheap enough to make suicide runs on commanders a viable tactic; air can occupy the same space while you cant build dozens of AA turrets atop each other.
There is room for debate over whether this tactic is 'realistic', but no question in my mind that it spoils the fun of fabricating armies and putting ground and naval defences to the test.
My solution would be to make air more expensive and therefore incapable of ending or winning games by itself - 'air support' should be just that, complementing the big guns on land and sea. (In my utterly partial opinion lol.)

I do feel like that might be a viable solution.

Although obtaining air superiority would be all the more important.

That can be allayed through balancing land-based AA - if air is too expensive to spam, then ground defences won't become useless in attempting to protect armies/navies/commanders, as there'll be few enough targets to actually target. That is, providing air doesn't have mad HP (looking at you, Aeon T3 AA Gunships!).

Ye

yeah. I totally think that both vision ranges and weapon ranges should be made more equal. The Leveller is purely a better Ant, the Slammer for many isn't worth the cost, the Peregrine isn't as good as more Hummingbirds and more Hornets...

The only alternative I can think of for air is to nerf T1 (particularly fighters) so much that it becomes economically pointless to produce in terms of the damage it can put out. But even then that might just be countered by more spam... The only real way is to make air an advanced form of support for land/naval, in my opinion - not something to dominate gameplay. Air shouldn't be the first thing we start spamming out in order to prevent a loss.

Personally I'd be happy if air was more in the price range/damage output of T2 air now, with bombers slightly nerfed and more expensive, to prevent commander-suicide runs and allow land/naval armies to traverse the beautiful maps. The spamming can be controlled by economic means because the economy is limited and dependant upon expansion on land. Making air expensive limits numbers, increases value, decreases lag, increases dependence on land warfare and thus the need for tactical reconnaissance in order to avoid defences...

That's a problem with the commander, not the bomber. If you balance bombers around Comm runs(I.E. deny them from making a single kill), that's basically the only thing they will be good for.

Bombers are first strike units that hit hard. You don't ever want your Commander to get hit first or hard. It's an ideal match.

How is that a problem with the Commander? And what would the solution be if it were? Burrowing Commanders? Flying Commanders? Stronger Commanders?
I wasn't suggesting that bombers be prevented from making a single kill - Commanders constitute high-value, heavily armoured targets with much more HP than the average unit. Bombers should be balanced around their effectiveness against armies and navies, which have less HP than the Commander. If that's done properly, they should be less effective at Commander runs (provided their damage remains AOE based and not DPS on single targets, which makes sense for taking out armies/navies).

Bombers are not being used as first strike units, they are being used late-game as game-ending assassination tools, able to make the Comm kill through sheer numbers crashing through a base's AA.

If you made them more similar to orbital fighters (I.e. missiles miss), then T2 fighters could have more accurate missiles (but again with the potential for the missiles to miss)

Air does dominate war. Control the air, you control the battle. But you can't occupy with just air. In my opinion air is fine for cost. People who hsve issues just need to build more AA and wait for T2 AoE AA.

Bombers are front loaded units. Their inherent design is to hit first, and take casualties later. Under most circumstances, this is okay:

Code:

 Bomber strikes, damage is dealt, defenders respond.

Against Commanders it flat out ends the game:

Code:

Bomber strikes, Commander dies, defenders respond, game over

HP does not solve this. No amount of HP in the universe can stop the Commander from being not just a target, but the target for bomber strikes. Bomber nerfs do not solve this. Nerfs only acknowledge that bombers have an awful one dimensional role and aren't good for anything else.

The best working solution is to completely deny an attack that consists only of suicide bombers. Such as by using cloak. When the power of bombers against a Commander does not matter, they can be finally treated like any other air attack unit.

I don't often agree with Bobucles, but this time I think he's posted pure gold.

Of course bomber nerfs can solve this. The commander is mobile and doesn't move as a blob, ergo bombers can still be effective against stationary targets and mobile blobs. That's 90% of the game, not one-dimensional.

Commanders are slow, and being slow is almost an essential part of their design. Dodging bombs is really not their thing.

A soft hitting, large AoE bomber is obviously not going to be very effective against Commanders. AoE is always used to kill swarms, and Commanders are a tough single target. That makes splashy bombers a good choice for T1. A heavy hitting, bunker busting bomber is a Comm killer. It almost forces such bombers to be T2, so the game can be established and Comm defenses can go online.

I had posted a similar thing about a year ago, the market has been pretty favorable for gold.