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

Or just not have heavy hitting bombers designed for single targets?
I agree that cloaking is a solution, but there were cloaks in SupCom and air supremacy still dominated gameplay.
I think the solution is in the economic cost and nerfing - if air is more expensive, it won't be an option to churn out 200+ fighters and guarantee early on that your T2 bombers can eventually end the game while your T1 bombers deny ground assaults.

1) 3 out of 4 commanders didn't have cloak.
2) The 4th commander's cloak was both a stupidly expensive upgrade and stupidly expensive to use.
3) Breaking cloak was trivial with a single spy plane for 2 out of 4 faction (patches increased this to 4 of 4.)
4) Supcom had a lot of problems. Air units with less cost, more health, more damage, and 5 times the speed of land units was just one of them.

Consider allowing tanks to stack infinitely for a moment. You can construct any arbitrarily large army of Levellers and go one-shotting any opposition you face. Drive your army up to the enemy commander, and blammo, you win. You can buff commander HP by any amount you like, but it'll only delay the inevitable by raising the number of tanks needed. Sure, anything with splash would hard-counter the infinite Leveller blob quite well, but it'd be pretty boring gameplay.

Code:

Splash > Stacked Levellers > Everything

A good solution to this problem would be to prevent tanks from stacking. Hey, that's how tanks behave at the moment!


Now, re-read the above text, but this time replace tanks with bombers.

Stacking units is not a problem that is new nor unique to RTS. And no, preventing stacking isn't the only solution. Better answers exist.

For example, the entire purpose of splash damage is to deal with huge numbers of stacked units. Against air swarms it's a beautiful thing. Supcom did this, and completely failed its homework on realizing just how quickly mass AoE damage renders air completely irrelevant.

Explosive death is another, less severe solution. Units that die deal damage to other units. Get a big enough battle, and mass forces of units eventually chain react and start killing themselves. Unfortunately PA is a game of rocket tag, so anything less than fatal damage is pretty much irrelevant.

TA Cloaking is the #1 defense against air. Why? Because TA air could not reveal ground cloak! The best hope was to carpet bomb everything and hope to tag a Commander. That's a huge risk with rare payoff. A cloaking mobile SAM would be very effective, since bombers would waste their first pass failing to kill AA.

Air to ground interactions have been discussed in the past, and I have frequently posted on many of them and how they would work. Unfortunately they require clever design to implement.

Commander casts D-gun.
It's super effective!

There's a reason the TA d-gun killed melee units with ease.

This, so much.

And what of the time-tested favourite tactic of flying a few sacrificial lambs ahead of your bomber blob to draw all the fire away? How does splash deal with that?

On the topic of D-Gun, I'll just build n tank blobs and attack simultaneously from n angles. It's similar concept to an increase in health - the D-Gun just delays time until I just build a larger number of tanks.

It's not supposed to. Outsmarting a player is a good thing and should be actively encouraged. Next time try using a combined force of splash damage with direct fire support to pick off the stragglers.

Too much splash damage can get very stupid very fast. Just check out flak cannons from Supcom. At a critical mass they instagib any number of gunships at any time. Splash damage is a fire that has to be carefully controlled.

How is this a problem? A Commander that gets surrounded on all sides deserves to die. That's why the TA d-gun was such a good design. It was super effective against a direct attack, which usually happens with a base at your back. However it fails as a defense after you get overrun, which is when you get surrounded. At that point it's perfectly cromulent to declare a winner.

Spread-out fighter formations would solve bombers perfectly, I agree. Rather than obliterating a single target in one fell swoop, you'd either have a carpet-bombing of the enemy base that destroys lots of weak targets, including fabbers that would be repairing the larger ones; or, you'd have a conga line of bombers bombarding one spot, but giving units like the Commander a chance to walk away.

Hell, can we have a separate thread for this?

Bomber formations have been discussed before. Best to do some research, see what (if any) Uber has said on the subject. Possibly necro that thread if nothing definitive was said.

I think denying air the ability to overlap would go a long way to making it more balanced. If land or naval units did so we would think it absurd.

Another method for encouraging more diverse gameplay could be to have no air units on planets without atmosphere. After all, you don't have naval units where there is no water - why do you have air units where there is no air?

I used to mass Brawlers and phoenixs pretty effectively in TA.... just saying

Id love ground AA to have a much larger range when compared to the mobility of fighters.

That list would extend to moons and maybe metal planets. For the former, it seems like a great idea since the featurelessness of moons and their average small size makes air redundant. For the latter, I'm torn between metal planets being challenging labyrinths to properly raise the difficulty of acquiring a Death Star, or unsolvable quagmires that can never be won because of the ample choke points and lack of alternatives for getting around them. I've won games on metal planets without air, but it's not pretty.

The OP did no such thing.

Kudos for the Hawk reference, I had completely forgotten about that hellish nightmare picking apart my gorgeously constructed fleets >_<

The simplest way, imho, is to reduce the damage of carpet bombing to needing at least two 'runs' to destroy most ground units. That way AA has a solid chance to waste the expensive bombers before being obliterated.

I'll admit there's nothing more eye rolling then watching half a dozen bombers level 100+ units, then being destroyed by your fighters. Or watching a death ball of T2 bombers heading for your commander and sending your fighters after them, only to realize that 1231783518 missiles are heading for a single bomber.

Like the OP said, tis Beta and there's no need for gloom and doom yet. I agree with the current assessment of Air and hopefully that's something being addressed before release.

I want to comment on orbital, specifically the kamikaze: How about no orbital fighters, and not a specific kamikaze unit, but rather you can command any of your orbital units to crash into another. This makes it a very delicate "do I want to use this for it's function, or do I want to keep them from using theirs".

Good idea. I think getting rid of Orbital's quasi air-spaceships would stop Orbital becoming about spamming fighters to allow a laser-run (which is just a reiteration of a bombing-run) on the Commander.

Orbital is so poorly developed right now that it's barely worth mention. Tier 3 air is stupid. Tier 3.5 navy is stupider. What PA NEEDS is to make sure that orbital barriers don't break the flow of the game. When the war stops, the game stalls. That is always a game breaking issue.