Advanced air units

Other than advanced fighters, what counters to advanced air units are viable?
Advanced fighters suffer a massive snow-ball effect, where whoever has them can easily stop other players from building up a force of them. Missile towers do not seem to be effective unless they cover the area entirely and even then cannot be easily maintained as the AoE from adv bombers will kill any engineers among them. Is there a more viable counter to them? Or do the methods I've mentioned work well?

well missile turrets should have been enough but now they're adding advanced missile turret.

Adv turret is def needed. Make it a flak like turret that spreads and one shot damages multiple planes to deal with big blobs of air.

This is something that's been discussed and is desperately needed.

Fighters are definitely the best anti-air unit, and always will be. They're so fast and maneuverable that they're simply the best.

However, the game then turns into "whoever builds the most fighters wins." And that's not good.

Uber will be adding advanced anti-air towers that will be flack, which will help a lot.

I'm also hoping they switch the missile defense towers to anti-air only and give them a dps boost.

Bombers currently have 20% less health per cost and equivalent damage when compared to AA(of course bombers don't shoot constantly, which skews those numbers). They're also 6 times faster.

20% is a good number but if it proves to be insufficient (and it likely will be), then try going to 33%. Then 50%. Then it's time to try something else.

I think I should clarify something here. Fighters are not the best anti-air because they are the strongest or the cheapest or the most cost-efficient in terms of firepower per metal cost.

Fighters are the best defense against planes because they can cover such a large area compared to static or surface unit anti-air. Even though they should be considerably more expensive and less efficient than static/surface AA because otherwise surface AA is utterly useless. Even one AA weapon should be able to do some damage to a group of aircraft, otherwise an increasingly large airblob will force an increasing centralization of anti-air, everywhere, which will eventually become impossible, and will be infeasible well before that and nobody will bother.

Furthermore, fighters can also intercept enemy air units, whereas surface anti-air is primarily a deterrent since the other player can move their aircraft taking it into account. They can simply avoid anywhere that the ground anti-air is too prevalent, and can plan around it. Fighters move faster than bombers, and can catch them before they enter the target area, and can chase them home.

Fighters need to be able to inflict kills on other air units, but they shouldn't be as powerful at killing lots of them as surface anti-air. Making both fighters and bombers valuable and quite alpha-strike oriented makes a lot of sense for such fast units, and acts to prevent them from being used in huge air deathballs.

It better not be an adv missile turret.

Give me something MORE

Like flak. Or a chaingun. PLZ

I believe a better route would be for advanced aircraft to have the same or slightly higher HP then their basic counter parts.

If air wasn't so beefy then it will solve the problem of basic and normal land anti air not doing anything to advanced air units.

Id like advanced air to be faster, but with less HP, trying to use more speed as a defence.

Let's NOT turn everything into a game of rocket tag, okay? Yeah.

If your best idea for an advanced unit is "like regular units, but with different numbers" it's time to stop. Think. Do something else.

Here's a short list of things that advanced air can do.
- Stealth. A great option for pretty much any air unit, stealth allows them to breach base defenses with ease.
- Fully submersible. An idea straight from TFTD, submersion protects an aircraft from interceptors and gives it an ideal sub hunting and/or ambushing role.
- Heavy cargo hauler: Moves crazy things like turrets and small structures.
- Repair: cheaper and dedicated gunship-style aircraft, for doing repairs on the field.
- Mobile radar: Fast and a definite upgrade from any stationary installation. Can be lumbering like a gunship or Sanic like a fighter.
- Heavy payload bomber: Not because it needs to be advanced. Rather, the game needs a waiting period before Comm busting units come into play. T2 does that.
- Interplanetary fighter: a lighter, more costly fighter with the ability to break orbit and drop into another atmosphere. What are you going to do, move them on asteroids?

Oh wow, did I already fill up the factory? Man, that was easy. I bet everyone else has as easy of a time as I do coming up with this crap.

No bob, I won't agree with you on this just because you can be sarcastic and then go on to suggest units that are nothing more then the same old units with different stats.

Different abilities are not different stats. Units can have similar health/cost/damage and still function in completely different ways.

I am sorry you can not see that. That is neither my problem nor have you provided anything better.

Just because I have not provided an answer you are satisfied with does not mean that my answer is any different to yours.

A different ability is a different statistic.

I'm not sure if you are trying to answer the OP's original question by countering IGN's answer, or just making a list of units that advanced air should be...

If you are saying the latter.. could you post those units to the unit megathread in the backer's lounge.

For the former, it still doesn't fight the issue that Advanced air units are to powerful for the basic land defenses offered.

No, lets.
Drop the health and fighter damage, but maintain parity. Done properly, the only difference this will make is that missile turrets are more effective and fighters can't destroy air factories as quickly. Both good things.

Fighters only destroy air factories because you are trying to build air units create a suicide unit which is guaranteed to die before it fires a missile, while there is a fighter ball over your base.

Build more MDT.

Build anti-air land units.

Don't try and build suicide fighters from your factory. You deserve to lose the factory.

Missile Defence Towers 1-shot T1 fighters.

There is no T2 AA, so T2 fighters just aren't comparable to AA.

It's not true to say missiles aren't effective.






I don't find that advanced fighters are that viable... You build the occasional one to keep up appearances.

Basically, advanced fighters cost the same as 4.5 hummingbirds, do 5 times as much damage, and have 5 times the health. Hummingbirds are built in 20 seconds, Advanced fighters are built in 30. You need 4 shots from a hummingbird to kill a peregrine. You need 1 shot from a peregrine to kill a hummingbird.

Deployment:

In the time it takes you to build 2 peregrines, for the same metal cost per tick, 6 hummingbirds are now 15 seconds away from their factory, and 3 more hummingbirds are 10 seconds away from being deployed. At that stage (65 seconds) your second peregrine hasn't rolled off the factory, it has just been finished.


(Note that although peregrines cost 4.5 times as much as a hummingbird, if you are running 4.5 basic factories simultaneously you are spending more than you would with a T2 factory)


By the time you have 3 peregrines, 12 hummingbirds are 5 seconds away from their factories.

Combat:

The peregrines and hummingbirds have entered combat with one another. They are both flying straight into the opposing blob.

3 peregrines fire 3 missiles at t-zero. At this stage both fighter-wings are 120 units of distance away from the target.

Relative to the peregrines, the hummingbirds are travelling at 180 units per tick.
At t-0.1111, the hummingbirds come into range and fire 12 missiles.

Relative to the hummingbirds, the missiles are travelling at 240 units per tick. They hit 3 hummingbirds and kill them at t-0.5000.

Relative to the peregrines, the missiles are travelling at 240 units per tick. They hit 3 peregrines. I have yet to see a missile overkill. So 12 missiles do 12 missiles worth of damage to 3 peregrines.

That happens at t-0.5278.

Result: 3 dead peregrines, 3 dead hummingbirds.

Peregrines have to be micro-ed perfectly for them to be used.


For that reason, I am inclined to think the following:

• Peregrines could have 3 missiles that do 90 damage each. Those missiles will either focus fire on a single target or spread out for some AoE (preferring to focus fire on a targets with a large amount of health, rather than spreading out for AoE).
• Fighter missiles should have inaccuracy, T2 fighter missiles should have slightly more accuracy than t1 fighter missiles (done by turning rate of the missile or lock-on accuracy or some such thing)

I think what is needed for balance purposes is create one class of anti air (naval, air, ground) better than another.

What I mean is that there should be a basic flak/missile tank that would be okay at dealing with air, but would be cheap and might not be the best option for dealing with a lot of air. Also, flak/missile towers would have limited range and would be expensive, but have a better HP.

Better would be air that could deal lots of damage to air, they're fast and cover the entire map, however they are expensive and need a large number of them to counter another blob of air-superiority fighters.

The best would be naval, where a large ship could mount several fast firing flak guns, with decent survivability, but would be fairly slow, expensive for the one unit, have a high production time, and could only cover the air above water, similar to the Core SHREDDER from TA.

Basically, ground units would be the cheapest, but also the weakest at trying to defeat a large number of bombers and fighters because of low HP and vulnerability to bombers. Air would be best to kill enemy air quickly, but at expensive to friendly casualties and economy. But naval should be great to fill the skies with lead and falling debris most efficiently as the ship could take more damage than ground units and air units at the cost of not being able to be deployed at crucial positions quickly.

What do you think? I just feel that if each class had a unit that was equally good versus another unit, in this case air, it would not be as challenging and fun to allocate your resources to what you need under the circumstances.

Welcome to the forums! that's a seriously good first post! Keep that up and you could be invited to join the Vanguard in no time. Or so we're told.

I think the issue with Naval being the best, is that on a Naval map, well... You don't actually have any units available, other than air and naval, and bombers eat naval for breakfast, so if you don't build any anti-air capability, you're kind of stuffed completely.

Unfortunately the current gameplay is that air is really "build 1 more hummingbird than your opponent"

Could air use some more work? Absolutely. The first iteration of "like tanks, but 5 times faster and 1/10th as strong" was stupid. I don't know how devs that worked on Supcom could have repeated such a blatant mistake. The current iteration of "like tanks, but 5 times faster" is also stupid. That was Forged Alliance's mistake.

Perhaps there is a happy middle ground? I know TA had a "like tanks, but 5 times faster and 2/5 as strong", which worked out pretty well. Why is getting something half decent so hard when it has already been done before?

Rocket tag does not work that way!

Here's how rocket tag works.


Are you ready for it?





Here goes.






The first guy to shoot wins.

It is a terrible design philosophy for RTS.

Bobucles. dropping the health of aircraft isn't going to make the game turn into rocket tag for aircraft to say the least. I guess this design philosophy was used for anti aircraft guns because those flak cannons in Supreme commander one shot T1 aircraft like it was nothing.

actually, most air engagements in the real world are rocket tag with other fighters. It's not fun but it is the nature of the fragility of aircraft. Bombers on the other hand have had known stories of surviving assaults.

I'm not saying aircraft in this game should emulate aircraft in FA/Supcom or realistic fighters. I don't think the iteration of T3 air in that forged alliance or supcome game was not fun whatsoever. tanky health air just leads to the game saying if you don't have it, you lose. The Aeon T3 gunship probably had the most hitpoints of any T3 unit except the brick. On the opposite spectrum. watching your air force die from one salvo of another aircraft isn't to fun either.

There should be a happy medium that i think the community would be happy with.