Nerfing advanced bomber com snipes

Hey, I know balance isn't finished but hey, I'll say this anyway.

I think advanced bombers are too powerful. The issues isn't their strength or their fire power though. The issue is that they can fly too close together. All bombers in a group can all nicely fly over a single target and all drop bombs without any friendly fire or crashing into one another.

What I propose is a change to the bomber AI so when they're in a large group they fly in bigger more spread out formation and can carpet bomb large areas. This'll make them just as effective if not more effective at taking down large army blobs or power fields etc, but it will nerf their ability to com snipe.

We just need to be patient a bit longer to see what Scathis has in store for us.

Mike

Please, don't prevent people from giving feedback based on the current implementation. Things are going to change, definitely. But how are the devs supposed to know how to change something if we don't give feedback? Yes, this has been mentioned before and the devs are probably already aware of it. But giving too much feedback is definitely better than giving too few imo. Even if some of it turns out to be meaningless in the future.

I think your projecting a bit here, I never said it shouldn't be talked about, but simply that we need to keep things in perspective. Not to mention the balance of bombers as a whole is a pretty well covered topic.

Mike

And you're right about that. It's a very well covered topic and people should use the search function

The only times I've been told to be patient is when someone wants me to shut up.

I think we need to cut the bombers some flak.

#seewhatididthere

hahahaha epic win.

I think the goal is to add some flak, and add some formations.

You can actually dodge Advanced bombers fairly well by moving sideways to the incoming bombers which should give your fighters enough time to finish off the bombers.

Flak will be very welcome, but my concern with that is that you then have a static building which is more powerful than a mobile unit, which in general terms promotes static play. Just so that there are more options available, how about an orbital layer "air-bomber"? This unit would have a weapon that would kill all air units directly below it, perhaps an area-effect weapon with a cooldown period? Note that it can only target and damage air units, perhaps by firing a "gravity field" that simply causes them all to slam into the ground and explode?

That could be said for any weapon system if the stats are poorly handled. There is nothing intrinsic about Flak as a weapon type that would make it flat out superior compared to anything else, it's just the balance that would dictate that.

Mike

It's a bit different with air though. Either flak cuts through all air with no problems, in which case air becomes next to useless, or it doesn't in which case air remains OP.

You know SupCom well enough that I don't have to tell you about ASFs.

Well yes there is something about flak as a weapon type that would make it flat out superior.

If it does enough splash damage to be noticable, a critical mass of flak is nearly invincible to any amount of air.

OTOH, almost any amount of single target damage can be overcome by having enough planes.

That assumes flack is near instant and does aoe damage. Flack doesn't have to be that.

This has been talked about quite a lot on the forums.

Uber will be adding flack towers as an Advanced AA Tower.

It's gonna be awesome.

It's going to be hell to balance is what it is.

I know SupCom well Enough to know that the issues stemming from ASFs was in no way related to Flak.

Mike

I'm surprised you've missed my point, but I will try to clarify.

Air units are special in that they move quickly and are not affected by terrain. When you get high-tech air units, you get the problem of high-HP, high damage and the ability to be anywhere on the map very fast. The T3 bombers in SupCom would have been as much of a problem as the adv bombers are currently in PA.

In SupCom this was "solved" by having T3 fighters that could take down the T3 bombers. This led to its own problems, because if they could take down T3 bombers with ease they could take down any other air unit with even more ease, and to be fast enough to catch a T3 bomber meant their position on the map was largely irrelevant because they could be anywhere at a moment's notice..

In PA there is no suggestion that we should sort the bomber problem with "ASFs", because everybody knows what happens if you do that. The alternative suggested, a high-damage fixed turret, brings with it its own problems and that is what I am concerned about. Either you create a total no-fly zone thus rendering air UP and pointless, or the turret can be overwhelmed by a critical mass of bombers and therefore simply delays the problem.

Having an AOE turret (i.e. flak) is definitely better than for instance a direct fire weapon that can only target one unit at a time, but still I think that if there are more potential ways to deal with the bombers that would allow greater flexibility and more opportunity for emergent tactics.

SupCom's air was literally fubar, and TA's wasn't much better. I hope we get shown a few ideas on how Scathis intends to solve this because there really needs to be some major work done on Air to make it anything other than tanks with noclip.