Nerfing advanced bomber com snipes

First of all, I think it is important to remember that PA is on a larger scale than TA, and even than SupCom. What this means is that air's mobility will be vastly more powerful than before. Fortunately, it also means that there is a lot more space to work with, so even if it is uneconomical to attack certain areas that are well-defended by anti-air, aircraft can still be very useful.

Static AA will have to be absolutely devastating. A deep air defense network of static AA should make an area basically unapproachable for aircraft- it should be suicide. Flak turrets' DPS would need to be outrageous, and SAM sites would need extreme range and very high lethality. Being static is a huge liability against very mobile units because they just won't ever engage unless they will certainly succeed. Your static defense functions as an expensive, idle paperweight right up until it gets killed by the very thing it is supposed to deter. In order to avoid this, it needs to be so effective that this is never a good idea. Serious static AA should basically force players to use missiles, artillery, land units, orbital bombardment, anything but bomb it with planes.

Mobile AA still needs to be very strong because air units can still gang up on them. But it carries additional flexibility because mobile AA can be redeployed. Each individual unit can afford to be smaller and less efficient than static AA, making them competitive with static AA.

Fighters are the most mobile option, and can intercept air units. So it makes sense to make them the most expensive and weakest. Possibly carrying limited missiles at a time, making them relatively easy to destroy, and so on. Most likely players will still prefer fighters even if they are terrible, simply because building static defense everywhere costs a prohibitive amount of resources, and even if you actually build it, it gives you no strategic options.


I also think it would be very cool to have fixed wing aircraft be "local orbital units" which can go into space around a single planet, but cannot fly between planets on their own. This also creates cool interactions between air and orbital. And suggests that certain anti-air units (such as the big-ticket static SAM's) should also pull double duty as anti-orbital weapons by making them shoot orbital units. This mechanic would then allow for low-flying planes which are not orbital units to not be targetable by anti-orbital static defense. So you can fly in with a helicopter gunship and snipe a SAM site to open up the path for fighters and bombers, like real helicopters do.

let's remember a lot of this comes down to UI and AI issues.

Imagine that if in Forged Alliance planes were smart enough to spread out from eachother and attack every target in an area rather than concentrating fire. Imagine Gunships that didn't just pile on top of eachother. Even T2 gunships might ahve been credible threats to bases in that case.

I mean the FA aerial formations looked cool but they were essential a suicide pact because flak. And even in formation the planes would still converge on the target and only a micro god could have split them up to reduce the effect of flak.

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I mean... I am just worried that between them gunships and flak will wreck air from a design perspective. Gunships are a greater threat to bases than bombers because they stay at range rather than overflying it. Gunships also tend to be tough targets because that feels good. Thus our adv AA flak structure will need to be strong enough to be scary to gunship swarms to prevent air from dominating the metagame. (If the only defense against air is air, only air truely matters.) Any flak structure that can deter tough, long range gunships will easily defeat any bomber raid.

Hmm.... Gunships: t1, weak, anti-army? Remove T1 bomber?

Do you want tough gunships? Or fragile gunships? Because if you have scary anti-air, you have squishy gunships even if they have big numbers for HP and vice versa. You can't do both.

This is because of the above, where you have increased gunship HP, and increased AA damage, and now the aircraft that do not have the buff are underpowered compared to the other air unit you have made strictly superior.

I disagree that gunships should be tough. Gunships should be squishy and tanks should be tough. Gunships can fly to evade many types of weapons, giving them a lot of freedom of motion. But the types of weapons that can attack them should be brutal against them. Tough gunships has a tendency to lead to gunship swarms that take too much time for AA to eliminate. You can spam an arbitrarily large number of gunships and win as a result, but a similarly prodigious investment in anti-air to counter the gunships cannot win you the game.

I didn't express a preference, just stated that gunships have been pretty tough considering their method of attack compared to bombers.

They really don't have to be though. A gunships raison d'etre is to do damage to an unprepared and unprotected foe. They're not line-breakers and they certainly shouldn't be a tank to soak up damage.

Gunships should be like like the Doxes of the air.

Doxes of the air is one possible air unit design. However I think having valuable air units that are high-damage and high-mobility is a much more interesting role than expendable swarms of super cheap flying units. This part is entirely personal preference; cheap air swarms of short-range DPS units have worked in other games. But I vastly prefer the gunships in Wargame: Airland Battle, where a helicopter is an expensive, insane-firepower, highly mobile badass but easily destroyed by anti-air. Flying directly into the enemy is a waste of an incredibly powerful unit which can keep killing enemies as long as you keep it alive. Best used carefully in small numbers to closely support ground forces, but capable of roaming far afield and fighting in areas outside of the enemy air defense.

Gunships like helicopters are modern cavalry units; expensive, powerful, and extremely valuable. And retention of those units should be a high priority because of their high cost and long-term usefulness if you keep them away from enemies that can shut them down.

For horse cavalry, those units can win entire battles by seizing and retaining the initiative, and defeating many times their number in weaker line troops. As long as you avoid engaging with specific enemies (long spears for horse; AA for gunships), you won't lose very many of them.

Great, now I have to worry about FLYING MONGOLIANS?

Great...just peachy...