The T2 Bomber - Balance Suggestion Thread

Problem:

Scout(I know that is not the only but scout save Commanders)

Solution:
1- Make more scouts
2- use a mod that make your scout more

well they will be balance, even for new players, but they will need to learn how to counter

Presenting all a unit's problems and suggesting nerfs for each, is usually a good way to nerf ALL those things and successfully over-nerf something. Most people complain about T1 bombers as an example of this.

So, with that in mind, I always thought health was more necesary for a unit's use and damage in trade of health was more a specialization. Therefore, I always supported making t2 bombers so fragile a single hit kills them, but make their damage possibly even higher than now. Then, give t1 bombers the t2 bomber health currently. That way t1 bombers are necesary for steady dps, and once anti air is cleared you bring in t2 bombers to flatten what the t1 bombers only agitated.

I liked the post, but I do disagree with the above. I've always felt that T2 bombers should be more durable then they are now, but deal a more "steady", lower stream of damage. This would encourage T2 swarming (you need more to deal the damage, plus they are harder to take down) and make it more bearable. It would also give the support bots something to do!

My feelings are that the T2 bomber is in better shape than most of the ground units. But when ever I play people cry about how cheap it is, so I thought it might be a good idea to start a thread and keep it updated. Uber should be pretty clear that the OP is simply more of a collection of opinions.

I do apologize, that was what I was trying to say, it just came out a bit wrong. I was trying to make a point that players (more so new ones) will always complain about an air swarm because they were unprepared and we shouldn't take being outplayed as a need for balance adjustments.


So far liking what I'm seeing!

I believe that the land army with standard mobile AA should have the ability to land battle, despite the persistent attacks air forces.
The Air Force should have a support functions. Not less, not more.
Air superiority, gives you enough advantages as an excellent scout and the possibility of fast, unexpected attacks in key locations. It is not advisable to aircrafts were the core of the army.

Yesterday I ruined someone's army with t2 bombers. I'm sure it was very frustrating for him. I felt like a cheater and it was not funny.
I understand, because it happened to me too in the past.

@StormingKiwi wrote that it is necessary to eliminate splash in bombers. I think that was right.
If the attack air forces will be used to track down and destroy the most valuable units in my army, it is fine.
If the attack destroys the core of my army, this is frustrating.

It takes 45,000 metal in T1 bombers to kill a Commander in one pass, in theory. About 6,400 T1 mex ticks.
It takes 13,500 metal in T2 bombers to kill a Commander in one pass, in practice. (More or less.) About 480 T2 mex ticks.
Maybe that's just a case of needing to buff T1 bombers, but if you buffed them to the same level of efficiency, well... Imagine if only 18 T1 bombers were strong enough to kill a Commander. That's how it is once you have a T2 economy and T2 air.

Something to chew on, at least.

As I've been saying before, Map control in Planetary Annihilation is 99% of the times the key to win the game. There are different ways to gain map control, early doxes, proxy factories, t2 bot pushes, bomber rushes, t2 bomber rushes etc.
Right now whoever has t2 bombers and air superiority effectively SHUTS DOWN ANY POSSIBILITIES OF GROUND ATTACK. T2 flak was step is right direction, it at least stops opponent from destroying your whole base, but the problem is that if you try to move out out of flak support you get annihilated. The key to fix this problem is introduction of effective mobile ground anti-air. This would balance out land and air because you would be able to use ground forces to attack your opponent.
Air has superior mobility to any ground forces and it has to be like that. There must be an offset to this such as inability to attack in one place if its saturated enough with anti-air (for example mobile flak) but it is still able to attack in another place. If unit is very strong in the fight and also very mobile it will always end up in spam of such unit.
So to sum up, the goal here is to allow ground attacks without air superiority. It can be done through many ways, in my opinion the best solution is slight t2 bomber damage nerf and introduction of t2 mobile flak AA (from bot factory) and slight buff of current t1 mobile AA.

(random design idea) Personally I'd like more orbital interaction towards other dimensions of war (air and land). Orbital unit that is slow but effective anti-air would compliment ground attacks perfectly. This way orbital fights would be much more important.
This would be pretty interesting because whoever controls 2 levels out of three could be dominant on a planet.

If that could have possibly worked, other decent RTS games would have used it. It doesn't, and they haven't, for good reason.

So don't try sniping a commander with T1 bombers? They are built for AoE.

IMO, all that needs to change is the T2 bombers speed. I love that they decimate anything they touch (they are giant bombers after all... ) but they are waaaay too fast. Cut their speed to ~25% or less of what it is currently and maybe give them some more HP. Make them like the Kirov airships from CnC: Red Alert 2. Slow as sin, but god help you if you let them get over your base. This gives them an entirely separate role from T1 bombers. T1 bombers are for army harassment and quick threat response and T2 bombers are the undisputed kings of destruction from the air.

Their slow speed would be further magnified as a weakness if some kind of long range high dmg SAM site was added in. It also gives the enemy more time to respond with fighters and makes them terrible for commander sniping all while keeping their dmg high.

I'm still of the opinion that friendly fire splash damage would be a good addition. It wouldn't affect their offensive use much, as there are separate balance vectors for that, but it'd make them poor choices for defense and make global patrol less of a total shutdown.

And yet, it would still be nothing short of a total shutdown.

Who cares about losing a few mex when you can just rebuild it in a few seconds, compared to having a massive invasion crossing continents to eat you? No thanks.

The new flak cannon was like trying to put an immovable object in front of an unstoppable force. It looks ugly, and usually goes mad, wears makeup, scars itself, and threatens to kill people in the strangest way possible.

In other words, its temporary.

I think T2 bombers should have their damage brought in line with t1 bombers - that is, they have the same effect a group of t1 bombers do on a t1 army against a t2 army.

I think we should keep the carpet bombing, and keep flak as the blob-killing madman. However, it needs toned down so it cant be complete air superiority. How it is now is just ridiculous.

I feel like the T2 bombers could do with having similar stats to the T1 bomber in most respects, but have its weapons be balanced so that the T1 and T2 bombers do essentially the same damage, but in different ways.

I strongly disagree with this, the T2 bomber should not just be an "upgraded" T1 bomber. They should be different and the T2 should be more specialized. For example, IMO, the T1 bomber should be a good, all-round, bomber. Decent against buildings and quick enough to harass armies. The gunship should be fast and light, only really good at harassing armies and terrible at base assault. The T2 bomber should be slow and heavy, high hp and high dmg. Too slow to bomb armies, but powerful at laying waste to a base.

That was kinda my intention.

Have both the bombers be similar, but have their weapons give them differing roles, or ways of doing the same job.

Hi I've recently came up with new strategy and after some testing I think t2 bombers aren't that overpowered. It heavily depends on the size of map but I think going heavy t1 into t2 ground into fast nukes might be better than heavy t2 air play. The key is to do strong attack with commander at the begining while you grab whole map with expansions. Then once he reaches t2 air stage you make mass turrets absolutely everywhere to secure bases while you mass your own t1 air and you only fight over t1 AA turrets. Then when you have your t2 bot factory ready (around 10 min mark or something) you immediately start nuke and flak up everywhere.
The commander attack doesn't have to attack his base. If spawns are close then yeah but if they are far away it's fine to attack some rich metal position inbetween you and your opponent. Then you secure it up with turrets and t2 air can't really touch you there. Then you do slow turret crawl or just rush nuke. (or both).
Also it's very important to use combat engineers with commander because they are very good at assissting him.
So basically it's abuse of Commander, proxy factories everywhere, combat engineers, mass t1 turrets, t2 flaks and nukes.

What I said earlier still applies - t2 bombers shut down most of possibilities of any ground attack if you don't have air superiority. But you only do attacks before t2 bombers are out and once they are, you don't let him do any damage with bombers because of turrets and then you just nuke the **** out of him. I think bombers should remain the same if we introduce t2 strong mobile AA. If we don't then small nerf won't hurt, but because of cost of t2 factory we can't do a big nerf because it will be serious overnerf!
I'll soon make some videos about this strategy.

I have a simple solution.
Make a Napalm Bomber (The actual bomb does no damage, the Napalm does damage over time).
Even if the Napalm does the exact same damage as the current T2 Bombers, stacking napalm wouldn't increase damage, it would just extend the time of the napalm or spread it outwards over a larger area.

Then have another bomber that does high single-target damage with a bomb.

I thought about T2 bombers too and I think we should simply switch roles with T1... meaning...

T1 gets weak carpet bombing... basically what T2 does just way weaker, T2 will be high damage single bomb... more a unit to snipe high valuable targets...

My problem with this is t1 fighter spam is hard countered by t2 fighters and t1 combat fabbers use insane amounts of power.

Things that you said absolutely make sense, but there is also something deeper in it.
T2 Fighters are 2x as cost effective as t1 fighters in theory. But we also need to take other factors into consideration.
First you have to build very expensive t2 air factory. It costs 3300 metal in comparison to t1 720.
If you want to make it pump a lot of t2 fighters you probably need to assisst. Assissting is less cost effective than producing out of factory. Which means the more you assisst the less advantage you have. Assissting also costs you engineers that could have been doing something else.
So yes in long run t2 fighters are better obviously.
But if you tech to t2 you sacrifice map control so I have more resources so I don't have to be as cost effective as you.
You also have to squeeze in bombers or gunships that limit your t2 fighter production.
If I do commander push, most of your limited resources go usually into stopping it. So you either sacrfice even more map control in order to make turrets and tech up. Or you sacrifice tech in order to expand a bit and still hold my push.
Also I fight with my t1 interceptors only when it's absolutely necessary and preferably over t1 turrets.
And I just do slight push, I don't all-in, i grab a bunch of combat engies and some doxes and I see what can be done, usually force out shitton of stuff while I just expand. Combat engies take a lot of eco indeed but I spam economy behind the push and I do it relatively late (7-8 min mark) so I have decent economy by then.
I will play more to test it out but I believe it's very strong right now. I was on both sides of playstyle, I've been abusing fast t2 tech for like 2 weeks, but I believe It's actually not too good. In PA getting map control and mexes as fast as possible is top1 priority.

So before we jump into too fast conclusions with balance, it's good to remember that pure stats isn't everything, strategies heavily influence balance

the point of air should be to scout, get intel on possitions, and TACTICAL things, maybe hit their army to SOFTEN NOT DEMOLISH SOFTEN it or take out a building they have not just spam air and A move to victory with a force that can fly. The problem is not that they aren't building ground units its that they aren't cuz they feel they don't need to cuz air is so strong.

kid you not i wan on a tiny little itty biddy base, with only 3 bot factories and 3 air factories and 1 t2 air factory. trying to stay alive and the other team had half the map and millions of tanks. but guess what. I actually won with t2 bomber spam and t1 fighter spam. no matter how many he got i always had a lil more fighters and no matter how many millions of tanks he had i send 1 bomber just 1 with all my Air fighters, no more tanks. What i think could happen is maybe shield bubble buildings like in SC. i think that would be nice because your ground units can now have a half chance living through a bomber att cuz they have a shield to protect from a couple bombs and if u have AA ground units in the shield there ya go. I think that could be an option.