Mod Takeaway: I have concerns with how poorly naval performs currently. I would appreciate it if you fixed it. To the poster: Your original post is the sort of thing that gets one removed from the forums. Please read the rules of our forums before posting again. Thanks. - Garat
The counter to bombers is fighters. The counter to fighters are things like AA ships. You brought the wrong tool for the job. Working As Intended.
Oh, so PA is Rock Paper Scissors now? Awesome. EDIT: that argument is just like "noobtubes are part of the game. get over it."
Eh. On topic, anti air already does prevent air attacks from being infinite. It doesn't prevent damage being done before stopping them. That is sort of intentional. Besides that, naval was tweaked to test it. It won't stay this way. Just a beta test, thanks for testing it and submitting an opinion, except for the tone of the opinion I guess. Still, opinion is opinion. Thanks. I too hope they consider the new "good point" for naval.
What do you mean "now"? This is pretty much the nature of every RTS, including TA. The other option is "I have more rocks than you. You lose." You can't just build 1000 ships, send them blindly at someone and expect them emerge victorious. There are effective counters to "just ships". Bombers are one of the good counters. And bombers are countered by fighters, so "just bombers" won't work either. In the end, it's about having combined arms. I can beat your ships with bombers. You can beat my bombers with fighters. I can send fighters to fight your fighters but if we have to do it over top of your ships, your ships will kill my fighters. But you can't just build a bunch of ships.
Ah, but you fail to realize that you don't NEED ships. You don't NEED ground units. But you do NEED air. As long as air is as ridiculously mobile and capable (with it's silly stacking), it will remain dominant and make the other units practically superfluous. Until that is no longer valid, I think that every "branch" of units should be able to hold their own against an equal force that consists solely of another branch.
It's more complicated than that. Air alone can't win you the game. It's too easy to counter with flak, which means you'll never get at the enemy's vitals. So while you don't necessary need ground, ships, orbital or nukes, you'd better pick one of those to go with because air alone won't cut it. By proposing things like mobile flak, it sounds like you're asking for a situation where you can win the entire game with just one type of unit. JUST ground will do it because ground doesn't fight ships and once it has effective mobile flak, ground can kill air, and ground can overrun ground defenses and kill other ground units and kill bases and kill commanders. All you would need to win is ground. You can't currently win a game with JUST ground, because air will kill it. You can't currently win a game with JUST sea, because air will kill it. You can't currently win a game with JUST air, because flak will kill it. I don't think we should change this. Yes you need air. Air is the glue that holds all attack plans together. But air alone won't suffice. You will always need something to combine with it.
Ah, but air will give you control of most of the map. With the kind of control, getting enough units to finish off your opponent is trivial.
There have already been TONS of solutions for keeping air as a fast support option while still having adequate ground answers. Flat out killing everything in the sky is a lazy man's last resort.
Technicality speaking, you only have control where you have units, what air units have is reach. It's a subtle but important difference. Mike
Yeah I don't find that to be true. Scattered, patrolling air will get shot down with a minimum of effort. If it's not scattered and patrolling, though, then I have time to go in and build flak in the direction I want to be, and then it'll be too late. He'd better have ground units coming out to deal with me or I'll be pushing his sphere of "control" back pretty rapidly. Last patch I was a major bomber whore. I pretty well stopped this patch not because I decided to be a nice person, but because ground is a lot harder to counter now than air is. Air will whomp an unprepared enemy really quickly but it fails pretty hard against someone who knows how to counter it. Ground will eventually overwhelm any defense, though. If you really want to win without making any air, you can, just by doing a flak-and-artillery-creep with ground forces to support it. I've done this. I find it's faster to escort my ground forces with fighters and mix in a good amount of T1 anti-air but flak-and-artillery-creep seems to be pretty reliable too. I think the bottom line is that people are trying to attack with 100% ships or with 100% ground units and that simply is not a good plan, and I don't think it should be, and I don't think we should introduce anything that changes this fact. You must support your attack with other game elements.
Supporting an army with fighters isn't practical. If the enemy is spamming air units they most likely have more fighters than you. Seeing as mobile AA is a joke your only other option becomes T2 flak creep, while effective it can be time consuming, thus it gets worse with planet size (only playing scale 2 right now to counter this). A 100% ground army with no support should beet a 100% air army with no support. Air should be for exerting control over a large area, while ground should be for head on attacks. Assuming a even match air should: destroy isolated forces, stop expansion attempts, carry out precision strikes and raid enemy mex fields. Air should not: Defend your base, destroy a hole army or snipe the enemy commander(this has been fixed with op flak). I hope to see some form of advanced mobile AA in the future to allow ground army's to combat air.
Don't get me wrong, I agree. I would really like it if air was a great addition to every army, but it is grossly necessary right now. When I find every single game I play pivot around who has the largest air force, "glue that holds all attack plans together" doesn't fit the bill. The people who defend the current air state just have more fun using air. This happens with all balance discussion (in my experience). I have done a lot of discussing Airmech balance, and I find that whenever a mech or popular unit is nerfed, the people who abused it were the ones that cried the loudest about how balanced it was. No amount of reason or logic could convince them otherwise. It is simply a matter of what is acceptable and what isn't, quite an arbitrary situation when you just look at player's opinions. Nobody wants air to be useless, just not stupid good and necessary like it is now. Everyone should take note that this discussion has gone from "Naval vs Air" to "Air", just like every other discussion that even mentions air units. Something is seriously wrong with how air units work.
How, exactly, are you defining "control"? If 100% ground beats 100% air and static flak also beats air then what, exactly, do you think air is going to beat anywhere on the map? How can you have control when you can't engage ground armies, navies, or anything with flak cannons nearby? I don't find it impractical to escort my ground forces with air. A Peregrine can shoot down a Hornet in 1 shot. 1 shot from a Peregrine + 1 shot from a Stringer will shoot down another Peregrine. There is a real benefit to having ground AA around to back-up your fighters. If we give you what you want, you will simply not need fighters. That does seem to be the stated goal -- "air should not be needed". Which means we can all just skip building air factories entirely, as they no longer fill any needed role in any circumstance.
Air should be able to use its extraordinary mobility to amass and overwhelm ill defended spots. The best response to such an attack is fighters as they can respond quickly to threats anywhere on the map and cost less then covering the entire map with AA. Obviously AA is super over powered right now; only 300 meal and can kill hordes of bombers. When AA gets nerfed every thing will work out. The role of air is not to destroy armies but, to support armies.
This remains the core issue for me. Bombers that can't focus all their damage on one spot are going to be much, much closer to being balanced. However, there's still some serious issues with air supremacy and the difficulty of toppling it. Even if the "rock-paper-scissors" of bombers vs. fighters vs. AA is stable, there are wrenches to be thrown into the equation. For example; what happens when one player has total air supremacy on a planet, and another player tries to invade? Scouts and bombers on global auto-patrol find and destroy air factories, teleporters, and turret AA immediately before they can be built. Even with drop pods/unit cannons coming in the future, and the defender's advantage of nearby reinforcements - augmented by the global reach of air units - means that attacking an air-swarmed planet is harder to overcome than any other defense. This might change with some numbers tweaks, and gradual adjustments to the metagame; it may well be that too many players are used to air being a luxury, rather than a staple. Likewise, the breakneck speed of air units makes their management and direction completely at odds with the slow, deliberate pace of the rest of the game. Selection UI also has some part to play, as there's no way currently to filter selection to only air units. I have started filtering AA bots into my attack groups, but I still can't juggle air easily unless it's parked.
One of the purposes of AoE is to punish an over reliance on air swarms. This can come from defenses, and it can also be self inflicted from the bomber's death blast (or even the bomb itself). Bombers depend on a heavy first strike, so any mechanic which obscures vision, resists initial damage(pop up turrets), or cloaks through the first hit is super effective. Defenses that provide a similar heavy first strike would also work, in moderation. Bombers are FAST, so any mechanic which lies in wait, funnels movement, slows them down or redirects them is super effective.
