POLL: Balancing Air - Continued!

If there is an example of Helicopters with realistic/(not the emphasis) movements, it can be a fun engagement for both the attacker and defender.


Hopefully Uber gets a tiny bit of interest from this game.

bombers already stack to damage as much as giles stack to damage horizontally.

as long as it is limited, and there is aoe to punish clustering, its fine.

besides that, these are "air haters" suggestions, balancing the numbers and even roles would be nice, because we know for fact bombers won't be in release doing exactly what they do now. Their speed, health, and or damage will obviously change.

That is not true. Opposed to ground units which can only drive around obstacles aircraft can also go above or below them. If air units aren't able to function in a context necessitating this movement behaviour their design is flawed.

Then it flies over or under the oncoming aircraft. I'm not imagining turning air into a flat grid; aircraft should be able to fly over or under one another - but they should not be able to all occupy the same exact spot and attack the same exact target with combined damage simultaneously.

Though Starcraft air units might move in blobs more prettily, you still get the crucial problem of overlapped damage. I'm sure we've all seen massed Mutalisks create a circle around a target and kill it extremely quickly. I still believe that large numbers should be able to inflict high damage, I just think they should do so without it looking buggy and requiring second-tier solutions like Flak.
If you have a basic problem: Overlap, and the solution is to fix that mechanic, you don't completely fix game-play by adding more units with special functions like AA AOE - the problem will persist anywhere you haven't massed Flak.

It would be fine if Aircraft flies like in SupCom.

About stealth, I would recommend a "radar jammer building/unit"

SupCom was spammed bombers flying through flak and dropping enough bombs to collapse shields and kill ACUs. Air overlap encourages heavy turtling, and even then isn't stopped by it.

I agree with you on stealth.

It could work, it just might turn into a traffic jam. Theoretically it could be a way to balance air, to make them slow to organize into an attack formation and very vulnerable to sudden changes.. try to make any hectic fast u-turn and your air force turns into a blob of chaos, stopping it on its tracks. Bombers already kind of work this way, with their wide turning arcs.. it just needs to be taken a bit further.

The poll is kind of useless, since there are no options to vote against the suggestions you make.
Still, even though air stacking might be impossible to avoid alltogehter, it would be nice if groups of air units were forced into formations instead of just individualy taking the shortest route to the target and unloading all of their damage at once or in an extremely short amount of time.

These aren't my suggestions, they were made by the community. I just put them in a poll.
I also apologised for forgetting to put a "I think everything is OK as it is." option in my OP, and asked people to post if they were of that opinion.
This is beside the point, as the vast majority of people have voted in favour of stopping Air stacking, and haven't lampooned the poll for not having a "Nay" option. The fact is Air is imbalanced, and if it ends up in a similar state to SupCom, we'll have bomber suicide runs ending games, and making it impossible for land armies to travel because they can annihilate a blob with stacked damage.

I agree formations might be a quick fix, but stopping units overlapping completely would prevent situations in which, for example, a large group of gunships surrounded a target and all flew into each other. Such situations just look bad, as well as the whole stacked damage issue which has been spoken about at length already.

Forcing unit behavior is one of the most awful types of solutions. There are PLENTY of ways to deal with air. Use them.

Uh NO. Don't make stuff up. Air overlap makes air more effective at sniping, which indirectly encourages more air power. Deal with the sniping and guess what? Air power isn't hot **** anymore.

Fortunately we already know about mechanics that directly deal with sniping. CnC used a shroud generator, which air units could not look through. TA used a cloak, which was easy to break with everything except air. Sopwith used the bomber's own bombs, which are ironically super effective against bombers.

Since bombers use energy, an EMP-type weapon can zap away their ability to deal continuing damage. This could be either a direct attack on its energy, or it could deny its ability to recharge. The bomber would have no choice but to flee.

So surrounding an entire continent with AA Flak doesn't count as heavy turtling?
'indirectly'? It directly leads to binary gameplay - Air is the only counter to stacked Air, unless you can lure the enemy in front of a tonne of Flak.
I'm not against the secondary solutions you suggested. I just don't see them as dealing with the fundamental issue of stacking - my only issue is that they seem to be workarounds attempting to balance it with special weapons or abilities. You can't deny the fact that unlimited air stacking is imbalanced in the amount of damage it can inflict on a concentrated point.

Enforcing reasonable unit behaviour on the other hand is of the best type of solutions. It deals with the problem on the most basic layer without resorting to arbitrary new mechanics and number juggling.

I have to agree on this point. Differentiating the handling of units shapes the way you use those units. naval is a prime example; their turn rate, long profiles and slow speed make the relation between flanking and head-on attack crucial. it's not forced.

Comparatively, Air's loopy post-strike movement (ideally) makes planning their sudden attacks a careful art. Having to factor in spread is not a detriment, but an addition to that.

My take is that they should be allowed to overlap, but only to a point.

No more than 4 or 5 should be able to take up the same space so that they can fly past each other without stopping. If we say no stacking what so ever, then its just ground 2.0....

Other then you know, moving over every bit of terrain.

Countering powerful with broken is a sign of a bad RTS. Nothing more.

In addition to being a flyer, bombers have very explicit strong points and specific vulnerabilities. Flak protects against approximately ZERO strong points and exploits approximately ZERO weaknesses. It is the very definition of the wrong ******* tool for the job.

... So you don't like spammed Flak? Is that what you're getting at? Neither do I...
I included stealth in the Poll, why haven't you voted for it?

I don't think overlap is necessary when aircraft can literally fly over one another to avoid stopping.
The only major difference would be that they couldn't drop bombs through one another, thus limiting the damage possible on any one spot - making air damage finite and thus easier to balance.
While capping the overlap as you suggest is a solution, it would result in Air needing to deal less damage individually, as even five stacked T2 Bombers at the moment kill most land units beneath them. I'd rather a single air unit punched its weight alone, rather than trying to balance stacking.

Stacking is not an inherent quality of Air, as igncom1 points out. Air's ability to move over obstacles at high speed, reconnoitre and attack very quickly all distinguish it from land or naval.

If altitude were to be implemented to prevent Air stacking, there could still (quite rightly) be the option of a swarm of gunships flying above one another in a cloud whilst firing at a single target. Preventing stacking similarly would not inhibit Air's capacity for attacking other Air; a squadron of fighters can shoot dead ahead at their targets whilst flying on top of one another. The balancing would affect Air's relationship to Land/Naval.

And air units can't be hit by land/naval. Only by special units from land/naval... and this units have a down side sometimes (can't shoot ground, only single target, slow in comparison to the air units, super low range so bombers just one for one them, etc.). So air is just to "far away" from ground i think. They play in their own league.

So if air has more counters it could help or the whole no stack formation thing!

And when you have a big base and you want new units and they have to move through your hole base, its just easier to build air.

You want to "park" your army some where? Just put all the air units in one spot so you save space and you can hide them more easy.

This is an important note; bmbers only need to do enough damage to be balanced with non air, and antiair only needs to do enough damage to reasonaby deter bombers. So long as air units are mirrored between players, altering their behaviour is fine.