I think that the commanders in this game should have a small amount of AA on them. Why, because it means the commander is better able to take care of himself in early to mid game, but still allows him to be taken down by a serious strategic investment, example 10 gunships. Why does this fit the design philosophy of the game? Because, sniping makes you put more focus on baby sitting the commander, and less focus on management of your armies and what you are building. Essentially it adds more micro. Given that we will be battling over multiple planets moons and asteroids, I believe giving him a minimum defense against a light snipe would improve game play. But we still leave the door open to a more committed snipe. The following is a list of tactics this is designed to negate. Small team gunship snipe. one or two, no. If you have 10 t2 on him, yeah he should go down. Ghetto gunship snipe. same thing as above. Commander to commander drop. You will want to think twice before taking your commander and loading him on a transport and trying to drop him straight on your enemy commander. You will still be able to drop him out just outside the base and push, ala thelittleone sytle.
Some Commanders could have it as their "special ability" or as an alternate firing mode for their secondary weapon attachment. All Commanders? Nah. Let's keep a little variety.
ideally, the scale of unit costs (or in this game's case, time, as all producers will have a fixed output) should allow you to have some anti air up around your commander before air comes into play to prevent that annoying supcom mechanic of the few bombers being able to raze you with no opposition, but I also would appreciate at least one commander varient having AA to prevent this early on. I'd prefer all of them get it, simply to promote commanders not being able to be beaten by unit type alone, but it's not nescessary for all of them. Same applies to torpedoes. I really hope that (some, if not all) commanders have the ability to attack all theatres of war, so that it's more about quantity of units/strategy of attack, rather than having the commander have a 'hard counter.' Just promotes less cheese. Well, theoretically of course. Without numbers I'm mostly just using conjecture, but still.
A small amount of AA might be nice. It depends on how available, useful and expensive early game AA is. Don't forget that this also makes air first more dangerous though. The enemy commander can just walk up next to your air factory if he suspects that you might rush air. Then you are sitting there with your pants around your ankles and there is little you can do to come back into the game.
I'd rather the commander just be a lot less vulnerable to bombs instead, but anything that minimizes the ease of a commander snipe is good in my books, without shields to protect the commander and with the much larger maps I'm worried that commander sniping is going to be the best way to win rather than just an option to win. I mean if it's going to take less than 100 aircraft to take down the commander then there's no point trying anything else as 100 aircraft is a huge bargain to win the war. ~10 aircraft being able to take down a commander was ok in SupCom because the commander could take refuge under shields to avoid it being too easy to snipe, but in PA it would be madness to make the commander that vulnerable. Giving the commander AA isn't going to help much because once a bomber releases a bomb it doesn't really matter if it dies and with the speed of aircraft it's unlikely that any balanced weapon would kill the bombers before they drop their bombs, though it might help against gunship units.
This was the idea behind the hunker ability in SupCom 2. A lot of people thought it was too over the top, but the basic premise is allow the commander to 'harden' it's defenses in order to prevent such a thing from happening. I remember there being multiple ideas on how to implement it. The actual implementation was simply that the commander can't do anything, but damage is cut in half. Perhaps a better way to implement it would be to balance bombers in a way that if a commander hunkers, damage per bomb that doesn't pass a certain threshold is simply blocked. Actually, you could have it as: -an upper threshold (sort of like the immortal shields) -a lower threshold -a flat percentage (which doesn't immediately solve the problem) -a damage over time threshold (the commander stops taking damage for a brief time if a it takes such and such damage in such and such time) -an 'only applies to bombers' mechanic I personally really like the idea behind the hunker ability, but it's true purpose is to prevent COM sniping, which wasn't the case in Supcom2. Personally, I think a damage over time threshold may work very well to air sniping, since bombers deliver it's payload in a short amount of time and must do a fly around to attack again, which isn't the case typically of land or naval.
Supcom 2 commander snipe: Build a few gunships (advancement of game determines how many). Level up gunship teleport. Fly near you opponent's commander, teleport onto him and goodbye sir you are dead. Btw, gunships flew under shields so they needed some impressive AA to stop this. I approve of some light AA on the commander, possibly to slow to shoot down recon planes (T2) but fast enough to deal with a few planes (a few being a small amount, less then 1 build AA would stop). Why these limitations? The predecessors of this game were to scout scout scout, counter counter counter. If you get hit by an early air force and you didn't counter air then you shouldn't have Mr Commander Pants (new official name of my commander from now on) be able to counter it by himself. I believe that the amount of air the commander can combat by himself should be similar to the amount of land he can counter (with the starting energy level of the UberGun).
Point up, d-gun, bye bye trouble. It's so easy a cave Commander could do it. Of course, firepower isn't the only way to deal with air. Not being found is the strongest option. Air tends to have lower damage efficiency, so damage prevention will end up naturally effective against air targets.
No no no, SupCom2's Problem was more fundamental than that, any kind of air swarm was crazy effective because aside from the Bomb Bouncer there wasn't a single AOE AA weapon in the game, SupCom is further a worse example because commadners could get an AA weapon that still didn't help! Not to mention the idea of Teleporting Gunships......REALLY? SupCom2 is more or less a horrible example for anything PA related IMO. Mike
Unfortunately, even in TA, one of my friends only builds air (god dam stealth bombers). So the best defense is Flack everywhere. When Supcom 2 was out and we all played ... everyone built air. So I played Cybran and used the Magnatron in combo with the Bomb bouncer. Held of attacks for hours. Also the bomb bouncer was bugged and could be used against ground units as well. Commander AA should hold off against early rushes (as the UberGun / laser beams will for land) but not be effective by itself mid to late game (if implemented at all)
