ACU snipes

Then please write FAF, your post says FA.

I feel like FA or FAF balance is a bit off-topic here.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to prevent Commander sniping on a spherical map without shields?

A commander bunker maybe?

As said many times before, there won't be just one spherical map but many. Just get it off world if you belive they will try to snipe you.

For now we dont even know if commander sniping will be a useable strategy. There might be no units (that include structures) that can easily snipe a commander.

Well. It's really more like this:
http://faforever.com/faf/unitsDB/unit.p ... 03,UeL0303

Any way you scratch it, air units were simply tit for tat superior to their ground counterparts. In order to perform its role successfully, the Restorer has to compete with the ASF on a cost basis, which means being competitive against those values. Unlike the ASF, it suddenly got the chance to point its gun down and reveal how screwed up the air theatre was against the rest of the game. It turned out to be OP. Big surprise. It's simply yet another case of "did not do the math" on the dev's part (and I appreciate the irony, thanks).

As for commander sniping, a good start is to not give overwhelmingly superior attributes to air units, so they don't overshadow the game.
The TotalA commander had an expensive cloak that was virtually impossible to reveal without destroying enemy power, thus driving the focus away from comms and towards base attacks.
Most Supcom commanders had considerable upgrades to keep them respectable as the game scaled.
The Supcom recall device was plot-only but it offers a method of quick escape.
Other Supcom commanders had short range teleportation so they were tricky to catch.
In PA, an ability to rocket off world or teleport across space each offer long term ways to keep commanders out of trouble.

Bunkers would not work that well, because without a planet there is no bunker.

I can probably count on 1 hand the number of games where air superiority did not win the game... Granted, those were the most spectacular games I've ever played Definitely looking forward to PA, and in particular Galaxy Warfare as was mentioned in the kickstarter stretch goals

Well most 1v1 are not decided by air alone...

oh come now. are you telling me your favorite match type was 1v1? I much prefer team games of any number over a 1v1.

Why are you comparing two units which under normal circumstances can never shoot at each other? You seem to be confused as to the nature of the Restorer. It never "pointed its gun down", not even in the release version of FA. All units which can attack air and ground always had two weapons for the two jobs. All you're doing is making misleading comparisons and saying things that were never true.

Not only is driving the focus towards base attacks bad for what's supposed to be unique about the game, the only reason this worked at all is because TA's UI was much worse than SC's and its commander was a liability late game. You couldn't use radar to identify cloaked units in groups in TA like you can in SC, and hiding your commander under a radar jammer in some forgotten corner of the map was only viable because the commander was pretty useless after a certain point.

Doesn't matter what is anyone's favorite, what matters is what the game was designed around. I mean look at SCII, it's got more or less top-notch balance for 1V1, when when you go into 2/3/4 V 2/3/4 it starts to break down due to faction interactions(on allied teams) that you just don't have to account for in 1V1. The game is still playable because it already has a solid foundation for the balance, but there are kinks for sure.

Some of this is offset by PA only having 1 unit pool, but that doesn't change the fact that big team games really do play differently from 1V1s.

Mike

He's saying (in a roundabout way) that the Restorer was able to compete with ASFs on a for cost basis, then got an ATG gun tacked on on top of it. Which is kind of broken.

Just don't have the retarded growth in strength between early-game units and late-game units. You're proposing a growth in defensive ability that matches the growth in strength. That sounds like a band-aid solution that patches over the symptoms, and leaves the underlying problem untouched.


Outright prevention of commander sniping shouldn't be the goal. If your opponent is an idiot and leaves his commander out in the open - of course you should be able to snipe him.

I think it's best to limit sniping to when people make mistakes, or when a very skilled player makes a well timed attack.

It doesn't actually fix anything to do this, because even if individual units don't get significantly stronger, a player's army as a whole does, and so an unupgraded commander's fighting strength becomes proportionally smaller. You still got airsnipes in TA, but they were done with about a million Hawks, not with half a dozen T3 Gunships or stratbombers.

That's why they added the T2 flak guns right?

Assuming we have an artillery without direct counter (i.e. shields), and assuming its range is comparabale to those of FA T3 arty when counting planet as map, leaving commander pretty much everywhere on mid-sized planet is leaving him out in the open.

Except that T2 Flak is next to useless against T3 air, The Scout, ASF and Bomber are soo fast the flak almost never hits, and the gunships have so much HP that it takes flak a long time to kill them, if they aren't killed first.

Why FA never had a T3 Mobile AA unit as stock I'll never know.....

Mike

Thats aloot of assumptions.
But even if they are all true you could just get him off that world? Build a "astroid bunker" for him if you want to make sure he cant be sniped (A astroid full of defenses). Even if they find the astroid it wouldent be easy to land forces on it if its full of defenses (or engineers to build arty).

It wouldn't make him invincible, but here is the deal:

1) I don't think he is supposed to be invincible anywhere. I think it is supposed to be just as difficult not staying in one place too long as it is to put pressure on one through snipe attempts.

2) I think he is naturally supposed to get safer as he claims territory. First, he will be deep in a base. Then, he will be deep in a fortified asteroid. Then, he will be deep in a fortified planetary system. The distance will naturally protect him, good luck getting past tons of hostile asteroids and planets to get just him.

The ASF and the Restorer most certainly can shoot at each other, and in FA v3599 and before the Restorer was more cost-effective at anti-air than the ASF was.

Restorers are now rarely seen in FAF, but the ASF is still a bit overpowered despite massive cost increases. PA needs to go down the path of having air units having 10% of the health and DPS of ground units to avoid this happening - it was tried in SupCom but abandoned for FA purely so that the Aeon Czar had an experimental level of health. There (hopefully) won't be any flying experimentals in PA so there is now no reason not to do it.

Yes. Loads. 1v1 is much more fun.

FAF 1v1 as it is now is not at all imbalanced (as far as my relatively noobly skills can tell), but in team games you get all sorts of ridiculous imbalances that are caused by players being left alone to tech up and/or spam air/experimentals.

So ground AA should be able to kill a hundred times its' cost in Air?
Do the math and this is what you come out with.

No, ground AA should be very ineffective against ground targets (when they can target it at all)

The problem is that it's harder to have low-flying gunships that can be targeted by everyone, acting like fast, terrain-ignoring light "ground" units, or flying fortresses that can be targeted by artillery (being it with lolmicro or auto-targeting if the units aren't retarded). But we can do without those anyway.