Air collisions

What do you mean? In dogfighting agility is highly important. If interceptors are mounted with fixed guns they will have trouble firing at jinxing fighters.

That assumption only works when the sky isn't filled to the brim with viable targets that can be shot at ANY time. It simply won't scale.

Also, why would you put a spinal weapon on something that demands agility, but has none? Go for missiles, or a turret, or something that isn't stupid.

Actually I once tried to adjust the air combat of supcom and with some minor changes; low maneuverability interceptors with fixed guns and long range slower but more maneuverable air superiority fighters using missiles, with a fairly even DPS potential the ASF's beat out the inties 15:40 with some to spare

and the ai in supcom is pretty dumb, lots of times I saw them get shot down because they were chasing some far off target flying in a straight line. If the combat AI had taken into account attackers chasing it they could have probably beaten them out with no losses

maneuverability and range is king

Yeah, bmb said it as well.

It does scale. Say that the fighters have missiles and the interceptors have spinal weapons. The interceptors just need to stay a short period of time in the target reticle of the fighters and the interceptor can fire its high alpha damage missiles. The interceptor on the other hand have to align itself with the target for an extensive period of time in order to keep firing at the fighters. A more agile fighter can jinx much more making it harder for the interceptor to align with it.

Because a machine gun type weapon could have the highest DPS. Aligning with the target and peppering it with bullets might be the fastest way to down bombers. Perfect for an interceptor.
I don't think you get dogfights if planes have omnidirectional turrets. You want dogfighting airplanes right? I sure do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKCfN_QP ... e&t=28m40s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKCfN_QP ... e&t=33m32s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKCfN_QP ... e&t=39m54s
same player wins all of those engagements with significantly less ASF by microing such that his air force doesn't have to turn as much to fire.

Also going to add that godde and I aren't speculating. You can literally see it if you play a variety of these games or mess with unit stats.

Recommended reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercepto ... aft#Design

Have no idea how that cast has anything to do with bob's post.

You're going to have to elaborate.

Yup, I went on to elaborate with an edit as that seemed terse. Essentially bob feels having separate interceptor and fighter units is redundant because maneuverability doesn't matter, especially in large air engagements.

I posted some videos suggesting the opposite and linked the design section of interceptors which explains the difference between ASF and Interceptors.

You could try a completely different design for interceptors, exactly suited for their task. More like an antiair gunship than a lightweight fighter.

Front facing anti missile lasers and sidewards facing flaks with burst shots, but little flexibility. Do a fly-by on an enemy swarm and shoot to both sides.

Even without large AoE this should provide a great coverage and it works best when facing enemy aircraft head on, contrary to ASF which are a lot better when it comes to hunting down fleeing aircraft.

It doesn't require high speed either since it is not designed to hunt fleeing enemies down, but it rather counts on enemy aircraft to pass by. Sending your bombers in when a few of these protect the base would be fatal, sending in ASF head on won't work either.

However you could still try to outsmart them, using the ASF for a real dogfight. Or just send in interceptors yourself and try to achieve a draw, however keep in mind that they are slow and therefor vulnerable to any type of ground based anti air.

I like gunships, mavor dissed them a bit but I think he'll see the light.

I would go so far as to suggest there should be separate gunship factory like there is for bots but we'll see.

Problem are anti ground gunships as they tend to become flying fortresses, especially when they are allowed to form death balls. This goes up to the point where you can't even take them down with ASF because their combined AA power is too high.

Anti air gunships are a totally different thing as you can't build a offensive death ball with them, they are purely defensive units which are designed to be used in combination with ground troops or to defend your own base.

They also don't work that well when left completely unattended, so you can't just stack them up at choke points and hope that they will shoot everything down without a single loss.

hopefully the ammo system will address that

No, it won't.

It will solve the problem where only a few bombers can nuke a base into oblivion until AA is up, but it won't work for anti ground gunships.

They still become a lot stronger in numbers even with self refilling ammunition. You can still stack them up to the point where they can deliver a constant stream of lead and only very few of them soak up damage so they can hold out for a long time.

Takes a LOT longer to get to that stage exterminans.

20 Gunships with unlimited, constant DPS does a lot more damage than 20 gunships that only fire in a 15 second "constant" DPS burst... and then dribble out damage, or have to go away to rearm.

only over time.

And that's not enough time to stop a snipe.

Of for goodness sakes... are we really back to THAT topic again?

Geez...

Well that's when a bust attack counts right?

I would argue that that is not a gunships' ONLY use. If that's all you've been using them for you've been missing out.

Tactical Missiles are/were a far better Sniping tool anyway.

This is off topic and needs to head back towards Air Collisions/Clipping issues anyway. You want to talk ComSnipes I'd go find one of the dozen other threads that have it as a main topic.

All this assumes targeting restrictions between ground and air. So far, the latest streams have shown "anti-air" towers and trucks firing on everything; and even an artillery piece downing a construction plane.

Lumbering and stationary gunships make themselves vulnerable to all slow, non-tracking projectiles.

would AA-gunships with splash be a more appropriate counter? Mobile SAMs with splash could also work I guess.

I'm actually for having a separate gunship factory like the vehicle-bot factories so I'd like that.