Air defence towers.

Well, lines of triple-barrel laser turrets do the same thing to ground units, pretty much. I think the only problem with flak right now is that they need to cost about 5x more. It should be feasible to scatter flak around my base, not rapidly wall in my entire extended perimeter with it.

I'd love to see aircraft completely redesigned into support assets, but it looks like we won't be getting major changes to the core behaviors of aircraft, so we have to work with them "as is". Given that, making AA more viable and interesting is the next best alternative.

Which is a super boring mechanic aswell.
I love having a super strong death laser tower in my arsenal, but more like the annihilator style with big range, huge damage and slooooow firing and turning speed.

I am NOT talking about ways to kill air. I am talking about normalizing their gamepay to land unit's mechanics. They have a unique mechanic, they trade a lot of sustainable gunfighting for a movement type that puts them on a different layer. Their attacks are still more universally useful between layers than the other layer is to it. Still despite this, it would be nice to have the few tools that can attack through to their layer to be diverse.

Besides that, they are balanceable. Uber has the right idea on aircraft in my opinion, if anything then if they just diversify roles for air and balance the numbers for health and damages.

That being said, what I have stated were ways to balance the actual values of flak, because anything doing too much or little damage is subject to being recommended "more functional" numbers, and besides that also support a new type of anti air that is balanced like anti-land stuff.

Also, if the catapult were reworked as a tactical single target missile launcher, it would be nice if it did target air. This is a suggestion if it were given it's nerfs and reworked as a t1 nuke, a nuke with cheaper yet still lengthy to produce missiles and no missile AOE.

You can't hate me for being passionate about these interesting game mechanic ideas tossed around.

How? The air theater is an order of magnitude faster than anything on the ground, it has a fraction of the restrictions, and a fraction of any kind of interaction points. The theaters are not related in the slightest, and trying to treat them that way is an awful idea.

Super speed can do things that slow units can't. It is an inescapable truth, and one that has to be taken into account if the axioms for building air units are to be successful.

There was a game that tried to normalize air vs. ground by giving them similar stat lines. It was Supcom 2, and the outcome was quite bad.

Have you guys noticed how much flak misses though? Especially if you bait them with interceptors before sending in the bombers. They're only truly devastating when your bombers are clumped together, although at the moment getting them to not clump can be annoying.