Air first viable?

Simple post, should air first be viable, or suicide?

Traditionally, air first was a risky strategy, an early bomber could wreak havoc on an opponent unprepared for such an attack, but is did so in a slight cheesy way, by killing an attempt to build anti air long enough for more bombers to arrive, after which it was GG.

I'd like to think that such tactics can still work, but not in the same way, I'm thinking a gunship rush, rather then bombing any attempt to build an AA turret, or air factory.

I think a simple early aa unit (with some other functionality) is a simple way to stop the one-bomber win, but still leave a viable air-first strategy available.

Thoughts?

As an all-in/cheese, yes.

But I really don't want to see great clouds of aircraft that clip through each other. It's really why I don't like air.

Air should be support and not meant to be used on their own. Else you get the beefy gunships from supcom 2 again who have more hp than tanks.

Sure there maps where going air might be better but overal they should be used together with ground units.

as stated above,I think air should be purely support units, maybe limit their range so you can only fly one attack? i hated those swarms of aircraft flying trough each other.

i liked how air was implemented in c&c generals, one attack than fly back...

I would argue for aircraft *not* having limited fuel. The way it is in Supcom/FA, I often leave my planes on the ground rather than having them patrol, just because I don't want hem running out of fuel, and setting up some refuel pads requires a T2 engy and time I could be spending elsewhere.

As for air-first as a viable strategy, of course it should be. There's been an argumen at FAF over whether (particularly Seraphim) bomber-first is OP. This only really affects the very best players though, and as long as PA makes it *slightly* easier to counter I see no problems.

So...that's a NO then...? :roll:

I wouldn't want to see it as "Air first and win."

Viable? Yes. Mandatory? Certainly ******* not.

There have been all sorts of suggestions on how to deal with it by players much better than me, but my own feeling is that a bomber should be able to inconvenience your opponent, but not beat them outright.

So it should have a similar value to sending a ground raiding party - perhaps it could be used to take out expansion engineers, but defending the main base would be easy enough that using a first bomber there would be ineffective. Of course this opens up a whole can of worms about overall bomber balance, but that should still be the goal.

It would be nice to have units do AA like in TA, so that we can have a range of more general units that focus on different ways of attacking rather then weather or not they shoot at air or not.

As for the planes themselves, glass cannon units that use their speed to defend themselves rather then relying on HP, making planes excellent at hit and run but not at holding ground....or air.

Air scouting? Air Transports? Flying support units? sure.

However, flying combat units are a very dangerous thing to have. Air units are the easiest to use and offer the least interesting styles of play. Players will err towards using the most straight forward spammable unit, leading to endless air spam.

Air units already have the terrain advantage. They often have a speed advantage, too. They don't need much more to be viable.

I don't see what's wrong with any tactic being used right off the bat, as long as there is a trade-off in terms of time, resources, complexity of tactic, etc to create a nice balance.

IMO, 50% of the time someone talks likes or dislikes about a gameplay style, tech type, or mechanic, they're not seeing the true underlying issue: balance and implementation.

Any mechanic that's not obviously functionally broken can and should be viable IMO. If the concern in this context is early game balance – single-unit advantage or a tendency towards spam – then that's a balance issue to do with making appropriate trade-offs until we see a decent decision spectrum in game.

Well aircraft in real life are not particularly good at holding ground, and have the armor of fishing boats in order to remain airborne.

But they do have good firepower and the ability to cross any terrain is always a nice bonus.

So we could go for that? Good attack, fast, but poor at keeping ground.

Really there are just a form of guided ordinance, just cheaper.

@eukanuba: I dont like the idea of limited fuel either, but maybe Pa should really go in the direction of C&C.

When you build an Aircraft factory it can 'dock' a limited number of planes, for repairing and rearming.
planes can stay in the air for unlimited time, but have a limited number of attacks before they have to rearm.

I find this more dynamic than having 100 fighters patrolling and shooting everything down till they get destroyed.
>ou could start a fake attack the enemy unleashes his bombs/rockets whatever and their planes have to rearm, and while they do that, you launch an air attack with your air units.

and like bobucles said above, air units have the advantage of speed, are immune to most terrain, and can't be shot by every ground unit.
So why not give them limited ammo, so you actually have to plan when and what to attack instead of carpet bombing everything.

I think I may have thought of a way to make bomber first viable, not overpowered, and without having any serious balance implications: give the commander weak AA. Literally just enough to take out one bomber before it does too much damage, but not so much that it is effective against multiple planes.

Another idea I had would also solve the bomber-first issue, but would have implications for the larger game that may be positive or negative: give the commander a manual-fire EMP weapon. Doesn't require energy to fire and has a really long recharge time. It would disable all enemy units for several seconds, and unlike the EMP in Forged Alliance it would cause aircraft to fall out of the air.

An extra positive use of this ability would be to freeze your attackers in time for a transport to come and whisk the commander away. An extra negative use would be that in would make the commander immune from air snipes.

I think the first idea is workable, simple and without obvious flaws. The second idea is probably broken, but there may be things I haven't thought of.

I don't know what game you are refering to but I guess it's SupCom:FA.

I would be in favour of limited payload.
That way planes can remain relatively strong but still can't overpower defences easily as they will have to go back and rearm.

Another option is to make fuel and payload the same thing. For all I know the bombers could be using stored energy as both fuel and bombs.
That way bombers will be able to drop more bombs near their base and taking less time going back refueling compared to attacking the enemy base thus making them better defensively compared to aggressively.

The game could feature both types of bombers aswell.

First air should be possible with the following ideas:

1. build engineers as fast as land facs (including roll out animation). This sucks in FA, where Cybran Air fac needs years to unload that engineer...

2. Bombers need to be counterable quite easily, but they would be cheap too. Bombers should not have radar or something, would be cool if you would have to send an air scout with them to make them effective. (of course there should be no aiming issues caused by that like in FAF, when it was tried out)

3. Micro needs to be possible. Engineers need to be able to maneuver bombs out.

4. air needs to be more expensive than land of course, you gain lot more intel and speed in the beginning.

Please God no, having one unit that can only be effective when teamed with another unit, in a game were there may be 200-400 units...no!

Unit synergy is a _good_ thing.

Fixed.

All of the C&C ideas suggested in this thread would simply be too micro intensive and to be useful would make air units basically into tactical missile launchers ala FA. Boring and unnecessary. Air balance as exists in FA is fine now.