Air first viable?

I beg to differ, and that's not just because aircraft are just ordinance delivery systems.

SupCom aircraft are very good at taking and holding ground and have a massive amount of HP for a unit that should really be about avoiding aircraft, getting a direct hit on any actual aircraft is a 1 hit kill, but not in SupCom where they are more like flying tanks.

T1 Aircraft - any defence makes short work of them.
T2 Aircraft - any T2 defence of a small group of T1 defence makes short work of them. Bombers are also reasonably weak to T1 interceptors.
T3 aircraft - A lot more health, can last a while even against T3 interceptors. Still very weak against T3 defences, which incidentally are significantly cheaper than most if not all other T3 defences.

Where is the problem?

Yep, that's a perfectly reasonable perspective to have. I was in fact quite confused myself as to why they increased the HP of aircraft from Vanilla to FA.

Taking ground, not bases.

Very easy to lose ground fast as well.

but your missing the point, planes in FA can eaisly keep ground.

Witch makes no sense, they are aircraft, not tanks.

And who's to say in the future aircraft won't be able to hold ground? Who's to say that in the future, aircraft won't supplant land based armed forces entirely?

Really? :|

They pretty much already have. Even still, gameplay is what we're discussing here. I suggest you guys go read the previous threads we've had on air balance.

I'm not keen on limited ammo or limited fuel. All the other units have unlimited ammo (presumably due to some sort of on-board nanolathe or any other excuse you care to make up) so it is inconsistent to limit aircraft in this way.

There are two things being discussed in this thread, air in general and air-first as a strategy. I think that it is very valid to talk about FA as a comparison point for both topics, as without some new mechanisms the old problems will likely rear their heads.

Is there any objection to having a low-damage AA gun on the commander to stop a single bomber being able to win the game two minutes in?

It would be nice if the only AA limitation was on turret turn rate and projectile speed like in TA.

and rof and damage and aoe and speed and hp and size and etc

Sometimes, I swear you're a chatbot ign

Ditto.

But yes, those as well.

I am not going to sit here and list every thing down.

In theory yes, and I'm generally very opposed to artificial limitations of any sort. However I can see why Supcom changed it - missile towers and fighter planes were too powerful and too multi-purpose. You even saw the same problem in FA v3599 with the Restorer.

There might well be a more elegant solution to this though - make the HP of tanks at least an order of magnitude higher than the HP of planes, and scale the damage of AA and AT weapons accordingly. Vanilla Supcom did something like this but it was changed for FA and I can't remember why.

That's why I said an aircraft's defense is its speed, because even a flock of birds can take down jumbo jets.

We've had at least three threads on this subject. They each went to like 20 pages. Every single thing said in this thread so far has been beaten to death many, many times. Please, no more!

I will repeat one point from those threads. To those advocating ammo limitations or airbases they have to return to after each strike, that idea has a really, really nasty side effect. If you nerf aircraft in that particular way you would need to buff their burst damage capacity to keep them viable in comparison to ground units. By doing that you turn them into something very much like the initial implementation of the Mercy. Does anyone really want those horrible things back?

I object. Having AA in a supposedly strong unit is not fun because you can't kill all the AA without killing the commander. There means that aslong as the commander is alive there is atleast 1 AA unit capable of hitting fast moving airplanes including scout planes.
Also why the focus on stopping just 1 bomber? Maybe it won't matter unless it can stop 4.
What if AA can be popped in a few seconds and able to destroy the bomber anyway?

When a unit only has a small amount of health it restricts balancing options. Unless you don't mind your guns doing 1.39 damage a shot.

Anyway I think it was a good change to restrict what a unit could shoot at. This allows you to keep unit health and damages in the same scale, which helps people compare. Can you imagine if an asf swarm could shoot ground? Oh that's right, hawks.

Go play some games where planes have limited payload. It doesn't have to be like that.
Maybe planes won't be able to make cost in 1 run in most situations and then you can even deploy counters before they make cost.

Considering that there is only 1 faction, why should aircraft they be balanced against land units?

If you can also build land units, why should aircraft be balanced against them?

Aircraft are support units, nor front line MBTs.