Air Gunships are missing

Well, I can't think of any possible role that a fast, terrain avoiding high endurance stream of DPS could hold over a fragile, front loaded burst damage bomber.

The weakness of bombers is multiple passes are required or stupendous amounts of bombers.

My favorite example of a good gunship is the Brawler from TA. It was quite fast, quite powerful, had quite a bit of HP but was not massively unbalanced. Mostly, because it fired like a Peewee (or like bots do now) and so it had quite a bit of spread. It also had the really cool side-to-side movement.

Of course, i am not advocating copy/pasting.

In general though, i see the gunship as a device to keep enemy armies in check. In Supcom i played a couple of games with a friend, and while he kinda turtled, i used my (T2) gunships to weaken the enemy armies, destroy the most hazardous units (like long-range arty) etc. Of course this only worked until the AI would build shield units, but in general the role of the Gunship is to have a more focused fire.

I would defend the role of the bomber as a pincer, and the role of a gunship as a lawn mower. I used my bombers in PA to deny the enemy (a player in this case) their orbital launcher and so prevent their space race. Most didn't survive the aftermath of the attack, but i accomplished my goal. I would use gunships to attack armies, weaken them before they get too close.

was that sarcasm ?
because a "terrain avoiding high endurance stream of DPS" sounds like a horrible idea

The Brawler wasn't op? It was just about the best unit in TA.

Similar in Supcom where gunships were very powerful. And thats the issue with them. They're horrible to balance.

Edit: I'm pretty sure he was sarcastic.

remember that a gunship is something that usually nicely hovers in front of all the AA turrets. With the current use of missile AA, bombers can pass quite a few before the first missile hit and so can penetrate the enemy base deep and attack before they go down. A gunship would probably take the hit before it can fire.

Be careful not to confuse "gunships are horrible to balance" with "supcom had horrible balance". The latter doesn't make the former true, but it does mean that you can't count on it ever working right if it was included.

TA brawlers were much closer to okay than you think. They could have used nerfs for certain, but it doesn't take much to push a unit from absurdly OP to utterly worthless.

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Starcraft had one of the most successful gunship-like units in the form of the Mutalisk. It was fast, leathal, decent against air, but not very capable in a direct fight. The glaive attack created unusual behaviors that helped with massing them, but they could always be answered in some way.

One way to balance gunship could be to have a machine gun cooldown, kinda like the UEF tech2 bots ? Or they use energy to shoot so you can't just swarm them unless you have a planet of t2 pgen.

Personally I like gunship, I think they have their place just like all the other classics (tanks, bots, bombers,etc) they just have to balance them properly.

Starcraft also has an armour system that makes it very easy to determine against what an unit is good and against what not. I would argue that you can't extrapolate from Starcraft to PA.

Gunships in supcom were overpowered because it was fast, ignored terrain, counts as Air(without the forward-motion), has high STREAM damage, and high health.
these are all upsides, it had no downside. (the high-health is what killed it IMHO)
, Yet, if you then proceed to remove it's high-health, it becomes next to useless.

This is not Starcraft.

i would prefer to not see gunships, they're to micro-able.
Bombers serve the air>ground role just fine.
Ion-Sats serve a similar purpose.

Yea and i want to re-iterate: i am not suggesting copy/pasting. However, gunships aren't all bad. Indeed, just because SupCom was wacky, doesn't mean that it's bad by definition.

I agree on Mutalisks: they're great air units but they're not OP, and not a certain victory. Yes, as someone else said, the armor system balances it, but it doesn't mean that PA can't have it's own mechanism to balance it out.



Just the way it moves could be enough to balance it. As i said before, bombers can get deep into an enemy base before AA missiles hit them.

Also: gunships ARE micro-able, yes. However, just about every unit in this game is Micro-able. It's also time you're not paying attention to everything else, and although the army system does somewhat offset that, dedicating players to controlling armies and players to controlling the economy is IMO exactly what the army system is FOR.

So all in all, i think the gunship is definitely worth a shot (pun intended) and if it turns out that it's just horrible for balance, rip it out. It's beta, call it a Work in Progress and it's justified.

Too much micro-potential, air based glass cannon with perfect movement... no thanks

I've always thought gunships should be something that plays more of a defensive than offensive role, in that mid-late game they should be completely incapable of attacking any major bases or armies (assuming the player isn't so stupid as to have no AA).

The role I imagine them fulfilling that PA currently lacks is as a rapid response unit to raiding in the early game. At the moment, if some of your mex's far from your base are attacked and you haven't put up any turrets, they're dead by the time you reach them with your own bots. The gunship would be able to respond to this threat, preventing harassment by just a few bots, but as soon as the enemy had a single fighter out, they'd be completely vulnerable.

In this way they fill a niche (T1 bombers should NOT be capable of reliably hitting moving bots) but do not become overpowered in large groups as even small groups of T1 fighters can deal with them quickly.

Of course, whether such an easy response to early raids is desirable is another conversation, and it's possible that it would reduce some of the skill in the early game.

Tl;dr Gunships should be early game only, capable of shredding bots/small tank groups but completely defenceless against fighters. No T2 gunships.

So raiding units?

I didn't say they should be glass cannons with perfect movement. I don't see why they need a ridiculously high DPS or why they need to be super-fast. I get the feeling you keep seeing Supcom gunships whenever we say gunships, but please kill that image.

For as long as the gunship is faster than a tank, but slower than a fighter, it's quite fine by me. The exact speed would be something i expect Uber to figure out. give it good DPS, but not too ridiculous. Give it enough HP to take 2 or 3 missile hits (i think that's slightly more or equal to a bomber). Give it a smaller turn circle yet give it more inertia. Give it the side-to-side movement of the brawler, yet put it into hover mode before it can fire.

Hah, thanks for condensing my dissertation into 3 words.
Essentially yes, but gunships were advertised as raiding units in supcom and look where that left us. The only really important part of my post was no T2 gunships. At all. Ever. In fact, the T1 Cybran gunships in supcom fulfilled their role pretty well, if being a bit too strong.

I'm o.k. with the idea of a fast-response defensive gunship. in fact, it sounds quite apealing.

i have a friend who jokes at Supcom, calling it (among other things) "a raiding gunship"

Actually i think that if we're gonna have Gunships, it'll be a T2 unit (because, specialization).


Still, i think that the concept of a Gunship is more than broad enough to figure out a package that:
-works
-is fun to play
-doesn't wreck everything else.

Even if the gunship is T2, sorry, "adv. air", there's no reason why it should be super-powerful, just because it's Advanced. It could be made cheaper than other T2 units, yet weaker than other T2 units -in such a way that it's balanced- and have a unit that fits a unique role (sustained Air->ground fire), is useful (so not a glass cannon, although Air almost by definition is) yet does not invalidate the Bomber. As i said before (several times, sorry if i'm boring), the Bomber's speed, movement type and attack type means it can get MUCH further into an enemy base because the AA missiles take some time to catch up. If we make a Gunship so that it needs to grind to a halt(more or less) before it opens fire, it'll take the first hit already and so has a MUCH lesser base-penetration capacity.

There are probably a million more and different aspects to a unit. Quite frankly, DPS and Health are probably the worst aspects to balance a Gunship on. It's far more important to get the feeling of a Gunship right, so it behaves more like a gunship and less like a hovering bomber. That difference in behavior could already be the key role difference we're looking for: the rest is just filling in a couple of numbers.

T2 gunships roaming around.... "less powerfull then normal T2, but also cheaper..." this idea is so incredibly abuseable, i dont even want to think about it.

i'm really confused on how that would work, exactly. stopping to fire just makes no sense, and is prone to buggyness (units running away?) that would defeat it's entire purpose

also why would taking a hit first, affect its "base-penetration"?, as an air unit, it doesn't really care (in blobs), unless you have an overkill of AA turrets.

as for "balancing", filling in the correct numbers is So..Much.. Harder then it sounds.


a T1 defensive gunships, as mentioned earlier, sounds like a much better idea

Rather than using armor, TA created intuitive counters through the way units moved, the way they shot, and the explosions/wreckage they left behind. It should prove more than sufficient for this game's needs. Altering with a unit's most powerful and important attributes (health, cost, raw damage) is a great way to make things not work the way they should.

Sure it does. Put the guns on the front. Now the craft has to stop moving full speed, in order to engage the target. A hovering unit is suddenly a very easy shot for even the most awkward of tanks, as this short video explains.

I dunno, the opposite of copy/pasting is reinventing the wheel; a load of wasted effort. Copy pasting something that works well between spiritual sequels and predecessors is A-OK in my book.