Air, Orbital and Nukes Vs. Land, Naval and Big Guns - What is the core of PA?

I do not want the game to act as if it's completed, this thread is about debating what air's role is, and where the dominant conflict should occur. We talk about the game as it develops, in order to guide it.
The combat we like to see was in the SupCom trailer and didn't carry across into the final game, in which air was the key decider/assassination method. We need to talk about air's fundamental role before Uber make and implement a bunch of interdependent units, not after.

If the balance problem is only about cost of units those are easily tweaked during the final phases of testing. Or even in patches later. So these shouldn't cause any worries at this point.

If there are problems in the different units combat functions and the concept of combat itself then they need to be thought earlier. Both TA and SupCom attempted to create combat with realistic feel and combined warfare which was one thing very different to other RTS games that mostly were paper-rock-scissor type. But neither of them hit the goal completely. One reason of course is that making a game in that way is difficult.

Anyway if it just about balancing costs don't worry yet. But is there some other problems in the concept itself?

As true as that might be, that's not the direction the dev team is taking. They don't have a professional RTS architect, so the best you will see is a pile of units held loosely together by numerical magnitudes and hard counter designations. That is how Supcom was made, and that is what you see unfolding in development.

Trawling the community for free design ideas seems great, but you'll get exactly what you paid for. All the ideas in the world are useless without an autis--- uh... hardcore math guy to map it out.

The problem lies in commander assassination being the core gametype.

Take Rise of Nations as the example - in that game unfortunately, stealth bombers were CLEARLY OP.

However that didn't matter. You only achieved victory if you captured another nations capital and held it for a few minutes, or if you captured the last of their cities. SO you could air spam all day, but ultimately you had to move an infantry unit next to their city, capture it, and then maintain domination.

Eh. Kinda. I mean, this is the sort of core game issue you can figure out in 5 minutes:

• Bombers deal rapid, high alpha damage against any target.
• Commanders are a single game ending target.
• Gee, maybe I should bomb the Commander?

The resultant gameplay should not be a surprise to anyone.

Are there ways to fix it? Sure, there are plenty of ways to make sure bombers aren't a single purpose unit. Does the answer involve killing all bombers before they can drop their bombs? Hahaha, of course not. It would be blatantly stupid to destroy a unit's primary strengths just because it has a rather obvious consequence. Is that the answer we will have? Uhh. Hmm. Huh. Yeah, probably.

Basically from what ican gather in this thread is you want slight balancing favoring the ground war game. I agree with you. I wish this thread was in the general forum though so it can get more eyeballs to look through it. However, there is so many topicsthat you want to cover in this thread that it might be hard to have clear final suggestions to the devs pointed out. I know you find a lot of the game lacking and you are voicing your opinion, but there is so many individual ideas here that are currently threads in the general forum

Below is an air thread regarding air balance rework.
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/fighters-anti-air-design.54460/

Of course, and why not? The resources are on the ground. The environment is on the ground. Gigabytes of memory and special effects are used to create entirely unique and custom grounds for players to fight on. So why would you throw away all that ground work by making space the most powerful theatre? Or render it irrelevant by giving victory to the air power? It doesn't make sense.

I think burrito is right, first off, even if it's not the right time, even if the game's not complete, you won't get anything to change by keeping your mouth shut.

I wanted to have huge megabots (or experimentals, or call them whatever you want) in game, but each time someone asked for it, someone crushed the idea for whatever reason. i insisted over and over and finally it turned out that a lot of people actually wanted them, so we finally had the megabot experiment topic, that's already something.

air is way faster than all the rest if in addition to that you make it cheap, sturdy and powerful, the rest has necessarily no chance.

and frankly i hate when the solution to a problem is to do the same thing. you opponent attacks you with air ? well the only answer is to make air yourself. so that's what i do, and then i have a whirlpool of flying toasters circling forever over my base, and i hate that.

there is probably a lot of balancing to be done with air, i think making it very fragile is a good option. as someone else said somewhere, aircrafts are a heavy investment for modern armies, maybe air could be T2 only with expensive units like heavy bombers, air/orbital fighters. stuff with a precise role you don't make millions of, and stuff you don't want to send on suicide runs. you shouldn't be able to snipe a commander with bombers because decent anti air would scrap everything long before you reach the commander.

this way air could have a support role rather than being a game plan on its own. you would almost never attain an unbeatable air superiority because the cost would be insane, and in the end it will leave more room for the ground and naval combat.

Id rather not have assault 'experimantsals' or by any name, as I feel it ruins the point of having smaller units and planet side world wars.

Other more support units of any size like carriers would be cool.

"It is powerful, so the only solution is to never let it happen" is a prime example of awful RTS design. Don't screw with bombers just because they happen to be good against one particular unit. Sniping units should be allowed to snipe. Oherwise they wouldn't be sniping units.

Commander problems require commander solutions. Issues with Comm sniping have already been solved in many ways. Perhaps one answer might even make it into PA.

Agreed in principle... but there is at least one role for giant robots to play. I'm of course referring to the Krogoth-mini-asteroid-nuke-assault-bot. It's like a walking base busting nuke with guns.

Ehh.....I mean, why wouldn't I use it all the time?

Id much rather have a rocket with built in tanks to fire at enemy planets to try an brake them.

Like a missile that contains 20Levellers, but can be shot down by fighters and umbrellas (And so is very hard to use on the same planet) would be great at attacking a moon (Where they have from orbit to ground to blow it up).

Good way to achieve a combat support role would be to make air inefficient against buildings and make fixed AA installations very powerful. Mobile AA could be much more inefficient. With those features the primary role of the aircraft would become battlefield combat support.

Why can't Krogoths be used all the time? Their firepower is poor, their cost is extreme, and they blow EACH OTHER up most of the time. But the key difference between TA and PA is that one of them lets you drop things directly into an enemy base from orbit, while the other needs everything to walk across a map.

The concept is not very different from a KEW with guns. The token weapons look cool, but the real function is the walking nuke. Nukes do not have synergy with friendly armies, and you can not DEFEND with a nuke. Because it is not a real nuke, you can't invalidate it with a nuke defense (though you can definitely interact with everything at your disposal).

The death blast is a feature that was missing from every Supcom experimental save for one. It turns out that was the only feature it needed to be a success, even against the most heavy fortresses.

Well, technically they all had one, though they were difficult to use compared to the Czar, and the Ythotha had a special additional posthumous weapon.

Anyway, I think it's better to go closer to TA on the way air and air defense works. Missile towers and flak were devastating against enemy air units, and the high missile flight speed from all anti-air made it very possible to create an effective air defense without covering your entire base. Mobile air defense was essential in protecting your ground armies from gunships, as equal metal in gunships could destroy a ground army or undefended base with no losses in seconds. An overwhelming air advantage could easily take out a thin spread of ground-based air defense, but mid to late game bases were absolutely no-fly zones for enemy air.

It's key to note the relative HP/damage of units was pretty different. Mex and missile tower HP and cost was very low. A bomber could take out either in a single pass, or 2 if unlucky. Basic units would lose 1/3 to 1/2 of their HP from a bomber pass. In supcom, mex and defense HP raised, and defense cost raised significantly, and units dropped to 1-shot level, even a whole clump from a single bombing run.

I've brought it up before in a different thread, but TA's flight mechanics were quite different from other games in the 'series.' Starting in supcom, turn rates were drastically decreased for everything air, changing tight turns to long arcs, exposing things to a lot of fire when turning. I believe this was behind the decrease in ground-based missile flight time, to make it easy for things to get a pass off before blowing up.

To get to the point, I think it's healthy for the game to have extremely cheap and fairly weak ground-based air defense, essentially building a fighter on the ground. This prevents the situation that one can see in supcom 2 where a tiny air advantage at the start of the game can snowball into a huge one. Then, at the upper end, there should be very strong and expensive ground-based air defense. I don't think it's right to take away the ability to have air be a game-ender at all, but it should require preparation like the other methods - scouting, a ground assault or missile strike that focuses on taking out a portion of air defenses. In addition, I think gunships, by their nature, should be superior raiders and destroyers of unprotected things compared to ground, but they should be fragile against mobile air defense of all sorts.

Perhaps. But the CZAR highlighted the value of the death blast in a very clear and obvious way. Other mega bots didn't get close enough for it to do anything, and the Ythotha blast was cute but hardly role-defining.

Unfortunately, it turns out that TA used a roughly 2.5x damage multiplier across all anti air units. The ONLY exception to the rule (flak) could not attack ground.

All the other cute things that helped define anti air roles pale in comparison to getting twice the bang for your buck.

I think you're making a bigger deal over that point than is necessary bobucles. Yes, 'soft' ground or naval AA weapons did more damage to planes... but so did air-to-air weapons.

The only thing that could 'reliably' hit aircraft that didn't have a 2.5x damage multiplier that probably wouldn't auto-kill an aircraft was the LLT. You could just have all TA aircraft with 2.5x less health and you'd essentially still be playing the same game.

The resulting game would have LLTs be a little overpowered against gunships... and that's about it. Don't make a mountain out of a molehill.

I brought up the damage multiplier thing originally, heh.

Building on Nanolathe's comments, perhaps the thing to do with ground defenses you don't want hitting air is mess with their shot velocity, rate of fire, and perhaps tracking amounts. I feel there has to be a sweet spot in there where turrets can still hit bots and such but are poor against air unless it's very close.

That's the thing. You can't just "welp, change the numbers 2.5x and it's fixed". It's a MAJOR change. Everything would have to be checked over again.

It's nice that the AA weapons were given a nice and clean damage modifier to play with. The problem is making sure all the non AA weapons don't **** it up this time.

As I've said, it's not that major. Most planes died in one shot to ground-based non-AA weaponry anyway. Do feel free to modify the base game to remove the damage multiplier and just blanket reduce aircraft HP across the board to test it of course... but I'm relatively sure you'd hardly notice the difference in 99 out of 100 cases since such 'non-AA' weapons' chance of reliably finding their target is slim to none.

The LLT against gunships is the only exception I can think of... and even then the LLT missed any shot that wasn't at the gunship's slowest speed and, relatively speaking was just as fragile, if not more so than the gunship that would be targeting it. The LLT doesn't last long under any form of concerted effort to destroy it and I doubt that the kill count for an LLT or even a group of them, would increase dramatically against a gunship swarm

(By the way, it would still take 6.1 hits from an LLT to kill a Brawler even at 2.5x less health)

@Xagar, pretty much. At least, that's how I'd do it.

Uh. An RTS can see HUGE meta shifts from a 10% tweak. This is a 250% blanket buff for every single "non-AA unit vs. air" scenario in the game. It's kind of a "complete redesign of everything from the ground up" sort of deal.

A lot of things shot air. A lot of things HIT air. Taking 2.5x less hits matters.

Keep in mind that when talking about TA air balance, bombers simply did not work. They were awful to use and did not scale in any proper way. The typical air raid was from fighter craft attacking down(which was removed in PA for some obscure insane reason), or with loaded gunships doing their thing.