Air Superiority

So make long-range SAM's do AoE!?
This is essentially how they work in real-life anyway since it's next to impossible to hit an fast-moving aircraft dead on.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous-rod_warhead

Who says that long-range SAMs must be the appropriate weapon/end-game weapon?

It doesn't really matter if it's a SAM or a big ol' flak gun. I think long-range will make it too effective versus individual aircraft, so if Uber had its heart set on using a SAM then it'd have to be short-range.

Air fuel and decent AA would fix this.

I think zero k did a nice job at this. Bombers there die quite easily and sending them into AA is generally a bad thing to do unless the target is a very high value (like commanders) one.

They should be more like glass cannons not the beefy **** like in SC2 where they easily flew through your 100 AA turrets like its nothing. Any AA and planes should either die or take heavy damage. Low hp, high alpha and high speed.

Planes should take advantage of their speed to cover the entire map and evade AA or to provide quick support when needed. AA should make cost easily but they cant cover the entire map. This happens in zero k and thats good.

please dont copy past your posts from 3 pages ago just because you feel like it.

No. SAMs are not AoE in real life. They're intended to kill a single target, not multiple at once.

Flak guns are AoE because they have no targeting ability. The warheads are primed to explode at a particular altitude and send giant sized shrapnel in all directions to damage as much as possible. If you fill the sky with enough flak fire you're bound to kill something without even needing to see your target.

I wouldn't want to be flying in tight formation (i.e. the blobs endemic to SC) with another aircraft hit by a warhead of that nature.
I reckon there's a good chance I'll cop a at least a bit of damage.

Now I'm not talking a wide area of effect.
Just a modest one as a simple game mechanic to reduce 'overkill' and wasted missiles.

By virtue of the fact that it forces you to build more factories it forces you to invest more resources into building factories prior to being able to get the units. It forces an evaluation of how to best invest resources. And, you can also make it take longer to build an air factory than a land factory.

If the complaint is that there should be less of a single type of unit being built, increasing the build time of that unit will reduce the number of those units being built. The point of limiting engineer spam is that it reduces the ability to easily get around the longer build times.

I have never had a problem with air spam although I do think it is reasonable that, if want a game more focused on ground combat with air as a supporting role, that's cool, and if so ground units should be quicker to build than air so you can always get more of them.

It seems to me though that by having anti air with strong area of effect would just encourage more air spam because of the sheer numbers required to survive long enough past the AA to have a group of aircraft do any substantial damage to anything.

I don't think you understand; with AoE, if one unit dies, many units will die. You can't exactly just throw more planes at it, and hope they get past.

That's exactly the kind of thing we're trying to avoid, the point is not to overcome every issue by building more planes. Planes are powerful tools yes, but they aren't invincible either.

Think of it this way, if there was a heavily fortified firebase in the middle of the map, do you just keep rolling tanks into the deathtrap, or do you scout the FB, look at it and decide a possible alternate route that won't sacrifice countless tanks? Maybe you'd use Air to take out a few of the most dangerous turrets or notice he didn't build any long range turrets and build some of your own to take it down?

There's more than one way to win a War.

Mike

You're assuming a uniform distribution of damage over the area.

Edit: In addition I'd like to see AA missiles have proximity fuses to avoid hordes of missiles spiralling about trying to make a dead-on hit.

So, if that's the case, and there is no way to build enough planes to get past the AA, then air becomes pointless.

No, air wouldn't become pointless.

It would still have a purpose and use where there wasn't AA.

Maybe it's a simple misunderstanding and the graphic is unnecessary?

It's all about balance and what you choose to prioritise.

Do you tilt it in favour of ground-based AA such that you can not expect a roughly equally investment in bombers to penetrate base defences without employing SEAD tactics such as using Standoff Weaponry (e.g. artillery or missiles) to take out Radar & AA?

Or do make a defender primarily rely on interceptor aircraft to counter concerted bombing campaigns?

The latter is largely the way SC behaved in my experience, by the time you took down Strat. Bombers with your SAMs it was usually too late, they had already released their payload so far out it'd just keep gliding on to the target and wreak havoc.
You need to have plenty of ASF's on hand, identify incoming bombing runs early, and intercept them well outside your base.

Edit:
My current thinking runs to making AA buildings of a higher potency (and expense) than in the past. Such that getting some up is a great boon but loosing it (or the radar on which it depends) is commensurately devastating.

Forward scouting with air units would still be important esp. to reveal units concealed via airborne jammers.

Mobile AA vehicles should be a great deal less effective than their building counterparts, and pretty much remain as they have been in the past, in that aircraft largely have the upper-hand.
On notable exception might be a high-end mobile AA that can only fire after remaining stationary for a short-period (I'd not want to add the micro of having to explicitly 'deploy' anything).

Let me clarify my statement. Air would become pointless in lategame once AA saturates an opponents' base.

If you make AA able to kill lots of planes, then an opponent will need to build a lot more planes to get through to do any damage. If you make AA so powerful so that no matter how many planes you have you can never get through to do damage, as your statement seemed to imply, then I contend that makes air useless.

The exception of air being useful where there isn't AA, I don't think is much of a consolation. Because if AA is so effective, it will get put almost everywhere.

I still think you're missing the point.
I could run the same kind of (flawed) argument to say AA is 'pointless'.

Yes, but isn't the point of this discussion trying to find ways of keeping Air Swarms OUT of your base so they can't go for the easy kill?

Mike