Air Superiority

If you just let them sit their pumping out more aircraft diddling your thumbs then you deserve to lose. Perhaps if they're concentrating on air, you could land assault?

Just remember that the attacker gets to choose where to hit you, so you have to build far more air defenses than merely enough to match his aircraft because they're going to be spread out all over the place.

I agree with this, I think long-range SAM sites will be helpful for stopping aircraft before they get close to your base and successfully kamikaze your important targets, rather than having to build flack under all possible routes of attack. We didn't really have long-enough range anti-air in TA and SupCom.

I agree that this is the ideal situation, but in Total Annihilation you could actually win with swarms of hawks and bombers, and SupCom with T3 Restorers, and it was far too easy and/or uninteresting to do so. That's why this thread is going on forever. We haven't really seen adequately balanced air before. In Starcraft, they don't even have really strong aircraft that can attack both air and ground, so I think it's a hard problem to solve.

I think AA has to be significantly more powerful than aircraft. By this I mean that for cost AA should win at a 2x-3x disadvantage. I don't say AA has to be "OP vs air" because that's a bad way of putting it, it implies imbalance.

My reasoning is that AA cannot or can barely move when compared to aircraft. If you have three important areas that can be hit by air then it will take three lots of AA to defend them all against one force of air. This highlights something which is often backwards, fighters tend to deal better damage than ground based AA. This is backwards because fighters are fast.

Powerful AA does not just make people spam more aircraft to defeat it. If someone spends 3x cost in aircraft against your AA then just kill them with whatever you made with the other 2/3 of your resources that you didn't spend on AA.

OK, I've skipped the last couple of pages of this to throw out this idea: what if AA was perfectly effective, but very short ranged and physically large? Basically, 1 AA for one building. So it gets exceeding expensive in space and cost to cover your whole base.

EDIT: alternately, AA could be long ranged but only effective over an arc (no 360 degree turret). The idea is that it should be difficult/expensive to fill all the gaps in coverage.

Making AA even weaker? Bad idea. Trouble is that air is to strong, not that it is too weak. Somehow the balling problem needs to be solved which is the main problem. In every game where aircraft lacks collision, aircraft tends to ball which causes all AA only to target the first plane of the ball, making AA completly useless since only 1-2 planes will be targeted at once, no matter how much AA you have build and how many planes are attacking. You can't do that with ground units either since you have ground defenses with splash, ground units have collsion and you can't stack them therefor so you actually need to use a real tactic when using ground units.

It may not be possible to break through AA just by jamming the AA with a large number of units, that problem needs to be solved first.

Well, there is nothing wrong with aircraft which is designed to take down AA (just like there are units which are designed to to take down point defenses, option would be a high HP, low damage bomber, just strong enough to take down a single AA, but no larger buildings), but normal aircraft (especially pure bombers!!) should never be able to break through AA just like normal ground units have no chance at breaking through solid line of point defense or T2 artillerie.

If you can take just 20 bombers and you are still able to devaste a base with 50+ AA, then something went just horrible wrong.

Just an idea, could air be made harder to use in a 'realistic' way?
IRL the default position for aircraft is on the ground at their home airfield. They participate in sorties of limited duration and then return to their initial base.

NOTE: I am not simply proposing fuel limits. How about you can possess a maximum number of aircraft depending upon the number of hangers or the general capacity of your airfields, which obviously consume floorspace which will need defending.

The rate at which you can scramble depends on how many runways you have built, as will the rate at which your aircraft can return to base after the sortie. If you have executed a particularly long sortie and you only have 2 runway to land your aircraft at it's conclusion, some planes might run out of fuel while circling in a holding pattern.

Aircraft lost during sorties can be rebuilt by the factories, but you could be prevented from overcommitting and building more aircraft than your ground based infrastructure could support.

This would mean 'proper' bombing raids, requiring planning and organisation, and of course you would always need fighters ready to scramble whenever long range radar detected a raid.

Not sure if any other games have ever tried this but IMO it sounds pretty tempting

Maybe this has been mentioned, but here's an idea:

Let's say refueling is still in (I know, a whole other bag of worms, but stay with me). I never had a problem with refueling in SupCom, I thought it was a neat mechanic. So, if refueling is still in, why not give ASF's a very small amount of fuel? That would make huge swarms patrolling very inefficiency, as they'd have to constantly land, and it would also open up the possibility for aircraft carriers, which never made a lot of sense in SupCom anyway. Give ASF's a only a small amount of fuel but make them very fast and efficient at their job, and you've got a short range burst damage air superiority fighter designed for fighting in the air, that's it. Not swarming in patrols, not long distance reconnaissance, just made for short bursts of air fighting. Allow them to take off fast, move quickly, and hit their targets, but give them a small amount of fuel so that they're really only there to sit on the sidelines and be used when needed.

Still doesn't fix the problem of people spamming seven million of them, and frankly that's a problem that's never going to be solved, like people spamming seven million tanks. We just need other ways of AA to be more effective I think

The problem with spamming one unit is that it tends to not be cost effective if your opponent is doing something to counter it. You can spam tanks all you want, but what if your opponent has a ton of mobile missile launchers taking them out before you can get to their army?

If you start spamming ASF's then your opponent might start investing in a strong ground force with mobile AA, which you won't be able to counter since you've put so many resources into pumping out ASF's.

The biggest problem with the refueling system in SupCom 1 is that relative to the size of maps and the duration of a game, planes had a very large amount of fuel. This made that system behave, some of the time, as if there was no fuel limitation, especially on smallish, even to medium-small maps.

If a fuel system is implemented it would need to be a quite restrictive fuel limitation that affects the way you deploy your aircraft, and require the player to strategize how they want to use their aircraft, and develop a plan to provide logistics which supports their strategy. Want to keep up heavy sustained bombing operations over an enemy base? You are going to need multiple airfields or carriers in range of that target.


To address ooshr32's proposed system:

This is a valid structure, and makes for an interesting dynamic. However, I will propose a different dynamic which would play differently. I draw a distinction between two kinds of anti-air, which would ideally be available both as static AA and mobile AA.

Flak: Available in mobile and stationary form. Low damage, high rate of fire, splash damage. Cheap, but short range.

SAM: Available mobile and stationary. Extreme range and damage, low rate of fire. Expensive, fragile. Stealth variant available for hiding a SAM site.

--

Static AA: Immobile. Extremely durable. Various weapons available.

Mobile AA: Cheaper lump sum, but less effective than static AA. Remains very effective at its job, however.

Interceptors: small, cheap, very short operational range. Uses close range weapons, no ammunition limit. Powerful and efficient.

ASF: expensive, fast, long operational range. Multiple weapons, but relies on long range AA missiles, limited quantity. Strong, but very poor for cost against interceptors.

Don't know if anyone has read my idea, but it prevents anyone spamming air...

As long as there's good mobile AA, ASFs aren't much of a problem. It's that you can spam x bombers/gunships at a high value target and guarantee it'll get destroyed.

Ah yes, sorry, I was thinking about the other thread =P

Well if a player's economy gets to the point that they can do that then the game should be over I supose, clumps of ground attack aircraft need to be treated as a game ender for your reason there, and cost as such

This is pretty much how it was done in the original C&C worked. You build the pad and got a free orca (gunship). You could of course build extra orca's after that but were limited by the reload time.

I wouldn't be against a similar idea.

Well that's the problem: They're a game ender that can't be countered. Aircraft ignore terrain, can clump large numbers into a small space and are immune to most weapons. I could spend twice as much resources in ground units and still not be as effective. Even nukes can be stopped with anti nukes, and KEWs can be stopped with (enough) nukes. It would be the ONLY guaranteed game ending option, so it would be used every game. Having only one strategy isn't much fun.

EDIT: sorry for all the separate responses.

I totally forgot about that system! It meant that planes could still be powerful, but the airfields were so huge that it was difficult to field too many at once, and it prevented too much spamming. Except the scrin in tiberium wars ¬¬

That could be a way of balancing it, but it would necessitate fuel running out being the death of the aircraft, which really isn't something that we'd think of seeing in a TA-esque game

Actually, if you spent HALF as much res on AA ground troops, and positioned them appropriately, you should be able to easily counter it, as with every other game ender, you just have to see it coming to be able to do something about it

That's the main problem with air in supcom, you can easily hide the face that you're creating 20 strategic bombers, and bring them out of nowhere for a 1-shot on the commander. If the player sees them coming, as few defenses and shields easily counters it

Not necessarily. Like in C&C, it was based on ammo, not fuel.

How are you supposed to see it coming when they can come from any direction? Spherical planets, remember? Even if you know they're SOMEWHERE, you can't predict where they'll come from. Oh, and aircraft are FASTER than ground units. No matter how you look at it, the defensive situation when going against aircraft is completely different than any other option.

Affixing aircraft to their airfields or carriers is the best way to go. You are limited in how many aircraft you can have operational at one time based on your logistical capacity.

If you only have one carrier with a capacity of 60 planes, then even if you have more aircraft in reserve, you are not going to be able to use them until that carrier suffers some casualties. You can build them, sure, but you can't get them flying over the enemy's base dropping bombs unless you get another carrier, or make some space on the one you have.

So yes, aircraft can come from any direction. But they can't just freely fly anywhere on the planet. As long as you keep the region around your borders clear of carriers and airfields, or planes strapped to the back of trucks or whatnot, then you won't have any planes bombing the center of your territory.

This implies that the range of aircraft is limited, realy limited! In SupCom length units to less then 10km. But i would be fine with that.

Btw.: Suggesting mobile AA vs gunships? Funny, but gunships win in this fight if you do the micro right.