Air Superiority

I don't know about the idea of enforcing a certain airbase to aircraft ratio, but automatically scrambling fighters to engage incoming aircraft would be pretty cool, as long as they would avoid being kited.

You could have an audible alert that says "incoming fighters", and the player would just have to hit a global hotkey to scramble fighters automatically.

Build fighters?

T3 siege assault bots can come from any direction too, you just have to see where they're likely to come from via radar/scouting and adjust accordingly. It takes a lot less time to move AA to the other side of your base than it does to fly around out of defense range

Only problem with that is that the bombers would be used in kamikaze and then there's another 60 waiting to immediately fly out =P

Ever considered this:

Create an AA type that is good against groups, but poor against individual aircraft. Flak is obvious for this.

Technically from a coding perspective this can be achieved by a low base damage, but the AoE having a large damage multiplier so that it did more damage to other things then the intended target.

For a extravagant example, you got aircraft that has 1000 HP, and you got a flak cannon that does 100 damage. 1v1 it would take 10 shots for the flak to kill the aircraft.

However, you bring in 5 aircraft with 1000 HP each against that flak that does 100 damage, but here is the thing. The AoE damage modifier on that flak is 2x. So while it would take 10 shots to kill a single of those aircraft, it would take 5 shots to kill the 4 other aircraft with the one that the flak is targeting.

Thus in this example, before you bring in a full wing of bombers, you should send in individual tactical bombers to take out the flak.

Thus AA would need to be mixed between AoE strong and Single Target.

Yo you're saying there should be a flack projectile that does more damage the more targets it hits at once? Because that's what it sounded like =P

The flak cannon fires a shot, hits its target aircraft for 100 damage, the AoE damage modifier (in other words the splash damage) is 2x, so the surrounding 4 aircraft each take 200 damage.

Since each aircraft has 1000 HP, the primary target aircraft would take 10 100 damage hits to kill, but the surrounding 4 aircraft would take 5 200 damage splash hits to kill.

Yeah math wise damage done is exponential by the number of targets hit. But be it 5 aircraft or 2 aircraft it follows under the same conditions. Primary target takes less damage then the other targets in the AoE.

Why not just do the same damage to all of them but still less than a direct fire shell? That way it'll still do more damage in the long run while still being less effective against a single target which I think is what you were going for, without adding extra complicaetabilityness that's hard to convey to players =P

You just said what I was trying to describe.

Flak shell is fired, flak shell goes pop, the target the shell was fired at takes less damage then the surrounding units. Who take bonus damage for being in the splash as the flak is balanced to be good against groups not individuals.

As far as the player will be able to tell with the balls in their heads called eyes, lots of planes die, but a few will survive to return to base. Through experimentation (and/or tooltips/tutorial videos) they will learn that against flak use individual high power bombers, not a bunch of bombers.

Tankhunter, people aren't agreeing with you, they're trying to tell you that your method is overly complicated and difficult to explain to players.

Flak shell is fired, it explodes at the appropriate time and does X damage to all units it it's AoE radius.

Boom done Fun!

Mike

Right. And also, flak rounds aren't intended to be fired at specific targets. They use an altimeter fuse that detonates the round once it reaches a set altitude. You fire the round in the general direction of a group of planes and you fire them off as fast as you possibly can and let the fist sized shrapnel take care of the rest.

Fuel in SupCom didn't really accomplish much of anything. Most of the time I simply ignored it. Typically my planes died long before they ran out of fuel. I'm worried if fuel was included that it would involve too much micro.

You see them coming exactly the same way you see the nuke launcher coming, or the heavy artillery battery, or the experimental, or the wave of amphibious siege bots or the TML snipe or any other method of ending the game - you actually bother to scout the enemy! If you sit in your base playing simcity until they drop <insert game ender here> on your head you deserve to lose.

If you see they've gone for heavy air you build AA near critical structures, keep your commander near your heavy AA, and take advantage of their weak land/navy (they've spent all their resources on air, right? So you should be stronger than them everywhere else). Or you send what air you do have to pick a fight, then pull back over your heavy AA. Or you use the time they've spent building a giant airforce to build one of the other game enders.

It is important that air isn't unbalanced and utterly dominant, but it's just as important that land isn't unbalanced, or naval, or artillery. Hawks were a problem in TA, as were restorers in supcom - but those were problems with individual units, not air as a whole. By FA the balance was pretty good, air was important and could be decisive but it was far from impossible to counter. If air is crippled that just eliminates strategic options and makes the game weaker.

When you look at it functionally; that mechanic behaves almost exactly like a long-range SAM.
You're just getting some planes to carry missiles closer to the target instead of getting a missile to go there by itself.

I actually made the original quote, I think you messed up when you were quoting.

That is somewhat true, but the fighters can chase the planes down even if they turn around. It's not completely the same. It would be a convenient way to intercept an airstrike before it could become lethal, and of course SAMs would help with that.

I would expect SAM sites to be expensive and have a lower rate of fire than air-to-air fighters, so I see both as essential.

Why does everyone keep thinking aircraft lack collision/are infinitely stack-able?

Guys... it's so early in the development cycle that aircraft can be set to not stack at all. That can be used a balance consideration (and it's just a we bit more realistic too).

Yep, 12 pages on air superiority and going strong. Some things in RTS never change :lol:

It seems to me that the majority of discussion is taking place around buffing anti-air. To the effect of, "if we make anti-air really strong, it will discourage people from building lots of air." I'm all in favor of having effective anti-air, and with having it be relatively cheap by comparison. But if you make it too strong not only do you discourage people from building lots of air, but it will probably also discourage people from building much air at all other than scouts.

The main problem that initiated the discussion was having too much air. If that's the issue, I still don't see what's wrong with just making aircraft slower to build. It is the single guaranteed way to reduce the number of aircraft you will see in a game. No matter what, you will see less air.

If it takes more time to put together an air force, you'll get fewer swarms, players won't be so casual with their air because it take longer to replace lost air units, and in the event that someone does start to go really heavy on air, there is a viable response to that since anti-air units can still be built faster than air.

If air units take longer to build, it would take longer to amass a horde of them and make it harder to have them fill the role of a primary destructive force. That's the gameplay niche ground units will naturally fill, and air will take its place as a supporting role.

Truth be told, the infinite stacking thing is only really relevant for two purposes. Stacking makes it impossible for the other player to target fire a damaged unit because it is only possible to click on the top of the stack. And stacking allows you to fit a large number of air units into a small space, allowing you to move them as a stack through areas with little or no anti-air.

I would be perfectly OK with seeing air units just have a hard radius around themselves that no friendly air unit will enter- and if an enemy air unit does, they crash into each other. As a matter of fact, the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of simply imposing a hard limit that air units path like land units and never collide.

And to address johnnyhuman, there is a good reason why there is often so much discussion about air units in RTS games. Past implementations of air units have almost universally been either boring or broken (sometimes both). No terrain->no maneuver. High speed->small map (and universal presence). Fair direct combat->numbers game. Limited options->few composition choices. Stacking dps->air spam. No path blocking->not feasible to defend against sufficiently large force, etc. etc.

That's just like your opinion man.

Seriously go watch a few dozen top tier FA matches. Tell me in how many of them that air is OP.

I think you are referring to my last comment that it is "not possible to stop a sufficiently large force." I don't think air units are overpowered by any means in games like FA.

What I meant by that is you cannot physically block the path of flying units. You can build a wall, build turrets, and physically put ground units in the way of enemy ground units and they will not enter where you are blocking them out. There is no way to do this with air units. The best you can do is build anti air that will kill them if they try. So if the enemy simply has enough HP in air units, they can ignore anti-air since it cannot physically impede them.

If you let your opponent get that number of air units then you're doing it wrong. The problem isn't with the fact you can't impede the air units, its with the fact that you let them get so many of them unopposed.

Having no aircraft stacking would be an interesting thing to see, and to my knowledge no major RTS has done it.

However, it might go a long way to helping to avoid the swarms of death that plagued Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander, so I'd like to see it tried out in Planetary Annihilation.

Also, from a balance perspective, it would make sense to not have them stack, since otherwise they are the only unit type where you can put arbitrary numbers of them into a small space. This is why they tend to so effectively crack any amount of AA, unless there's also an area of effect AA weapon.

This one is right, and remember that in SupCom it takes a T3 factory about 2 minutes to build a strategic bomber, but players can use engineers to spam them out in around 5s. If your economy gets to that point, you've pretty much won the game!