Air Superiority

On mass rich 80km maps, the game was far from over at that point since you had also plenty of water with (expensive!) frigates, the only actually working AA units in the game. Such an economy could be reached after 2-3 hours top and the game could still be running since you just began to start the mass construction of game enders at that point. Aeons would just have finished the construction of their Paragon at that point, bringing the game onto the next level.

And given that PA is supposed to enable 12 hour battles, the aircraft system musst be prepared to work properly in advanced phases of the game too. That means, it must be possible to defend against aircraft just as you can defend against ground units, strategical nukes or artillery.

Also: When i hear people about just rising the construction time, how should that help? Build more factories or send engineers to assist, then time doesn't matter. It would have worked in TA since the maps where rather small and building space was limited, but on a planetary scale building space is almost unlimited, rendering every attemp to controll strategies by scaling the time useless. Usually your construction rate is not restricted by time but by the metal / mass production only.

See This? That's a player making AA cruisers in about 3-5 minutes, and a whole fleet of them being built in secret after about 10 minutes. You can make whatever you like pretty darn fast in games like TA and SC, if the enemy player sees it coming, they can prepare a counter (torpedo bombers > frigates). If it takes you 2/3 hours to build a handful of frigates, you didn't have enough factories.

You are right. Increasing the construction time only delays the inevitable.

Land is the 'main' thing; you have lots of variation; all kinds of tanks and bots, all kinds of artillery (inaccurate, accurate, shells, missiles, small range, huge range...), shields, anti-missiles, anti-air, stealth generators, et cetera...

Then we have air, which a few bombers, gunships, fighters, and transports. This is generally on par with the tanks and bots (sort of, if you get what I mean).

But, just like there are so many land units, there is also more protection against them; instead of only a point defence structure, you have various artillery batteries, and you can have stuff like that magnetic beam from Supreme Commander 2, or landmines, or whatever. But against air, you nearly always only see a generic anti-air turret, and that's it.

But because bombers and gunships are sort of on par with tanks and such (I really have no idea how to explain what I mean with this), they can easily be too effective.

So what if we also have multiple air defences, just like we have multiple land defences?

A generic anti-air turret that easily destroys aircraft, but does so one by one. Another anti-air turret that has a larger range with area of effect damage, but is inaccurate, or has a slower rate of fire or such (to counter air spam; just like artillery against land). And why not anti-air 'artillery'?

And why don't we expand air while we're at it? Flying shields, flying anti-missile units, flying artillery...

#1 If you restrict the number of engineers you can send to assist a factory, build times will matter a great deal.

#2 Even if you don't restrict the number of engineers you can send to assist a factory, build times still matter because of the simple fact that you need to send more engineers to an air factory than you would to a land factory to get the same number of units. If you want to invest in building air fast you do so at the expense of being able to keep up with the production pace of ground units.

Time is as valuable a resource as either mass or energy. Don't underestimate it.

What are you suggesting exactly here, slowing the build time of a unit?

Because no matter what you do, if the player keeps on updating their production facilities, they will be able to build units faster (20 factories will always be 20x as fast)

Yes. But don't just think about it in isolation. A player can choose to build 20 air factories, but 20 land factories will always produce more units.

Additionally, I also suggest increasing the relative amount of time it takes to build air factories. A player can still build 20 air factories. But in that same time span their opponent could build 30 land factories.

The point is not to restrict air production in an absolute sense, but rather in a relative sense. You should always be able to field a larger ground force within the same time frame. If you invest heavily in air, you will have to deal with the disadvantage of having fewer units overall on the battlefield.

You will hit the unit limit anyway, so your theorie fails. In the end a player who focused on aircraft will have the same number of units as a player who focused on ground units. In 1 on 1, air is far superior in all terms except durability, but they make up for that with sheer DPS.

I see nothing related to hitting unit limits that changes anything I've said. And, you are making a couple of assumptions that don't necessarily pan out:

#1 You assume that players are typically hitting the unit limit in every game. There is nothing that would imply this would happen commonly. For instance, most games I play in SupCom I never actually hit the unit limit unless it is set to the lowest value of 500. So hitting the unit limit is more the exception rather than the rule.

#2 You assume that if both players have played long enough to hit the unit limit that the player who hit the limit with a lot of air will be on equal strategic footing with the player who focused on ground. This very well might not be the case since the ground player will have had more of an opportunity to claim territory sooner, establish map control earlier, claimed more resources because he got more ground units out into the playing field first, etc.

In other words, players don't just sit around peacefully building units until the hit the unit limit, and then start attacking each other. (Unless you get a ground player who wants to do nothing but turtle, in which case they probably deserve to lose).

What I suggest you should think about is how does the game play out before the unit limit is hit? If you are spending a long game slowly building up air units, while your opponent is quickly building up primarily a ground force, what implications does that have for the game?

But you can't build enough of that counter to cover everything you have on the map. Remember that the planes can go everywhere quicker than you can, so whatever counter you have has to scale linearly to the amounts of places you have to defend, where your enemy only has to build one big squadron. And every time he builds more offensive aircraft, the amount of damage they can do to undefended or not sufficiently defended scales up infinitely if their fuel or ammo is unrestricted.

Once his planes overwhelm and take out your air defenses, after losing a fixed number of aircraft, he can deal infinite damage to everything remaining in a very short amount of time. This was the problem with planes. You could build them up to a critical mass, and send them all to one spot on the map and completely destroy it. If you limit ammo, the destruction is limited rather than unlimited.

Of course this "unlimited damage" scenario I've described above is true of land and water units as well, but they can't all get to any point on the map in a trivial amount of time, and escape before anything else can get to them except for other aircraft.

As the game gets later, moreso on larger maps, the rate at which aircraft overpowers other units becomes exponential. Limiting fuel would help this problem, but I believe ammo will fix the problem in a better way without adding confusing micro-management.

Except that's completely wrong. Go watch some competitive matches.

The largest difference between ammo and fuel is that when fuel runs out units CAN continue to fight, they just aren't as good, where as when ammo runs out they have to go back to base. All your 30 interceptors then get chased down and you lose half on the way back to your base because the enemy had 3 half dead ones that still had ammo. I know its a balance issue but the difference in effectiveness is that you lose half or all.

Could have units that run out of fuel simply crash. If we have an aircraft system that depends upon fuel, then it makes sense to have air units be competent at ensuring they have fuel, and know to return home when they are running out. If they are good at handling it themselves, why not make the consequences for running out severe?

If that's too harsh, there could be a short grace period where they function at greatly reduced effectiveness while running on fumes to give them a chance to land. Even with no engines, they can go into glide mode for a short bit. If they are out in the middle of nowhere, they're screwed though.

I have played competetive matches on a fairly high level myself and coldboot is at least partly right. In map sizes 10x10 and higher without much water, supcom tends to be airspam in midgame and air + experimental spam in lategame. Though small raiding troops with t3 bots appear in lategame, they usually don't decide the game, air does.

I would think they would be VTOLs, and unless over the ocean/lava they should be able to land.

The fuel supply is more a measure of how long the units energy reserves can run at full power, its onboard energy generator still gives it enough power to fly and fire, but it can no longer use its afterburners.

The consequences are there to prevent air domination not to make half your force dissapear if you push them to hard.

This is kind of like units will drown if they walk through the water. You don't want units automatically doing stupid things that kill themselves.

If you're limiting fuel, it's sufficient to make them go slow but still allow them to get home. They'll be vulnerable and unable to engage. Units should automatically go home before they run out of fuel, and issue warnings when you're forcing them to fight on fumes by calculating the distance to the nearest airbase.

There should simply be balance in air roles. Interceptors should be best suited for taking down and destroying air to ground threats. Fighters should be best suited for destroying enemy fighters and interceptors. Mix in effective ground AA and voila dynamic air play.

^ please cut the special snowflake text

Fuel was a bit of contrived mechanic, I think as a gameplay idea it has merit but it needs to be explored far more in depth to be worth anything. So for the purposes of PA I think it's entirely reasonable to scrap it. Additionally repair stations could be universalized to treat all units. Could even be generalized to the point of it simply being an engineering tower.

This is actually a pretty solid idea. I also agree about fuel, it is really contrived. There's merit to fusing staging facilities with engineer towers. Exactly how would that work though? What would aircraft carriers do then? I don't see land staging as problematic but they probably shouldn't automatically head back for staging?

Staging should be free repair and two tech levels of staging would be good too.