Air Superiority

I think what Neutrino said about bombers should apply to all air:

essentially air has an "energy reserve" that replenishes. a bomber with 10 bomb slots reaches it's target and unleashes hell. the 10 bombs fall and do massive damage. now the slots are empty and the bomber is out of ammo. the ammo regenerates (say, 1 bomb per 10 seconds). So air can deal "peak damage" after which it is stuck at a lower firerate untill it withdraws from the fight and regenerates.

*note:*

Neutrino said this was just an idea, nothing's definitive.

I'd rather see this system than some weird fuel system.

Actually I think it could be good if units could auto-retreat when damaged enough. Togglable obviously, since sometimes you want to go all in.

You might see forward staging facilities (like military hospitals) at the front lines then instead of shield-firebases like you do in Zero-K and SupCom.

The fact is that, in modern warfare since WW2, winning the air war is the only way to win in total war scenarios. The Americans proved this through their eventual air dominance over Germany, just as the Germans dominated Central Europe the same way just 4 years before with Bf-109s and Stukas.

A good example is when real attack helicopters, like the Apache, first came out some theorists were worried that gunships would render Main Battle Tanks completely useless. To an extent they were right, an attack helo is a far superior weapon and an MBT doesn't have much chance, even with other kinds of AA support. However, we still see tonnes of MBTs today and there are many more planned for the future.

This is because there has always been a single limiting factor for aircraft, and the amount of them you can have: costs. Build time, fuel limitations, armament limitations, base support needed. You'd never be able to have enough helos (or other aircraft) in the air to dominate an opponent efficiently. Thus air is always a supporting element, even in modern warfare, but ground forces are the real source of victory.

The solution, I believe, is for air to be limited in this way, while remaining a fun and essential part of the game.

1) AIr bases that have limited support capacity, only a squadron or so, and they take up much more resources to maintain than other facilities (so that efficiency wins out).

2) Emphasize base AA, make it powerful enough, so that air strikes have to take place in the open battle field and not just stream towards player's bases. However make air cover a more attractive option than simply mobile AA.

3) Many aircraft for specific roles to complement ground war. For less confusing gameplay, ideally there would be 3-4 types of aircraft and then upgrades you could select for them to fill certain roles better. ie: UNIT: Fighter UPGRADES: Interceptor, Air Superiority, Ground Assault.

4) Range and Ammunition Limits aircraft relying on a bases is the lynch-pin for all this working. Ammunition can be balanced according to the game, but only reloaded upon landing back home. Fuel should also be understood by the AI, so that at 40% or so the planes will automatically head home unless otherwise specified (there should be interface options to specify). Upon hitting 'empty' fuel planes slow to 30% speed until they reach base, so that fighting outside of their range leaves them vulnerable.

5) Combat should be WW2 style close quarters. This is probably what will be done anyway, since it's a more intimate and visceral way of having the game's combat to work. Too many long range missiles in a game tend to make it not rely on positioning enough.

Most of these ideas have already been put out there, but I just thought I'd throw in my support for them.

Just thought of something that might mitigate the problem of the fuel problem.

The way I see it is that fuel is a massive micro hog. Patrolling fighters will always have a few that run out of fuel just as an enemy attack is incoming. You have to keep checking and refueling planes that run low.

So have a global (per-planet) state toggle. Low/High Air Alert.

In Low Alert, your planes will return for refuel at 50% fuel. When you think your fighters might need to do some interception, you go to High Alert, which means they run their tanks dry before returning for refuel. Tada, micro problem solved.

Bombers and gunships don't obey this state.


More information on display would be nice too:
eg. select a bunch of bombers and order a move and then attack. Next to the ETAs for each command, there is also an "expected fuel level" that is the lowest % in the group when they have reached each order (so you know how much further they can go).

Yeah I think good AI is gonna be important for air to work.

A good idea, but I'd make the percentage a variable. So you can set it at 3%, or 75%, or whatever. Individually per plane, as well as per factory, per planet, and globally.

The argument here is much too black and white. Having AA do its job (which it didn't do properly in SC) does not automatically make bombers useless. It only makes them like every other unit in the game, good at some things, bad at others.

For example, in SC-FA even if I build a ridiculous defensive outpost to stash my commander on to, say

4x fusions surrounded by
double layer of overlapping shielding (24 deep in the center) surrounded by
3 concentric rings of spaced out alternating Sams and Flak (312 SAMs & 360 Flak)

with my commander in the center I would still get successfully sniped by as few as 150 strategic bombers.

The reasons for this are many and can easily be addressed in PA,

1) Long range missile defenses all targetted the same or just a few of the vanguard bombers, therefore no matter how many SAMs you stacked or in what formation, you could only kill a dozen or less bombers prior to them dropping their payload.

2) Flak was too short of range to kill ANY bombers prior to dropping their payload unless they were so far forward as to require far far too many of them to provide 360 degree defense. Even if they were placed so far forward, an opponent would just bomb a hole into such a grid at almost no losses prior to the main assault.

Issue 1 has already been addressed officially by devs (I cannot recall exactly where) but they definitely said they will work toward much more intelligent AI controll of AA tower targetting to prevent supreme overkills and massive waste of defensive fire.

Both issues would be considerably lessened by reducing the lead time on the payload deployment of bombers, also very likely to be resolved in PA.

The only real balance that needs to happen is to make is so AA > Bombers. Make it so no matter what, assaulting an AA emplacement (immobile) will always result in a greater attritional loss than the tower regardless of the number of attack bombers.

So have a SAM cost 1.5x the metal as a strategic bomber. Have it have a great enough range and rate of fire to shoot and destroy two bombers short of attack range.

Therefore it would be an option for the attacker to destroy AA with bombers, but it would NEVER be efficient to do so and would ALWAYS result in a net loss of metal (doubly so if you are attacking deep into the opponents base and they get to reclaim the wreckage).

So with enough bombers, a commander snipe would still be possible. But with enough SAMs, a snipe defenses would always be possible.

I agree with the rest of the message but I think the implementation needs to be the other way around.

The SAM (anti-bomber AA) costs ~50% of a bomber and has a ridiculously high Alpha, enough to vapourize an equiv-tech bomber in one shot. Bombers fly into range and bam, it makes cost instantly.
Add in a no-overkill logic (bombers with SAM missiles in flight prevent other SAMs from shooting them) or instant-shot (AA laser?) mechanic and you take care of the overkill problem.

Balance with being a turret and long reload. Fighters are cheap enough to eat the casualty and gunships are less fragile than normal planes and tank the shot.

Essentially the same idea yeah. Mine was 1.5x the cost and a certain 2x kills, yours is 50% the cost and a certain 1x kill.

Both have the same relationship between SAMs and Bombers. To kill SAMs with bombers you must eat an attritional loss no matter what.

Then IF you are so far ahead in econ to build enough bombers to snipe a commander (or super artillery emplacement) despite such an AA advantage, the option is still available for you. You only have to pay the price (or be winning by a large enough margin anyway, that it is merely a means)

How about preventing overkill by making homing missiles retarget if their target dies.

Overkill is a deliberate diminishing return mechanic. If you didn't want it, then you shouldn't have spammed so many missiles.

And if you didn't want your Commander to be bombed, you should have spammed so many missiles.

Or made fighters to make sure the enemy bombers didn't reach your base.

I like both these ideas really.

First, if the air units were specialized and the antiair was specialized, we would have t2 aa that is better than t1 aa but more complex and vunerable so it doesn't replace t1 aa and you would need t1 aa to cover the radar stations or aproach of the t2 aa, and we would have small coordinated air unit strikes instead of mass-blob-air-strike in order to peck at the aa and weaken it strike by strike until they open up a hole.

Balancing that, where it is possible for Air and AA to both win depending on the scenario, is necesary. The Air needs the benefit of the doubt to be able to open up a hole in the AA after a few strikes, and AA needs the benefit of the doubt to either repel non-fully-commited Air Strikes or blob-aircraft or buy a good chunk of time to react to the aircraft before the aircraft dismantle that AA and enter.

Lastly, arguing with Modern War, war cannot be entirely won because eventually you start bombing rubble over and over again and spending the full $100k on a bomb that just reorganized already destroyed rubble without any additional enemy damage, while ground units simply sifting the rubble would have been cheaper; Yet, if the resources are available, it can be tried, as before invading Hiroshima, the US just shot with shells to hell at the island for 3 days straight before sending a single troop in, and there was still resistance, but they argue that every shell made the resistance the US faced just a little softer because every shell was a chance at caving in another enemy bunker and/or causing casualties.

I happen to like my LMG in Black Ops 2, and I consider every one of the 200 rounds in the clip to be a roll of the dice on hitting the enemy or not, and I roll every single dice in my clip in odds that I may hit and follow up with a kill through a building crawling with enemies. I spray the hell out of that building while fluttering about my own line of cover unpredictably to avoid being a loud easy-pickoff target.

As a non-AA topic entirely:

How about we use 2 types of fighters that aren't direct upgrades or have artificially tacked-on (through special-case damage values) areas of expertise:

Air superiority fighters - Not too fast but have great maneuverability and are therefore adept at dog-fighting with enemy air units (A little like a tech 1 interceptor from SC). Escorting bombers and protecting land armies would be obvious roles.

Interceptors - Very fast but have low enough turn-speed that they can't easily compete with ASFs in combat despite the damage they can potentially deal. Useful for responding quickly to bombers moving to attack areas without adequate AA, or scouting.

+1

so much more dynamic than spam T3 ASF

Oh yes, I'd love that! Brilliant idea!

It's realistic, as well as interesting. Gives the player a choice, as well as consequences.

I like it.

It's been suggested about a dozen times. You have a fast/light one and a slow/heavy one. Yeah, that's pretty much how every RTS game works. It's mildly interesting but does not do much beyond giving victory to the biggest air spammer.