Air Superiority

Except it's slow/light, and fast/heavy.

The dynamics of having mass is the new consideration.

Isn't that what Supcom did? The heavy fighter was faster, stronger, and had more firepower than the light one, even if it had a big turning radius.

I wonder how well that one turned out...

T3 ASF definitely don't have a slower turning radius than T1 ints

you want fast speed, slow turn, high hp, high dps low rof for an interceptor
you want medium speed, fast turn, medium hp, low dps high rof for a fighter

T3 ASF had more like fast speed, fast turn, high hp, high dps high rof

How is changing the turning radius going to fix all those things? Big air battles are blob vs. blob. Whoever has the best blob is going to win.

In a dogfight between forward firing aircraft, turning radius is everything.

For example, three of my proposed ASFs attack three of my proposed interceptors head on:

The interceptors have a high-alpha, and take down an ASF as the forces collide. Once the two groups are together, however, the initiative lands firmly on the ASFs. While each interceptor is turning for another shot, the ASFs have already turned and can shoot at the less maneuverable interceptors with relative impunity. Even when an interceptor does finish its turn, it would be lucky to get an easy shot as the ASFs can swing round and out of the way before it fires.


Unrelated - Personally I think something like an interceptor would be awesome with a single, central railgun.

Suggestion, ECM perimeter. If you have an ECM building which can disable any enemy units at range on line of sight it means that to oppose it you have to use ranged units to knock it out and any overflying units will be knocked out of the sky, at a radius which acts before a bomb targetting the building can be released, so it prevents bomber spam kills within a smaller protected radius.

Where two opposed ECM buildings exist with overlapping ranges they should cancel each other out inside the overlap. So if you can hold the ground long enough to build an ECM building you gain a foothold which allows you to move ground troops in but air would have to be manage with great care over their approach vector or they could stray in to the active ECM zone and be lost, but might be worth it to take out the enemy ECM building with a head on bombing run.

In a fight between two or three aircraft, this is true. In a fight between 50+ aircraft, it doesn't matter anymore. There is ALWAYS going to be something for everyone to shoot, no matter how fast or slow they turn. At that point it's just a battle of numbers, and the bigger ones are gonna win.

Even then, the ability of a faster turning unit to be ready to fire again quicker plays to your advantage. If a series of interceptor style units flew into a dogfight they would still over-shoot and have to turn back no matter how many of them or the enemy their were. Sure they would have more to shoot but so would the enemy, think of it like a ratio.

In my opinion a large problem is the target allocation system. In SupCom, it was common to see every AA turret fire at a single plane at the front of the formation, while the main body of planes proceeded unharmed into the centre of my base. So couldn't a system that allocates targets intelligently produce a similar effect as buffing the damage? For example, a group of 20-30 bombers with, lets say 1000 health flies towards your base. your air defence locks on, and each shot does around 500 damage (My numbers are picked randomly, they're not accurate representations by any means). Instead of a group of 30 AA turrets launching enough missiles to deal 15,000 points of damage at a single plane, groups of one or two turrets are allocated to a single target. This would have the effect of destroying roughly half of the group, rather than a single plane. Obviously, there would be a chance the missiles miss their target.

The damage and health numbers may need changing, but I think a system similar to this would go a long way to reducing the advantage of flooding the map with planes. What do the rest of you think?

I can't agree with you there though i know this all stems from a will to make things more interesting in PA but nothing so far points to air as being OP, in fact it would rather be navy so far. an the fact that speed and numbers turned fighters into a deadly force in FA was an interesting factor. if no air can gat past a base without being wiped out entirely than there's no acceptable "realisation than change of mind" you've just made a sour mistake that couldn't even be put on your back it's just.... fate. we don't want PA to be determined by fate now do we?

In FA it is true things were fairly standerdised for a seton's clutch 4 v 4. a back player would go full on air with nothing else. and air domination would generally seal the deal. but there is actually multiples phases. the first is the drop and snipe phase, where t3 air is not present yet, the second is a lull where the t3 air battle rages and the third is the phase where the superiority is prooved to be held by the naval players, where a naval player who holds his sea (one half of the map), can make it impassable to air units with his ships in great numbers.

So it wasn't an all out "air is almighty" thing. All strategies remained viable, it was just that indeed you could not say "no, air's not my thing, I shall not do air" or "no, naval's not my thing, I shall not do naval" or "no, land's not my thing, I shall not do land".

and this of course applies to PA as well ; you cannot neglect a domain or that's the one that'll roflestomp you.

I like the idea of T1 fighters using machineguns and T2 fighters using missiles.

T1 fighters are slightly slower than T2 fighters, but more agile, if they can catch up with a T2 fighter the machineguns will rip it to shreds. T1 fighters can also harass ground units unlike T2 fighters.

T2 fighters are fast, but turn wide and take time to accelerate. There missiles are long range and deadly, but the rate of fire is pitiably slow. If you can keep the T1 fighters off of them they will dominate the air. But it has no more HP than it's T1 counterpart and as soon as anything gets close enough, it's and expensive crater.

This way T1 units will stay useful. I got the idea thinking about how the F4 Phantom didn't have guns because the pentagon thought missiles made them obsolete. Then it turned out phantoms were screwed at close range.

I too love that idea of tier seperation.

Same could be done for bombers. T1 are the current ones, short range rockets, good at unit hunting, easily destroyed by ant tanks though.

T2 would be strategic bombers, flying much higher (thus harder to hit by slow weapon ground fire), deploying small rivers of bombs (ie. TA bomber style) to carpet bomb larger areas or enemy bases.

I was actually thinking maybe only have one bomber aircraft, and then making the other tier either a ground attack gunship or a wild weasel aircraft that fires missiles at anti-air structures.

Sounds like you never played FA, because strike units are exactly what air was.

The only reason it was a problem was the lack of t3 ground AA. Other than that, air is how air should be. Very mobile, strong bombs.

BulletMagnet has definitely played SCFA. He's a main contributor on the GPG forums.

Make airplanes have limited ammo and need to re-supply after spending the ammo.

That way, bombers will only be able to make one run, like they should. They can be quite powerful but they'll still only be able to make a powerful hit once.

That way, fighters will be able to be powerful and be a very fast mobile AA force, but they won't be able to keep up with the incoming bombers and kill them all.

That way, the mobility of air can be counter-balanced.
Airplanes will reach anywhere much faster than any other units, but they will have to go back to re-supply after delivering their payloads (bombs, AA missiles, whatever). So, to reach somewhere very far, they'll have to go back very far as well to re-supply.

That way, the power of air strikes can be smoothed down.
If you're caught by an air strike you're not prepared to, in the standard RTSs it's a complete slippery slope. In the re-supply model, the projection of power of an air force will happen over time, over each strike.
Also, fighting will be made more long lasting.

Airfields would become quite important - you will want to have enough airfields to re-supply your forces quickly or save on airfields and take longer to re-supply your planes.
You'd definetely want to have aircraft carriers near somewhere you'd want to strike, in order to make more frequent strikes.

Actually, maybe it would be interesting to remove airplanes as directly controllable units and have airfields and aircraft carriers as the units themselves, to which we'd give patrol, strike and move-to-other-airfield commands.

That would make it harder to concentrate too much air power in one place - you'd have to have air bases near by.

As somebody in the alpha, I will tell the non-alpha people right now. I haven't seen an air blob yet in PA. Instead lategame will eventually devolve into blobs of T2 tanks (which is just as bad really)

There are no T2 ground-air defenses, but currently EVERYTHING can attack air, and air units are made out of paper. Overflying a blob of tanks is pretty much instant death for even T2 air units. Unless you micro them, they are only really good for kamakaze runs (they will launch there missiles before they get shot down) and commander sniping.

Now this might change as ground to air is tweaked. But right now, rest easy and start bitching about how T2 units invalidate T1 units and how exponential economies devolve into lategame unitspam.

good last couple posts

As has been discussed in other threads, and briefly mentioned in this, a possible solution to this (potential) problem is to use proper collision detection on all aircraft. I think this is definitely worth exploring, and for reasons other than the air/ground balance issue too. Having 20 aircraft flying on top of each other and looking like one is just bad in every way.

I also really like the idea of giving combat aircraft a strictly limited ammo capacity so they have to strike once, and then return to base. Especially when it comes to bombs and heavy missiles. No aircraft sieges, and sustained attacks can be the realm of ground/sea units. Maybe aircraft should even have limited fuel capacity? The thought of building basic forward airfields for resupplying your attack swarm is appealing.

So basically I agree with everything pauloaugusto just said.

Another thing... what do we think about this odd ability to hover that all PA aircraft seem to have? And why are there no helicopters?