Balance of flack, and should it change

People asked for flack and know its been added. Its currently very strong due to its stats, and overpowerd due to how it works. I am sure by know, almost everyone has seen examples of large armies of aircraft clustering up and getting wiped out by a few flack shots.

My opinions is that this shouldn't happen. There should be a point when you can overwhelm someone due to the size of your army. With flack and air mechanics in there current state this is almost impossible.

As I see it, there are two solutions to this.

1. Improve how air works, make it so that planes can't clump up. While this would be nice (also a good thing to make comm snipes harder), I doubt it would be easy. I haven't seen a game where this works well.
2. Put a limit on how many targets can be hit, or how much total damage flack can do in one shot. To me this is the better solution. Easier to implement and doesn't hurt flack when defending against a smaller air force.

So, my questions are "do you think flack scales too well with air clumping up?" and "what do you think of these possible solutions?".

1. can work, if you dont mind oddly looking aircraft movements. it could work similar to ground units, but it might look silly for aircraft^^

2. maybe one can also think of that planes "shield" each other. So even if some planes are hit, others arent hit although they are in the same area.

and its "Flak" for "Flugabwehrkanone"

if the turnrate for flak would be quite small, you could avoid that it kills all your planes, by using attack command and spreading the planes out.

I think the flak is fine they way it is. Just needs to cost a lot more. Just multiply cost and the damage needed to kill it. To have it the same cost as t1 is possibly the dumbest balance move I have ever seen.

I think the damage should be nerfed by half, but the fire rate double'd

What's the aim?

I was actually thinking they should cut the fire rate by half so that bomber clumps that are passing through a flak line have more of a chance while those that loiter will still get mowed down. So you'll want more flak around the thing you want to protect rather than simply building lines of it at the edge of your base.

Perhaps they can make it so planes have a little more height variance, as in they can fly over or under each other, and that would allow for them not to clump up as much. Maybe could also affect how flak hits the planes?

I see this as an approach to diversify T1 and T2. Why not have T1 missile defenses that are very accurate for taking down single aircraft, while flak is horribly inaccurate but mows down swarms more easily?

I'm confused by your misspelling of the word 'Flak' liquius.

Ah, kyrovow's comment makes a little more sense now. Probably shouldn't type while eating.

I wouldn't call it dumb. I'd call it "finding the lower edge".
But I agree with your reasoning.

Flak is currently 10 times stronger than anything else in the game. And that's not counting its splash ability, which is a damage multiplier.

Something is wrong. Terribly wrong. Approximately 870 milli-TARDISes worth of wrong.

Not really, there's lots that do more damage - sheller, stingray, hornet, SXX, catapult, holkins, advanced laser tower. If the vanguard actually worked it would have over 10x the damage of flak. Unless you're talking about for cost in which case I guess it's only the sheller and hornet that have comparable strength.

The way bombers work and how long it takes for flak to target things, the towers are usually gone before they can really do anything in my experience. Two bombers who manage to get their payload off and the flak is gone.

One thing that I'd like to see is increased range, even if the damage went down a bit. Right now the Flak has the same range as a missile tower. Usually that means that bombers can hit their target and then finally get hit once they start to turn around.

That's not good for business. Unless you have a line of them...

I wouldn't mind normalizing them. Making them weaker per shot compared to missile towers is fine, considering it hits a whole clump. Then, it needs normalized in price, maybe even longer range like above.

It always feels everyone wants different balance. As long as it works, I am fine.

PER COST. The metric that matters.

Some of the damage values in the game have such absurd overkill that it doesn't really matter and was clearly intended as an ad hoc "damage type". Flak runs pretty efficient damage.

I think that flak should not be used as a wall.

Flak should be used to "thin out" the formation of aircraft flying overhead.

I agree flak should have a limit on how many targets it should affect.

I think it should affect every target in the air layer (i.e. it should affect missiles, "artillery shells", other flak projectiles, aircraft, both friendly and foe)

I think the rate of fire should be greatly decreased, so it fires 1 projectile every few seconds.



Bonus offtopic post: Personally, I think that flak it silly by design, as this is supposed to be a pinnacle of technology, and the game appears to be set sometime before 1950. I think that t1 anti-air should be a laser beam or a chaingun or something, and the AOE weapon should be a SAM site that fires a barrage of missiles at a limited number of targets.

I suppose that that would be considered visual, yes? Although, it would change the way flak works, and that would affect how effective it is, and if it would need to be balanced yet again.

Yes it would.

Shrapnel hypothetically should just do universal damage to everything in the AOE. Unless a piece of shrapnel hits something and slows down, it would be equally as dangerous to every non-armored target in the AOE at whatever range.

Whereas missile flak would only affect a maximum of 10 targets, not because of an artificial limiting factor such as "your shrapnel can only do damage to 10 targets", but because there are only 10 missiles that were fired.

The issue I have with splash at the moment is that the splash travels through stuff, which makes most splash based weapons "overpowered", because in large groups the splash dealing units are effective against both large groups coming from single direction, and multiple smaller groups coming from multiple directions. I think rather than just blanket "damage everything in this area", it should damage everything with decreasing damage with distance.

Again, that's an artificial limiting factor on the game, and I would rather the game didn't resort to that. For me the ideal situation would be to spawn the individual bits of shrapnel that actually inflicted damage. But I guess that's not technically realistic.

If you are going to argue reality here, then I am going to apply that same argument to air clumping.


As for the flak turret, anything that moves air from it's stupidly dominant position gets a huge thumbs up from me