Currently, I love how destructive bombers are...I also really like the gunships. There are plenty of other discussions about balancing hitpoints, fire power, speed etc...here is something a little different. How about some type of anti-grav wall to help funnel/control air, just like we can with the ground units? An option would be a ground based electro-magnetic projector that air couldn't fly through. Alternatively, current ground walls could maybe project an EM field or some such into the airspace above them..? Also, it could be made so that it can be toggled on and off...maybe a power drain if turned on, depending how many Air denial walls you have running? When turned off it would be like a normal ground wall. You wouldnt even have to have a special effect..just change the color of the top of the wall so you could tell by sight if it was on/off...or have a flashing red light or something For: 1. This would blunten an air focused bomber attack as the bombers could not fly over them to drop their payload. 2. This would give a ground focused player a bit more of a chance against an air focused player. 3. The wall would still be attackable by gunships/fighters (while they currently attack ground...?)and would take a fair amount of punishment, like current ground walls. 4. It would encourage a massive mixed army for a well entrenched area. 5. It would mean that the your commander would be very hard to bomb snipe. Against: 1. It would restrict the flow of aircraft for an attacker and the defender could not fly over them either...just like their tanks cant drive over ground walls. 2. It would make artillery hard to approach via air, ground or orbital (umbrellas) if it is well entrenched. 3. It would mean that the enemy commander would be very hard to bomb snipe. This would create opportunities for other specialized units as well, such as a wall demolition bot...or something Please list any other pros or cons you can think of. TLDR: A wall that blocks aircraft and cant be attacked by bombers. Costs energy to keep running. Thoughts...?
Making restricted air space sounds interesting in concept "advanced wall" I would actully like air to have collusion detection on so there is no stacking like ground could avoid each other by going over top or underneath each other. But might cause some visual problems or have them crash into each other maybe interesting to see air blobs crash in to each other and take each other out lol I can see this as a mood thing not a release thing could be lot of coding but not work out in practice :-/
This is the #1 solution that we are likely to see. In the Splash Damage thread; I made mention of bombers; giving them friendly fire would curb their use outside of strike missions, i.e. making them far less valuable for defense and global patrol. https://forums.uberent.com/threads/friendly-fire-on-splash-damage.56118/page-3#post-863679
Supcom 2 had the closest thing to air collision, and it didn't work. Why? Because air units were faster, more versatile, and just as powerful as ground units. Why use anything else? More solutions are required.
Ehh, SupCom 2 gunships are like that, but isn't a problem of being literally better then tanks in every way. SupCom 2 bombers however are much more balanced.....which ironically also make them freaking terrible at anything then sniping single targets like experimentals, or a totally exposed commander (Which can also hunker for protection).
I agree unit collision for planes would be cool...kinda impractical though for air I think in a game, unless you want your planes to look like pinballs bouncing around off each other. Particularly when there is a few thousand in a deathball. An option, I guess, would be to have them fly in a permanent formation, like a triangle or square, or even two or three squares/triangles on top of each other, and you would control them as a single unit, instead of multiple units together.
I would take a look at this thread below. Its recent and just in a different forum... not sure if it should just be moved here...It has my thoughts already in it. https://forums.uberent.com/threads/poll-balancing-air-continued.56145/page-2
