Bombers are more op as before...

Yeah, I believe they never dropped, which was a problem. I think they should get locked into an attack run early so that mobile single targets can dodge, but they should always drop their bombs so they remain effective against blobs. Though I'm not sure making them effective against blobs is good since you then get back into the land of air superiority, though that's primarily a mobile AA issue I think.

I feel like this is all down to an ineffective surface based AA model.

Even without AOE AA, the current AA defences are totally incapable of dealing with the upfront damage of bombers.

And so I really do feel like the balance of surface AA to flying AA should be range, the range of sufrace AA I feel could be doubled or even tripled.

Enabling AA weapons to maintain a grater zone of protection from the nimble aircraft who can also slip from place to place as needed, making surface AA easily stackable when used across a large base or with a mobile army/navy and thus making air snipes much more difficult as moving one's air fleet would infer greater attrition before they get to a target.

I have found that mobile AA vs 1 bomber results in equal destruction. Which is the right balance. Seeing as each is effectively the counter to the other.

The issue is that the swarm of AA gets taken out by the one bomber that drops one bomb on them.

Is that a formations issue?

It can be.

At full speed doesn't a t1 bomber fly over a mobile aa and survive, and can then circle and kill the mobile aa,.... In a 1v1 of course. In previous patches this was the case. Was also possible to have vision on he mobile as and attack it in one pass before. Not sure if this is still the case however pa-db's figures would argue it wAs.

Well. . I thought I saw 3 bombers die to 3 AA vehicles. That was a while ago now. And I thought I needed exactly 1 more bomber than the opponent had AA vehicles. .. but I could be mistaken.

But do the bombers die before taking out their target? The issue isn't killing bombers, bombers are always going to die, it's whether you can kill them before they drop.

Increasing AA range would definitely require that AA become dedicated to air because otherwise it would totally break the ground model. I'm becoming more of a fan of limiting ground AA to air only as that would then allow the single-laser turret to have a purpose as well as making balancing AA much easier.

I still htink t2 Flak would do wonders for the air game. I mean, I do often forget to spend resources to spam fighters, but it would make AA actually make sense, compared to short range missiles.

I mean, what happens when strafing runs are implemented for units like, say. a Warthog A-10 like unit?? The range there would be more than enough to tear into t1 AA as it stands now.

a T2 AA that shoots Lazers !!!!!!!
or a chaingun something !!!!

This is a terrible way to design bombers. They are all about charging in to get a first strike. If you do not want this, then you should not have bombers in the game. It's really that simple.

It should be EXTREMELY DIFFICULT to kill bombers before they drop. That's their whole purpose in life: to get into where other units can't and destroy a high value target.

I'm fine with how that's working right now, except for the fact that if the high value target is a commander, there's not much you can do about it assuming you've lost the air war.

MAD it is then.

Again, we just need the commander cloak. That was how TA kept bombers useful as a unit of mutually assured attrition without making them into simple game enders. You saw the bombers coming, you turned on your cloak. Or you had enough power to just run your cloak all the time. So you could bomb the nukes, the anti-nukes, the fusion plants and so forth, usually at a high cost in lost bombers, but you couldn't just go in and kill the commander. (Not easily, anyway. He would become visible if a unit got close enough to him but then he has serious defense problems if planes are just flying around with impunity, looking for him.)

Can an air unit even get close enough to reveal cloak? I dunno if it was even possible in TA.

Bombers don't need to deal ALL their damage on a first pass. Sometimes a battle can be allowed to take more than 3 seconds.

We really need advanced AA or something. The AA towers get easily blown up by adv. bombers

Only use for AA towers atm is to fend off early rushes of very small bot-groups against some remote mexes.
Against T2 Bomber, they are pretty much useless.

Something like a Flak tower is really appreciated.

Well, the towers are still useful in trying to make sure that the fighter vs fighter battle ends up in your favor.

But anyway, yeah, missile towers are not a counter for bombers. Fighters are the counter to bombers. Even if we have T2 flak cannons, I expect them to be expensive enough that it's hard to use them to defend your whole base. You really need a good number of fighters. Most players don't build anywhere NEAR enough fighters.


Incidentally, one nerf I think should be considered for bombers is speed reduction. I feel like they're too fast. A modest reduction would help players respond in time and give defenses more of a chance while still leaving bombers as a deadly force against the unprepared.

Yes they are some (small) support for your fighters, but a stationary one and needed in quite high numbers which is perfectly fine if theres something with more power available.

I dont expect T2 flak to be a complete area-denial system for aircraft but they should induce heavy losses in a group of (slower) bombers attacking them and make it more difficult to gain air superiority directly over the enemy base. Have to be somewhat expensive in order to prevent them beeing spammed all over.

I think there are a few things that need to happen:

1. T2 AA to help kill fighter spamming (t2 fighter spam), This would be AA ONLY, t1 ... could go aa only or stay as it is. Like someone said it would make the single laser useful structure.
2. Slow bombers down a smidge, not sure specific numbers but fighters can only just catch them. Bombers in real life (I do realise this isn't real life) are really slow by comparison to fighters, or is that just WW2 and they are quite fast now? Maybe have 2 bombers, a fast single highish yield bomb bomber with low health and a slow AOE multi bomb bomber.
3. AA range to be increased, if t1 AA got the range increase though it would need to be AA only, no sight increase though similar to pelter but for aa.

-Felix

In the case of AA, it's a unique case.

The bomber is the counter for the AA unit, and the AA unit is the (partial) counter for the bomber.

So in the event that you have 1 bomber vs 1 AA, it should always be mutual annihilation. That is what I observed. I observed a single bomber moving into attack a single mobile AA, and both died at the same time.

Of course, if you micro your bombers TOO much, they'll die before they drop because they slow down too much.

Edit

The following quote is invalid. I checked PA-DB and PA-Matches.

Apparently missile defence and ants have the same range. I frequently observe ants firing on such targets with impunity, so I'm not sure what's going on.. but mathematically, it should work out so that neither has the advantage.

Single lasers have the same range as levellers.