You wouldn't need a gate per mex lol. We've already established that land can successfully hold a certain area against air with little Issue. A few well positioned gates greatly extend this range as each gate in effect becomes a 'centre' from which land can expand. The issue currently is gates cost a lot and cost a lot to operate and Fabbers are totally vulnerable making aggressive land based expansion almost impossible to defend against air whilst as @elodea points out the air player gets free reign to expand. Make it possible to support land based expansion and the whole dynamic changes. Land becomes a slow and steady force expanding around the map, pushing a hard air player back.... Currently that's just to hard to do in an effective way.
Another random thought: SupCom did not have air engineers at all. Probably for a good reason. Remove the t1 air fabber completely. t2 is fine, but no more cheap expansion on air only.
Then what was different in TA? I never played TA at a decent level, so I dunno. I only ever massed air fabbers because they were convienent to have there. Apart from that air was so horribly clunky to use without zoom I worked around it by maybe using land.
TA had much smaller maps, and even air was limited in their movement by the borders of the map. In PA, air has much more freedom to move and evade. There is no such thing as a frontline, where you could intercept air before it gets into your territory. Thinking about it, the solution might be to increase the range of T1 AA towers big times. 2-3 times what laser towers have. Keep T2 AA for crowd control, and T1 AA for denying opens areas to air. So you can deny your opponent the chance to capture metal with air fabbers, without the need of capturing the precise location yourself first.
I definately think they could get a range buff too. Not too big though cause at some point how you are going to scout those? I don't think you can give scouts much more vision or else you'll see like half the planet really easily.
Scout goes boom -> You found one. On an alternative: Just use Skitters instead to check for counter measures first. There's a good reason why you have two different types of scouts available.
Let's also remember that you couldn't one pass aa units ( fair enough the aa units missed if facing the wrong direction and lag etc ) but air couldn't kill large armies, aa vehicles could also hit land units so you wernt wasting too much dps. t1 air was only good for raiding mexes and wind generators. The units cost a lot more on the energy side, didn't have to defend a whole planets as in there is less avenues to defend. The aa turret 50% less metal that the bomber and was about 85% cheaper. Not to mention the aa turret is also able to attack land units. So what does that mean and how is it different than PA. Basically in TA you have much less mex sites which are cheap and easy to defend with aa turrets. T1 bombers midgame are used to kill factories Berthas and other key targets. The basic gameplay is so different that it's wrong to say well it worked in TA. Some balancing mechanic needs to be used, whether its make aa units hit land units too, make air factory more expensive on energy/metal. Having reread your post Stuart I realise you were arguing about the refueling mechanic and not the other ideas I argued for. My bad
I agree with all of this- though as you realise at the end Stuarts point that *no refuling mechanic was required* is still valid. PA and TA are quite different beasts, as I've been trying to point out though I don't think refuling is the solution and other options can work just as well. I'm not convinced however that increasing cost alone will do much, you are correct that in TA defending against air was easier as AA units were a more common part of your land forces (in PA they *only* work for air which means including too many makes you much more vulnerable to other land forces). Also in PA missile turrets cost a bit / take time to put up (although they are quite strong) and coupled with that fabbers can't survive even a single pass against them. Making AA units more common, easier to construct and / or longer range would probably work better, as would allowing easier movement over large areas for land forces by making gates more accessible.
I like this idea too. Also, doubling the price of air sounds like overkill to me. Price increase maybe, but not by 100%.
2-3 times means no air scouts. It also means air getting shot by stuff that you can never see. Doesn't sound like much fun tbh. While air needs nerf, let's remember that we need to keep it viable too.
Yeah I doubt 100% is the right cost but could be worth a pte or a stable hotfix for a week for more people to try. Worst case scenario, huge land battles , proxy bases, and fun. Edit: anybody interested in a no air game today?
That is an old problem of the intelligence system in PA, I just wish you could automatically get vision on units which have successfully landed a hit on one of your own units, maybe even the moment you can see a projectile. That would solve quite a lot of problems... Even though I don't think it would eliminate air scouts. It would just mean that their durability was decreased. Not much of a problem IMHO, considering how cheap they actually are. It also reduces the amount of information the air scout can yield and how far it can penetrate, as it can only tell you that the enemy has denied you access to that area, but your air scout won't be able to provide any information beyond that. That's not stopping you from scouting in other directions to see which areas are uncontested. Also keep in mind, that the AA range is virtually useless when the defender has no working radar. So that's one more possible target to snipe. The only thing I would be worried about, is if a player was to spam T1 AA turrets. But then again, nothing you couldn't break with simple ground forces. Either they are placed in bulk, or they are spread afar. In both cases they are either easy to snipe or easy to raid. And they still fail if you can deny your enemy radar coverage, in which case they are loosing their range advantage. They would have an effect on allied units though, as even without radar, their vision makes air raids on allies in protected areas always lossy. So even just a simple enemy SCOUT can put an air fleet at danger. That again means: Multi vector approaches gain attractiveness. Increased weapon range on the T1 AA tower would actually have a surprisingly large number of side effects.
Yeah that's just it, balancing is hard! Perhaps making them 20% more expensive or so as a starting point would be enough. Idk, game balance is hard and i'm no expert!
Make AA hit only slow targets on long range. 3x probably s too much, though the spinners problem certainly is the waaay too low range it has.
Totally agree on the terrible spinner. I've been on both sides wiping out well protected land armies and having my own forces destroyed despite having significant aa. An even bigger problem then this being unbalanced imo is that it is entirely based on luck and micro. If the spinners bunch up in the formation the bombers can kill them all in a single pass and trade efficiently, if they are spread out through luck or micro then the bombers are much less effective, and picking the target of the bombing run so that all the extra bombs also fall on spinners, or formation bombing is critical to the success of a bomber attack on a well protected army. All of this adds randomness and micro, both things that i play PA to get away from. As to solutions, buffing the spinner could work, and so could nerfing bomber health. It might make the t2 gunship a little more useful if it were the only unit capable of fighting aa from the air.
Air fabbers are already 10% less efficient than land fabbers (not sure about naval ones). I think they're ok. They're still very weak, can't defend themselves. Just patrol key points on the planet with a single hummingbird if you think someone has snuck out an airfabber
