Firefly Damage

I think everyone is kinda missing something here.
Here is what I noticed:
When I want to find someone on a planet I put a few scouts on patrol paths and do something else. Then, as soon as a Firefly runs into a hostile unit, it will fire at that unit and will not advance on its patrol queue.
The gun gives it the ability to stick to the first hostile found. Plus if you have it hotkey'd you can easily jump to its location.

This has never been done in an interesting way before. Kamikaze units are generally very one-dimensional.

Furthermore, the issue isn't whether you can destroy the enemy unit in the fraction of a second before it fires. You assume both sides fire. The issue is whether you can destroy it before it penetrates your lines and destroys whatever it wants to destroy.

A missile turret in the periphery is an expendable deterrent. Flying over it will cause casualties. Dropping bombs on it wastes bombs which will take time to regain. Defense in depth with such weapons makes deep air raiding impossible/impractical with ground strike craft. Get a real bomber to do that job.

Well it's a good thing that scouts aren't interesting units! Look, damage trading is not a bad thing. Trading is in fact one of the few things that can stay sane across all scales. If a kamikaze scout does 20% superior damage with 4 or 5 of them, it will still deal 20% superior damage with a hundred, because the suicide bot is guaranteed to die every single time. That is NOT true with bombers, and it is most blatantly not true with your instagib arena.

Obviously, a suicide bot is treated by payload:cost. Supcom most conveniently showed how NOT to do it, with the Aeon Mercy's warhead dealing over 30 seconds of T2 gunship damage. Multiplied by splash. In a game where gunships are lucky to last 5 seconds against flak (also, taking longer than 0.1 seconds to kill the Mercy was a game over). The game had some serious math problems...

It's still a race to who can instantly kill the other guy first. It's doomed to scale in the most horrible of ways, where the slightest advantage very quickly takes all.

It's time to step back and see that the problem you're solving takes place over fractions of a second. You do not take the fastest front loaded units in the game, and kill them in the tiny window between reaching their target and dropping their bombs. It just can't work (also, it's basically a gigantic FU to the true function of bombers).

You're not realizing that this isn't a single confrontation. It isn't about the tiny period of time when units are actually shooting at each other. The point is that these units will have to fly some distance in order to reach their target, and they only get to fire once.

I take it as read that if the plane wants to bomb a missile turret, it can, and will destroy it. But what the plane really wants to hit is the fusion plant, or the commander, or other valuable target that will be defended. And you cannot just fly over multiple lines of anti-air defense to do that. You have to fly over potentially many layers of enemy airspace, with enemy anti-air and fighters to shoot you down. That isn't a tiny window- that is a quite considerable window, especially if the distances involved are large.

You can't park an anti-air gun right next to the thing you want to protect and expect it to shield the target from being bombed. That's not how anti-air works. You put the anti-air between the enemy and the thing you want to protect, and force the enemy to fly through it.

And that is precisely the difference between a Firefly-style ground strike craft and a real bomber. Making a ground strike craft that cannot handle anti-air at all, but which can destroy mexes and such, is a completely different role from making a bomber that is meant to fly over some amount of anti-air and hit a certain target.

I think you are having two problems here. Firstly, "slight advantage" meaning having just a couple more units makes you win the battle? You are correct, but that isn't an issue. That is predictable cause and effect, and is necessary to have good gameplay.

The issue is what happens as the scales get large. And even in a direct confrontation, where supposedly it is a 'race to see who can kill the other guy first' you are totally incorrect about the effect that has on gameplay.

Secondly, you are thinking about "winning" like it's useful in battle. Having more units will make you win the battle, sure. But victory and defeat are irrelevant compared to the efficiency of the battle. The "winner" of the battle might still lose the game because they lost more units than the battle's loser did. You can win every "battle" and still lose the war because your enemy split their forces more intelligently than you did, using your one monster army that never lost a battle.

If we imagine units which literally do instagib each other, an army of 10 against an army of 20 ends with 10 survivors on the more numerous side. If we imagine 10 against 100, then the winning side now has 90 survivors; the absolute effectiveness of the losing side has not decreased.

To further prove the point about efficiency, instagib isn't actually the ceiling on efficiency. Suppose each plane fires four missiles that instagib another plane. A group of 5 against a group of 20 would get annihilated, but so would the entire group of 20 planes. In a 100 against 10 fight, the smaller group loses the battle, but kills 40 planes and only loses all 10. The smaller group has lost the battle, but was wildly more efficient and a rational player would prefer to use more groups of smaller size.

By contrast, units with lots of HP can focus fire for longer because it takes longer for the enemy to destroy them. Durable units with weak weapons fighting each other must be used in the largest possible group because outnumbering the enemy 20 to 10 means you inflict your first kill twice as fast, reducing the enemy's firepower while yours remains stable for longer. This gets even worse in the 100 vs 10 fight, because the group of 100 will probably annihilate the smaller group with no casualties. As you can see, this DOES run away with relative advantage, and encourages having one very large blob.

Long story short, fragile units vs fragile units allows players to use small groups. A small group will lose to a large group, absolutely. But its efficiency against a large blob remains high, meaning both sides benefit from splitting their forces up instead of consolidating them into a single tremendous army to maximize their efficiency.

i would rather the firefly not attack so i can leave it alone in an enemy base for 2 seconds and it not alert every fighter in the area

That's exactly what I don't like. I want my Fireflies to patrol around the enemy base/area and keep an eye on everything that is happening. When I see metal extractors pop up, I know they're expanding that way and I should go raid them.

I really like the idea of a fast attack plane as you describe, but I don't think it ought to replace the firefly.

I'll sit with the 'remove its weapon altogether' camp on this one, but I would like to see a small, fast, annoying attack plane (presumably with a shorter LOS) which could be uused for early engineer harassment.

I do think that the firefly's massive LOS is its primary weapon, and having it deal significant damage in addition makes it a bit, dare I say it, overpowered.

If you stopped stroking your hate-on for SupCom for a few seconds, you'd notice that Corsairs and Januses were not obsoleted by the Mercy, so the balance problem you talk about clearly isn't unsolvable. Mercies had ten hitpoints. On a scale where a Corsair (its closest equivalent) has 1,100. One volley from any anti-aircraft weapon in the game killed a Mercy. And the Mercy was slower than both T2 fighter-bombers and T2 gunships. It also had one minute and fifty seconds of fuel and couldn't land or be refuelled, meaning they couldn't be easily stockpiled, and if the opening you were looking for didn't materialise, you'd just wasted 125% the cost of a gunship before it even faced the enemy guns. And it couldn't be used against T1 (and a lot of T2), unlike other T2 ground-attack options simply because your opponent would win the exchange without doing anything because a Mercy couldn't easily kill more than its mass value in T1 units. It was a powerful weapon, but it had so many drawbacks that it wasn't useful in the majority of situations. You're just looking at its alpha damage, not its stats in the larger context of the game.

How many units can track a bomber all the way from their build point to their target? There's only ONE- the interceptor. How many units can attack bombers after they get into attack range? Everyone else. My point still stands:
- Bombers are advantaged with a front loaded attack and a very high ability to use it.
- The window between finding a bomber and responding to a bomber is extremely small.
- The vast majority of anti bomber units have to deal with it, because the bomber ultimately determines where and when it chooses to fight.
In theory, a base gets to be ringed by anti air defenses. In practice, that never actually happens(seriously, find a situation where it ever works). A ring of defenses is not useful if bombers only have to approach from one direction, and get to pick them off one at a time. Defenses are best placed near the valuables, where they can have as much overlapping cover as possible.

My point is that you can't protect a thing from being bombed at all. Dropping bombs is the bomber's role. It has inalienable advantages that let it pierce defenses and deal damage up front. The only way to make those advantages not useful is to destroy the fundamental niche of the bomber.

Let me quote that again:

INSTA. GIB. Look it up. If you can not see that the Mercy was the prime example of the fast draw endgame, then I can not help you.

(Also, thanks for proving that it was a race for the first and only shot.)

*coughINTERCEPTORcough*
Everything in its name says "fast attack aircraft".

I would like to exchange the minimal damage against a bit of unit intelligence, which automatically skirts the encountered AA installations of an enemy base and returns behind the base onto it's original course.
A scouting unit which doesn't seem to understand the dangers it has scouted and doesn't try to avoid it in particular in the case of fast and brittle air scout, is kind of pointless (except perhaps if your are in full scouting mode a keep an eye on every scout).

Also, alerts about scouted information, before the scout get's shot down, would be nice too.

I make a post saying "you need to look at more than just a single number", and I get a response looking at a single number. If you're not even going to look at the context, just watch some SupCom games on YouTube (since I assume you'd be too disgusted to buy the game even though it's a dollar in the Humble Bundle at the moment) and note how many of them end in a Mercy snipe. Maybe one in a hundred. If Mercies were examples of fast draw endgames, you'd expect them to, you know, end more games. They're more often used as last-ditch anti-experimental weapons by a player who's gone heavy air and has been let down by his teammates or caught off-guard.

Only if you don't know anything about planes. The roles of interceptor and attack aircraft are pretty much diametrically opposed. Optimising for one makes a plane's performance worse at the other. Attack aircraft need low minimum speed, good durability, long loiter times and good payload, while an interceptor needs top speed, climb speed and acceleration.

I don't understand the point of this. The firefly is a scout, not an attack aircraft. It shouldn't even have a gun, the scout ship (the name escapes me) doesn't have one and it's still useful.. well an aircraft typically is more so but I hope that changes.

I would like to point out to all of you that want the gun removed so the unit will not fire that you can set units to hold their fire. Anything the firefly does when told to hold its fire other than ignore enemy units should be considered a bug in my opinion.

I personally think the firefly is acceptable as is, but see no problem increasing its attack damage a little to open up some more harassment based strategies early on.

My point is, any harassment from the firefly is completely pointless.

How dare you insult the glorious method of sending fireflies to kill a commander. It is almost as glorious as reclaiming him.

This. Anything a firefly can harass, a fighter craft or bomber can harass just the same. The scout craft brings nothing new to battle.

Reclaiming a Commander to death would be the absolute best way to win a match.

After discovering that spent orbital boosters do damage when they hit the ground (if you don't watch out, your Avenger spam can kill off its own build capacity, very slowly), and fall on a trajectory that you can sort-of specify by setting the orbital launcher's rally point, a friend and I concluded that the real best way to win a match was to kill a Commander with a rain of space junk.

Wat.

So this thread inspired me to try to win by only using fireflys... Here are the results:


It took probably upwards of 20k+ planes to "win" a 4 player free for all. I put "win" in quotes because I think they mostly just disconnected from the lag... but I certainly felt like I was winning before they left

Edit: I had 195 T1 air factories by the end and the largest group of fireflies I had at one time was probably about 1200.