I played a game last night where one of my flack cannons took out ~200 aircraft in 3 shoots. This happened not because flack is OP but because of formations. When my opponent told his aircraft to move they formed up side to side, front to back. When he right clicked on my flack cannon to attack, the left side of the formation met the right directly over my cannon. Correct me if I'm wrong but with the change to AOE damage in the patch each shoot hit a row's worth of aircraft in the formation for full damage as well as hitting more with splash. I have two thoughts on this, a different formation density/shape for aircraft, and/or right clicking to attack when you have a formation selected causes the formation to attack in an intelligent way, like in a staggered approach for aircraft.
The community has been calling for aircraft to not stack for some time now. I really support the idea and think it would solve some issues with aircraft being over powered, and give them a boost at the same time. Yes that makes sense in my head. When you have 100 hornets all on top of each other... it's pretty OP. Com sniping with that is just nuts. However, at the same time, when you tell the hornets to attack a blob of units, they all fly in a single file line and drop all their bombs on the same units. If they stayed in formation, they would carpet bomb the whole blob, rather than wasting all of their bombs on the same unit. It'll also, as you mentioned, prevent them all from being taken out by a few Flak cannons.
In that situation I prefer to give an Area Attack order. Or even better, a Patrol one, so that my Air Units do not land and keep flying.
I don't like how t2 air/antiair basically invalidates t1 air attacks, and in the case of the flack cannon T2 air attacks on it. Specialised or replacements?
Currently replacements. I'm hoping the difference between T1 and T2 bombers will become more pronounced ie T1 will do the same single target damage as T2 but for a fraction of the cost, although it somehow makes more sense to me to have T1 as the carpet bombers and T2 as the single target snipers. Fighters are a little harder to differentiate, I question whether we really need two tiers of fighter at all. Flak cannon I agree is still too good, I'd prefer it to have much greater range and lower damage.
I also hope that stacking aircraft (especially bombers) is looked at in the future. The combination of the movement speed of aircraft and their ability to focus a large quantity of units (and therefore resources) efficiently into a small space or a single target has the potential to be highly abusable. Mobility and coordinated strike capability also both scale much better with numbers than other features, like HP or even raw DPS. Forcing aircraft to maintain distance from each other (even a very small radius around the model) could help address some of the reasons air has been a problem area in the past. Air formations would become significant, and aircraft can be designed with this limitation in mind, such as increasing range to allow small squadrons to focus fire, but huge armadas would have a very hard time focusing on a single target. Also worth noting, aircraft can potentially make formations in 3D space. This means bombers can "stack up" behind each other, at increasing altitude so they don't hit each other with bombs. This formation allows a string of bombers to attack the same target by making a line. This is much more interesting than literally stacking onto the same location in the air because you must expose each bomber one after the other, instead of all at once for only a moment, and thereby overwhelming any AA (making splash critical). And a line of bombers is also more realistic than lots of planes passing through each other.
Okay. But is it OP against anything that isn't a Commander? Because last I checked, killing something a baker dozen times over is a waste of killing it a dozen times. Commander issues are just that. They exist ONLY because the Commander is part of the game. The Comm made it a problem, which means the Comm should fix it. It's really not that hard to understand.
It should be noted that while bombs can land on enemy aircraft, they can't land on/ do damage to friendly aircraft. Adding that would make it much less viable
Focus fire is going to happen. Whether the bombers super stack or not is irrelevant. If the player tells a thousand bombers to go attack a target, a thousand bombers are going to converge on that target one way or another. The biggest change for a formation is with how pretty it is. Granted super stacking looks like crap, which is reason enough to be rid of it. But it's not going to fix what you think it's going to fix. It could also make your bombing squad explode in one single hilarious fashion. That might not be such a good outcome. A death explosion might do the trick. If the bomber pops for 5-30 damage in a small AoE, that can significantly add up en masse. Or. You know. Use the half dozen other ideas which attack every single trait and advantage a bomber can have. Not every solution has to be a brute forced numbers advantage. In fact the fewer of those you have to resort to, the better off PA will be.
Heard a good idea a while back that bombers drop space naplam that does impressive damage over time, but it can't be stacked onto a target at the same time, so 1 bomber is as good as 3 billion in terms of damaging the same target.
