Hornets VS commander

Hi,

The new tactic for many players is: get an awful lot of hornets and let them attack the opponents commander all at the same time. Many times they loose a couple of hornets because of anti-air defence, but in the end still a lot get trough and the person gets annihilated.

I know there are a lot of ways to kill a commander but this seems to be too easy. No matter on what planet your commander resides, if it is on land where an opponent has about 25 hornets, you are done.

I like the carpet bombing and how powerfull they are when it comes to firepower, but i think they should make the unit more fragile in order to prevent players only creating hornets and leave all other game-elements aside.

Send fighters at the hornets before they reach your commander

Right now lots of fighters are absolutely imperative. Scout out incoming bombers and send your fighters to intercept.

Though the fighter/Hornet rush is a little OP strictly because there is no viable counter to bombers other than "build more fighters than your opponent."

Uber has stated they'll be adding an advanced anti-air turret that'll be flack based to cut through large swarms of air units. I'm really looking forward to when that gets added.

Static and mobile flak should hopefully solve this
another counter would be radarjamming

Its annoying atm that the only viable way to counter T2 bombers is mass fighters but its all we have for the time being.

What would help is if Air units could not stack on top of each other so they take longer to make attack runs.

They never went so far as that thought. They did say due to the community's views/thoughts they will be considering it but let's face it, we can't assume something is needed based on the current balance.

Mike

Mavor said in the latest livestream that the community's demand for a t2 anti-air turret convinced him that it's a good idea. Although that is not a definite yes, it's pretty close.

I noticed during a recent game that an astreus parked right on top of a commander can shield it from a few bombs. Probably not a a cost effective strategy though.

The reason why people asked for t2 aa is because air was (and still is) very op. Once air gets some balance, advanced shouldn't be needed.

If it is added, it shouldn't be in the form of "t1, but with more damage" which I think a lot of people are expecting.

But why wouldn't we want a t2 anti air turret? Especially a flak turret with aoe damage. Isn't more different units = better? I don't understand the mentality of some people trying to argue against the implementation of new units. Can someone explain it to me?

The main issue has nothing to do with air balance. The main issue is there is no counter to air other than "1 more fighter than my opponent." That's bad. While fighters will be the king of air superiority, there needs to be a method of driving off enemy bombers without resorting to 1 more fighter than my opponent. That's just bad game balance.

Just to make this clear once and for all:

"Is it needed?" Should NEVER be the question when it's about potential units. The questions that matter are:

"Does it make sense from a gameplay perspective?"

And possibly:
"Is it awesome?"

If the answer to at least one of those questions is "yes", then the unit in question deserves to get implemented. The only exception being a unit that is awesome but doesn't make sense gameplay wise.

"Is it needed?" can be abused too easily, like in
"Are ants really needed in this game?" And the answer would be "no, probably not."
But that doesn't mean that ants shouldn't be in the game.

I know I'm being bold here, but I hope that I'll never read "Is it needed?" again in these forums regarding potential units.

How is this bad game balance? Are you looking for perfect balance?

The problem is that there is only 1 way to counter bombers, and doing so is almost neccesary. that can lead to some pretty stale strategy in my opinion. The game shouldn't be about "the player with the most fighters wins" (not saying that's definitely the case, but I can see why some people might feel that way)

With the introduction of air balance, advanced aa shouldn't be needed, however it is nice to have more unit variety.

I would like more aa options. What I don't want to see is advanced aa where the only significant difference is that it cost more and does more damage.

We should have advanced AA for point defense, but it should be expensive. You shouldn't be able to cover your whole section of the map in advanced AA any more than you can cover it in anti-nukes and umbrellas. Fighters will always be the best counter for bombers.

Basically if you don't have at least 6 basic air factories cranking fighters full time, you're doing it wrong. I usually do 6-10 basic making fighters and 1-2 advanced making fighters and 6+ advanced making bombers and that beats, oh, 95% of people. Lots of them only have 1-2 basic air factories, if they have any at all.

And that's why they die.

And, as always, scout. If you see someone else ALSO cranking air, you might need to ramp up production.

And until there's some major balance patch, ground should mostly be something you make a smattering of. A little raiding maybe. I little mobile defense. Ground is absolute rubbish for attacking right now. If the basic T1 defenses don't stop them, the T2 bombers will.


Also note that T1 bombers are rubbish right now too. I think a swarm of scouts might actually be better damage dealers.

Generally, there is still possibility in having "some fighters and some ground AA beat more fighters".

At least, that works defensively. Works offensively but only mainly as bait if you can get some enemy fighters to leave the safety of their base circle-patrol and over your own base's AA.

Generally, that only helps struggle for air defence and perimeter, and not actually enforce it, as they usually manage to make it into the target area if they go in dense. Which makes flak highly anticipated but not yet promised.

What would be cool, is if rapidfire AA was "basic", and missiles and flak were both "advanced" (one slow rate and one-hit kill, one low damage faster fire and AOE).

Personally I'd like to see 2 types of advanced AA, very long ranged, high damage, slow firing no AOE missile (or laser) based AA (think an anti-air Holkins) and low ranged large AOE flak based AA.

The horribly short ranged AA in RTS games has never made much sense to me, obviously part of it is for balance reasons, but if long range arty can be balanced to allow ground combat, I don't see a reason why long ranged AA can't also be balanced. Make it shoot slowly, or give it a limited number of shots before it has to recharge / reload (like bombers) so you can't make a base impenetrable. Give it a minimum range so once air has closed in, it no longer can shoot back. This long ranged AA should be designed to keep air units outside of an area but unable defend if overwhelmed and closed in.

Once air units are inside an area that's when the shorter ranged flak AA should come in to play. It could make up for it's relative inaccuracy by having a large area of effect and / or a high rate of fire. Sure by then the enemy aircraft might have already gotten to fire on their targets, but the flak AA would be designed in such a way to try to prevent 2nd passes or letting enemy aircraft return to base.

Neat idea, the long ranged AA. If that was one of the advanced flavors, and balanced very limitedly, it would be pretty tasty.

If they fired slow enough, or better yet had a limited number of missiles and a long reload) they might only get off 1 or 2 shots before aircraft closed in to range. I picture a large SAM launcher (maybe something like the UEF T3 SAM from supcom) holds maybe 2 blocks of 2-3 missiles each, can fire them off fairly rapidly (maybe even independent targeting for each block of missiles) The missiles would have to be high velocity and fairly accurate... but once they are expended it would take a good number of seconds to reload. The launcher would have to be expensive (like a Holkins) but I can't see why it couldn't be balanced. Holkins don't make bases impenetrable to land and air moves much faster so could close the distance much quicker.