Hornets VS commander

I just think it would at least stir up the "having a passive circle of constantly patrolling fighters" strategy up. You could still do it if you expect losses to thin them out over time, or you can intentionally pressure these SAM sites, or you can just keep fighers farther inward and deploy them manually. There are ways to make it relatively useless (it would be expensive-ish, losing it with 2 kills under it's belt would be such a waste), while it can still be used to harass or enforce a mutual rule against standing air-to-air defence. Again, anti-air tanks still work, both players have SAM, and SAM would get very few kills against a built up and launched bomber rush while the bombers pave over everything, making you wish you had some Flak instead.

Just have the commander cloakable. All problems solved.

Would hate for flak guns to dominate the anti air role, the way they came to other times.

Hornets may be part of the problem. Perhaps their single target damage is too high. They obsolete the T1 bombers as is, and the addition of a flak turret would make that even worse.

I think the peregrine should be a flak fighter, anyways. Most obvious way to differentiate it from T1 fighters.

That or give them turrets to engage multiple targets at once, but less effectively then a focused fighter.

And new problems created.

What problems you see with cloaking? Are you familiar with how it worked in TA?

The problem with anything that seems OP is that the commander is such an easy target. This is the reason for most nerf posts and in my opinion has ruined the game. The ant and leveller wars of alpha involved so much more strategy than anything we have now.

NAILED IT!

Most people here never even heard of Total Annihilation and even think supcom2 is a good game. Let's not even talk about people wanting "balance like starcraft".

I like SupCom 2 and TA.

In fact you might find it hard to find a RTS I don't like.

I think part of this problem is how they attack. They carpet bomb, but drop the bombs too close together, so the AOE overlaps so much that they just decimate everything. Perhaps spreading the bombs out would reduce this issue.

Completely pointless point. The point is that if you made the win condition anything other than assassination, the current unit balancing issues are completely solved.


I think it's probably a bad thing to give someone as advice "Just accumulate T2 bombers, hide them away from the opponent and don't show them to him until you are able to snipe his commander".

How do people feel about a version of the catapult that can hit air? I would say just make the catapult hit air but its missles are to slow.

High damage against a single target?

It's more or less equivalent to just building 4 MDT together in a tight grid. It suffers the same issue that those do..

Its the range that I am after, which missile defense turrets lack. It would be nice to have the current T1 rapid fire, low damage, short range; T2 flack so medium range, low damage, AoE; T2 slow rate of fire, high damage long range.

Agreed.

That does need to happen, but it wouldn't entirely solve the problem. I would just bomb your anti-nukes and nuke the largest energy production cluster I could find. Maybe if commander could cloak AND anti-nukes were about 75% cheaper...

Incidentally, this is a bad idea, even now.

The most effective fighter formation is "the ball of fighters". Whenever I see a patrol circle, I wad a bunch of my fighters up and send them into the patrol line. They will chew up the entire line with minimal losses if the owner doesn't stop them and form his own fighter-ball.

Consequently, I usually have my fighter factories set to fixed group points around the base, inside my defenses, or sometimes patrolling in a tight circle(*). If I see a big attack coming I can wad them all up fairly quickly to counter it or grab the nearest group if I don't need them all.

I never do those giant patrol routes anymore. That's really only useful for stopping scouts and is a good way to lose your fighters.

(* - advantage of a tight patrol pattern is that the fighters stay flying, which makes them quicker to respond to threats. "Taking off" takes a couple seconds. The advantage of letting them land, though, is that any enemy fighters that fly over them will get fired at and will not fire back until my fighters take off. So both have their benefits. In fact, I think you can tell them to hold position and they'll never take off, which means the only thing that can destroy them are bombers or ground units...)

We already have "Advanced AA". It's those advanced fighters that no one ever uses.

Catapults for air seems like an obvious step. Currently, their discounted price and homing is not worth getting outranged by enemy Holkins. With their slow rate of fire, they'd mostly discourage persistent bombing in an area, which AA turrets do already. You could add it to the current model without too many disruptive balance changes.

As far as the air units themselves go, I feel like bombers would feel more appropriate if their main use was against structures. Otherwise we run the risk of the current problem, which is that air is ubiquitous and solves all problems. It's really hard to tweak them with the limited parameters we have now...

There are no damage modifiers, so we can't alter their role towards something less "assassin-ey" such as by giving them mostly bonus-vs-structure damage, or anything as blunt as reduced damage vs. Commanders. Even worse would be "nuh-uh" rules like only being able to target structures. The former might be acceptable, but it'd open a slippery slope towards the latter.

We could increase their damage spread to make hitting single targets less effective, but that'd improve their ability to wreck standing armies and render the ground game nearly irrelevant, even with mobile AA in play. A damage-over-time effect would spread the damage out over time as well as space, dealing less damage in theory to moving units, but Commanders and rallied armies have a bad habit of sitting still.

Even decreasing damage doesn't help much; if a critical mass of bombers can punch through air defenses and snipe the commander, even increasing the number needed won't help, unless it's economically unfeasible to do so, in which case why build them at all?

The problems is, that's "have more fighters than your opponent."

Very binary. Very poor gameplay.

If your opponent gains air superiority because he built more fighters than you, then currently it's nigh impossible to regain air control. Even partial air control. Lose it and you can't regain it. That's bad.

With a flack air tower then it's possible to regain air control over your base. Or retain defensive air control over your base without relying too much on fighters. That allows for more diverse gameplay.