Idea to balance planes - Airbases

Air units are already good at sniping commanders. I don't think pushing them to be better at that is a positive.

I agree that if you let a swarm of strategic bombers reach your commander you deserve to die. But if you push all aircraft to be dramatically more front loaded you make ACU sniping that much easier, and more viable at lower tech levels. that means it'll happen more often, and if it's too much easier it will become the obvious way to end all games.

A commander in Zero K will die in three bombs from a precision bomber. OP?

There are some cheeses that involve rushing two-three prec bombers and going for a fast commander snipe. However, on the whole, it's not a problem. They only drop one bomb before heading back to re-arm, and anti-air can prevent them from penetrating deep behind your lines and killing your commander.

The point is that limited ammo high burst damage makes all aircraft more suited to ACU sniping. Everything from the basic T1 bomber up gets better at it. I don't think this is a desirable result, and I don't think there are enough benefits from the design change to outweigh this downside.

As I said in my previous post, I think that limited ammo can work if a non-extreme approach is taken. Enough to limit how long an aircraft is in the field for, but not so much as to make them all assassin style attack craft.

(also, for fuel, what would be wrong with making planes glide down/crash when they run out of fuel?)

Can work, and better, are two different things. I haven't really heard a compelling argument why this would be better yet.

I'm just trying to get everyone off of "well limited ammo = commander sniper units and that's bad" so we can have an actual discussion about drawbacks and benefits

What do you think we've been doing for the last 12 pages. Commander snipes ARE one of the drawbacks.

Only in an "airplane X has 2 bombs so they get to be mini nukes" situation. I'm thinking a more reasonable compromise like having a helicopter with higher than average DPS but can only sustain fire for 15 or so seconds before having to base.

Also, please no helicopters, futuristic gunships are so much cooler. (/unrelatedstatement)

Not all air units need to be the one-shot-per-trip style precision bomber, or area of effect carpet bomber. Gunships would need lots of ammo to be effective at their role. Or give them a main weapon with unlimited ammo, and supporting weapon with limited shots, such as Hellfire missiles or something. These might not even have that high burst damage, but give the unit more range than it would otherwise have, or a finite capability against air units, or some other limited capability.

Interceptors might just have a gun with unlimited ammo, whereas air superiority fighters might have many missiles to allow them to engage multiple targets before returning to base. These might be long range and high-power, enabling them to keep control over a large region of sky, however in close combat against cheaper and more numerous interceptors, their comparable guns make them less efficient than interceptors, if they are out of missiles.

Fighter/bombers could have two kinds of limited ammo, giving them independent counts of anti-air missiles and anti-ground missiles, in conjunction with a flexible unlimited-ammo nose-mounted gun weapon.

There are lots of ways to differentiate units that don't involve making them commander assassins.

But what's the benefit? If you make the burst damage increase very low and the ammo capacity very high then it's like fuel in supcom - mostly irrelevant, just one more bit of micro you have to deal with. The larger you make the effect the worse the ACU sniping issue becomes.

Why does this added complexity make the game better than the TA/supcom system? Why is it worth dealing with the ACU sniping problem and the extra micro?

Futuristic gunships are cooler agreed.

The problem with ammunition though is you have to compensate in some way for the reduced damage they can inflict over time due to them having to return to base, and largely the only way to do that is to increase the damage they do per salvo. Otherwise you just make air an inefficient source of damage.

This is what I get for working at work instead of reading the forums. I've just unburied myself from the 8 pages I was behind in this thread.

These particular issue can be solved with new automation features. Instead of having your aircraft beeline over hostile territory to the nearest resupply station, they could be given a retreat path that they will save for later. Once they come close enough to running out of fuel or ammo, they would automatically follow the safe reatreat path back to their refueling station.

Creating safe waypoints home could be reused by making them with Orders as First-Class Entities (OFCEs) which could be attached to retreat paths in one click. This ensures that for every group of planes you send into dangerous territory, you only have to tell them what to attack, and what retreat path to take home. This could even be configured for damaged planes that need repair, which would be useful in a game without fuel or ammo restrictions.

If you don't want to manage that process, simply stay with your planes until they run out of ammo, and tell them where to go when they're done. Players often do this already, when telling their aircraft to go home for repair.

ACU sniping does not have to be an issue. There are a number of solutions. Such as:
1) Make high damage aircraft weapons do less damage to ACUs (so aircraft would need to make more strikes)
2) Give the ACU active defense measures that have limited ability to intercept troublesome aircraft weapons (so you would need more aircraft)
3) Give the ACU decent anti-aircraft weapons (so ACU sniping becomes a late game issue)
4) Give the ACU cloaking ability that cost lots of energy (so it is hard to snipe the ACU late game)

Any combination of these could help solve that problem, if it turns out to be a real problem.

There's an in between, depending on precisely how many you can realistically muster and how long that takes. With limited ammo, you can make gunships act like raiders going in and chewing on anything undefended, instead of weak fire support to ground troops or interceptors (or have other major drawbacks like low speed/super low health/etc.).

An ugly, arbitrary hidden modifier, no thanks.

If the ACU has some kind of CIWS type system what stops it working vs other kinds of incoming fire? It's not as bad as hidden damage modifiers, but again, arbitrary. If it does work vs other incoming fire you're effectively buffing the ACU's health, which means aircraft remain more effective than other units.

That makes early aircraft unable to operate near the ACU, no raiding their base to try and knock out an engineer or power plant any more.

Then all ACUs will be invisible late game, which often leads to a tedious search to be able to end the game. Cloaking your ACU should be something that you have to invest in, if it's possible at all.

Yes, I'm sure there is some combination of changes which would address that particular problem - but each one of those changes has further knock on effects. Again, why is this better? What about the change makes it worth all this extra complexity and dev time?

It worked for nukes in TA. Also I see no reason why anything would be hidden.

If it is made realistic then it would likely be able to take on missiles, bombs, and shells. Artillery could be fusion/plasma balls so it may not be able to take them on. Also the speed, durability, and smartness of the projectile could be changed to make it get though the defense better if that were an issue.

Then wait for the engineer to stray from the ACU, it can only be in one place at a time, and expanding early to gather resources is probably going to be very important.

It was possible right off the bat in TA, it worked fine there. There would be no late game issue as you could simply take out the power infrastructure.

The first option is easy, and has no further knock on effects.
The second option is not easy unless they plan on implanting anti-missile type stuff already but some may fine it more palatable. Admittedly it could have a number of strange effects.
The third option is easier than the second but does suffer from changing the game from TA/SupCom.
The fourth option is pretty easy. It changes nothing from the TA standpoint as it was already implemented.
Why is this better? Some said that commander/ACU sniping would be an issue, these are some fixes that took a few minuets to think of and write down.
Regarding the complexity? It is mostly because the easy and simple solutions are too ugly according to people like you.

No, why is this whole concept of limited ammo better than TA/supcom? What flaw are you trying to address? Despite all the attempts to justify it no one has actually answered that basic question.

On September 1st in "New System for Aircraft" (viewtopic.php?f=61&t=35574&start=10)

Huh, you have had a very different experience of air battles than I have then. AA (both fixed and mobile) constrains where aircrafft can go like terrain and the radically different characteristics of different classes of aircraft (fighters vs bombers vs gunships vs transports) open plenty of strategic possibilities.

Yes, if you and your enemy sit in your base playing simcity until you both have a giant air force then throw them at each other it's boring. But it's boring if you do that with land units too. Small numbers of gunships can be used to harass outlying assets and draw out fighters to either engage with your own fighters or lure into range of AA. Bombers can perform suicidal strikes on high value targets, air dropping construction units and mobile stealth gens in amazingly fun.

So yeah, I don't see the supposed 'air is boring' problem.

I don't think anyone addressed the fact that the ammo system giving more burst damage means they are better at sniping everything rather than just the ACU, which isn't something I want in the game as aircraft are the most maneuverable units in the game, because then all aircraft would just play like mercies in supcom.
Not having ammo makes them do less immediate dps making it more possible to defend raids with your interceptors.

I don't want air gameplay to devolve to who can snipe other players power/mass more often/sooner