Just wondering what the community's thoughts are on aircraft having ir flares, they recharge every so often and have a certain percent chance of causing guided missiles to miss.
Do you mean Universally or used as a method to help make different units distinctive and provide variety? Mike
Universally, as in every aircraft has them but amount of flares and recharge time varies per aircraft, sand when I say flares I don't mean visual lights I mean flares as in the things aircraft shoot out to confuse incoming guided missiles.
Because it's boring if it's universally applied. Think of it like that, imagine if every tank was amphibious, yeah it's cool and neat, but because everything can do it you lose a lot of variety. Same thing for shields, if everything has them they aren't special anymore. Mike
You also run into issues where sudden;y any missile based weapon is instantly less effective against any unit, and what if there are other AA options why use something that's guaranteed to be less effective? At that point you might as well just make missiles weaker all around instead of adding in more complexity to the system. Mike
Well then it can hold some potential, but as always the devil is in the details of the specific execution. Mike
It might be cool if T2 airplanes shot missiles and used flares to defend from other missiles, while T1 airplanes had machines guns and no missiles. So T2 airplanes would be good offensively against T1 airplanes, and evenly matched against T2 airplanes, but T1 airplanes would have a close range offensive bonus against T2 airplanes because the flares won't effect machine guns. A T2 fighter could probably swat T1 airplanes out of the sky before they even see it, but T1 fighters could mow down T2 bombers easily, at least provided they can catch it.
For all planes; no thanks. For a limited selection of plane types; so long as a good and proper amount of balancing is done.
Something like that can work, but weapons have so many mutable elements you don't want to pigeon hole the them too much. Mike
so that bombers can bypass defense even better and nuke the commander without being hit? no thanks. give it to scouts - fine
I would like to see this for scouts. However that also means you could just build 100 scouts to accompany your 7 Bombers and have the Bombers coast over a pillow of harmless missiles and glowing balls to the location of the Commander, merrily dropping their bombs upon him and flying off into the sunset entirely unharmed.
This was my first thought on seeing this. It's a cool idea but I think this will be very hard to get right.
Thats why we need to have varied methods of AA, not just missile based. Explosive flak and/or minigun type would ignore this.
I actually really like the idea of countermeasures to weapons in general like flares / chaff etc. Not to do it just to do it, but it makes it that much easier to have specific unit roles in a game where pretty much everything can shoot everything and there aren't fake effectiveness adjustments.
First of all it kind of doesn't make much sense in the PA world to shoot IR and chaff to fool autonomous robots. Why wouldn't a missile just use whatever optics all other robots are using rendering any countermeasures ineffective. Also if it would be implemented it would be would be really silly just to see them on some units, why wouldn't you equip everything with cheap flares or chaff dispensers. It wouldn't even make much sense in a game play either as the effect would be either completely random or the equivalent of just degrade the performance off all missiles.
