Is T1 stationary AA unerpowered now?

A simple question: is T1 stationary AA now underpowered?

I think it is. The reason is following: In the tourney I came up agains bomber spam and with combat fabbers my enemy had 5-10 bombers above my base before I managet to put my third factory up (which was going to bean air factory). A good strategy whose destructive punch got increased by my enemies excellent execution and the fact that I hadn't found my enemy yet (I REALLY NEED MY MEX ICONS BACK I CAN'T BE SPRNDING 5 MINUTES LOOKING AT THE SCREEN SEARCHING FOR MEXES AND WITHOUT THEM MY SPAWN SELECTION, EXPANSION AND SCOUTING ARE QUITE HINDERED). The first thing that got focused down was my combat fabber and my bot and unfinished air factory denying me the good and efficient bot AA or Air supperiority. I responded by putting up an anti air tower only to find them underwhelming. They did their job, but I needed to invest a lot of time into their production only to find that my enemy could send in a swarm of bombers and wreck havoc in my base for qiute a while before their bombers went down. At the end I was forced to invest into 6-7 aa towers (3 of which got bombed and my expansion got stopped) before I could rebuild my factories. I eventually did put a stop to his bombers and I managed to rebuild my base away from my commander but due to being forced to overinvestmrnt in AA and I had to stop one of my 2 suriviving expansion fabbers to rebuild my commander was left open to a ground attack and I lost.

You can get 3 mobile stingers for the cost of an AA turret. They are overwhelmingly better. Stationary defences should in general be better than mobile forces.

I find them cheap enough, but I haven't done much MP so Zaphod is probably correct.

Stationary AA has always been kinda meh compared to mobile AA. Rather than a simple damage buff, I'd love to see a range increase for stationary AA. Ideally stationary AA could fire at air before the air can attack rather than at the same time.

Not always. Ground AA used to be 100% completely worthless, while missile defense towers were alright. But that was back during the days of early Beta.

Missile Defense Towers certainly could use a buff. I'd like to see a slight range increase.

I should have just said meh. Before gunships it wasn't as much of an issue but I've never been impressed with the stationary AA especially on the range front.

I've talked about this before in previous posts...
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/did-anyone-else-notice.58496/page-2#post-921104
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/balance-of-flack-and-should-it-change.55880/page-6#post-863442

but the short version is

I'd like to see more types of AA, jack of all trades T1 AA similar to how it is now, T2 flak that is great against gunships, good against slower heavier bombers and horrible against faster planes, and a T2 advanced SAM that is great for picking off planes at distance, but horrible against large numbers due to a slower reload / burst fire / possible minimum range.

To go with that, I'd like to see more differentiation between bomber types (ie a heavy carpet bomber bomber for dealing light damage to large area (like clusters of units, factories etc) and a glass cannon fast moving bomber sort of like the strat bombers in SupCom with a single high yield bomb meant for dealing lots of damage to a single unit.

Maybe you didn't read my entire post. My bot factory and the single stinger got bombed by the swarm of 7 bombers that gout rushed out and sent my way. Stationary defense was the only defense I could go for.

EDIT:

The point is that I T1 stationary AA is sub par for the power of bombers we have now. Like I said I had 5 and he was still managing to take out my fabber, AA and after a couple of waved even factories. At the end he admitted that it the only correct counter was a blind air first or massive blind AA spamm. Also as I have said this wasn't something he though of or tried once and it worked, it was a strategy explicitly designed and practiced for the tourney. It was too well executed to just assume that I didn't counter it properly.

I very much want a long range slow rate of fire anti air.

I don't want a strat bomber.

We already kinda have one through the Bumblebee, now that it is better balanced. But I definitely don't want a high speed high yield bomber. Those types of things are always incredibly powerful.

That kind of bomber should be powerful, that's the whole idea behind it I don't think we should see the same type of power that SupCom had with its strat bombers because you can't cloak commanders (yet?) nor can you sheild them so obviously you have to balance it out to not be an instant win, making it have very low health would help. I'm not saying it would be easy to balance but I think it is possible.

You know what else I'd love to see? A better setup for bombing an area, something similar to the formation line drawing tool. Right now you can bomb a specific target, or you can use the area command to bomb a circle.

I'd much rather see a tool that let you draw a formation, pick a start point, pick and end point and the bombers will fly in that formation from start to end dropping bombs on any enemies below, or until they run out of bombs. The big difference between this and a circle area command would be that the bombers shouldn't pick a specific target in that area, they should just fly from start to end point dropping bombs on any enemy that is below, that way you don't have bombers that hit target A, then circle back to drop on target A again (which slows them down and makes it easier for them to get shot down)

If you made a very long shallow line of bombers you'd deal minor damage over a very large area (at least until they ran out of bombs), if you made a short but very deep formation you'd get lots of damage along the flight path.

Right, I was pointing out the stationary is UP compared to the mobile AA which is very good.

So you had 2 factories but only 1 AA which is pretty low. You should have at least 2 if not 3 purely to protect your engineers and combat fabbers from lone bomber snipes. If he bombs one of your factories then you can still assist your 2nd and pump out mobile AA which is really good. If you have any aggressive units you can immediately send them out to your opponent to raid him or force him to task bombers to deal with them.

Considering the time it takes for the missile to reach the target, they're okay but can still be killed by bombers before they get any more than two shots off. Flak is far better, having hitscan and near instant turning speeds.

Stingers/spinners suffer the same problem, but you can build them faster than you could a missile turret defense line. Hummingbirds are the best T1 AA you can get, but as you stated, you would need an air factory very early on, which would hinder your economy to defend against a tactic that might not even be used.

I think they just need a slightly increased range, and combat fabbers need a nerf.

I just played two games earlier where someone got out t1 bot factory and t1 air within first 1-2 minutes. This may not seem so bad, but by assisting the air factory they were able to easily build enough fighter/bombers to overwhelm my defense within the following 30 seconds. Once you loose your only combat fabber this early, its impossible (or very nearly so it would seem) to catch up.

I was able to use the same strat against others, and it seems there is no easy counter to this quick and early death :/

Sure, you can spam anti-air, but that is apm and resources your opponent did not have to spend, and as a result leaves you at a disadvantage.

tl dr: t1 anti air is not the issue, combat fabbers allow super early air and easy snipe.

At least, that's how it appears to me.

id like to see them attack ground again...

okay, so, I got my laugh in...

okay, that longrange damage with weakish hit, that sounds alright. Like AA pelter. But with low damage don't need to be expensive.

If flak damage was nerfed, had limited range, and larger aoe, then ideally it would be t1 AA turret, the missile would be t2, you could defend against bulk air with acceptable losses with flak, you can slowly dig forward with missile AA, so it makes sense.

Full ack.
Flak as T1 and missile defense as T3 worked perfectly well in SupCom. And the current configuration does not, small missiles without any AoE just won't work at all against early bomber rushes while the OP flak later on fully denies bomber strikes. Definitely the wrong order....

The second

The current combat fabber balance surely doesn't help either, but currently any mobile AA is better than stationary, or rather stronger. Stationary units are supposed to be the strongest, but stationary. With T1 AA they are just costly.

EDIT: You get a like for that signature though.

Flak was T2 in Supcom, single shot AA cannons were T1. Flak should do less damage but with a decently large AOE, T1 misses are pretty fast firing but can focus on less enemy's at once, taking out single units easily with higher alpha damage.

Sniper AA vs scatter gun AA.

Following the trend of Basic being generalized and T2 being specialized, might I suggest that T1 Missile Towers gain a slight AoE, while Stingers remain how they are now? The purpose behind this is to make bases and encampments less vulnerable to mass bombers, while mobile armies remain open targets to an enemy with air superiority. By extension I would also suggest T2 AA have both a Flak tower and something like a high-damage/gatling tower, but that's more of a personal wish than the fruit of analysis.

What trend?

The preferred trend.