So as the title says this will be my little view on how bombers should work in both tiers. We've heard time and time again that there is not supposed to be a tech tree, there's basic and advanced. Now I know this game is still in it's Be- I mean.. Gamma phase, but that doesn't mean I can't throw out a little idea every now and then on how to give each a more specialized role! Now.. the way I see it- the role of a basic bomber should be more for direct attacks. They should do very high damage in a small area and very little damage as it dissipates, essentially being used more for taking out tougher units. The advanced bomber however should aim more at being an army breaker. It has a very small high damage area yet has a large medium damage area, and finally a very large low damage area. The role of it is not necessarily to blow up all the units in it's AOE but instead to actually bring them down to much lower health. Depending on the area the units are in it's AOE it could cause whole groups to go down to half or less of their initial health, a few killed in the more concentrated areas. Please note, all unit sizes and ranges are not perfectly to scale. Color Code: Dark red = High damage area. Bright red = Medium damage area. Orange = Low damage area. Yellow = Falloff damage area. I'll start with some examples on changes to the Basic Bomber. 1: Basic Bomber. (1) Range of weapons and sight. It has a large range because of it's payload, missiles, being able to change their trajectory. (2) Examples of it's role in combat as a single unit. As you can see the bomber fires it's air to ground missiles towards the tanks, the damage is very highly centralized, and does not really go out much further than a single advanced tank. Now, for the Advanced Bombers. 2: Advanced Bombers. (1) Range of weapons and sight. So as you can see the Advanced Bombers have less range than the Basic ones because of the fact they.. Drop bombs. The sight however is slightly increased giving them a little more view over the battlefield. (2) Examples of it's role in combat as a single unit. (Please note again, these are not perfectly to scale and can be tweaked to work accordingly.) So, as you can see, the bomber drops a few bombs, these bombs causing a very small amount of high damage whilst having a very large area of effect. The larger the area the more drop off of damage. 3: How will these bombers work in a combat scenario, together? (1): Scenario- An army of units are left in the open. The group consists of half basic bots and tanks, a few advanced tanks are dotted in as support. They're rapidly approaching your base, what do? (1) Send your Advanced bombers in, carpet bombing the masses of troops. (2) The army suffers sever losses, many units lost, others damaged heavily. Now you opt to send in your Basic bombers to take out the higher priority targets, the Advanced tanks who have managed to take little damage from the blasts. (3) Sit and watch sipping from your delicious drink as the remaining forces of the assault are picked off by your high damage Basic Bombers. Viola:So now you have seen my interpretation of how Basic, and Advanced, can be played off without making either redundant! I'd really like feedback on my suggestions, come to critique? Add your own suggestion to the pool of endless ideas? Well.. I'd love to hear it! Begin Debate.
You mean a sniper unit. Correct? Regardless: I like this idea - it's certainly better than the ones I've seen floating around. It would be interesting to see how it feels in combat.
I mean that right now, you can rush peregrines and gunships on a mid to large size planet and there is nothing the other player can do about it besides mirror that strategy. They can defend with flak, but never with enough to protect more than the main base. That leaves the gunships free to kill everything else, and with that kind of map control, the game is basically over. My issue with t2 air is that the only good counter to gunships is peregrines, and the only counter to peregrines is more peregrines. The fact that t2 air is its own counter pretty much makes it the apex predator at the top of the food chain, but the bombers aren't actually the problem. Balance is much better than it was before gamma, but it still needs work.
*cough* mobile T2 AA - oh wait..... That doesn't solve much. Ditch peregrines. Replace them with torpedo bombers. Let's just go pure t1 fighters. Up their damage and health a bit, go from there.
Well I always saw gunships as being a bit more of a gamble unit as well as a bit more like the infantry of the skies. Gunships would take a similar role to that of bots except in the air. They are fast, agile, low damage- high fire-rate, units with low health. Gunships should be extremely vulnerable to AA and be limited to one unit each they have low damage but very high dps. They'd have a closer range than a basic bomber but would have a slightly larger sight range possibly? Picture is related.
Getting rid of peregrines would solve a lot. The other option might be to make peregrines good at killing gunships and bombers, but give the aoe weapon to hummingbirds. That way hummingbirds kill peregrines, which in turn kill bombers and gunships.
What about merging Hummingbird / Bumblebee (Hummingbee?) in to a basic Fighter / Bomber that fills neither role particularly well? Then accentuate the chosen specialisations of the Peregrine / Hornet / Kestral. e.g. High-speed AA / High-speed high-alpha-strike with long recharge / Low-speed constant-damage AG.
Okay I think I may have come up with a bit of a solution to our fighter problem.. I'm going to follow my example with my Advanced and Basic Bomber idea and slap that on the fighters! My idea now is similar to cptconundrum's but elaborated further. The advanced fighters could play a role as more of an Attacker Aircraft, it would be more for taking out bombers and have something more similar to a dps weapon rather than a high damage low dps weapon like a missle. The fighter could have three or so Pulse guns? which would be firing at bombers in close ranges, they'd be slightly faster than a bomber so they could keep up, their turn rate, slightly better as well. They'd have somewhere around half the range of a basic fighter but further visual range. The basic fighters however would do more direct damage and would be better at well.. fighting. They're more like a dogfighter, fighters fight fighters and attackers basically. Attackers fight bombers. Fighters can only focus on one target at a time but they can deal more damage per shot whilst advanced can deal with multiple targets but with hampered direct damage attacking with weapons similar to flak? Picture is related. The glorious food chain of air!
@cptconundrum i'm not going to argue the point of peregrines being a game ender, but you've got me sitting here thinking; they really shouldn't be! they've got zero aa abilities - on paper they're vulnerable to ground AA as well as fighters! now that I think about it, I don't even try to do peregrines unless I've got air [at least mostly] locked down, I just kinda assumed they'd fold like paper to even t1 fighters... but never actually tried it. duh. are you saying they're tough enough to stand up to fighters? maybe that's the achilles heel they need, if they don't have it already (like I'm realizing now that I assumed they did!)
Well the real problem is everyone would spam both Gunships and Advanced Fighters (Peregrines). The fighters would take out any Basic fighters you had in seconds when grouped together because of their splash damage and high health. The Gunships would be virtually invincible.
While I do like the idea in general I do think that your proposal does not gel with PA's, well, popcorny combat, i.e. units dying to a cough or two hard stares when it comes to it. Also the tiered area of effect is not in line with most of the other area effects which would make it hard to convey properly and feel a bit out place, too. All in all, I think the T1 bomber should follow the traditional approach of carpet-bombing but with much lower speed and bombs dropping almost vertically and the T2 bomber carrying a sort of cruise missile with no area effect but long deployment range to avoid/minimize anti-air exposure. The T1 would excel in environments without anti-air coverage and theT2 in contested areas - but only against single targets.
The Peregrines are OP because they went from a single high damage missile to rapid fire multiple missiles. This is why they slaughter T1 fighters (plus AoE which I think is still in there). Possible ways to resolve: 1. Peregrine goes to a single missile. Hummingbird slowed down. Hummingbird fighter is more cost effective but Peregrine gets to choose its engagements in good hands. 2. Remove the Peregrine. I think you'd be stuck with the exact same setup as now though, but with Hummingbirds instead. However, it would be harder to lose control of the skies as T1 air is in almost every build. 3. Differentiate the air tiers by range akin to the Slammer and the GIL-E. The Hummingbird is a nippy close up fighter, while the Peregrine is a slow firing, long-range interceptor. Downside is this encourages micro and with air being as maneuverable as it is I don't think it solves the issue. 4. Mobile flak. You can lose the air but you can still protect yourself. 5. Move flak to T1.5 but make it track slowly, so it takes out units which stick around, but isn't great against fighters rushing by. Now the Peregrine still owns the air but the other player has real ground options to deal with the things the Peregrine's protect. You'd need to ensure flak didn't go stupid and track circling Peregrine's though. Flak being at T2 seems to be an issue. Advanced fabbers have better things to be doing than building flak, which is why everyone goes T2 air. You get a counter with incredible mobility and you free up your valuable T2 fabbers to go T2 eco and nukes. I said in another thread that I only ever see flak used as a means to guard the commander.
