I'm interested in why this was decided, and whether it's temporary? It seems like an odd decision given the method of fire is clearly exactly the same, visually and mechanically, and the arbitrary distinction is weird and confusing, not to mention sacrilegious (anti-TA).
Not much to add other than I agree. Laser turrets and rocket turrets need to either be distinct or combined into one unit otherwise the incentive is always with the rockets because of the ground+air capability and the ridiculously low cost when compared to lasers. I'm sure its being worked on and has been discussed into oblivion by others.
I don't understand. Laser towers are far more solid of a choice against land forces then the AA turret that can struggle to take down even a small squad of units, let alone a major attack.
My query is nothing to do with effectiveness. It's a question on why mobile AA can only hit air targets, but AA structure can hit land AND air despite having almost identical aesthetics and projectile mechanics. It seems like an odd arbitrary choice, and I would assume a conscious decision by the devs since mobile AA could target land in the past.
I like current rockets. The reason why, is spammed they quickly build to cover area with light resistance. I wouldn't call them aa, i would call them all way. They put up half the struggle of lasers against land btw. I don't think they were intentional, but they are very balanced. Honestly, they need a dedicated aa turret, like the missiles just without the long stand, aimed perpetually upwards, with slightly longer range higher damage tracking missiles, and half the rate of fire. Also, flak. Just... flak. Edit: dude, modify the "longshot" model to use for the dedicated antiair missile turret! You know what i mean Uber
Mobile AA is very underpowered at the moment. I would wait until they are slightly useful before thinking about specifics.
There's a reason none of the spiritual successors to TA carried that decision forward. Hint: it's because it sucked and led to one dimensional unit balance.
I can't disagree more with what you just said. There is a place for dedicated AA units, but that should be for specialised AA. There should be general units that can shoot both air and ground. Whats on your list of spiritual successors? I can only think of SupCom that didn't follow TA, but that changed a lot of things for the worse.
I wouldn't mind if units were bound by where they can fire simply by their turret attributes and move speeds and damage differences and such. I just think that this rocket turret was an intentional design. I don't even technically it is an AA turret anymore, it is just the only turret that can shoot air atm. Strength wise, a handful of dox gets in, but there is never just 1, but a handful of dox are roughly faster to build and deploy, then there are levelers and such which just eat these turrets even when built instant-fast late game. My preference, is they add a shorter turret with a missile pod aimed diagonally at the sky and make it fire faster or stronger missiles. Because right now t2 bombers are even more powerful than levelers against the all purpose missile turret, a field of missile turrets can be cleared by roughly 8 t2 bombers.
Why? TA did this and it didn't work, because weapons which work great against air (which require range, speed and homing) proved to be fantastic against ground to. To balance that you need to get into arbitrary damage dealing and make your game painful to learn.
In TA they are good at attacking ground only when you mass them vs. smaller armies. If you went all out missile spam any sizable army consisting of tanks could steamroll them. They just aren't as good as people remember them to be. As for balancing you don't need to fudge the damage. You can give air units less hp then ground units. You can change how these things shoot at ground. They don't have to be great at AA and they don't have to be great at killing ground units. Saying that they can't be balanced is just stupid, it may be harder then your average tank, but its still very possible to do.
Except they don't, because they die before getting into range through radar targeting, they die to missile tower spam, they die tripping over the wreckage of the tanks that died before them. Maybe the meta changes, but in the early 00's the TA top level scene was dominated by missile spam, both mobile and towers.
I'm not asking for mobile AA to be allowed to shoot ground, I'm asking why mobile AA and structural AA have different rules. If the concern is that missiles shouldn't be allowed to target ground, then so be it, but the inconsistency is my issue.
With a rebalancing of the single laser tower that might work, it could fill the current AA tower niche for MEX defence.Whether AA towers would still see much use without anti-ground capability is debatable though. I'd be surprised if we see much in the way of mobile AA for the same reason, you're wasting your factory production abilities on a half-way unit. Better to get fighters for shooting down planes and dedicate those ground factories to anti-ground capabilities.
Hopefully Uber's direction of trying to make every unit useful for the entirety of the game will see they get a good fixing up, there's multiple directions they could go with it. I don't mind which, just be consistent
Flak might make the game lag a ton Longer range missiles? higher DPS? yeah. Sounds like someone wants a T2 AA launcher.....0.o Maybe something more specific.
