Mobile AA should shoot ground units

That's one of the things I liked most about ta...

I hate the rock paper scissors mechanics in other games.

Also as for aa being dominant in ta... Only if you were doing it wrong! The aa units had no armor to speak of so were easy to counter with fast skirmish units that could get in close.

Yeah, but they didn't get in close, because missile unit spam killed them faster than they could close in. If you got in close your opponent was ******* it up.

Um. What 'fast skirmisher' unit, other than the Samson or Slasher, are you talking about? Those are the mobile skirmishers, pretty much. They can fire on the move with perfect accuracy, and have longer range than any other basic land unit (in OTA; mods fixed the Sam Spam Problem).

You literally cannot counter massed Samsons or Slashers with basic units in vanilla TA, except with more of them. They will just back up as soon as you try to charge in, and you will never catch them. They have more range than every other basic unit, and are also faster than almost everything, and anything that could catch them will be dead long before it does so.

Different mods took different approaches to solving the problem. The most popular one was invented in Uberhack; making the Samson and Slasher dedicated anti-air. Other approaches were less popular, such as adding new units to the basic factory to counter them and/or nerfing them into the ground.

Zero-K still has the Slasher, and it is surprisingly similar to the OTA slasher in that it attacks air and ground with virtually perfect accuracy at long range. But it must stand still to fire, which means assault units will actually demolish them because you can't kite with Slashers any more. It's funny how after so much experimentation with all kinds of weird Samson and Slasher designs and models, ZK is right back to a unit very similar to the OTA Slasher, with a minor modification like forcing it to stand still that actually works quite well to give it an interesting and special role.

The idea that those two dedicated AA units being so broken that by nerfing them into the ground (IE: unable to shoot at ground units at all), that doesn't get rid of the problem of them being too powerful vs ground units, it just ignores the problem and throws the whole idea away. I've always hated that type of design because the only thing it proves is the designer doesn't want to balance the unit so they just want to take the easy way out. Problem isn't solved, it's ignored and creates static and dull gameplay.

Not saying that they weren't really poweful units, but if they did a less damage to ground units overall, it would immediately solve the problem. You just need to find the point where they stop doing so much damage to ground units while in large groups that they can't be approached at all. To be fair, they already do very little damage compared to the weapons of other units, but if you dropped it too much they wouldn't have any purpose firing at the ground. Perhaps just by simply making their acceleration lower with a slower turret rotation speed, you could get a drop on them more easily. Make them attack one direction then flank them before they can get away. The thought put into units has to be more than halfassed.

I played ota online for years competitively.... Aa spam was only op if you sat there and let your opponent ammas hordes of the things. Early raids with flashes, aka or peewees easily stopped that from happening and remember flashes and so on were much faster. I always found storm spam worse to deal with, especially when advancing....

No one launched early raids with peewees, because an early peewee raid meant Kbots first, and so you'd already lost by choosing the a factory which produced a slower expanding unit with lower build speeds.

You also got the jeffy, which was both faster than the peewee and a better raider.

I won plenty of games kbot first! Depends on the map though of course.

Comet Catcher with kbot start in OTA = loose agreed. Maps with rougher terrain like green haven was kbot start or loose. My comment was simply to point out that aa spam certainly wasn't unstoppable. Agreed with a vehicle start jeffies were a must for early raids. Flash tanks were good against aa units though as they could outrun them.

After messing with some AA bots today.......they cant even turn fast enough to fire at planes...........They really all do need a revamp.

I think flash tanks were more effective on Green Haven, but that map was pretty much unique in having tactics developed specifically for it.

units have roles to them and they should be kept that way imo
meaning i personaly only want aa to shoot at what it is supposed to shoot at ... mainly AIR ...

I think its a great idea to have Anti air bots/tanks shoot ground units. It would also be good if tanks/bots could shoot slow moving air units... this could help balance out gunships if they get added.

TA's pro gaming was significantly different from its casual gamers, and you don't really see any pro TA games anymore. Pros used mostly Flash/Sampson spam, with a VERY late T2. FOO called for crushing your enemy under a dominant wave of T1 before they could do anything.

Casual games were much more open. I once won a game with nothing but Jeffies and prayers, THAT was fun. It only takes 3 shots from a Jeffy to kill a Metal Extractor, so you could completely deny your opponent economy just by having these things zip around dodging bullets and blowing stuff up.

TA didn't do everything right. Sampsons were way OP, and they were nerfed into the ground in almost every mod because a unit that can shoot at everything with incredible efficiency, unerring accuracy and decent damage is bluntly overpowered. It was one of TA's glaring problems, which is a thing old games tend to have; another good example of this would be Deus Ex. It was a positively wonderful game with a bunch of gaping holes shot through it in the form of major gameplay/technical issues. But nobody cared about the holes because they just made the game look cool, kinda like ripped jeans.

Everyone saying raiding with peewees and flashes is incredibly powerful is correct. But in a straight up fight, a big blob of Samsons/Slashers is straight up dominant. On most maps vehicles were better, but on maps with decent amounts of rough terrain bots were totally viable.

However in my opinion OTA is just the beginning of a very long story of thousands of third-party units, balance mods, and mega mod packs that max out TA's unit and weapon ID's and rebalance everything. Countless variations on TA from Absolute Annihilation to Zero K then followed. And many of them were considerable improvements on OTA, and then the next crop was a considerable improvement on the best designs at the time.

OTA was a wonderful game, but make no mistake it had a lot of problems. But the core of the gameplay was so compelling and so flexible, and the basic structure created such a moddable game, that practically everything that can be tried has been tried. After years of evolution, games like Zero-K look very different from OTA, but are vastly better in every respect, with better economy design, more diverse and better balanced units, and much more varied gameplay. Features like flat balancing units to create diverse gameplay, features like mex overdrive to balance expansion and infrastructure development, these are huge steps forward.

Specifically about mobile anti-air, it should go without saying that there should be several units that can attack both ground and air, to varying degrees of effectiveness. The current paradigm of having one unit that shoots ground and one unit that is dedicated anti-air is not very interesting. More unit diversity will fix this, hopefully.

The issue with the Samson was not that it shot both air and ground. The ability to attack ground units at such range, and being able to fire on the move, with perfect accuracy, in conjunction with its good movement speed, was the problem. Just because some mods solved this problem by making it dedicated anti-air does not mean it could not have been designed differently, such as in ZK by making it unable to shoot on the move. Or perhaps by splitting its weapon into two different weapons, one against air, and a different weapon against ground.

Personally I think the usefulness of AA can come through additional specialization perhaps there AA weapons can also functions as Ground to Sub Missiles, allowing you to use them to attack subs along your coastline.

I think allowing them to shoot other tanks, will confuse the purpose of this unit.

for that you got torpedotowers and later torpedobombers

it may balance out gunships ... but i fear that it rather unballances the game as a whole and makes it more complicated to balance propperly

Hopefully.......

And what about depth-charge satellites?

i am not entirely against it but i don´t think it´s THAT useful nor realy preferable honestly

That's like buttering toast with a spoon from the next province over.

the thing is you don´t .. you do have 1 (minimum) to 2 aa units per type weither it´s intresting or not is subjektive
what is neccesary is clear roledefinition between units ... just because you are able to shoot an aircraft with a pistol doesn´t mean you should do that instead use that portable SAM or that flakvehicle that is specificaly designed for that ... imho having multiple jack of all trades doesn´t make for intresting gameplay either ... i also would be rather annoyed if aa starts to attack passing groundunits instead of aa while patrolling ...