Well you managed to get me to chip in on Kickstarter and come out of lurking as well.. My friends and I have played a ton of TA and FA over the years and have had a problem in both games that we couldn't find a workaround for. Our issue is the swarming of aircraft and their ability to become unstoppable in sufficient numbers. In TA if you could come up with around 20-30 tech 2 bombers and scout out the enemy commander it was possible to carpet bomb him through any amount of anti air defenses. If you knew how to do the bomber bug you could force those bombers to drop a continuous steam of bombs and wreck bases in short order even if you didn't snipe the commander. FA had the same issue where if you had 20-30 or so T3 bombers come in spread out so the flak couldn't take them out before they could drop their bombs and you could bomb through any amount of shields and snipe a commander. The counter in both games was advanced fighters but they had their own issues in that once they reached a critical mass they could prevent the enemy from fielding any air power and thus be unable to respond to harrying attacks quickly. In many FA team games it devolved into flinging blobs of fighters into the enemy's blob where whoever had the most won and then used their held back bombers to snipe for victory. Valid strategy maybe but not very satisfying. This issue only really comes up in extended team games but was sufficiently unstoppable that we had to come up with gentleman's rules to avoid relying on it. Given your focus on allowing long games I worry about the issue cropping up again if there are heavy bombers in the game and sufficient time to get a large force of them. A side question is whether you want to put in engineering stations in the game like they were in FA? That rapid building power focused on a small few air plants was what allowed the air war in FA to become so dominant. As fun as it could be I think it detracted from the overall game. Anyways it's early days and you have a monster task before you. Good luck and thanks!
Heh fair enough, lots of time for balance once the game is actually a go. I guess I'll bring it up again once things are further along. Thanks for the reply...
Nah its, easy, what you do is build outlying fire bases in a wide area so that the planes take significant attrition before reaching the base. make a pattern of a shield surrounded by half a dozen spread flak towers and a couple of teir 3 anti air, maybe an engineering tower to keep it autonomous. not sure what this has to do with PA though.
In large FA team games with a 500 unit cap you couldn't defend mainly due to that unit limit. It wasn't uncommon to have 1000 ASF in action between all sides. The ground defenses just didn't have the ability to stop it unless you devoted all of your unit cap to it. If you spent your cap on anti air you left yourself open to a ground attack. This is why later FA team matches almost always were "No Air/No Nukes" games. Air swarms with engineering stations were too potent and the air swarms could pick off anti nukes with impunity and allow nukes through once a critical mass was met. It was never an issue in the 1v1 or even 2v2 because the matches were too fierce to let someone sit back and amass fighters or bombers in those numbers. In a 3v3 or especially in a 4v4 you could buy time to have one person build up their air force. Given the disparity between tech levels it was possible for a small handful of T3 fighters to clear all of the enemy T1/T2 and then use that advantage to keep the enemy from fielding sufficient T3 fighters themselves to counter back. Once engineering stations came into play you could pump out a T3 fighter every couple of seconds. Unless the enemy team was doing the same you could wipe out their air force and simply patrol over their base. In late game you could replenish your fighter numbers faster than static defenses could knock them down and lock them out of the air war permanently. A variation on this is what I worry about since the game is using a similar economic model as TA/FA and has the same guiding hands behind it.
Were flak cannons AoE weapons? Because I was going to say having a cluster of bombers would be wiped out with AoE weaponry
They were, but Flak was only T2, and T3 air was too fast and too high for Flak to be decisive, you might get a hit occasionally but it wouldn't do much damage. Mike
Yeah, would be nice if they put in better AoE flak weapons, or better yet, give planes low health and relatively big explosions, so if they are in a large group, blowing up one will damage all the others. That would stop people from grouping too many planes in one group, and attack in several groups instead.
No, that would make attacking with any size group pointless. FA is kinda weird in that it had Mobile AA for everything BUT T3, which is in part why Air is so powerful, other issues like the fact T3 air was so fast that even the T3 AA Turrets couldn't do anything to stop the attack, just damage/kill units after the fact, especially considering they tended to overkill the first unit to get in range letting the rest go by until they reloaded... If we get the larger unit variety in PA we're hoping for we should have several AA options we can use depending on the situation. Mike
Why would it make groups of any size be pointless? I don't mean that one plane blowing up would immediately take down the whole group, just that it would damage the nearby units a bit. Basically, the more units you have in a group, the more damage you are getting from each unit lost (because it would hurt your other planes). Here is an example. Say you you have a group with 20 planes, and another one with 100. If a plane blows up, it does 20 damage (no clue what values units will have for health, would need to be balanced) to the nearby planes. If you have 20 planes, losing one plane would deal 19*20 = 380 total extra damage. If you have 100 planes, losing one would do 99*20 = 1980 total extra damage. By total extra, I mean the amount of damage to each plane added up. This would mean it would be far less efficient to have 1 very large group as opposed to a bunch of smaller ones.
Having low health planes that damage each other just ends up making planes less useful. In FA for example once you had a few flak units the T1 and T2 bombers were just a donation of resources to the enemy. In T1/T2 there was a decent balance between bomber mobility and the ability of ground based defenses to counter it. The T3 bombers were so fast that the flak couldn't take them out fast enough and the SAM turrets overkilled individual targets rather than spreading it out more efficiently. Even with the low tech bombers or gunships you could make sure they survived long enough to drop their payload by bringing them in a spread out line as opposed to a clump. The AA would clean house once they started clumping together on their second runs but that first run was nigh unstoppable. Having a smart system where the AA units and turrets split their fire would certainly help but at least in FA that wouldn't stop that first drop. With your solution it removes the ability to have a large air war without eliminating the ability to mass bomber units and get that one critical drop in. All you need to do is send your units on a linear patrol to spread them out nicely and then have them converge on the target. With sufficient spread they barely take any damage from each other blowing up until they've made the first drop.
And that's micro-management, which is exactly what we don't want. I think he's right about just making air defenses smarter about killing more planes, rather than killing the first plane they see as fast as possible.
The simple trick would be to make sure they can't occupy the same space at the same time. True 3D pathfinding, to an extent. The reason why Aircraft were so effective in TA is that you could "stack" them and concentrate fire to devastating effect.
Ideally allowing for mid-air collisions then? I think alot of the problems with air and naval units is that they behave too much like land units. Move towards the enemy & fire. Since air units never collide it led to stupid swarms, throwing blob against blob and the one with the most units wins. Since sea units are big, slow, and have large health bars compared to the damage they do, and don't collide, it led to fleets just sailing towards each other, parking at point blank range and sticking around for a bit till one side wins. Adding collision damage may fix the blob issue for aircraft, leading to nice extended dogfights and hilarious failures as dogfights are frequently interrupted by piloting accidents. Also allows for aircraft to crash into high enough mountains if they are distracted by a target, increasing the importance of terrain. For ships, I'd suggest collision damage and slow acceleration & large turning circles, so the battles might consist more of fleets sailing past each other and firing till out of range, then circling back and doing it again. A bit like bombers vs a base, but with two sides. Also allows for one fleet to pursue another. Adds movement and constant excitement to the battle. Also allows for ships to run aground and to ram each other. Allows for smaller ships to be treated as "boats" and behave like classic TA/Supcom naval vessels. I have sort of gone off topic but there we go. Some suggestions.
Air units shouldn't be able to damage each other through piloting incompetence. That's putting too much of a strain on the AI. These air warfare issues sound pretty game specific. You can make AA which is able to deter aircraft swarms. I would wait to see some units first.
Agreed, a lot of the "issues" being raised here are stemming form SupCom, but some of the issues have nothing to do with the aircraft themselves as much as counters and the Tier balance as I pointed out before, I know the guys at Uber know about these cause it's something we analyzed on the GPG forums yeeeeeears ago, lets wait until we know more about Uber's plans for air combat before trying to fix "issues". Mike
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=34822 I think you guys need to take a look at the air fuel thread. It discusses some of the issues that drive the problems associated with air warfare; specifically that it is like land warfare but less interesting.
