Static vs Mobile Defenses

You absolutely could win in TA by building nothing but aircraft. In fact it was the best way to win on large maps. Ground to air weapons obviously can't keep up with air units, and you CANNOT build enough anti-air to stop an enemy's air deathball EVERYWHERE. You have to build an airblob of your own just to not lose.

You make a good point about the separation of planets serving as a mobility barrier to aircraft. However I would like to see arbitrarily scalable planet size as well as arbitrary number of planets. I for one think having very large planets like a very large conventional RTS map should be the primary game design focus. Multiple planets then serve to have multiple simultaneous boards, and would be that much more complex and harder to play.

The game should be as interesting as another RTS game like TA even with only a single planet. Multi-planet options, moons, asteroids, etc. will then compound the game further. The depth of a single planet thus makes planet-scale operations that much more significant. The ability to have a base on a moon is hugely significant if the game could be fully internalized to the planet. And destroying an entire map becomes a HUGE play.

For example, having a very large planet with a couple quite small moons in orbit sounds like a very interesting game setup. Having 1 to N small and discrete maps is less interesting than having big planets with huge wars on their surface.

In line with the topic here, would not a kind of superior AA system be prudent to defend players from stupidly used air blob?

Something that is more useful on clusters of high-speed targets the on any individual high-speed target.

Having better AA makes air less powerful, but doesn't solve the problem. Stronger AA just increases the size of the map needed before air units' independent mobility per cost starts to run away. Larger maps means more area to cover with AA, and simultaneously more resources to put into the air blob. Stronger AA increases the size of the blob needed to overpower it, but the blob can be everywhere, and the AA cannot. You cannot build enough AA sufficient to defeat the blob everywhere.

The only solution that actually fixes the problem is to limit air units' mobility. Either by making them slow (which seems a poor solution) or by tethering them to units/structures which are slow, or even immobile.

The point of aircraft is their mobility.

And the idea of this AA would be to prevent a critical mass of aircraft from being effective in one area.

The point isn't to defeat the blob everywhere, but to prevent it from being dominant where you dictate it.

And overall better AA will prevent players from devoting large blobs of aircraft to an attack due to the problem of losing more aircraft then from a normal air raid due to stacking AOE damage.

No blobs, because a blob won't be overwhelming AA, because aircraft should never, ever, be able to overwhelm a players AA so long as both players are playing properly, using aircraft to raid targets, but never overwhelm them without significant casualty's.

Even stacking AOE damage can be overwhelmed with either micro, or sheer numbers. There is also a dangerous possibility of either forcing an AA turtle on a single location with mass splash damage AA- this is effectively the same as losing the game, it just takes longer for you to die. If your choices are airblob or AA turtle on a single location, creating the Iron Curtain of anti-air, then you should always choose the airblob and go kill your opponent with it.

I agree the point of aircraft is their mobility- meaning they should stay fast and dangerous. Which is why I think they should be tethered to an airbase or carrier, with a long operational range. If they fly 20x faster than a ground unit can move, and can fly 3000km, hit a target, and head back to base, then they remain highly mobile, dangerous units.

What they can't do under this arrangement is blob up en masse and fly anywhere on a planet together, killing everything in their path. They are tied to their base or carrier. Now, if you have an airblob's worth of carriers in range of the target, then go nuts. Overwhelm their AA with air units. But that's quite a different proposition compared to air units being able to fly anywhere on the map at speed.

^^ This plus long radar range and cheap anti air rocket towers. Combined with your own air patrols for early detection and radar jamming so the planes come in blind greatly reduced air power in TA. Ive never seen anyone build straight air and win in TA but then again any game i played had waves of rocket towers ringing my base for air blob insurance.

I do agree with what you are saying.

And in the topic thread in question you will find me agreeing with the idea.


I still hold down the idea however that Proper AA defences (Not just a dower with a SAM on top, but something concrete) should be expensive to run and build, but be nigh indestructible from the air.

Possibly some kind of missile command, designed to fire fighter sized AA missiles to exterminate clustered aircraft?

I don't think static AA should be indestructible from the air, but I do think the design of static AA should be such that it is tricky for air units to engage effectively.

Very long range SAM sites with extremely high lethality, for example, which can be destroyed by air units, but obviously you have to fly within range for some time, which is going to cost you a few planes.

Cheap and powerful shorter-range static dedicated AA like flak guns should be murder for a big cloud of planes to loiter over. However such guns should be cheap enough that you usually wouldn't want to spend your limited time and firepower shooting the anti-air instead of your intended target.

A light anti-air structure which is suited for large AA screens covering large areas is also a good idea. A structure of this type would also need limited anti-ground capability or a second cheap defensive structure which can defend it against enemy light units like scouts. Can't have a single recon cutting a swathe through your wide-area AA screen so easily. For units like bombers, gunships, fighters, etc. it would be a painful experience to fly over an area peppered with these area-AA structures, but no single one of them is really worthwhile to attack.

Indeed.

And such a AA fort could possibly possess the equivalent to one or two basic PD devices.

But of course devices like TA's annihilator turret or dooms day machine should be a players first choice for (They absolutely must not reach what I am defending).

Funnily enough TA's annihilator was equipped with a basic radar system built in, and when supported by the radar targeting facility could murder any army that is not heading straight for it.

And I must say that a trio of these devices are effective at keeping all but the most heavy tanks at bay, unless the enemy intends to rush with infantry bots.


But of course they did cost 1000 energy to fire a single round, so leading into the need to secure more power. The endless cycle.

The annihilator was actually a very poor defensive structure against air units, and even against small ground units. Yeah, it kills them. But it kills one, and for small units they are always in quite large groups. Annihilators were effective at only one job: killing big, slow targets like heavy tanks.

An AA "fort" as you say is entirely the wrong way to think about air defense. Air defense is not a hard barrier like ground defense. Neither should anti-air be composed of expensive structures directly defending a vulnerable target. An effective air defense is a spread over space, and causes the enemy to hemorrhage units if they try and fly within that space.

The closest you'll get to a hard anti-air defensive line is a cluster of anti-air in a wide perimeter around a very sensitive target, such as concentric rings of flak turrets around a key base. The idea isn't to make it impossible for a very large air wing to get past- that can't be done. The idea is to make the proposition so expensive that it isn't worthwhile.

A AA net is more effective overall, yes.

But a kind of AA fort is designed to achieve air dominance over a specific area, and turn it into a no-fly zone.

Requiring a combined arm's strategy from a air player to defeat, limited only in it's range it in effect would create a static element to the otherwise terrain free aircraft role.

Using what are essentially tactical cruse missiles of the air, allowing this building to deny a mass air attack from enemy bombers and fighters by firing very powerful but expensive ordinance to destroy aircraft in a large area.

That's what i'd like at least, but I do understand what you mean by the coverage, I would just like a harder and stronger tool down the line to protect my airspace.

(Possibly what I am looking for is a drone hanger, to dispatch fighter drones to defend the air).

Did anyone ever build an annihilator? Or even the doomsday machine? Plasma cannons did the same thing more effectively and cheaper AND they had an arc of fire so wouldnt get stopped by wreckage. A couple of them or one annihilator isnt really a hard choice hehe.

I think the ideas above for air defense are all good. Cheap spammable general purposes anti air turrets, flak cannons for blobs and maybe a AA fort of some kind which combines the two and is more expensive but used to cover only key installations.

I mentioned it above aswell but radar jamming is very effective. Planes generally dont have radar and going in blind can be pretty much suicide when you're trying to find a key target with a blob while being worn down.

I like the above ideas of a AOE anti-air defense. Air Blobs are really heinous sometimes but it is a viable strategy. Perhaps there could be a flak canning that has a long recharge time, IE 3-5 seconds but really puts up a HUGE amount of flak.

Think a flak cluster bomb, it goes up as car-sized projectile and them explodes outward violently like a 8" mortar shell on july 4th. I would LOVE to see the particle effects on that as broken planes and flaming ordinance fell from the sky !

So the weapon is wicked powerful, but only cycles once ever several seconds, so a giant air blob would likely not get wiped out in one firing cycle, but it would get the point across that they need to do they're damage quick!

The largest problem with aoe anti-air is that it does destroy an infinite amount of planes. You build the required amount and then you are effectively immune to aircraft.

The largest reason why Air blob could be so powerful was the massive overkill of sam launchers, they all fire at one thing that dies and then the air blob is unaffected.I'm not sure they are going with the idea but they did mention the concept of those overkill shots not going to waste (IE: acquire new target on death of old target). With that the linear relationship between AA and Aircraft can be maintained effectively. If you still get dominated by air in that situation you were going to loose anyway because they won by skill instead of exploiting target priorities.

I don't neccesarily see a problem with certain locations being immune to aircraft. There's still the rest of the map for them to control, and you can use ground forces to break the aircraft-immune part. Or at least to take down the object that is making it aircraft-immune.

Then you are a fool. Every layer of immunity effectively removes a strategy. Hard counters do not belong in the game that way. Solving problems with raw numbers does nothing to address the core issue at hand.

This is the real problem.. No amount of solutions will ultimately solve the scaling problem with aircraft. The only real answer is to attack the mobility head on.

So.
1)Increase mobility of ground units.
Transports, terrain bonuses, jump jets, unit cannons, and bulk teleports all make ground units fast when they normally have average speed. It's okay if it takes a bit more infrastructure to get things going. Air has the advantage because it demands little infrastructure up front. But as maps grow arbitrarily large, ground units need superior ways of crossing the map. As long as those options exist, air units won't be the only answer to a large map.

2) Punish air units for being fast.
The most obvious thing is to make air units more fragile and have less raw DPS for cost. Limited ammo means they must return to base after dealing fixed damage. Radar systems can better spot aircraft at long range.

The most lethal solution is to slow aircraft down. A super defense (like a volcano spewing out ash) might create an area of space where air units lose 20-50% speed. That's absolutely devastating on every single level.

3) Create more effective and multi purpose AA weapons.
A weapon that only attacks air is not enough. Defensive structures should incorporate air protection so they can assist when other threats are not around. It also makes combined assaults more effective as they each tie up different kinds of defense.

Lasers. Good against ground, good against air. Great all around weapon from the days of TA.

Direct ordnance defense. Great against missiles and arty. Great against bombers too. If it shoots the bomb, then the blast can even kill the bomber.

Physics defense. Great against more types of ordnance by deflecting missiles and arty. Great against all aircraft as it can pull their nose into the ground. Instant kill. Alternatively, they might return missiles/bombs to its source. Revenge kill.

Gunships are the biggest death ball unit around. Make them fly low enough that ground weapons can hit them. Now they're vulnerable to both AA and AG. That's horrible for direct assaults, but they'd still be effective raiders on any undersize force.

LoS weapons in general will be more effective against air simply because round planets have a horizon. A SAM battery would not be effective against ground units because of terrain problems, but it would excel against air units in a wide open space.

Burst damage works better against air, which depends less on endurance and more on hit+run tactics. So weapons with a long charge up time or a huge volley of slowly refilling missiles would be super effective.

4) Limit death ball activity with diminishing return mechanics.
Splash damage is the biggest way to hinder any death ball. Defenses with splash damage have a danger of scaling up to infinite death, so they should be limited. However, friendly fire splash damage is super effective. Exploding planes can damage other planes. Bomb malfunctions can take out small clusters. Overkill becomes very hazardous when aircraft have limited ammo.

5) Make air useless at the most important roles.
First up are fabbers. There are many options here. The strongest is to remove construction options. Air units might never have access to advanced tech. They might be very expensive for very low construction power. They might not have any construction options at all, being stuck in support roles like repair/reclaim.

Next is Comm hunting. Don't have omni radar, limit direct spotting. If a Commander is cloaked, then that's it. Air units can't find him. Only ground units or carpet bombing will work. Certain comm abilities may prove extra effective against air units. An economically linked shield(energy for HP), for example, is super effective when flying units have limited damage output or rely on burst damage to score kills. Build up some storage, and a 40K damage bombing run every minute isn't a big deal. A D-flak might take out whole swaths of gunships, making them a poor choice for comm hunting.

Smoke, pollution and the like might render their ground vision worthless, so only ground units can spot targets. While an air unit might be able to easily find pollution, they can not do any reasonable scouting of a clouded/shrouded area. Red Alert worked like this, where shroud generators made air raids impossible.

An inability to use fast travel options like unit guns or teleports mean that air units have a lot of trouble to move between worlds, and may even end up slower for extremely large maps.

Something that doesn't move isn't a hard-counter, it's area denial. An impenetrable AA-ward around a base is to aircraft what a mountain is to tanks: a sign of "you cannot go here". To be honest I'd have no problem with a defense weapon that does literally that; project an area where aircraft cannot fly, rather than something that kills them.

And it doesn't remove a strategy, it just means that "spam air" is no longer viable, but there's a bunch of options coming back for it. Supporting ground with aircraft is still viable. Taking out the AA and bombing after is an option. Disabling the AA with a stealth unit is an option. Locking down an area with fighters is still an option.

There's plenty left to do with air, even if the largest of bases can place a (very expensive) total air-unit lockdown field around themselves.

Everything with a gun is area denial. Some methods are more effective than others.

Solving defense issues with a direct numbers buff has proved to be ineffective in virtually every RTS ever. Too little, and they're worthless. Too much, and the game becomes a turtle fest until the first long range gun kills everything. There's very little room for a well balanced defense. What matters instead is having utility above and beyond something that a standard unit can do. If it can not be matched by a mobile variety, then it will always find a use.

Shooting air units? Not a big deal. Any idiot with a gun can do that. Shooting air and ground is very handy, and it might be difficult to find a ground unit that is good at both. Enter the laser.

Blocking damage is very important for base defense. We won't have shields, but any layer of ordnance defense is essential to keep a base strong against long range bombardment. Putting those features on mobile units can cause traumatic death balling as they are force multipliers.

Scouting and anti scouting is all about bases. Anything that works is worth having in a large enough form for bases.

Physics guns are hilarious, and should be included in any way possible. This game emphasizes a good layer of simulation, after all. However, things that instakill or deflect projectiles are similarly very dangerous to put in a mobile form. Also, it's silly to watch a tiny tank do crazy things to a larger tank. Structures are anchored to the ground, they get to have the fun.

I should have said "something that doesn't move but can destroy all of your aircraft", probably. Such a unit is not in the same category as a regular turret, and normal rules don't work for it.

As for the rest of your post; you seem to be attacking my idea by mentioning your own, which is interesting because I didn't say anything about your idea; in fact I think it's probably a good idea, and worth looking at alongside my own.

We did see something similar in Supcom2, in the form of the Bomb Bouncer. It was stupidly good, capable of 1-2 shotting nearly everything in the air, even with the limitation that it has to first take damage. Something that large and effective is going into experimental territory. A reusuable version in PA would be insanely good, perhaps ruining air completely.

One of the more popular (and theoretical) applications of nukes is to swat aircraft out of the sky. Details are a bit scarce, but a combination of EMP shorting and giant air shockwave causes aircraft to fall down and go boom. Such a weapon could end up an amazing super weapon against gigantic air blobs. It'd be even more effective if you fire it on a real target, so that it has to be intercepted and not just avoided. Using nukes against aircraft would be very expensive with every use, so it isn't effective for denying small numbers.