T1 bomber snipes in FFA

I hate people who spam bombers, but only because it reminds me ive been neglecting air or flak and the folly of doing so.

So the air spammer has let's say 3 extra air factories than you. After 4 minutes he had enough bombers to kill your commander, or if you get to the point were you are too aggressive he sees you making gains he uses some them to counter your vehicles. Remember it takes a few minutes to reach his base with your standard vehicle rush. If he feels by scouting with his air advantage that your com is too protected he can kill all your expansions with his air.

From here you need to figure out how much should you invest to stop his air while still trying to make gains on the metal front. It quickly becomes you having a super safe commander but not so safe proxies and raiding units.

So your initial 3 min of being ahead leads to several minutes of falling behind. I feel if a good player plays this well it could be hard to make up those 3 factories and eventually lose you the game.

I'm still not 100% on this but seems like a lot of advantage to the air guy.

All I see is a bunch of whining. Air isn't OP, just useful.
You build AA all over the place with your PD and you'll be fine.

Air isn't op, but AA? I dunno.

Yes, air can be used to raid effectively. No, that time is not during the early game, unless someone completely forgot about air and didn't build any AA. The only way to do that, though, is to suppress your enemy's AA with continuous attacks. Quite difficult to do - I'm still not very good at it.

You leave him standing without resistance for a few minutes, and they build up enough AA units to smother your bombers. It's what costs me games.

I'm gonna agree with OP. It doesn't take many bombers atm certainly not 50 to snipe the commander early game. Maybe give AOE back and leave rate of fire where it is at.

The same amount of metal invested exclusively in any of these units could kill a commander:
T1 Tanks
T1 Bots
T1 AA ships with thier ground attack

And each of those (inlcuding the Bombers) are a terrible choice for commander killing. I can kill AI commanders with about 10-20 flame tanks, quickly prodced by 3-5 groudn factories with some production to spare for light tanks and AA vehicles mixed in to avoid the main weaknesses of a flame only army.

You did a FFA. Chances here are you loose sight of one enemy, he isn't attacked by anyone else and he one-shoots you by exploiting a weakness in your Defenses.
You did, so he did. He beat you fair and square. Learn to up your anti air game and build at least 1 Air factory on eternal build of AA fighters.

Before this change air units (especially the bombers) could not even get near a commander without gettign swatted like flies. He was way too effective to even zerg-rush him with bombers. Now at least masses like this have a chance to get through.

Edit:
I just looked in a GW match. The cost per bomber is 240 Metal.
That is more expensive then even the most expensive ground unit (Flame Tank, 225).

It is 180 for the interceptor, the hard counter (as the bomber cannot shoot back).
Both Ground vehicles and bots have anti air units that will propably kill a bomber for less then 240 metal in units/per bomber.
Naval certainly has that metal effectiveness.

Yeah you can.

Flak, and swarms of fighters.

Have radar to spot incoming bombing runs. Scout your opponent to see that they're building bombers. I pretty much always have an air factory building nothing but fighters. That's normally enough to take care of bomber snipes and it's good for scouting as well.

I find it kinda silly that they all clip into each other like so.






I think they should keep formation and actually carpet bomb an area instead of a single target. Just my opinion

It was much worse in beta - the bombers all stacked in one spot, so all the bombs dropped at once. While I too would prefer this, I'm not sure it will work well with attack commands

The original commander aa was stupid OP.

What I played is galactic war, and lacking all other AA you could defeat an air opponent by walking your com with your army, despite missing t1 vehicles and going against an air armada, the commander WAS your 20 spinners.

Now, he is the only mobile AA you have, but you can't outright negate air with his presence.

Then again, he shouldn't be stronger against air than he is against land. He was originally weaker against air beacuse his shot didn't home. Now it does. Now, he just needs to do reasonable anti air, where 50 bombers DO overwhelm him, but 5 would all die and only land a single blow on him. Before, 5 microed bombers would shut down AA and be immune to the commander. Now, microing do not allow bombers to solo a commander, no amount of micro keeps just 5 bombers alive.

Adding AA to commander fixed "commander can't hit 5 bombers so commander loses to just 5 bombers the whole game". Adding AA shouldn't make air useless if sent over an enemy commander.

That being said, AOE wouldn't be bad. That doesn't effect early enough game, and stays relevant late game. Just, not retarded rate of fire, and not ridiculous one hit kill missiles.

I agree that is what OP vs bombers.

I don't have the naval cost before me, but is there even one T1 unit that is more expensive then the bomber?
It is the most or second-most expensive T1 unit in the game. And it stood the chance of a snowflake in the desert even when attacking the commander in large numbers.
It's ability to endanger the commander was way below it's cost and what any other T1 anti ground unit of comparable metal value can do.
Now it is just worth it's (high) cost if it can actually snipe the commander of a unprepared enemy (seriously, how can you not have at least 1 air factory churnign out fighters? That is downright suicidal against normal AI, much less in PvP).

Bombers are only immediately expensive.

Once the player has enough metal to think about going T2, bombers are as easy to build as dox.

Right, but with old commander weapon, dox had a better chance in same numbers to make a kill. With a fractional price. Earlier in the game.

With that commander weapon, you can only win via suffocation, going wherever the commander isn't and sniping fabbers and eco constantly anywhere there is no commander present. And it accomplishes servere economic disadvantage, easily gamewinning, but against the commander itself they are incapable even in large numbers to land a kill before the nerf.

With the current way bombers take formation it wouldn't work out well. I would like to see them forming in something like this instead of in squares.

YES. ALL OF MY YES.