Hey guys, just wondering if anyone can confirm the coming of a t2 AA tower or if they know if there won't be one, i think there should be, because as soon as i get rushed with 20+ t2 bombers even a whole field of AA wont take them out.
Or......just build 3 AA whenever you would have built just the one. Works for me....against the AI...BUT IT WORKS!
Fighters are always the best air defense. They serve no other purpose than to attack other air units... so they kinda have to be.
They also make everybody very angry. 2-4 air factories pumping out t1 fighters is great air defense, but it gets pretty laggy very fast once you get 100-200 fighters patrolling a base. Killing them lowers network bandwith use instantly by 20-30%. (Ofc alpha is alpha, but I kinda feel bad for lagging everybody through my air units... )
Eh, still yet, i hope the current overuse of bombers ( if you can produce bombers, you can produce just enough fighters to get through the enemy's to land bombers, the only cost is the loss of more units) and artillery ( with swarms of aa tanks) won't continue to always be the only two methods of win. I am seeing new units soon to be implemented that might become just as powerful, and at least it isn't one single overpowered thing yet, so i have no complaints so far. The game is good, you throw an army at the enemy and fun is had. Rarely do you feel like you built bigger and still lost to a small cheesy setup.
The only purpose of an AA turrets is to attack air units and a static turret has much less maneuverability than a fast fighter. Clearly turrets have to have the best AA.
Not necessarily, they just need to be the best for area defence. For example; defending a base against air is usually a case of anti-bomber duty. Therefore having AA towers that are good at attacking bombers but not so good against fighters would still see AA towers used. I'm not suggesting that is the way it should be done, but just pointing out that there are ways of making AA turrets useful without being the best.
So AA turrets may have more dps, but since Air fighters are mobile they can hunt down enemy bombers before they even reach the base, attacking for a far longer period of time and therefore doing more damage. From that perspective the statement "Fighters are always the best air defense" makes sense.
i just build 20 rocket tank thingys and send them patrolling, its basiclly aa and its reusable. BTW hope seeing the t2 AA as a flack turret. pretty please.
T1 fighters are the best defense against T2 bombers. I see people building ground based air defenses, and they do shoot down my bombers, but not before they blow up your power generators, radar, catapult, or commander. People make the mistake of putting them in a line, or clustering them around the object they want to protect, ignoring the fact that the bombers will only be in range for a short time. Fighters on the other hand, the bombers will never even get close to your base unless escorted by expensive T2 fighters.
I'd also like to point out that the direction you point the AA in is very, very important. It can often mean the difference between one and two shots fired.
I was just pointing out what I think is a flaw in Scathis' reasoning. There are many units whose only purpose is to attack AA. The fact that fighters can only attack air doesn't mean they have to be the best at it. I think we're struggling with the ambiguity in the word 'best'. Of course there should be no best unit so when I see 'best' in this context I think of the unit in terms of it's combat effectiveness. I should have pointed out this ambiguity. For example assault units beat scouts so they are better at combat, scouts are not built for their combat ability but for their speed. The same makes sense for fighters, they should be worse at combat than ground AA but make up for it with speed.
i personalyl think it's an issue between "active" defense (AA Fighters) and "Passive" defense" (AA Turrets). with fighters, you have to either A: Babysit the radar feed and send them off to any air blips you see. B: Set up a complicated enough patrol path so that any bomber that tries gets caught. this usually means multiple patrols encompassing the intersecting routes, or so many on one route that they form a chain. with AA turrets it simply becomes a case of "set it, forget it, replace if it dies" so that the player can then focus on something other than trying to cover his own ***.
I like to put massed quantities of AA turrets around my base in concentric rings. Just set a big long string of shift-orders for a construction airplane, and forget about it. If you use a constructo-bot or vehicle, it'll likely get stuck in pathing, or on wreckage, so I definitely recommend the plane version for now. Doing AA with fighters has always struck me as too much micro, while I'm trying to do other things!
In my experience all you need are two air factories pumping out T1 fighters in a patrol route around your base. It only takes a few clicks to set up and once it's up, it requires zero maintenance. With AA turrets you have to rebuild them, but a wall of fighters is forever. I seriously don't see what you are talking about with micro. Building rings of turrets and replacing them is micro. But an air factory with a patrol route qued to build forever is self guided and infinitely replenishing. The only drawback is it murders your frame rate and will probably make your enemy really angry.
Oooo that sounds even better than what I was doing! OK, fighter patrols queued from the factory it is!
