Thanks for letting non-AA shoot air units

Not really in OTA the lvl1 AA units were the anti land swarm of choice due to their large range, most mods then made them air only.

I agree to land things targeting air, they should just be bad at hitting due to the time it takes the turret to raise and turn plus the speed of the plane.

It was cool to see guardians hit the occasional plane in TA too.

Battleships positively MURDERED Brawlers in a fight. Dem AoE Plasma Cannons.

Unless your the core, when your TRIPLE BARRELLED RAPID FIRE LASER just tore them apart.

+1

glad they can (poorly) shoot back. It makes sending one bomber after a tank army still a bad idea.

In that case it was both lol.

I actually have complete opposite experiences, and I've torn asunder entire battalions of battleships. The scout boats are worse to fight against in my opinion because it takes some serious speed to micro away from missiles. (Example : You'd need to be micro-ing a scout plane to avoid ALL anti air missiles over an enemy base, even from other fighters)

The plasma shells were slow, and it wasn't that hard to get brawlers to wreck shop. All the ships in the in a close proximity will fire at approximately the same time, so you just command the brawlers to attack a couple ships down right when they fire, and they'll easily move out of the way of the entire salvo. Any ships with missiles are the ones I tend to go to first unless they've got flak ships, then those are no questions highest priority. Depending on situation, obviously, but normally yeah.

Granted this is micro, and something PA is avoiding, but when you have 100-200+ gunships over a navel fleet screaming for blood, and the fleet could pound your base into oblivion, you're going to micro the stuff. (Same reason you micro T3 AA in SupCom. It's a decisive game-changing battle.)

Or... you could not micro it when they don't have the flak ships, and the brawlers will naturally split up and pick different targets. They sway back and forth and avoid a lot of incoming fire, but unless you're microing your ships too, then they won't be firing on one group of aircraft. They'll pick random targets which is bad for the entire fleet in general.

Not that the AI of the fleet won't take out the aircraft eventually. If you've got enough ships to take out brawlers with one salvo, you want to micro your Brawlers, and in doing so, they easily out-micro anything with slow moving barrels.

The AA from TA did a bit too much damage to land units in my opinion, but it's only because the other land units didn't do all that much damage in comparison to make anything else feel worthwhile. That in itself made them feel useful in a land battle. Superior, even. They were weak, but had range and firing speed.

Personally I think it was much more balanced than people think when it comes down to raw stats and ability. The dedicated AA, Jethro/Crasher for instance, small footprint, didn't have a lot of damage to ground units, missile was fast, probably needed it's damage dropped on ground units a bit. Not by a lot, because that would make them useless, and that's precisely what we don't want.

The Rocko/Storm on the other hand were non-tracking heavy missiles, akin non-guided RPGs. I have no problem with them having the damage they did to units since they weren't very good at shooting aircraft, and their missiles were slow too. It's a unit for taking out non-moving targets, much like artillery, but not as heavy in the damage department, but more nimble and mobile. They can even hit slow moving targets unlike artillery because rocket speed instead of mortar. Wrecks got in the way though.

Perhaps the AA's ratio of damage vs range was a bit above the other units in terms of usefulness in groups, sure, but making ground AA only attack aircraft is the wrong way to go about fixing it, and just removes the charm TA had about that in the first place.

I'm actually curious about how the decision to go about doing this (Edit : Making ground AA and air AA fire on ground, and vice versa) originally went down, and would like to see more in-depth thoughts about the future of the subject.

I have fond memories of taking out a small group of brawlers with a bertha, it was a last ditch effort to save a forward base and it was so awesome that it worked (despite heavy casualties due to the shots that missed ), I'm glad it's still in for PA .

Not even close! TA gunships were stupidly cheap. They easily trashed ships per cost. Perhaps the only ship that stood a chance was the lowly scout boat, simply due to its competitive cost. However, scouts had their own problem of not packing very well.

Just treat micro like it doesn't exist, ok?

Common consensus on the forum, is that micro is something that needs to be killed with fire.
Not only made unnecessary by teaching the individual unit AI all the tricks a real player would have performed, but also made pointless by nerfing the attributes which make micro so successful, in the case of dodging this would simply be the turn ratio and acceleration as well as large AoE radius.

Second thing else which should be considered non-existent: Deathballs.
A large murder of fighters would only work because there is no friendly fire in the current build (which isn't there, because the current targeting AI completely lacks LoS tests in the target selection, and without these, your army would shred itself to pieces). Add friendly fire, and they are suddenly forced to fly in a much broader formation which greatly reduces their efficiency and allows ground units to pick them of one by one, even with reduced damage ratios. That even solves the issue that a large pack of direct fire tanks can outperform any number of indirect fire units...
The only type of deathball which can't be prevented by friendly fire are indirect fire weapons, to be specific artillery and any type of dedicated air-ground- or ground-air-weapon (including antiair, bombers and gunships). But hey, they already have a hard counter in the form of ground-ground- or air-air-interceptors. And for artillery? It's your own fault if you allow your enemy to deploy a full artillery deathball...


If you consider these two issues non-existent, than there is nothing which would speak against allowing free targeting for any direct fire unit, that even includes rocket artillery. Only exception are units which specifically use ground, not unit based targeting like regular shell artillery and bombers.

I agree, all units should be able to target all units, some units should be specialized to target a certain type of unit.

Submarines shooting aircraft with torpedoes, Get.

Also, in before submarines with vertical missile bays hitting satellites and other such structures.

As amusing as it is, the latter is the obvious answer to the former. While whether we'll get that specifically is definitely up in the air, I do think stereotypical submarines are probably going to be the exception to the rule. They should be able to shoot any units in shallow water, though, and any submarines with AA capability like the Atlantis in the Supreme Commander trailer (with the dual T3 missile launchers).. those should have to surface to fire as per the usual.