The T2 Bomber - Balance Suggestion Thread

Welcome to a place you can dump your rage over the T2 bomber.

As I've killed with (and been killed by) the old T2 bomber spam, we should prolly help uber out with this unit. I don't intent to police this thread but before anyone makes a post that's barley readable to due foaming at the mouth, please keep your criticism constructive.

I'll update the main post with potential issues and reasonable balance changes as we go.

I'll start off:

General Balancing options:

• Lower/Increase health
• Unit countering - wouldn't mind some unit ideas
• Speed adjustments - raising or lowering the speed would change how bombers are used

T2 Bomber Issues:

AA Units: Most AA work on the same level, which is fine. A greater need for fighters would in it's own way, reduce the production of bombers.

Solutions (a bit crazy): Having a Close combat weapon on T2 fighters would help against bombers a lot, it could also allow the T2 bomber to be made stronger against ground AA as fighters are the intended counter. Something like a high damage chain gun with a very short range would make T2 fighters highly effective against bombers without having them being able to knock out other fighters (they are the same speed) It would also mean that players need to have air cover and slow down things like sniping.​

Bomber Role: Currently bombers are a one stop shop for air to mud destruction. Subsequently they need to be good at blowing up tanks, buildings & ships. Having a more specialized role could make bombers a better unit choice with more balance

Solutions: Need more input here! Changing bombers to do less damage to units and more to buildings would make help out the blobs. Creating a naval variant (Torpedo or Dive bomber?) might also help ships from being slaughtered,​

Critical Mass: The most difficult issue that most players encounter is that once a T2 bomber swarm reaches a certain amount (30+ usually), they are able to effectively breach defenses without any difficulty. Defensive depth (fighters intercepting & layers of missles) does help here, but a ball of T2 bombers is exponentially more threatening then ground units.

Solutions: Currently flak is the solution, flak however is a devastating counter and might be a little much. Having another solution would be a great way to go


Damage: This is a very easy one to balance (should it need to be), currently the T2 bombers drop half a dozen bombs that can level a ground army without any difficulty at all.

Solutions: Changing the weapon to single seeking missile (removing the AoE component), Nerfing the damage on the bombs to allow ground units to survive and have a chance at counter attack & repair.

Low Metal Cost: Air units are low mass, high energy units. Energy is an infinite resource and can is more easy to come by then mass (more so at the late stages) so bombers become extremely cost effective late game.

Solutions: A general increase in Mass cost.
​

Hopefully that gives people some starting ideas. I'm not really sure the T2 bomber will ever seem "balanced" to new players, because if you aren't prepared for them, they'll kick your ***.​

I like the bombers attack type, but hate their stacking.

Id also like them to drop their bombs over a larger line to lessen the damage on any single target, but allow a bombing run to properly carpet an area to bombs that in themselves might not be damaging, but after multiple bombers move over a target would take considerable repeating damage.

As it stands, bombers are rather metal expensive in comparison to tanks, so a economic cost increase might not be sufficient. I suggest a time increase. Possibly roll off time increase.

As for the T1 bomber, id like it to have a kind of high damage single bomb, but one that para-shoots down, making hitting moving targets impossible. Perfecting an anti-building anti-ship roll.

I don't think there's a problem with bombers anymore. If anything, flak is a little too good at countering them.

I have had ridiculous swarms of bombers come at my anti-nuke only to all get killed by what I felt were relatively few flak guns.

Towards the late game I usually attack with T2 bots and switch all of my T1 bot factories to do nothing but AA, then have fighters escort the attack in (queue up a bunch of assist orders followed by a return to base). Bomber spammers will tend to wipe the first few waves but I always seem to end up shooting down their bombers faster than they can replace them.

I'm actually a bit worried that it's too easy to totally thwart bombers by just putting flak up all over the place. Flak should probably cost more. I still make bombers but not nearly like I used to, and I use them for defense more than offense.

Yeah flak is a little weird, but for T2 bombers I agree, they are really really fun and good.

Just the planes stacking is a little weird.

In Build: 59607 bombers greatly grown in importance. As a result, land army built with difficulty, can be destroyed in a few seconds.
This is particularly evident in the final fight of the last tournament.
As for me game at the moment has become too tactical (do not want to use the word arcade). A good operator group of bombers is gaining a lot. As for me, too much for a strategic game.

I think that we should ask the question what role have the bombers.
I see them specialized to destroy fortifications and surgical elimination of key structures.
I think that the direct support of ground troops should not be their job.
For this purpose gunshis are created.

solution:
- After all, reduce the dps bombers in general
- Drastically reduce the dps bombers against vehicles/bots

Yeah, but I do love carpet bombing enemy troops, and even being carpet bombed!

I just feel like the stacking issue and overall damage is an issue.

The problem I see with increased spread is that bombers will then be weaker at bombing structures. This I would imagine is the intended role for bombers.

I do however agree there is an issue with their effectiveness at killing unit blobs. Wether blobs are too compact, the bombs drop too fast or that the aoe radius is too big are all ways to fix this.

Flak does help a lot with them but defenders advantage is pretty huge now.

Could that be the role of T1 bombers to help differentiate them?

Yeah of course but t1 bombers would need a major damage boost to be anywhere near efficient at killing structures. Right now we would need 50 to kill an energy storage in 1 pass.

Yep, tried getting 300 to clear a base....it was a massacre.

i think with the new flak cannon they are not so op anymore. I would recommend waiting a little longer to check the effectiveness of bombers. Maybe the reload time of bombers' ammunition could be prolonged.

The most annoying thing right now is that you often cannot protect your commander effectively, especially if you dont see the bombers coming.... maybe bombers need to be even slower, or there should be a warning, when several bombers are nearing your commander's position^^

Flaks can protect the base but not moving army.


I think that bombers should release the bomb at large distances from the target. This enables elimination of stationary targets even if the bomber is destroyed. While the moving targets would be harder to hit.

Generally, my vision bombers are units that:
- They have the ability to penetrate the base protected by AA (within reason)
- They have the ability to destroy the selected target
- They have difficulty in maneuvering and destroying moving vehicles / bots even in large groups.

yeah the "vertical" bomb drop also looks stupid

T2 bomber is mostly ok no that we got the new flak and much cheaper T2 fighters balance it. Wouldn't mind having T2 figthers armed with flak though (not sure if they are now or not) to counter critical masses of bombers. Also having T1 missile bot and missile truck (becuse that looks more like a truck than a tank) do damage to both air and ground like the t1 misile turret would be exteemely nice (the thought process here is that you still need fighter support, but t2 bombers no longer counter your groud forces 100% You just sacrifice some ground damage to counter air, but this way you still force your enemy to build ground forces and not got 100% t2 air and rely on t2 bombers/gunships - unlike now wehre T2 air either forces you to take away 75%of ground damage to build masses oa AA only vehivles or or massive T1 fighter spamm). That would extend their use and still allow you to build massive ground armies with some air support rather than gaving to switch to full figther production once enemy goes t2 air (like now). I wouldn't increase the metal cost mainly becuse that doesn't help to counter large blobs of bombers. The enmy can still dump their economy on t2 factories and produce crazy amount of t2 bombers if the yant, unles the cost is so big that the bomber simply isn't worth it. AS for taking away AOE - do that and you are left with ehat we had in early beta - a high cost, but useless t2 bomber, becuse it can only really deal with single structures (for which a T1 bomber is much better solution).

Protecting your base against bombers is only a small part of the problem. It is not possible to attack your opponent with ground or naval if they have t2 bombers unless you have air control, in which case they don't have t2 bombers.

I believe this issue will be fixed by the introduction of unit formation. If unit formations are similar to supcom's, unit will be more spaced out and thus, bomber will hit less units with one carpet bombing.

Which I also described dealing with. You can't simply forego building any fighters. The old formula is still true:
Ground AA > fighters > bombers > ground AA

I send my T2 bots in with ample T1 mobile AA and covered by fighters. If their bombers come in, they die to the fighters. If their fighters come in, we have a shootout with my AA helping tilt things in my favor. Most likely they send everything at once for a huge scrum but in the end I lose my ground force, they lose their air force and we repeat for the next wave.

Except this shouldn't be the only thing I'm working on. There's also:
* Creeping forward with flak and artillery
* Building teleporters to attack from new or multiple directions
* Nukes
* Other planets
* Space lasers

Basically I don't see the problem. That first option (creeping forward with flak and artillery) has pretty well handled the bomber spammers I've met since the patch. Maybe that will be harder if they increase the cost of flak (which I expect) but for now it's easy.

So their air alone is holding off your air and land units.... You dont see a problem there?

I didn't say they were holding me off. They should be slowly losing as I creep forward with flak and artillery.

What's the alternative? That I have mobile flak and someone can go 100% ground and trump air entirely? What's the point of air, then?

With the invention of flak, we've almost created a real-world situation where airpower will only get you so far. Air superiority makes it nearly impossible to attack you with conventional ground forces but once dedicated AA starts moving in, the air superiority guy is going to be forced to switch to ground attacks to deal with the flak creep.

100% air doesn't work anymore. Neither should 100% ground.

At the same time, air doesn't work against a base, which is exactly where it should be expected to work.

I think that the issue of too much damage could possibly be fixed by fixing the way that splash works, so that the splash does 110 damage at radius 0, and 0 damage at radius 10.

At the same time, T1 bombers are kind of pointless.

I think t1 bombers should have air to surface missiles for use against everything.

As an aside, I don't really see the need for an Albatross. . . I feel that the role could be achieved by giving t1 bombers anti-ship missiles, and t2 bombers depth charges.