Air Superiority

I do not know much about how air was balanced in Total Annihilation but In FA air dominance consistently devolved into simply spamming more of one type of unit then your opponent. I believe this is not a design choice PA should follow. This thread is a brainstorm of ways to to make air superiority decided by more then who has the largest swarm of fighters.

What are your thoughts?

Yeah, that's true... I was never really bothered by it, but I think the best solution would be to make ground AA more of a priority, and make AS fighters a specialty item in your air force for those looking to focus more on air. In other words, a swarm of ASF's shouldn't be your anti-air, anti-air turrets should be your anti-air. ASF's should be part of your squadron that you keep parked for emergency's or for special operations. That would work for me, at least, anyone else have any ideas?

Make air units niche/strike units. Don't have them as a main-line combat unit.

Hi,

It is a good idea maybe to use nuclear AA defence like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIR-2_Genie (fas.org http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/airdef/air-2a.htm )

It would bring new feature to in-game air combat and the same time - solution for massive fighter production. It maybe the way to force player to make more stealth, precision air-strikes instead.

I would prefer it if air was only bombers/transports/other, but not fighters. The war would be between air strikes and ground aa.

Bring back guided missiles for Aircraft

Also, why is it that if there is a weak air unit that breaks your line, why is it necessary for the entire wing of your aircraft on patrol to engage it? Surely only two units (maybe even 1) should persue. Surely this was an easy way to bait your patrol stack away from the route you planned allowing your enemy to break through with heavy bombers and fighters.

This always bugged me about the unit AI. The thread about carpet bombing had a similar point about how a large group of bombers would only attack one target at a time. It was awfully easy to get patrols distracted.

that was fixed in the last patch, that you can get via steam, or even further improved on faforever.com. Its just a matter of balance. if done well, air will neither be useless nor overpowered.

This is pretty much what I said about air in another thread, the result of OP air in SupCom/FA has less to do with the air units themselves than outside factors, like the lack of T3 Mobile AA and just the way the tiers were balanced overall. I think we need to wait a bit to learn more about air and what Ubers plans for them before making judgementcalls

Mike

I can see whee this is going. I was not trying to create a thread about how powerful air should be when compared to other options. I do think that it should be viable to go heavy air but no player should be forced to go heavy air just because one player does.

It was supposed about making going heavy air more complex. Look at it this way, In supcom 2 if a Cybran or Aeon wanted to go heavy air they would spam one unit the entire game(fighter bombers). This was pretty boring. In FA it was a similar story where the player would only build bombers if he/she was certain they had more then enough fighters to kill the enemies swarm. because in he air the fighter was the only unit that mattered in terms of air vs air superiority. I think this is a problem.

I Think that that there is a flaw with the stereotypical fighter counters all other air units in the game. and if I can win the air war by making more of the fighter(counter all air unit) than my oponent, I think there is a problem.

So you have higher damage but slower interceptors (for bombers) and then lower damage more maneuverable air superiority fighters (for interceptors). There is substantial overlap between the two but the difference is still important?

The problem with Air units is they they are rather one dimensional, in BlackOps we added in very few air units, the ones we did add mainly filled a gap in the lineup(like Seraphim not having a T3 Gunship) because trying to add new air unit roles was practically impossible without ridiculous amounts of overlap. We wanted to do some different air units in BlackOps, but they just always ended up working the exact same way as Existing air units, they just looked different.

Mike

A lot of the air imbalance seems to stem from T3 aircraft. Remember that these will be absent in PA, and I think that should alleviate a lot of the problem.

Not so much as you'd think.

EDIT: A good way of putting it is that the RESULT was that T3 Air was OP, but the T3 Air units weren't the ROOT of the problem.

Mike

See my comments about limiting fuel and/or ammo in the "Aircraft Fueling" thread.

I'm basically arguing that regardless of how powerful your air force is, you can limit its destructive capacity over time by limiting its ammunition.

This restriction should be in addition to having viable T3 air defense and all other air balance factors.

The real problem was having air units that cannot be hit by flak. If flak's MV had been buffed enough, it wouldn't have been such a problem.

You want to permit light bombardment or raiding, and heavier stuff on unprotected regions, but you don't want mass air blowing up everything. So it's simple. Flak units- not very accurate, but high splash and muzzle velocity. Make a critical count- let's say 5-10 depending on cost- and no air is gonna get through unless they strike the flak first, which means slowing them down and having more time to react, plus inflicting losses for killing nothing more than a few cheap flak units.

In SupCom every air unit can be hit by AA, thats not the problem. But given a large enough numbers, T3 bombers could just outnumber every AA, even 3-4 lines of T3.

Problem was mainly that air units didn't have a propper collision modell, they did stack unintentionally, making it possible to fly 20-30 planes over the same place within seconds. Make them consume more space (not just the size of their hitbox as for ground units but a lot more!) and they will seize to stack, solving the problem of simply overrunning anti air by confusing the target system.

That combined with yet another problem of the T3-units: To high range. You could simply fly across the map (no matter how big the map was) without the need of any preparentions (like establishing a offensive forward base) since T3 units got so much fuel that they almost never needed carriers or alike.

I agree completely. I hate hate hate the aircraft in TA, and SC for that matter. The problem is they are the shotgun in the rock / paper / scissor mold. They are the nuclear rock. All other rocks bow down and worship before the aircraft.

Once aircraft exist, all other units became irrelevant.

Sure, AA units existed in TA. They couldn't get the job done. Pulverizers / Guardians were too expensive, too slow to build, and when doing a simple test of one tower vs one plane? the plane wins every time. Let me repeat that, The plane costs less, and is more powerful than an AA gun. Planes win.

Flak cannons, are admittedly much burlier and actually can kill planes pretty effectively. But they are too expensive, and take too long to build. By the time you have managed to build even one of them, your already dead. Your base is already ruined, any power you may have needed to operate the flak cannon is rubble, the constructor you tasked to build the cannon is dead, and all you are left with is the empty worthless green shadow of a flak cannon that never was. The one good thing, is if by some bizarre miracle you do manage to get flak turrets in play, they demolish planes quite handily. Or at least they do once you get a few of them, a single turret is still quite likely to get spotted, focused, and removed by a large swarm of planes. The planes will suffer heavy losses, but you still lose because it will be a cold day in hell before you build another one.

I typically played TA with very strict unit limitations, limiting Aircraft to simply not exist at all (except for constructors), or severely limiting the number of planes that can exist in the game, limiting players to a max of 5 planes of each type for example. With planes in the game, these became the only unit that was ever used. Without planes, TA was a rich and interesting game system.

I think zero k did a nice job at this. Bombers there die quite easily and sending them into AA is generally a bad thing to do unless the target is a very high value (like commanders) one.

They should be more like glass cannons not the beefy **** like in SC2 where they easily flew through your 100 AA turrets like its nothing. Any AA and planes should either die or take heavy damage. Low hp, high alpha and high speed.

Planes should take advantage of their speed to cover the entire map and evade AA or to provide quick support when needed. AA should make cost easily but they cant cover the entire map. This happens in zero k and thats good.

Except for the fact that T3 Air flew too high and too fast for the slower Flak to hit them and because of the way the tiers were balanced, even if a few flak rounds did hit they just didn't do much to T3 Air units.

Mike