The problem with fighter planes

Since TA, this genre has had a problem with fighter planes, namely that the top-end fighter (aka Hawk or ASF) becomes the overpowered game-winning default unit in large enough games. SupCom tried to address this by only allowing fighters to shoot at other air targets, but all this did was delay the inevitable air snipe until enough heavy bombers could be made after air superiority was established.

Later Forged Alliance patches tried some more to sort this, by massively increasing the cost of the top-end fighter, but all this did was delay it some more - the ASF still behaved the same and still won most large games.

Since 1997 there has not to my knowledge been a successful way of making the ASF good at its role without making it too powerful.

Yesterday veteran modder AdmiralZeech posted on the FAForever forums with a possible solution, and with his permission I repost it here:

My take on this is that you could make a good move towards balancing ASFs by implementing a rock-paper-scissors system, albeit one that is emergent from the unit stats rather than being arbitrary hard counters.

If low-end fighters (aka interceptors) can take out anything in the sky (bar ASFs), but ASFs can easily take out interceptors (and nothing much else), then you have a dynamic air game that would not degenerate into spamming the best unit, because there would be no best unit.

For the sake of argument, let's say the stats are like this:

Int: 100 health, 500 DPS, projectiles too slow to hit ASF (or ASF has a flare system that defeats it)

ASF: 2500 health, 100 DPS, projectiles always hit their target

Assume cost scales with health, so one ASF costs 25 ints but can take out a literally infinite amount.

So what can take out ASFs in such a way as to not make them rule the skies?

The obvious solution would be a mobile, land-based, massively front-loaded weapon that can take out an ASF in one shot, but takes several seconds to reload and has no splash damage. It would be utterly useless against ints but devastating to ASFs.

This solution is neither perfect nor complete, but hopefully it will inspire someone to help finish the model.

Of course Uber might have an entirely different idea in mind for air combat, but if not then maybe we can come up with something awesome.

Sounds interesting. I do think air is a challenging area to get right.

Luckily we'll all be able to play the game and give our comments on this stuff during the alpha. That's one thing I love about this process, bringing everyone into it and then playtesting the hell out of it.

I dont see how ASF's won large games in SupCom/FA... never had a problem dealing with them :|

Maybe they should die faster, after all theyre made for speed, not tanking. RPS balance sucks IMHO.

The difference between an Interceptor, and an ASF is that the interceptor is designed around defense by removing any aerial threat but has relatively short range, and the ASF is designed around seizing air superiority as quickly as possible, by removing any aerial threat and has long range thanks to its speed.

The easy way to do it would be to heavily restrict flight times, and then balance their speed and cost relative to role. Interceptors should be more rooted to their base and cheaper, while ASFs should be able to strike down enemy aircraft from long range thanks to speed, but would not be able to hold control over an area for very long and are more expensive.

One of the big problems I saw with the ASF in SupCom was how flipping long of a flight time it had, the things stayed in the air for practically forever and the only thing that could outrun them was T3 spy planes. They had such high speed and flight time it was no wonder they could strike anywhere at will. They really needed to have a more constrained flight range.

They don't do it alone. They obtain air superiority, allowing you to then use bombers with impunity (note that they also act to draw AA fire away from bombers).

To the OP: I still don't see how this avoids the "critical mass" situations. In the end, it's still a fight to the most air units, regardless of which one you choose. The goal isn't just to balance air, it's to balance the entire theatre of war. I could be wrong, but I believe that aircraft in Wargame: ALB also have fuel and/or ammo. Not that PA should have them, I'm just pointing out that their aircraft more limitations than are being talked about here.

Personally I don't have a problem with them as I only usually play 1v1 or 2v2. In a larger game though there is always at least one player who is left alone to tech up, to the extent that the back player on any 4v4+ FA map is expected to spam ASFs. ASFs counter anything airborne in FA, so the air player just has to learn a series of clicks and do it faster than his opposite number.

This is a universally accepted problem in these games.

Granted it is only a problem in games where the pressure is not on like in 1v1, but most people prefer those games.

Here is FunkOff's contribution to the thread on FAF. He's a long-standing top player.

It's incomplete, yes. There still needs to be a cost-effective, mobility-effective way to take out fighter planes that does not in itself act as an I-WIN button. Mobile anti-air is the best thing I can think of, but it is flawed and needs some clever people to refine it.

Pretty much this, you beat me to it! ;p

I think just by the nature of PA's Tier setup we'll get a lot more interesting interaction not only between different Aircraft, but also land/air as well. In SupCom if you wanted to clear the air, you had 2 options, ASFs and T3 SAM turrets(Aeon also had the AA gunship instead of ASFs) and that's it, T1 and T2 units stood no chance in SupCom.

Mike

Dont ASF's counter ASF's? :|
A well established base should have enough AA defenses and good intel, late game SAM's are mandatory and a decent number of fighters can counter any bomber/fighter attack.

They've always been hard-ish to build regardless if its TA or SupCom, so there's plenty of opportunities to find out what the opponent is doing. In all humbleness I never lost a supcom game against someone focusing on air superiority.
TA was another story, vamp/hawk swarms were unstoppable.

But then thats just me.

Sorry, my nitpickyness couldn't let that one slip through.

I think a good way to avoid the problem would be having both splash based AA-fighters as well as straight up damage AA-fighters.
That would create a nice dynamic where big blobs are forced to split up or they get smacked by the splash, but still have to stay together otherwise they get killed one by one.

The biggest ASF swarm takes and holds the air. Not over your base of course, but who cares about that? The bombers only need to make it to your ACU. So I suicide my ASFs ahead of my bombers to draw off your SAMs, then plow my bombers in. Nothing you could possibly have (in non-modded supcom FA) could kill that many units fast enough.

If the only counter to something is to mirror it, then I would say that there is a problem.

This is the problem. To have a real RPS balance, you need something that counters ASF as well.
As proposed, you have bombers < interceptors < ASF.
ASFs are on top of the chain, as there is no airplane that can be cost-effective against those (yes, they're not good against bombers, but bombers are of no use at all against ASF).
In this example, with ASF having far more weight than interceptor, you could have some sort of air-sniper : a long-range, precise/guided, high-alpha, low RoF weapon that would totally overkill interceptors but wipe ASFs clean. Like putting a SAM on a bomber frame. Those would be slow, heavy and would still be wiped out by interceptors, but they would take ASFs down.
Then you have (bombers <) interceptors < ASF < ASF-killers < interceptors

This is probably still incomplete, but it would already be better.

The problem here is one of localization. The problem with TA and with SupCom ASF's is simply that winning the air fight gives you air superiority everywhere.

Obtaining air superiority and using it to attack the enemy with bombers and gunships is how air units are supposed to work. The issue is that once you have killed the entire enemy air fleet, they can never compete with your air superiority again because every single fighter they build is effectively thrown into a very small boxing ring (same map size, very fast fighters) with your huge air fleet.

Because the outcome of that fight is so important, and ASF's stack together perfectly, you have absolutely no choice but to get the biggest blob possible and hope yours is bigger; automatic victory if so.

I see a lot of suggestions to create rock-paper-scissors gameplay. RPS is a big improvement over monoculture deathball, but it's still quite boring. A complex distribution over space can be interesting even with only one type of piece (see Go) and gets vastly deeper with even only a few more pieces. With a large diversity of unit options distributed over a large board, the game possibilities are effectively infinite.

It needs to be possible to win an air battle in just one area, even if you are losing an air battle somewhere else at the same time. It needs to be possible to build air units a long way away from any particular air theatre and send them places, rather than have such mobile air units they are essentially everywhere on the map.

No, a rock/paper/scissors interceptor battle is not going to solve anything. Air battles will still go to the biggest spam. Balance belongs to the DBZ trinity, where a fast unit necessarily sacrifices its power and ability for speed (low power + high speed = high cost). A fast unit should not be kicking *** over slower and more powerful units. It's that simple. This is the biggest flaw of Supcom that ruined ASF play.

Air has to be attacked from many many angles to make sure it works well within the game. Support roles have been most effective in RTS games. Spell casters utilize powerful attacks with limited ammo, drop ships move ground troops around the map, and raiders hit weak points but crumble to a real army. Raw brute force tends to dominate over ground play, 50% due to speed and 50% due to creating death balls.

Most importantly, air defense should be flexible and versatile, so that air defenses can be useful when air is not in play. There is a big problem where air defenses have to be anticipated far far in advance, as simply seeing an air force means it's too late to react. Many things should be able to contribute to air defense as a secondary role, when they are not doing their main job. Some ideas are shown below.

Even if air spam wins the battle, it should not have the ability to win the war. Have some copy pasta:

This idea requires dogfighting to be an important aspect of air gameplay. Whether or not micro is required to gain the upper hand in dogfighting doesn't matter so much.

Interceptor. The fastest antiair airplane. Poor manoeuvring capabilities. It got a forward facing "machine gun"-like weapon. It needs to align itself with its target to hit. It has high DPS so it is good at destroying less manoeuvrable planes if it can get on their tail. Cheap cost.

Fighter. The slowest antiair plane. It has the best manoeuvring capabilities of all planes. Equipped with missiles and a machine gun. With superior turn rates and quick turns the Interceptors have trouble aligning to fire against the Fighter while the missiles can be fired and track the Interceptor and the machine gun makes short work of their adversary if they get on their tail. Medium cost.

Long range air superiority fighter. Faster than Fighters but slower than Interceptors. Medium manoeuvring capabilities. It is only equipped with long range missiles. Typically it can fire before Fighters and devastate their numbers before they enter a dogfight. In a dogfight however the air superiority fighters are at a slight disadvantage as they are abit less manoeuvrable than ordinary Fighters. Interceptors are faster and lower weight so if the Air Superiority Fighters are intercepted or even worse, if the Interceptors catch up on them from behind, the Air Superiority Fighters will be outnumbered and dogfighting against higher numbers than their own. Expensive cost.

Intended metagame. Fighters are the generalist among the airplanes. Able to defeat Interceptors. They can escort bombers and patrol to intercept incoming air units. Later once a player can make the more expensive Air superiority Fighters those are faster and better suited for shutting down enemy air movements but an enemy can still keep air production if they lose air superiority by deploying ground AA suited for taking down the expensive Air Superiority fighters and could make Interceptors as a cheap counter which can complement the ground AA if the enemy venture into the their area and might even threaten to intercept Air Superiority Fighters and defeat them by numbers.

If PA have ammo and/or fuel I'd say that:
Interceptors have alot of ammo but little fuel. Short striking range but able to fire continuously if they can get on the tail of the enemy.
Fighters have medium amount of ammo and fuel. Medium strike range. Good for escorting bombers.
Long Range Air Superiority Fighters have low ammo and alot of fuel. Long strike range but are limited to how much damage they can do before they have to rearm.

If antiair planes are able to attack ground targets:
Interceptors do alot of damage in strafing runs but are exposed to counterfire and splash damage in larger numbers.
Fighters might be able to use their missiles without doing strafing runs but missiles should not do much damage against ground targets.
Air Superiority Fighters can fire their missiles at longer range but do little damage with their AA missiles. Exposing such an expensive force and wasting their shots on ground units might not be a good idea as an enemy air force can intercept and get on their tail.

I'd imagine dogfighting to be in a style similar to how it is handled in the Spring engine. The most important decisions there are from what angle you attack the enemy planes and how you spread out your fighters to attack different enemy planes. Once the dogfighting has begun you can try maximise the spread of your units so that enemies aren't allowed to get on your other fighters tail.
Sometimes dogfights can last a while and you might have a window to route nearby fighters to join the fray.

In all seriousness, if you let your enemy amass anything that can most likely destroy you then you deserve it. If the whole idea is to distract the AA defenses then you can build MUCH cheaper aircraft to sacrifice and have a backup plan.

Bombers are very easy targets even guarded by fighters. They're simply not fast enough.

The best way to counter and not overwhelm base defenses is scripting AA to target bombers as priority regardless if any other aircraft already in range, once the most dangerous threat to commanders is eliminated (be it bombers or worse), then targeting criteria can change to gunships leaving fighters for last. Also, longer range defenses should be available, if land/sea can have arty, then some sort of AA arty could be balanced.

ledarsi got the right idea, thats how they're supposed to work... which is also true for land and sea; the ultimate deciding factor is speed cause air units can make it to the other side of the map in seconds, giving you absolute airspace control.

This is not really a 1v1 issue, but in large games where players are left alone to tech up, small initial advantages can snowball and the entire game can be decided by who has made most ASFs. This is a fact of SupComFA, regardless of whether you believe it.

T3 bombers in FA have 4000HP and are fast enough that only SAMs (T3 static AA) or ASFs can take them down.

ASFs are the only unit in Supcom that can kill T3 bombers before they bomb their target. SAMs don't stand half a chance in hell of protecting anything. Not surprisingly, the answer is to build even more ASFs.

The value of ordnance defense is that while ground AA may not be able to stop a bomber, it is still possible to stop the bomb. Various occlusion options can also waste bombs and render the first strike less effective.

AdmiralZeech is at it again on the thread on FAForever.com

Some excellent idea in here I think.

Definately! Good stuff.