[Poll: Limiting Air movement to Radar Range] - Result: No! Come and suggest for the next Poll :)

EDIT 2: This proposition was not particularly popular; Poll Result: Hell Naw.
However, I am of the opinion that Air has a few fundamental issues, such as overlapped AOE and massed roaming bombers preventing invasion forces from establishing footholds. Therefore, please feel free to discuss possible alternatives to my proposition below.

Edit 3: I'm keeping a track of alternatives to my 'terrible idea' ^^ and may post another poll.

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The proposition is to restrict Air units' movement to that of Radar's circumference. The reasons for this suggestion are as follows:

• To allow Ground Units to traverse the map. Currently several T2 Bombers can carpet bomb any army out of existence - as PA has no shields, Air warfare can thus dominate gameplay if spammed in enough numbers.

• To link Air combat to Ground combat, and make Ground/Naval victories a more viable tactic through destroying your enemy's Radar towers and forcing their Air to retreat or be grounded.
  • This would mean that Air could still (especially with Advanced Radar) roam and defend over a large area, but Ground forces would be afforded the chance of approaching enemy "Territory" before being bombed, rather than being bombed the moment they left the shelter of a base or lost fighter support. It would also mean Ground had a means of responding to Air other than AA, or more Air.
• To reduce Commander/Anti-Nuke suicide runs by several dozen T2 Bombers.
• To allow Invasive forces to establish a foothold by destroying Radar in an area of a planet's surface, thus preventing "Claimed" planets from being completely dominated by roaming bomber forces. (Even when the Unit Cannon comes in, this problem will persist if units land only to be bombed into oblivion. We also saw in a recent LiveStream how difficult it was to get a Teleporter built with unlimited Air roaming.)
• Less microing (in a macro game) to avoid your blob getting annihilated by a few bombers.
• A more defined role for Bots as Blitzkrieg units who penetrate enemy positions to take out supportive structures like Radar.

Some things to consider:

• T2 AA may alter the balance between Ground and Air, but spamming and suicide runs will persist, and Air's ability to overlap and deal damage on a single point will continue to make Land/Naval army blobs easy targets for overlapped AOE damage, even if this means a suicide run for a comparatively smaller force of Bombers.
• Currently, surrounding a base with AA and spamming T1 Fighters is a necessity in order to prevent being dominated by enemy bombing forces, leading to repetitive gameplay and less direct combat as people are forced to waste resources erecting defensive AA early on.
• Scouts would be exempt and free to reconnoitre, functioning as mobile quasi-radar.
• Assaulting an enemy's base with Air would remain completely viable; Advanced Radar's range is such that it could cover an Enemy's base. Indeed, it is often enough to cover almost all of the smallest moons. The only difference is that you would need to ensure you retained Ground and Naval superiority as well, or at least defended your Radar with your Bombers.
• If you want a 'Realisitic' justification, put it down to computing power; Air Combat requires Radar to avoid all those whizzing bugs crashing into one another.
• This could be an optional setting, of course.

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EDIT: It might be worth linking the previous poll I posted about where we like to see Combat; on the Ground or in the Air:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/...al-and-big-guns-what-is-the-core-of-pa.54505/
This new poll is, in a way, an attempt to provide more interplay between Ground and Air, and ensure Air does not act as an entirely independent entity from Ground/Naval forces and bases, and cannot substitute Ground or Naval forces.

I'd also be interested to see if anybody has read this, so please feel free to propose other solutions to the current issues with Air I outline and attempt to solve above (particularly ease of defensive global dominance and redundancy of Ground/Naval warfare when you can have globally mobile Air units which are unobstructed by terrain and able to make suicide runs on high-value targets). If you voted No, it'd be interesting to hear what you think - Is there even a problem with Air's role at the moment?

but how could destroy enemy emplacements that your ground units cant get to because they keep getting destroyed by artillery?

Place a Radar that covers the Arty and send in the Air? Drop units on it with the Unit Cannon?
Artillery is far more balanced since the last patch; it's much more suited to hitting static targets like buildings as it now has a slower projectile arc. Your Radar and the Enemy's Radar could overlap, as now - you would be able to provide Fighter support as you sent Ground most of the way in, even if you couldn't quite reach the Arty with your Bombers.

As much as I agree with you on the need to keep a leash on air units, I don't think leashing them to radar would quite work. If you needed radar to send in the planes, and you need to build a radar near the enemy base to get "air vision", why not just build a Pelter there instead? Same thing with Adv. radar and Holkins/Catapult creep. Besides, not scouting AA defenses is already a punishment waiting to happen; so in effect, recon IS still important for using air.

Bombers are the only real issue with air balance, because it creates an asymmetry of a highly mobile unit versus any number of not-as-mobile units. Tweaking them by altering their move speed, HP, damage/AoE, and - hopefully coming soon - their ability or inability to stack together is a better solution than trying to impose new rules.

We may also see tweaks to the metagame as the UI improves; I've already started using the continuous build feature to splice in varying percentages of AA into my ground armies at all times. We could see more and more improvements to notifications, as well, such as alerting us when units are detected in radar range - making forward radar coverage just as important as AA, since it'd give you time to send fighters to intercept.

Ehh I dunno.

I'd like them to fix the problem with stacking and maybe flush out the ammo system a little more.

I think this makes defending against ground attacks even easier. If the attacker only has radar going up to one side of a base, you know there is only one attack path that can be used against you. Armies coming in without air cover could just be bombed.

Instead, it would be really cool if we got some squad ai in the game. When a unit sees an enemy bomber nearby, your other units in that area should try to spread themselves out. This should work when units start getting hit by artillery, too. If you want to micro your units by hand, you should be able to turn off squad ai. I think most people would love to have help dealing with that kind of micro though. It would give you more time to go get fighters and send them in to help out.

The thing is, if you built a Holkins, it would do a lot less damage than the combined overlap of spammed Bombers heading for a Commander. Fixed positions are more vulnerable through their immobility and attack from Ground/Naval. Air is currently more manoeuvrable, less vulnerable and does more damage en mass.
Also the risk of AA is no deterrent to suicide runs on Commanders and Anti-Nukes, which just leads to a need to spam more Anti-Nukes.
Gunships may also pose an issue for Armies and Comm-Sniping as they did in SupCom. And to say Bombers are the only issue belies the fact that Fighters have no real impact on gameplay other than within Air - namely Bombers and Gunships; so what you're saying is that the only form of Air which really impacts upon gameplay outside Air is the issue.

I worry that such adjustments to movespeed, HP damage and AOE will simply be overcome by more spamming. I feel what is needed is for Ground/Naval Units to be able to interact with and deny Air.

I also don't feel that warning systems and more fighter-spam is a solution. This draws away from the interesting combat on the ground, and turns gameplay into a fighter-spamming contest - if you can take out 100 fighters with 200 fighters, you can go and bomb a Commander or a base.

Preventing overlap is perhaps another solution...

Hmm. Fair points; I hadn't considered Gunships. So far, however, they've acted as glass cannon raiders, which I like quite a lot. They can't get through any amount of AA for comm sniping unless they're ganging up on a lone t1 turret 5 to 1, and their slower movement/stationary attack type makes them even easier to kill with fighters or ground AA.

You're right to worry about players spamming their way through the bomber's deficiencies; even if it takes a long time to reload, is slow as all get-out, takes considerable damage from AA and is too clumsy to concentrate on a single target, the prospect of a sky blackened by bombers is not one to be taken lightly. But then, neither is the prospect of a dense bot and/or tank army marauding across the plains and smashing through defenses.

But the latter looks AWESOME!

Really do not like that limit.

Today's aircraft don't need it. Having that limitation would take away some of air's most important roles – like quick defense. Backside raiding. Strategic strike of key structures in the middle of the enemy's base.

Advanced radar only has a range of 600. That is not a large range. It'd mean that aircraft can only really be used for defending. If anything, it would just increase the frequency of Hornets destroying attacking armies since you'd be unable to send fighters to cover your attacking army.

If you neglect air, just like if you neglect naval or orbital, you deserve do lose.

I do think some of the units need to be balanced further, but that's true of all layers.

Adding this arbitrary boundary to air would gimp air into completely uselessness.

unless scout planes had radar which would allow all the other planes freedom of movement.

But I digress, terrible idea. Thanks for posting though!

How about removing any kind of sensor capability from bombers thus limiting their effective operational range to your intel range? That would automatically relegate them to a support role. The same principle could be applied to fighters to a lesser extent: By reducing their sensor capabilities fighting over enemy territory would become much more dangerous.

I agree that air is a problem right now, but I don't agree this is the best solution. To solution (which air spammers are gonna whine about) is letting all units shoot all units. TA style, as it always should have been....

Not this again. It's not like a few Flashes are gonna shoot down a Shadow bombing the heck out of your base, or like Bulldogs will ever hit a Hurricane more often than once in a blue moon.

Well you are all against pointless limits on some things (like being teathered to radar) but love your pointless limits on other things (restricted targets). I'm all for the limitless, scalable game they pitched. Pointless arbitrary limits are lazy band-aid fixes to symptoms not real solutions to problems

Fair enough, that's that idea sunk.
Alternatives proposed thus far for balancing Air are as follows:

1. No air overlap.
2. Letting all the things shoot at air. (Edit: Altitude controlling combat - shooting at landed/low flying aircraft.)

Edit:

3. Realistic Air Movements (constant movement).
4. Reducing Fighter HP, increasing Bomber Reload times.
6. Cloak Towers/Mobile Emitters to mitigate Comm/Anti-Nuke suicide runs/allow army blobs to move undetected, which out of the above only 1. would also do.​

I may post another poll with these (and any other suggestions), to see what people consider a solution for Air's current imbalance. I agree with vyolin below that Air should act in a supportive capacity for Land or Naval rather than as an independent alternative, because given the choice, the current manoeuvrability and stacking AOE of Air will almost always make it the more economically/tactically viable choice.

Third would be, realistic air movements, (always moving to stay flying)

There's two different things here. The first is arbitrary restrictions that say X unit cannot shoot at Y. As in, it simply isn't allowed to. Ever. Even if it's right in front of the barrel.

The second is whether a unit, if not explicitly forbidden to shoot, is capable of hitting the target at all. If a tank's shell can't physically hit an aircraft because it can elevate the turret enough or fire at a fast enough velocity to reach the altitude of the aircraft, it shouldn't aim at it. But this can change on a situation by situation basis, and should be limited by the design of units rather than arbitrary rules (eg. if you want to prevent units being anti-air, make planes fly above their targetable height, or lower weapon velocities and/or maximum barrel pitch etc.).

Let physics work out what should shoot what and when. If a plane comes into land right in front of a tank, why should the tank have to wait until the engine says the plane is now on the Land layer before it can fire? It can clearly hit it when it's near the ground, so it should. If the tank surprises a landed aircraft, the aircraft shouldn't be instantly immune to being targeted the second it leaves the ground and enters the Air layer, either.

As an aside to the original question: I think it might be beneficial to talk about the role of air units and agree on one before discussing their balance. Most of those balance discussions boil down to people assuming or preferring vastly different roles for air units thus leading to discussing different things entirely.
Back to the topic: Generally I prefer air units assuming a support role, subsequently balancing them around superior combat efficacy and inferior operational range and duration.
However, since air units in TA-style games are - in my opinion - designed as combat units and rearming/refueling introduce tedious micro or at least disrupt their usage I would propose setting off their high mobility and damage potential with long reload times for bombers and low HP for fighters.