Why I think T3 air is badly designed

@exselsior said in Why I think T3 air is badly designed:

Creating an air based counter to asf means sams reign supreme in the late game. Asf blobs are useful as meat shields for strats and t4 air units, now that just makes it so that those units are virtually useless if enemy has sams and are taking away options to end the game. Not to mention a unit that kills asf blobs would also wreck a group of strats coming in.

You do realise that if your opponent is fully coverd in sams than it means he spend a lot on it and the game just progress into even later stage at the game. Its like asking for still having an option to kill acu with mantis on t2 or t3 stage.

About overkill of SAMs:
Currently SAMS kill way less ASF then they should be if we go purely by DPS numbers. This is fine because SAMs are balanced with this in mind, but they don't do close to full DPS to a ASD cloud that moves by, because they shoot way too many missiles at the same target, and missiles are quire slow, so when the target dies there are already a bunch of missiles in the air that are gonna loose the dead target and be useless.

I disagree on this part. Could it be that you have not seen how sams do extremely good to blobs and perhaps you have yet to witness a sera sam. Sera sam is such a beast.

@jip So, it seems the OP was correct and T3 air is indeed badly designed, mainly because ASF can become invulnerable to sams by flying in a straight line

Was this updated in the most recent patch? I see the github issue is still "open" so I assume it isn't.

That was not part of the patch, afaik it has been in the game since GPG.

@fruitien00b said in Why I think T3 air is badly designed:

Also, a single t2 shield hard counters a strat rush.
You can hover under the shield with strat lol

Yes and I can count on one hand the amount of times I've seen that actually be pulled off after a ridiculous number of games played/watched, and if there's any aa present this kills the strat.

@fruitien00b said in Why I think T3 air is badly designed:

@exselsior said in Why I think T3 air is badly designed:

Creating an air based counter to asf means sams reign supreme in the late game. Asf blobs are useful as meat shields for strats and t4 air units, now that just makes it so that those units are virtually useless if enemy has sams and are taking away options to end the game. Not to mention a unit that kills asf blobs would also wreck a group of strats coming in.

You do realise that if your opponent is fully coverd in sams than it means he spend a lot on it and the game just progress into even later stage at the game. Its like asking for still having an option to kill acu with mantis on t2 or t3 stage.

Not really. It doesn't take that many sams (if well placed) to effectively deny strat attacks with a single strat on most team game maps, and building a lot of sams before starting game enders on high eco team game maps is fairly standard practice anyway in the late game. Perhaps ladder is different, but in ladder there are other issues if you're losing to a strat that don't have much to do with t3 air being badly designed. I see t3 gunships end high level ladder games that make it to t3 air more than strats anyway I think.

Im quiet a low skilled player, so may opinion may not be counted.
But if we fantasy some.

How about SLOT-BASED ASF?
T2 air factory can be upgraded to ASF-base. It supports, lets say 16 ASFs, build it automatically, like drones and support\repair it.
What we can get from it?
Lost air can be comebacked fast.
But as winner's ASFs survived and can be docked to base very fast - they save veteranacy.
Winner in most cases have more bases and so it ASF cap still higher.
Also - air carriers\CZAR\Atlantis may also work as ASF base, increase comeback potential for land\naval players.

PS it opens way to some interesting ways to play with fuel and fuel-games.

I think INTIS are capable of killing a T3bomber, all you need is 50-80 of them and a good engage turn

@sprouto said in Why I think T3 air is badly designed:

Perhaps a T3 flak (rather than SAM) would be an idea. I can't think of any real world analogy to an airborne AOE platform, but there are certainly many ground based ones.

There were nuclear A2A missiles. And normal AA missiles are technically AOE

@exselsior said in Why I think T3 air is badly designed:

The issue with asf is that you can go into a fight with 200 asf vs 190 asf, both be even in micro skill, and then the guy with 200 somehow ends the fight with 150 left and the other guy 0.

This is a common feature of war, though exaggerated in this instance. It's also probably why the main winning strat is "out build enemy."
https://youtu.be/wpjxWBwLkIE

Would an option be homing missiles?

Assuming: ASF is standardized on gun type weapons.
Give them:
Anti missile flares.
A Secondary of AOE homing missiles in a limited supply, like TML. Restockable at air staging. Toggleable fire at will feature like overcharge.

The flares can make a missile not hit your plane, but a missed missile still explodes, making it more effective against blobs than small squads.

Other idea:

Fire control tower you can build and 'assist' defensive buildings to, tower controls target acquisition and can toggle from focus fire to spread fire, allocating targets to lessen overkill and lost missiles. Gives a good boost, make it like a radar tower, juicy tactical target. EMP volatile when it's killed, power drain. Spitballing here.

Normal AA missiles, in RL and in-game, are not AOE. I mean - yes - they explode - but we're talking about an AOE radius large enough to impact other nearby aircraft - which is a very large difference. There's a good reason that flak style AA weapons are still in use today - along with SAM - and there are excellent reasons why aircraft are generally NOT equipped with flak style weapons for A2A combat, but instead have A2A missiles or simple guns/cannon. (Good thing no one has mentioned enabling 'damage friendly' for flak weapons yet).

Flak weapons are, by definition, considerably simpler, more robust, easier to operate, cheaper - but decidedly less accurate, than SAM - and more well suited to area denial. This makes them ideal for cluster formations (read: gunships) and other low level air threats.

Speaking directly to the original topic: Air units are simply too plentiful and easily replaced - no one thinks about using them carefully.

@sprouto This isn't the place to delve into IRL weapon deployments, but now I gotta google who uses flak still. I'm gonna be up all night. HOW WILL I PLAY FAF NOW!?

Anyway, we can't let reality get in the WAY of how we the community build our game (It's ours now, fuck Square), we should have reality INFORM our creativity in building an experience for people of all skill levels.

Anyway, on your point, they do get quite plentiful, but barring (for now) making some equivalent airborne SACU combat unit named "Maverick" we should see if we can make simple changes that deepen the air game a bit.

On that note, has anyone made a mod to give ASF AOE damage?

@kalethequick Ah shucks - I was just trying to add some meat to the conversation.

so much unecessartây theory,just build a few sams to cover the map and even if you are going to be behind 10-12 asfs,those sams are going to be extremely worth it,also if you want to nerf it,air will turn to be extremely useless since all the AA needs to be reworked as well due to that

@ftxcommando said in **Platinum question**:

No idea what a reasonable amount of fuel is and what the level of buff it allows would be, but in general I’d rather not convert air into land-like balance where you take away the thing that makes it unique. All I want from air balance is some sort of AOE t3 fighter to disincentivize asf blobs and introduce some level of counterplay in late air.

Restorer spammers be rubbing their dirty little hands together in excitement at the thought of ASF blobs being reduced significantly.

@derpfaf Yes. I would very much like the unit labeled "Anti Air" to be viable for that purpose.

A good air-based counter to the ASF would be anything mounting an extended-reach air-to-air missile: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40660/f-15ex-to-carry-new-oversized-air-to-air-missile

Presumably, a new plane would carry something like this in FAF. It could shoot from ~5-10x ASF's weapon range and the missile would have both tracking and significant AoE (maybe 10) to kill 10-20 ASF in one shot. Missile damage would be low (~4,000) and rate of fire would also be low (0.05, or 1 shot per 20 seconds) so, if this unit cost ~5x an ASF's cost, it could be weak against air XPs and outright countered by T4 bomber and CZAR. To make this unit even better, allow it to fire the extended-reach missile backways, thus allowing it to kite the ASF hordes.

The counter-play to something like this would be sending a few ASF in, or using these things to shoot down each other. The first is micro-intensive and small squads of ASF lose to ASF hordes. The second option is expensive and does little to kill bombers or T4 aircraft.

Why don't we just give each faction a T2 fighter like the swiftwind.

@funkoff sounds great, like seeker missile from the Starcraft 2 Raven and Parasitic Bomb from the Raven.

Interesting to note is that both offer a counterplay by breaking off the targeted unit. The Parasitic Bomb from the Viper is a Damage over Time Aura allowing late reactive counterplay.

How do you view Blizzards implementations, and how would you offer factional diversity in this massive missile anti-ASF unit?

@funkoff So... A unit that is capable to single-shot any strat bomber. 25 of them would be able to single-shot any air experimental. For the modest price of 125 asf's. 25 of them could also kill (with single shot) huge amounts of asf, even when coming from 25 different directions. Not to mention kiteing. And all that with 5 times less health masswise than asf. Making it hugely vulnerable to aa. Basicly unit that counters all other air units easily and loses hugely to aa. Defencive absolute. Both sides will build ~30 of those and then all airplay will stop?

Maybe reduce the ~4000 damage? Also, this range will give advantage for stealth asf's over normal asf's. Also, if those counter asf blobs, how would people kill air experimentals (without big asf groups)?

Every One here is stating that building a sam is a counter to a strat bomber, however air players tend to just rush T3 in ten minutes or so and make no attempt at making other units, so to compare that with a naval or land player who has to spam out massive amounts of low end units to get map control exc is never going to have access to T3 Tech in the same time, some players will even still be at T1 at ten minutes, meaning no sheilds no flak and deffinetly no sams or power to even run shields, second point is that the larger the map the ever more devestating T3 air strat rush is as mexes are spread out and you cant make a shield or sams over the entire map to cover all your mexes everywhere.

The simple matter is if your air player does not keep up with the enemy air player and they make an early strat you lose the game.

Wich makes for very boring play just rushing t3 air and no variance in strategy.