AOE against air

The time to refuel is the time it takes for units to fly to air staging and return to where they are needed, and the cost is the opportunity cost between having your units where you need them (with less time on target) and having them staged in the rear (but fully fueled). Superimposed on those decisions is the location of air staging facilities, which can be far from the action (safe, but longer sorties) or near (dangerous, but quicker turnaround time). All of which are macro elements.

the reality is that you can't make any good and fun gameplay with it anyway considering the game we are playing

Could you expand on this?

Also "air units crash when out of fuel" is a hard no from me. That information (fuel range and time) is presented to the player with low resolution, and heavily punishing for misjudging it turns what should be a tactical opportunity for your opponent into a banana peel.

I literally won all asf fights with janus until min 40 in one game, idk what you guys are talking about with t2 fighters, do you expect 4 corsairs to win air against 2 asf or what?

All these ASF nerf ideas are gonna result in is converting every current air slot in teamgames into a min 15 nuke rush slot.

What if we'd make ASF take up more space in the formation, automatically forcing them to spread more? Similar to how one experimental causes your land army to spread out too.

No idea how that would impact anything. Thing is that once ASF go above like 200 for each side it’s more efficient to do stop micro rather than circle micro so it more than likely wouldn’t address the worst case scenarios unless the spacing is ginormous in which case you’re likely going to morph micro into some sort of shift+g into stop micro.

@ftxcommando said in AOE against air:

All these ASF nerf ideas are gonna result in is converting every current air slot in teamgames into a min 15 nuke rush slot.

This doesn't follow. ASF are a fundamentally defensive weapon; if they were nerfed (or disappeared entirely) you'd see gunships, strats, etc. (the sharp end of air) become that much harder to counter and that much more useful.

Low asf = sams decide air = investing in air is pointless beyond 25 to snipe strats = make sams and nuke rush

Well it seems that more people are comfortable with adding a new unit than I previously thought.

People have to understand that T3 air being so strong is one of the few counterbalances to extremely defensive and turtley strategies on large team maps. If you can’t effectively dominate air to make a path for your strats to strike (a SAM or 3 can’t stop a dozen strats from making a first pass) then you are indirectly buffing nukes, ecoing, and game enders.

So if we’re going to introduce a unit to counter ASF it should be expensive and only cost effective against ASF and not other air units. Maybe something like an aerial Fire Beetle that explodes and leaves a large but lower damage AOE cloud.

@ftxcommando said in AOE against air:

Low asf = sams decide air = investing in air is pointless beyond 25 to snipe strats = make sams and nuke rush

I'm not buying the logic that nerfing a counter (ASF) to something (other air units) would make that something less useful.

@zeldafanboy said in AOE against air:

Well it seems that more people are comfortable with adding a new unit than I previously thought.

I think other options should be explored first. Any AA unit that's good against fast, tough, high altitude aircraft is going to be good against anything. T3 MAA has a bit of an "aftermarket" feel to it, as it is (at least at first, I got used to it).

If men with batons came to my house and said "you need to add an AA unit to FAF to counter ASF swarms or we're going to beat the bricks off you" I'd say the solution would be an anti-air nuke, small yield, built and launched like a tactical missile (with homing). Keeping the rate of fire low is the only way to prevent it from blowing out Czars/Soul Rippers, etc, AND it would potentially (depending on damage) give you the opportunity to retreat and repair heavier planes.

I think that if anything we need to find some way to allow something non t3 to counter strats. As far as late game asf fights, czars and washers help a ton with countering asf spam since when a washer is going in u either need to submit air dominance to kill the washer or u need to allow the washer to do damage and win air. This means that, assuming the player with the washer is competent, the player with the washer is in the lead dispite haveing less asf.

My idea for fixing air was to give inties/asf a fairly slow damage over time so that there are diminishing returns to larger groups of them, because they will each waste multiple shots into an enemy plane before it dies. A smaller group would be able to inflict lethal damage on a larger number of enemy planes. The main goal of this idea was just to make air micro more consistent and less game-deciding, but I hypothesize it would work in this way as well. I'm not sure if damage over time would have negative consequences for performance though.

if that will work on t4 air exps, game is literally ahwassa rush and you're dead due to crash damage+bomb damage in 90% of the games

That won’t work the way you think because of stop micro making ASFs attack one another individually in large groups.

What about increasing ASF min airspeed?

AA needs to have some target priority coordination, like SMD. Now it's like... lets fly over a fly spyplanes, then then bombers.... all SAMS empty.

Casual reminder save T1 Arty & Engi. T1 Land Mobile gets invaliated as you go up the techs. Only Navy keeps all piece relavent. Also part of Air Design*, was way air units auto prioritize targeting. So being able to throw a bomber, transport or experimental into an air fight to tank or distract enemy asf so you could catch was thing. Due to stuff like ASI changing priorities, and adding the ability to micro preferred targets. Meant its harder to “distract” enemy units.

I think AoE would be onteresting. Could result in less clumping and more spreading out. I do think thinks could be done with fuel I don’t know what through.

By and large, what would be intriguign if we see more of a dbl down on certain mechanics. If we made Broadswords cheaper so spammable jn mass to make ASF first volley “miss” be interesting. (Ghetto labs being able to shoot air aldo be cool but thag another doscussion)

Let flakk fire from transports

This topic is no longer required - we've found an alternative and a fix for ASF battles being so notoriously slow. It will soon be on FAF Develop, make sure to get the #dev-news role on the official Discord server to stay up to date.

That's great news and I look forward to reading about it and eventually seeing it implemented!

The changes are live on FAF Develop. I highly encourage everyone to give it a try. As a host, you can choose the FAF Develop game type:

All other players will download the correct files accordingly.

A copy of the announcement on Discord:

The notoriously slow ASF battles are in the past - I highly encourage everyone to give the game a spin on the FAF Develop branch. With thanks to the unmeasurable help of @Deribus we can safely confirm that we manage to do a 700 vs 700 asf fight at ~40 ms / tick on FAF Develop. Where as that jumps to 300+ ms / tick on the regular branch.

I'll leave out the exact details, except for the pull requests that are responsible:
 - https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/3892
 - https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/3891

And two example replays between the immortal Deribus and myself:
 - Old (on FAF branch): https://replay.faforever.com/17159334
 - New (on FAF Develop branch): https://replay.faforever.com/17159366

edit: We're very open to feedback. You can use the game-bug-reporting channel to provide your concerns. Make sure to provide structured, objective feedback and keep it civil

Is it just a performance fix?