T1 bombers are too good at hunting down expanding engineers

After reading through the whole discussion, I'm a bit confused.. Why exactly isn't it an option to remove the radar of the bomber?
It doesn't have to be the only change ofc, but without the radar it drains more apm since you have to use and protect the scout as well + if the scout dies (which is far more likely the case before the bomber dies) the bomber loses quite some power.
Or am I wrong there?

and what I've noticed is that this discussion at some points / replies is more of a "Should the game rely more on the micro or macro-perspective?"-question...

No radar on bomber basically kills 1st bomber as any possibility, was already done. Whole reason it was brought back was to make the opening game rely on something besides optimal land factory scaling.

In my opinion, the only place where T1 bombers are truly OP are big 20x20 maps with lots of expansions where it's much better to just spam bombers on repeat and snipe random engies everywhere instead of trying to make ints and scouts and catch the bombers which is much much harder and not even too rewarding (since you make inties while your opponent is making bombers. If you catch all of the bombers you both have equal expansion but you have 5 more ints which at that point in the game is pretty worthless given the immense eco scaling).
As for 10x10 maps, I think that bombers are perfectly fine, it's just a fact that most FAF players are pretty lazy and greedy and don't make any scouts. If you go 5 engies into a tank + scout and make 2nd land factory you are supposed to take damage from a guy that went 2nd air bomber. The whole idea is that you sacrifice one advantage for another. You make more engies for better scaling and 2nd land for early land pressure. Your opponent rushes out a bomber and either has fewer engies or has nothing to defend them which allows you to attack with your land. Not to mention that if you open up with 2nd air int the bomber usually doesn't get anything done. Now, you may argue that these openings are too coin-flippy but if it wasn't for the viability of the 2nd air bomber opening the early game would be very static. Before the bomber buffs, the meta was to basically go full greed and scaling and 3rd or even 4th air fac with both players just defending with most of their tanks and maybe 1 stray one looking for damage.
I also disagree with the over-exaggeration of the game being immediately over when you lose your expanding engies. Yes, it's true that if you lose 2-4 critical expanding engies and you do no damage to your opponent whatsoever while having more land you will probably lose, a well-deserved loss. But if you lose 1-2 engies and do some damage on your own you are in a fine position and the game at least isn't a sandbox for the first 5 min.

Why homogenize the game

First bomber isn’t an all in but it’s close to it, if you fail to do significant damage you’re very far behind. I’m unsure if this complaint is in a 1v1 or team game scenario… first bomber takes a lot of investment in 1v1 and it’s countered by first intie in team games

I think with the right tuning the suggestions in the OP could lead to more interesting bombing decisions. Right now engies are basically the only viable targets, because they die in one pass, while the power in the base needs multiple. A weaker but cheaper bomber could allow you to make two to one-pass either engies or power in the base. So you can now either commit to multiple early bombers and do a lot of damage, or make only one and have less harassment with fewer cost.
Having more vulnerable pgens could also be nice for later raids, right now engies die so much faster than pgens that it's hardly worth it to target pgens instead of buildpower when a raid gets into the base.

Bombers are also very good vs T1 armies and are decent at killing stray mexes. They can also be used to bait your opponent into taking an unfavorable air fight. I believe they are in a fine place right now.
Reducing Pgen hp to allow for more power raiding is an interesting idea though. Not necessarily connected to this suggested bomber change.
Overall I don't think making bombers not one shot engineers is a great idea, they are supposed to be an aggressive tool to deny enemy's expansion

Nerf power and mex hp and u buff all t2 air when t2 air is already op

Like wouldn’t janus one pass pgen lines with that sort of hp reduction?

Oh yeah, and you can't really increase Engie's hp without messing with the current LAB and early tanks vs engies balance so that's pretty much a no-go.

We could always buff t1 land scouts again so it'll be even worse when people still refuse to build them.

T1 bombers can:

• very efficiently snipe expanding engineers, outcome can be brutal, game-deciding (especially on transport maps)
• bomb pgens depending on faction matchup
• suicide bomb into t1 radars and be worth it, let alone t2
• suicide bomb into t1 armies and still be worth it most of the time with just one pass (hard to prevent)
• in 1v1, be spammed on large high-mass maps not only to drain opponent apm but can also quite easily kill its own mass cost in engineers, mexes and radars due to opponent reaction speed & intie travel time
• be spammed late-game to deal with (t4) land pushes somewhat efficiently

I think most of these t1 bomber strong points can be somewhat alleviated by increasing its costs. doing so won't interfere with any other unit interactions. it doesn't address the main problem as well as other solutions could, but I personally don't think that was the only issue with t1 bombers to begin with.

the best idea i can come up with to actually address early-game bombers without ruining them is to decrease their reload speed and/or maybe their flight speed (or remove their radar because why do they have a radar while inties dont?)

Has radar on t1 MAA been considered? Just an idea. Maybe like 5e for radar that covers the range of the AA.

That does nothing to stop bombers.

Just addressing some things in random order:

Aside from first bomber sniping too many crucial engineers or maybe a quick 2nd air bomber sniping too many i see no big issues at all with bombers. They're strong yes, but they require micro and create quite some interactive gameplay in the early phases of the game. There is some rng involved with some bombers and the way they drop, but generally against someone who reacts well and prepares a few land scouts to spot raids the bomber can quite easily end up not doing much and you only put yourself behind.

I think a bomber not being able to 1 shot engineers will completely cripple it and make it terrible. Yes, ofcourse you can adjust its stats differently, but this is such a game changing decision that will impact the entire t1 stage balance. If you send a bomber to snipe an expandin engi, you send it to an engi where you have no other units to kill the engi. Leaving the engi on low hp is worthless. You either kill it or it has no impact. Finishing the engi off with a lab or tank basically means you didn't need the bomber regardless. Need 2 passes for the bomber to kill the engi? Basically halves the dps of the bomber and gives the engi an infinitely higher chance of survival because you got tons of extra time to dodge the second pass. This is also the reason why uef/cybran bombers are worse than aeon/sera (if you don't get rng). The engi dodges some of the damage so it doesnt die so you need twice the passes.

drops being 1 shot by bombers shouldn't happen. Don't be greedy and split. Sure they can still brutally rape your drop with multiple passes, but i think that's completely fine. You made the drop while your opponent went for some ints and a bomber to punish it.

bombers being efficient at sniping t1/t2 radars is a no issue imo. I think this is a pretty good interaction. Also literally anything is efficient to snipe these.

first bomber being overly efficient in large teamgames is i think an almost unsolvable issue since it is the same problem (to a smaller degree) as with nukes and smd's. You force all opponents to make the counter. I also don't think any bomber change aside from ruining first bomber bo or not making them 1 shot engineers will fix this, and those changes are terrible for bombers and i don't think they should be implemented.

All in all i think the best way to make early bombers slightly weaker is to slightly decrease their RoF so that you don't snowball succesfull drops at the start when they're being microed.

idea sounds interesting but increasing engie hp might make labs absolutely useless

I get that the change is really hard to imagine and it's impossible to exactly predict how it would play out. But look at it like this. As farms said, the current interaction between engineer and bomber is binary: you either kill an engi or the bomber is worthless (well technically you can make the engi waste time by forcing it to dodge, but let's disregard that). By lowering the stakes on both sides (bombers are cheap, but require 2 shots to kill) as well as introducing other choices (hoverbomb some mexes/pgens) we create many more interesting scenarios (explicitly talking about 2nd air first bomber here):

• bomber kills and engineer (devastating, but highly unlikely)
• bomber forces an engineer to dodge for a long time. To evaluate the situation you compare the lost time of the engineer to the new reduced cost of the bomber. If the bomber is cheap enough it will always be worth forcing enemy to dodge - or if it's too expensive it will never be worth. Perhaps a good balance can be found in this interaction? Also I'd like to compare this to aoe2 where feudal archers behind treeline force you to vacate that treeline even though they don't kill anything and sc2 where oracle stasis trap disables workers in mineral line for some time without damaging them. Both of these examples are more healthy imo, because there's a lot more granularity than the live/die binary of the engi.
• Bomber destroys 1-2 mexes (depending on bomber micro and enemy reaction time). Again depending on the adjusted cost of the bomber this may be made worth doing
• Bomber goes after pgens. Effectiveness depends on pgen splits
• Bomber goes after factory build platform to cancel factory production
• You simply make a second bomber with the reduced cost/buildtime and do all of the above. Note that it being 2 bombers instead of 1 bomber again creates way more possible scenarios than the binary engikill or not of the current bomber making the interaction less volatile in the process.

The rebalance would move power from the "hunting engineers" role to all the other possible use cases of the bomber. I totally agree that bombers make the game more exciting, and I also don't think they are overpowered at all. In hindsight I should've titled the thread in a way that doesn't suggest that I'm complaining about the bombers being op... mby something like "T1 bombers need a redistribution of power within the set of their use cases" would have been more apt.

@blodir said in T1 bombers are too good at hunting down expanding engineers:

T1 engis should live with low hp from one bomber pass. Some combination of the following:

• increase engineer hp
• decrease bomber damage

another problem here is that if engineer will not dodge on 1rst bomber pass, it will dodge on second one potentially meaning that bomber will do absolutely nothing

maybe make all bombers do damage over time equal to engineer HP xD
so if it is an expanding engineer it will die, if it is a group of engineers in base - they will survive if they repair each other...

Personally i also would like to see people be less greedy. (even tho i am often greedy myself)
Would be cool if land scouts could be made even faster out of the factory so you could use them to spot bombers, just get a ring of scouts around your base, tho even that is not possible on many maps due to terrain or water or just map being huge

another part of the problem for me is that engineer might be staying still so it needs to accelerate 1rst before it can dodge, and that is annoying (especially with 500ms delay)
Maybe let t1 engineers make land scouts without a factory? xD

I think it is very cool when someone makes land scout to counter 1rst bomber
Or when people split pgens or make preemptive mobile aa... tho preemptive mobile aa is actually feels quite weak move

also it might be weird but what i hate the most is that i don't hear bomb release sound when bomber is coming out of the fog of war, cause of that there is no chance to dodge (add 500ms delay to that as well)... maybe i would not have chance to dodge anyway, but not hearing that bomb sound makes is much more annoying cause i often hear it when second engineer is already getting bombed

okay i read more of this thread... didn't read the "bomber becomes cheaper" part.
i think it all may work, tho i have few concerns:
•bombing inties in factory might be painful, with aeon or sera you can bomb factory and pgens around it at the same time.
•also inties costing much more than bombers feels weird
•You can spam bombers all over the map even harder
•bomber gets cheaper but becomes better vs pgens and mexes... i don't have problem with that... but not sure if lower rated players will like this

Give engineers an auto dodge to help out decrypted old players with 0 awareness and 0 APM like me.

Also why not buff t1 maa range and damage to make it effective to build one to guard a key expansion area?

I don't know if it's a good idea, but engineers could get a 'hunker' ability so that they could survive a single bomb or last a little longer against a lab. That way if they are being defended they will likely survive, but if undefended they will still die. Removes the RNG of dodging while still requiring attention and defending, without modifying bombers or labs.

Let engies repair themselves - a quick order could prevent them dying to single bomb if some of the damage is changed to dot