Restructure air by delaying tech 3 air

My first dumb thought was "if you delay t3 air too long, the air slot would be bored from having nothing to do". But nvm that.

Decreasing the amount of asf on the field would help land anti air, and also sim speed amusingly. It also helps air exps a bit I think. Sounds reasonable. Build time change seems the easiest to justify. Power adjacency is really obese too. Hq change also slows rush down.

If t3 air rush is slower, the time delay for t3 land aa is less. Having a choice to sacrifice some advantage to get quicker t3 land for maa could help land slots have more agency. Not sure what type of time delay you want between t3 air and quick t3 land. Or they can just make t1 aa, idk. Point is, t3 land isn't so bad unlike t1 aa spam since it also helps their offence with t3 tanks.

On the other hand, if land slots went into t1/t2 air more often, the problem with t3 air wouldn't be so bad. Often there isn't even another air factory other than in air base.

If the meta was for air slot to go t2/t1 air instead of t3, I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. Sounds like land slots would have more chance to get in on the air action. Transports would also be much better since they aren't just flying targets like they usually are at t3 air stage. Of course, t3 air still has to be good.

@FtXCommando
Survivability depending on storage is interesting, but it breaks muh immersion. Make mex volatile too so they all blow up on crazy rush.

Alternative is t3 bomber + t2 bomber one shots mex, so you need another player to support you to make the rush work. Or t3 air player goes t2 bombers instead for their higher efficiency damage per mass.

Anyone using crazyrush for a balance discussion loses their brain privileges. We’d be moving janus to t3 stage if we cared about crazyrush. Having to use t2 bombers (or t3 gunship or another strat) to finish up a loose mex either delays the strat rush itself or gives a slower target for ints to prioritize.

It also gives interaction capability and makes punishing an eco greed gremlin actually be their fault as they shouldn’t be ringing mexes without some margin of safety.

The more people post the more I think we’re playing different games. It would be good to help air t4s be viable? It would be good to make drops easier? What? These are absolutely insane parts of the air gameplay as it is and the former is getting a ridiculously large nerf because of how insane they are. The latter has always danced around the cusp of being oppressive because of their speed, hp, and damage potential.

ASF are incredibly tanky for their mass cost and have very strong dps. One or both should obviously be reduced. However they are the only strong counter to strat bombers aside from static SAMs and the only real counter to T4 air. So maybe buff T3 MAA (which always seemed a bit weak to me) too. Obviously a fighter plane should be the best form of AA but maybe shift its power a bit more elsewhere.

First strat rushes honestly can be countered if they are scouted in advance even without Tech 3 anything. Make like 4-5 T1 AA turrets and position 15~ interceptors accordingly and you can cause their considerable investment to be totally wasted. Harder to do with stealthed Cybran strat but still doable.

@ftxcommando yeah let me go for corsair snipe, cool I killed 1 ACU!

oh wait one opponent has 2x eco and went t3 air, there's a strat sniping my teammate and all my corsairs either died on the first snipe or enemy ASF are eating them alive.

Yeah going t2 air was the key to winning, sniping is a super good strategy on teamgames and not absolute garbage that makes some other dude have more eco and better units. But if you kill 1 ACU, you did your job no? xdxd

Is this an attempt to say t2 air is not viable in teamgames?

@ftxcommando said in Restructure air by delaying tech 3 air:

The idea of making ints trade mass efficiently against asf is even funnier, now you have literally zero reason to ever even go t3 air.

Even if I ignore all other T3 air units that can be built and just look at asfs, inties trade mass efficiently with swifties yet swifties are still built - being faster, more durable and taking longer to run out of fuel are significant advantages even if mass for mass in a fight they're worse than inties. Are you trying to argue there is zero reason for people to build swifties because inties trade mass efficiently with them?

Much of the value of swift wind comes from the fact you have an HQ you made to spam aeon gunships. You now have an HQ that can make ints or swifties. Between the two, you are able to put more mass into air faster by spamming swifties and since air is a heavily timing focused part of the game, that spike in mass in air means you can win an early air fight and snowball an advantage before an int airgrid can scale into matching your mass investment. This is the same principle as janus or notha air wins.

So what's your point there? ASF are only decent for that 2-3 minute period after getting early t3 air and then once the more efficient int scale catches up (easy with the t3 pgen + t3 air hq investment you must pay while enemy can just ask for a t3 engie from land/navy player) you lose forever?

@ftxcommando Not really, maybe in some coordinated high rated teamgames they are. But in 90% of every other teamgame its literally T3 air rush all the way. The window to effectively use T2 air is very limited and needs coordination from the team.

Maybe in your experience T2 air is really strong but in the average teamgame, all t2 bombers are just cannon fodder for the dude getting ASF on min 9-10.

Tbh, the lower the average skill level the bigger the T2 air abuse window is. People won't have flak, won't have AA nor ACU in proper positions. It's literally easy pickings for you. What's more, fuckers will throw single ASF after your intie/t2 bomber cloud and keep on throwing their tech lead instead of getting the snowball rolling.

So no, T2 air is even stronger in lower rated games.

And imo it get's way harder in higher rated lobbies to do it, that is if at least half the people can be arsed to play the game lmao.

Here, some replays of me being a t2 air retard in lower rated games.
https://replay.faforever.com/17871445
https://replay.faforever.com/17846127
https://replay.faforever.com/17845769
https://replay.faforever.com/17839100

Id love to see every option besides option 3.

The level of coordination is drastically overstated. At most, having 1 person on the same page will be all you need to win a game. The reason you don’t see t2 air often is a self fulfilling prophecy of low rated players thinking t3 air is all that matters so they only practice it and then only know how to do it. I have seen PLENTY of dudes that farmed 1500-1700 rating off of bashing noobs with t2 snipes because they actually bothered to learn something besides 2 bos. It’s the same issue as noobs still percy spamming, the lower the rating the lower the sensitivity to balance. If you start going “muh 1000 rated games” you will absolutely ruin gameplay in higher levels because nobody there is gonna realize strats suck until they need to 4 pass t2 mexes.

In fact I KNOW this is the problem because I’ve had lower rated people submit training replays where they try to do t2 air play but it fails. What do they do? Treat it like strats. Make 2-3 t2 bombers, send them in, they die, soon they realize and then go t3 air, now they have nothing but lost time, now they lose. Then I got to read about “there was nothing I could do dude” against asfs.

Lower rated players not using T2 air doesn't have to mean that T2 air is bad at lower ranks.

It could also mean that the lower rated players that do use T2 air stop being low rated rather quickly.

I remember T2 bomber snipes were actually quite a popular strategy on the 'Gap of Rohan', the original 'noob gap map', back like 3-4 years ago - mostly used with cybran Corsairs. So I wouldn't say the noob-side of the community never had contact with this concept, it's just that given the fall of Rohan and rise of Dual gap, being a much larger map, the T2 snipe ability and how it's executed probably fell into oblivion.

I'm no pro, but given what has been said up till this point, maybe an immediate solution could be to try and remedy the snipe-potential of T2 fighters/bombers? What would be achieved by this? With a bit of a 'propaganda', players could be educated on the primary strength of fighters / bombers - to be both. By doing this, maybe over time players would realize that T2 is actually a competitive anti-air solution - ofc, outranked by 1:1 T3 air.

Reduce T2 air alpha, increase area

How this could be achieved is maybe by increase T2 anti-land ability, while reducing their snipe strength. One way to do this is by increasing their AOE range, while reducing damage.
Current damage values (for larger targets), assuming static targets:

Maybe reduce these values to half, around 600-700, but increase their AOE by 30% to 50%. You could add some variety by say keeping the Corsairs a bit more 'snipe' oriented, so their AEO could be made a bit larger, but also damage reduced by less. Mass cost would then have to be adjusted (I'd argue lowered by 20-30%, potentially mass-matching ASF).

Reduce T3 strat aoe range, maybe HP

Reduce Strat AOE range

In similar kind of fashion, another thing that could be done is making T3 strat bombers more of a 'strategic' strike unit, and less 'f everything in this general area' kind of unit, by reducing their AOE by say 20%, but keeping the damage. This way, you would take away their ability to snipe multiple mexes at once, while still having them keep their sniping ability. They would still be a threat, but making them more mass-expensive or implementing the speed hierarchy (maybe not making them slower than inties, but as fast - so a well commandeered strat can still do some nice damage, but can be caught by Inties with proper micro) proposed in my previous message, which would mean they area easier to stop with existing forces players might have on the field, namely inties and T2 fighters. You would somewhat reduce their ACU-snipe capability given it would be easier to dodge with smaller AOE, but I don't think that's a bad thing in and of itself.

By doing this, it would additionally reduce, albeit not cripplingly so, the strength of rushing T3 to get that T3 strat. I'd argue that's 75% of the reason why people rush T3 in the first place - not to have ASF for the sake of air dominance, but to have a way to stop Strat snipes, and the only way to do it effectively is ASF, given other anti-air units can't catch up with them and kill them in reasonable time.

Reduce Strat HP

Another change that could be done to make this more reasonable is to reduce T3 Strat's HP to like half. I know land and air are not the same, but it kinda makes sense for the 'artillery' unit to be less tanks than the 'fighters'. Like to get my point across, compare T3 bombardment units (namely mobile arty) with T3 ground-combat units (titans, percys, bricks, harbs...). They have significantly lower HP than the units that will actually partake in the brawl - because they are assumedly supposed to be used with the premise they are safe to 'go out in the field'. Ofc their range allows them to not stand in the very front lines, but if you are making a push or using them as 'sneaky snipers', it's more than likely they will be in a position where a flank attack will get them killed.

Killing units like that doesn’t matter in a teamgame so you just made t2 bombers effectively useless in teamgames and focused gameplay around gunships. Which in turn means the only good t2 stages are sera and aeon with UEF t2 air being even worse than their t2 navy.

Also, as I stated before, t2 air needs to work well as a comeback mechanic for 1v1 gameplay. This change would eliminate Cybran ability to use snipes as a punishment tool for too greedy play in 1v1 and make then extremely toothless there.

@fichom Janus is really bad for snipes (I tried once out of desperation and learnt never to try again after seeing the pitiful damage they deal). Nothas can be dodged. That just leaves the corsair and even then its damage isnt great if dodged so if scouted ahead of the snipe attempt it should be possible to defend against.
With full share applying to most games now snipes can also cost you the game since you likely lose all the bombers in the snipe attempt and could make the enemy team better if you killed a weaker player.

If you define snipe as acu snipe then janus is bad. Janus is excellent at sniping power, though.

I'm not sure I can acknowledge the claim that killing units is of no consequence. It opens up a path for your allies to make a push, potentially securing additional mexes and reclaim. Ofc it's all situational, but if T2 bombers actually become proficient in bombing and clearing out forward land forces / outpost bases, wouldn't this actually work to incentivize players to actually spend some time in T2 and build up some T2 air forces before inevitably going T3 to assure air dominance, otherwise risking loosing a front due to delayed air-reaction?

Like yeah, you can just ignore T2 and go straight T3, but if the enemy air player goes T2, it can cost your teammate quite a bit of ground while he waits for you to reach T3. Ofc it would be a reactive tactic to invest more in T2, if you scout and know your enemy is rushing for T3. Over time it won't become a norm to rush T3, but it will have to be considered as one of the options (which currently it is not).

Again, I mentioned to maybe keep the corsair on the snipey-side of damage.

@maudlin27 exactly why I'm proposing for T2 bombers to be more proficient in clearing out larger unit clusters. Not that you have to target the actual units on the front line. You could go for production and eco. What would differentiate T2 bomber capability is it's larger area but weaker damage, compared to strats.

Assuming we make the damage values for Janus | Corsair | Notha as: | 700 | 900 | 750, you can still snipe T2 mexes with 3 Corsairs, or 4 Janus/Notha (which is mass-efficient compared to T3 strats, but admittedly more risky at current speed hierarchy), but you can also use it's aoe to wipe out other parts off the base. Like unshielded PGens. You could also still snipe your land opponent's unshielded land HQ (pressummed T2 UEF HQ) with 'only' 6 T3 bombers making 2 passes (assuming no AA to kill them, and assuming the proposed lowest 700 Janus dmg, attacking a UEF highest-HP T2 land HQ).

Edit: forgot to write about 1v1 vs NvN, will be added in a hot minute (below, so you don't have to re-read the above, if you already did).

The 1v1 vs NvN problem

I'd argue this is a problem in all team games that allow for 1v1 situations, especially in RTS. It's the problem of how to balance the game in a way that both 'sides' are satisfied. And given the amount of years humans have been making RTS games, the amount of attempts this generated, and the fact that number of attempts = numbers of failures, I'd argue it's impossible to balance a game in such a way that the same stats are as impactful as in 1v1 as they are in team games. Similar problem, but one regarding pro vs noob balance, has been a problem in games since forever, not just RTS.

Now this is more of a philosophical drivel, but we as the community will probably always be torn between what's more important to balance, 1v1 or NvN. We could in theory 'decide', but that would, I feel, serve as a trigger to split the community, which I'd argue is not a good thing. Also, this part is not related to the discussion, but is important in the sense that we need to acknowledge the viewpoints of both 1v1 players, but also NvN players, and that those will in some cases vary wildly.

No because any decent land push has shields and flak which will drastically minimize any damage those bombers do and if you invest in the 8-10 bombers to make the shields/flak insufficient you then need to hit something like pgens or mexes or an acu to make the upfront cost of those bombers worth it. Killing random tanks loses you the advantage and you were better off ecoing.

On top of that, a timing push from your ally should have been succeeding without your bomber support already, or the armies are attacking into each other and now you are hurting your ally as much as hitting the enemy with the bombers. The only exception here is if the push ran into something like the first few t3 units and needs assistance against them, but this change serves to actually make the bombers actively worse at hitting those high priority targets to allow a snowball to continue.

The push should succeed without you because the ally should be investing nearly all of his eco into the push, otherwise it’s half assed and wasn’t intended to end the game. In which case you investing critical air resources into your land player dicking around was also a waste of your time and now you’re behind for no reason.

But you are basing you statement on the idea that each attempt ever should be solely based and determined by that players' attack force. Which, pardon me saying it, sounds very 1v1-focus biased and not representative of team games. Like in 1v1 there is no one else to cover for you, so I understand your sentiment of "if you can not do it yourself, it means you can not do it at all, which in turn means you are losing by doing it", but I think it's realistic to leverage additional support from one of your teammates if he is ahead enough to afford it - like, for example, from your sheltered air player - where most of the "air T3 rush is oppressive" sentiment arises from in the first place - because someone can afford to do nothing but rush for T3 air.

Following your reasoning, you shouldn't push ever if your army isn't overwhelmingly stronger, which means that in an ideal game, you will never push, and solely rely on using your ground army as a deterrent. Which isn't unreasonable, but it means you assume any and all games should be ended by sniping the ACU despite all of the infrastructure and units it has supporting it. Which is cost effective if you can pull it off, ofc, but I don't think should be the pivoting point of the discussion.

Tenderizing your ally's push path seems quite a reasonable strategy to me - either by doing it directly, say bombing the enemy forward combat units, or doing it less directly, by bombing their eco (say to stall enemy E, so shields go down, or their factories, to reduce their unit output) or other fortified positions - it won't take ages for a couple of T2 bombers to take down a couple of T2 shields. And yes, you might get the enemy to react by building disproportionate AA to dissuade this, but then you achieved your goal - making it easier for your ally to push (given some BP and mass was invested in additional AA by the enemy, instead of ground-striking units).

@javi if you think that sole purpose of t2 air is sniping acus you are such a monke. Like what if you go for pgens, mexes, hqs? Maybe skill of 1ks is too smol to consider this, thats why appealing to their games is clown.