Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF

T3 air is so oppressive in the game. 1v1's its basically the opposite however if you get to T3 it can still get oppressive even in a 1v1. T3 Air always ins with 2 giant blobs of Air just staring at eachother.
The single point of T3 Air being so Oppressive (not OP) that it basically eliminates ground pushes late game especially if you are down in air because the enemy can cheese it so well with bombers, gunships, mercy spam (it happened before lol), etc. It's just not fun with how Air is balanced

Of course this is my opinion and experience.

T3 Air also eliminates any interesting plays late game because you locked on ground because for one T3 Omni exist (needs to be NERFED HARD IMHO but thats another topic). You can't sneak anywhere on the map because the Enemy Air will just see you instantly. Maybe we should nerf ASF Speed? No, in my opinion thats like a middle nerf. You aint actually solving the problem. You are hindering it but not fixing it. ASF should have more buildtime and T3 HQ Upgrade & Supports should cost more, the Power Adj should be nerfed too.

T3 Sams IMO is an easy fix, just revert like maybe half or third of the AoE.

Why are people talking about nerfing aoe in a thread about making sams stronger vs asf

@ftxcommando

Aoe makes it way stronger against Gunships & Strats
You can just nerf ASF dont need to buff SAMs

Nerfing ASF necessitates nerfs to pretty much every other air unit. Nerfing sam aoe brings them back to being the noob trap unit they were prior to the aoe buff, even if you give them double the damage.

@azraeel said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

T3 air is so oppressive in the game. 1v1's its basically the opposite however if you get to T3 it can still get oppressive even in a 1v1. T3 Air always ins with 2 giant blobs of Air just staring at eachother.
The single point of T3 Air being so Oppressive (not OP) that it basically eliminates ground pushes late game especially if you are down in air because the enemy can cheese it so well with bombers, gunships, mercy spam (it happened before lol), etc. It's just not fun with how Air is balanced

Of course this is my opinion and experience.

T3 Air also eliminates any interesting plays late game because you locked on ground because for one T3 Omni exist (needs to be NERFED HARD IMHO but thats another topic). You can't sneak anywhere on the map because the Enemy Air will just see you instantly. Maybe we should nerf ASF Speed? No, in my opinion thats like a middle nerf. You aint actually solving the problem. You are hindering it but not fixing it. ASF should have more buildtime and T3 HQ Upgrade & Supports should cost more, the Power Adj should be nerfed too.

T3 Sams IMO is an easy fix, just revert like maybe half or third of the AoE.

You are missing the point. There is virtually no difference between DamageRadius = 0.1 and DamageRadius = 1. I tested this years ago. I think if my memory is not failing that there is something about DamageRadius not working in decimals but only in integers.

Besides that, as soon as you introduce splash damage in any amount, any overlapping hitboxes will magnify the damage dealt by Sams. Gunships have this stupid behaviour that if you tell them to attack anything they all fly in shift-G mode to the target, then once they reach the target they go into reverse gear, spread out and hover around the target while firing at it which clumps them up in one big blob with tons of overlapping. You wont achieve any meaningful improvement by only reducing splash damage alone, whether by half, 2/3 or even 3/4.

Essentially why any number 'n' of gunships suck so bad vs sams is because when attacking they take up to 'n' X 'Sam DPS' which makes it equivalent to the DPS of 1 sam spiraling up towards a variable 'n'.

Splash or no splash are the only 2 real options.

@ftxcommando said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

Nerfing ASF necessitates nerfs to pretty much every other air unit. Nerfing sam aoe brings them back to being the noob trap unit they were prior to the aoe buff, even if you give them double the damage.

As I said, it would take several changes...

You need to look at it in terms of the magnification of damage. The more ASF there are the more damage a Sam with AOE does. The AOE of a Sam doing 1 damage vs a sam doing 2 damage can be the difference between a volley doing 1 damage and it doing 3 or 5 damage. This means that whether you have 200 or 300 ASF over the enemy base you will not have a linear increase of 50% above his air grid. Should one really be penalized for have more ASF by giving the losing player a catchup bonus? Should 5 sams really be able to take down 15, 20, 25 ASFs in 6 seconds instead of just 5 or with a doubling in damage 10?
10 ASF=3,500 mass 400,000 energy. 5 Sams = 8,000 mass, 80,000 energy and Sams will prioritize incoming Starts so the ASF being there wont matter much to the player who has no air.

Like everybody in the game is currently unaware of the strength of sams and drastically overbuilds asf so I don’t really see why they would be nerfed. Pretty much any ASF number over like 700 (can do as low as 150 on a map like hilly or canis) is a mistake in a game and you were better off sam creeping by that point.

@evildrew said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

10 ASF=3,500 mass 400,000 energy. 5 Sams = 8,000 mass, 80,000 energy and Sams will prioritize incoming Starts so the ASF being there wont matter much to the player who has no air.

1 sam costs 800 mass, not 1600 though

also target priority mod is a thing, so sams can prioritize whatever the player wants, which is a good thing before you argue against it

@ftxcommando said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

Pretty much any ASF number over like 700

Oh wow, only 700. Super common to see

It is quite common on any spread out 20x20.

@ftxcommando said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

Like everybody in the game is currently unaware of the strength of sams and drastically overbuilds asf so I don’t really see why they would be nerfed. Pretty much any ASF number over like 700 (can do as low as 150 on a map like hilly or canis) is a mistake in a game and you were better off sam creeping by that point.

It's not 700 that's just a completely artbitrary number, it basically comes down to:

(enough asf to snipe exp) * ((amount of enemy air exp) + 1)

The reason is simple, SAMs make all air to ground units that are not exp mostly completely useless.

However in practice it doesn't work exactly this way, because usually u don't want to lose air sniping enemy air exp out of fear that they will poop out another one in 30 seconds and SAMs are not so good vs asf so even if you are fighting over your own SAMs the player with more asf probably wins.

Your formula doesn’t work. The faster you can get a spread of sams to protect everything the less ASF you’re going to need. That’s why hilly and canis will never see more than like 200. 3 sams in base stop all early aggression and each person can build 10 sams out to make half the map impenetrable. At that point, you just care about having enough to intercept any rushed t4 or 20 strats.

700 is arbitrary because I never seriously attempted to discover a magic number for something like sentons. It’s just a value I’ve argued about and basically the largest number anybody I’ve had this convo with would say. I’d personally put it closer to 550 or so.

@ftxcommando said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

Your formula doesn’t work. The faster you can get a spread of sams to protect everything the less ASF you’re going to need. That’s why hilly and canis will never see more than like 200. 3 sams in base stop all early aggression and each person can build 10 sams out to make half the map impenetrable. At that point, you just care about having enough to intercept any rushed t4 or 20 strats.

That's... what I said. You just need enough to snipe the ahwassas and a few sams will do the rest

@mach said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

@evildrew said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

10 ASF=3,500 mass 400,000 energy. 5 Sams = 8,000 mass, 80,000 energy and Sams will prioritize incoming Starts so the ASF being there wont matter much to the player who has no air.

1 sam costs 800 mass, not 1600 though

also target priority mod is a thing, so sams can prioritize whatever the player wants, which is a good thing before you argue against it

You are right I was distracted while writing it, I accidentally did multiplied the Sams cost by 10 instead of by 5.
Yes the default priority was also set to strat on Sams a long time ago I think.

@blodir said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

@ftxcommando said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

Your formula doesn’t work. The faster you can get a spread of sams to protect everything the less ASF you’re going to need. That’s why hilly and canis will never see more than like 200. 3 sams in base stop all early aggression and each person can build 10 sams out to make half the map impenetrable. At that point, you just care about having enough to intercept any rushed t4 or 20 strats.

That's... what I said. You just need enough to snipe the ahwassas and a few sams will do the rest

No, it isn’t what you said. You said there is some uniform formula of the maximum efficient ASF output. I’m saying the number is extremely variable based on how long the game takes to sufficiently shut down air aggression. On a map like senton, you need sams up pretty much in a whole pond + the middle to accomplish this because torps can win back a whole pond themselves if the opposing air player just doesn’t care.

On hilly, air aggression is shut down like 2 minutes into t3 air stage.

Surface-to-air balance in the game is just weird IMO:

• T1 AA: reasonably well balanced vs T1 air; poor vs T2 due to higher HP of T2 units (though cost somewhat excuses this)
• T2 AA: flak is great vs gunship clouds. Not quite so good as I'd expect vs inties. Maybe should have larger AOE.
• T3 AA: SAMs are OP (strong damage + AOE) except that nothing less than nukes and massive numbers of weapons can kill an ASF cloud quickly (fair enough, considering the cost)

The problem is that T3 air play is too often about getting an ASF lead and keeping it. Since T1 and T2 AA is so weak vs most T3 air, SAMs are the main counter. But SAMs are expensive, high-damage systems not anti-swarm systems.

Fix: make SAMs much cheaper and weaker. Maybe also move to T2. Maybe also remove AOE, giving flak a role vs gunships even at T3 (will take more tweaks to balance).

Additional note: there is no good T2 AA vs T2 bombers; this is also in part why a strat rush can be strong. Having a T2 SAM would help balance both.

I saw someone in game fly over 10-20 seraphim cruisers with a cloud of like 200 asf and they all got deleted in seconds

so yes flak can work vs them

Don't think making them weaker vs strats will have the desired effect. You will then rely more on asf to counter/defend against strats.
I am guessing the reason for this post is to address asf not really caring if they fly over sams.