I'm talking about air and fuel in general. FTX covered ASF and T3 air interactions, I touched on lower level air.
Your opponent is most likely either also building 300+ asf or they're in the process of dying to air after losing it all to the dude who made more asf. Either or.
@exselsior said in What if? Experimentals end ASFs:
in the process of dying to air after losing it all to the dude who made more asf
I hate to grind you down like this but "killing your opponent's units and attacking their base" doesn't sound like doing nothing.
yes getting to make ur first proactive action min 25 when u scout if enemy made air or just straight rushed for game ender is certainly not doing nothing, but it damn sure feels like it
I again gotta ask you to unpack why any of what you just said would follow from ASF having to refuel more often.
Why would you be waiting until minute 25 to scout?
It's hyperbole. The change to fuel makes any air aggression attempt prior to a total air win cheese because there is zero room for maneuvering due to fuel being impactful. You either kill enemy air so you don't need to worry about doing anything beyond afking your big asf blob next to your damage dealers or you just don't do anything. For all intents and purposes air slots become game ender slots with an air cheese win condition if it's fully ignored.
Basically: you make high level air gameplay play the way low level air gameplay works.
and you dont wait min 25 to scout cuz they other team could be making drops or nukes or full monkey rush
Returning to the fuel debate it rarely comes up with t3 air just cuz you'd have to be attacking for over 10 min for asf to start to run out of fuel and at the high level people will always send all their asf back to an air staging ground after an air fight to repair everything. It is much more annoying when playing 1v1 or 2v2 and you are using t2 air to attack something because after about 4 min all your inties will be out of fuel and you cannot attack anymore. + it takes forever for inties to actually return to an air staging ground and by the time they do the game is either over or you have t3 air.
Let me highlight again that I'm only discussing a fuel change with regards to ASF. It doesn't follow that introducing a tempo to ASF--a fundamentally defensive unit, concerned entirely with destroying other air units--would reduce the room for maneuver or impact of said other units (it suggests the opposite, very obviously). Scouts, transports, and ground attack aircraft would retain their usefulness, and would receive an indirect buff as @Exselsior said.
Suggests there might be something interesting in switching those two states: reduce t3 fuel, increase t1/t2 fuel. Lower tier air units retain an advantage into the late game from a maneuver and availability standpoint but lose in a pitched battle.
We can agree at the start that bad complexity A. exists and B. hurts players, but I need some hook for what counts as "good complexity" and "bad complexity" before I can dive into it further.
Y'all can discuss your fuel or whatever, but the core idea of "air experimentals should beat ASFs at some point" is the same as with land experimentals overpowering land factory units. As to "what will counter them then?": same as what counters land experimentals: the other units in land-vs-air; so, that would be T3 land antiair and cruisers.
@SlickNixon The point of that was to show that having fuel in the game limits aggression which produces more static gameplay. Static gameplay is also inherently less complex because you simply aren't doing anything.
All those air units will still immediately die to a handful of asf. Now you can't risk attacking without a 10+ asf escort. Now you run the risk of the enemy sending 15. It just converges to you needed to send all your air, and since you have zero fuel to play around with to make the enemy take bad positioning or do feints you're just going to go in with your aggression with nearly zero asf coverage or right after you crushed enemy air totally. There is no air control pushing to take advantage of both players not being willing to risk the game swing of an air fight due to how undecided the rest of the game is.
Likewise ints would still be terrible because you're still investing ridiculous resources to compete with asf. If you invest 20k mass into ints, less than that mass in asf will crush them at those numbers. And it isn't like you suddenly got more asf because you invested into a way worse mass efficiency unit. The engagement is still good enough to respond to with your own afk AFK blob. Not to mention, at this point in the game, any relevant area can have 3+ flak, which will rinse any int blob you made, making even that pointless.
@slicknixon said in What if? Experimentals end ASFs:
Let me highlight again that I'm only discussing a fuel change with regards to ASF. It doesn't follow that introducing a tempo to ASF--a fundamentally defensive unit, concerned entirely with destroying other air units--would reduce the room for maneuver or impact of said other units (it suggests the opposite, very obviously). Scouts, transports, and ground attack aircraft would retain their usefulness, and would receive an indirect buff as @Exselsior said.
FTX already directly addressed this. It discourages on going fighter screens which is what happens high level air play.
Take any 4v4 20x20 map, in this example our hypothetical map has a strong navy component because that’s my preferred way to illustrate this. You have two relatively even air players, and one makes some torps to help his navy dude. What’s going to happen in high level games is both air players will play highly aggressive with their asf - the dude with the torps positioning his to defend the torps and the other positioning trying to both snipe the enemy torps and not get caught in a bad position. This can potentially go on for a long time and is quite fun, it’s where the true air game takes place not the base sim. It’s also fairly difficult and not something you see done, or at least done well in anything other than high level games. You can replace torps with gunships, strats, and t2 bombers all are related. There’s a lot of micro going on there and doing that well has one of the highest skill caps in the game. It follows that it reduces the usefulness of things like bombers because bombers have to be escorted by asf, and those asf have to travel further and longer than the defending asf do, meaning fuel favors the defenders when talking about late game t3 air interactions.
What does fuel do to this interaction which is one of the most complex in the game? Puts a pointless time limit on it. Literally nothing else. Just a dumb time limit and then you have to manage refueling for whatever reason.
My comment about bombers and transports getting an indirect buff is a detraction of fuel not a benefit of it. There shouldn’t be inconsistencies in how units behave vs what they’re supposed to counter. And no, bombers and transports do not need a buff in the slightest.
@melanol said in What if? Experimentals end ASFs:
Y'all can discuss your fuel or whatever, but the core idea of "air experimentals should beat ASFs at some point" is the same as with land experimentals overpowering land factory units. As to "what will counter them then?": same as what counters land experimentals: the other units in land-vs-air; so, that would be T3 land antiair and cruisers.
Only being able to counter air with surface to air fire is horrible for the game. Now everyone has to build static aa everywhere. Hopefully I don’t have to explain why that’s bad.
Also, land t4s lose to mass equivalent t3 units.
@exselsior said in What if? Experimentals end ASFs:
It follows that it reduces the usefulness of things like bombers because bombers have to be escorted by asf, and those asf have to travel further and longer than the defending asf do, meaning fuel favors the defenders when talking about late game t3 air interactions.
I agree with your reasoning here, and I appreciate you engaging with the details. I'd counter that fuel favoring the defenders is an interesting dynamic! On top of all the elements you've mentioned, it adds an offensive component to map control for the air game (via refueling stations) to match the defensive component of terrestrial AA.
Puts a pointless time limit on it. Literally nothing else. Just a dumb time limit
As it's somewhat the pillar for the rest of your argument--why is a time limit dumb? The game is full of decisions with time domain elements.
@exselsior said in What if? Experimentals end ASFs:
Also, land t4s lose to mass equivalent t3 units.
Tech+ vs tech- in SupCom is about how narrow a passage is. Too bad we don't have this in the air, but we have a lot of small units in the air vs not so many big ones, and we could use it in a similar way.
@ftxcommando said in What if? Experimentals end ASFs:
It just converges to you needed to send all your air
If your opponent thinks every air engagement converges to sending all their air, that's an opportunity to lure them out of position.
since you have zero fuel
How many minutes of fuel do you need to do a feint?
@slicknixon said in What if? Experimentals end ASFs:
@exselsior said in What if? Experimentals end ASFs:
It follows that it reduces the usefulness of things like bombers because bombers have to be escorted by asf, and those asf have to travel further and longer than the defending asf do, meaning fuel favors the defenders when talking about late game t3 air interactions.
I agree with your reasoning here, and I appreciate you engaging with the details. I'd counter that fuel favoring the defenders is an interesting dynamic! On top of all the elements you've mentioned, it adds an offensive component to map control for the air game (via refueling stations) to match the defensive component of terrestrial AA.
Well I want to be clear on what I mean with it supporting defenders more. At t1/t2 where it currently stands it overly benefits attacking (kinda...) because often times you don't inty screen t1 bombers or transports and enemy defending inties run out out of fuel entirely too quickly. If fuel was taken away I wonder if high level play would start to screen bombers and transports more than what they currently do because there's less of a penalty to doing so. Which again, adds to the complexity of the air play. This is more of a 1v1/2v2 thing though, but it still has implications in larger team games.
At T3 that changes a bit, mostly because ASF are both far faster and have way more fuel than inties, and screening is not only common but required unless you've already won air.
It only benefits defense in the sense that now there's a limited time that the attackers can maintain their air screen to an extent, and if too many asf need to refuel they can't really attack.
Puts a pointless time limit on it. Literally nothing else. Just a dumb time limit
As it's somewhat the pillar for the rest of your argument--why is a time limit dumb? The game is full of decisions with time domain elements.
Time and timing attacks is incredibly important, strongly agree there. I'll be slightly annoying and answer your question with a question: which is more engaging and fun air play - having to manage fuel and randomly having to hold back air due to fuel constraints or having an intense back and forth where the timing plays that come up are waiting for one person to misplay and then capitalize on that, the whole time you're trying to force a misplay while making sure you're not having a misplay yourself while managing asf and torps/bombers/gunships at the same time? It gets even more interesting when the navy players are trying to get their opp to misplay and position something in a way that the air player can snipe with torps.
Being either air or navy in that situation is quite literally peak FAF for me, and is why I play a lot of Setons.
Furthermore, I picked navy intentionally for another reason - both attackers and defenders will run out of fuel at similar rates, defenders don't really have a fuel advantage in this case if the naval fight isn't close to a shore. Meaning fuel is just annoying and doesn't really do anything, other than both players have to periodically refuel some asf and hope they don't miss click and cancel the air staging order on low fuel asf.
