@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.
What if? Experimentals end ASFs
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.
@slicknixon said in What if? Experimentals end ASFs:
@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?
No, you don't understand what I said. I said that you can't defensively support your attacks because you need to proactively send 10 asf to deal with the inevitable 5 asf response. But now the enemy knows you send 10 because anybody competent at this game knows what radar or spy planes are so they will send 15. As the numbers get higher the risk gets more extreme for air loss so you might as well as just send everything you have as a defensive force instead. And since you have no fuel, you can't play passive with the defense force and instead need to actively go and kill the enemy air first because running out of fuel still strongly benefits the opponent since you're over enemy territory in the first place.
The only way to change this dilemma is by making some downward pressure exist on forming a deathball where you make yourself vulnerable to other ways of winning air. Fuel serves as a way of making attacks even more dangerous since you cant get the passive utility of forcing good air trades from them anymore. Most of the time you won’t want to use anything other than high alpha damage air units that can quickly run away and gunships passively gaining value is basically made unviable unless you got total air control.
@ftxcommando said in What if? Experimentals end ASFs:
As the numbers get higher the risk gets more extreme for air loss so you might as well as just send everything
Your logic here is circular. You can avoid the extreme risk of a large air loss by not sending all your ASF. This breaks the circle.
"But then you'll lose for sure!"
No. The greater the opportunity cost to fly your planes across the map, the greater the incentive for your opponent to respond proportionally to ensure their payment of said cost is worthwhile.
And you didn't answer my fuel question.
No you lose because again, 100 asf vs 80 is a net loss of 70 for the 80 player from a current net loss of 20 due to the snowball nature of air fights. This dynamic doesn’t disappear at lower numbers. I can send 20 asf to kill your 10 and lose like 3. Now you’re in a worse position than you started with, especially since I have the reclaim.
Reinforcement time is always lower for the defender, lower fuel time favors the defender, it’s just double buffing the defender and making the attacker face even larger risks therefore eliminating much of the dynamism in air gameplay. The attacker suffers from first move disadvantage and must choose the protecting asf value, that’s why it reverts to all or nothing in combination with the snowball nature of combat. Fuel changes nothing about the nature of that, it just makes the margins even tighter.
Like the perfect thought experiment here is just looking at int combat vs asf combat. You don’t split your ints up into nice equal chunks of 20 ints to protect everything. You keep a big blob and you might have small groups of 3-5 around dangerous areas that loose drops or bombers may come.
Ints have lower fuel than asf, gameplay doesn’t change because the mechanics of the fight aren’t different.
No you lose because
I lose what? What was I trying to accomplish to begin with with my other air units? How many ASF do I have available now that I've lost 10, and how many do you have available now that your 17 survivors are on their way back to the repair pad?
True you couldn’t win air when you had a net loss of 10 asf there so your chances have increased now that the net loss is 17. Thanks.
If you and your opponent started out equally matched in the scenario (with, say, 80 ASF), you now have 70 immediately available while they have 60. Can a delta of 10 make a difference in that scenario?
It won’t be equal because you made air to ground to threaten anything so you’re down not only the extra asf in the first attack but whatever mass expended upon the threat. For air player to care that’s probably like 2 t3 gunships or 3k mass. Since you’re doing this double attack gimmick you need at least 4 so that’s 6k mass meaning you’re 17 asf behind already. You lose another 10, that’s 27 lost. Enemy lost 20. Enemy also is closer to reinforcement range and 20 asf only require like 2 rotations on 2 air stages to refuel. At best you kill like 3 t2 mexes somewhere and now you lose the rest of your air and game is over. But you did some minor damage that didnt actually impact the game compared to the now undisputed air dominance enemy has and can repay the attack tenfold.
In a real game you were better off baiting the enemy with your 4 t3 gunships to then get a good turn on them and ideally have the gunships tank a decent portion of the initial asf dps. Now you could overcome the asf disadvantage.
You still got less asf bro. Beyond all of this, it basically makes zero sense for fuel to be a problem for 1 side and not the other side. For you to do this weird double attack you had to send your asf flying across the map beforehand and now need them flying and wasting fuel as they spend time in the middle of nowhere. Beyond the fact you coulda just had your air completely crushed as it's split for no reason and the enemy had any remote capacity for scouting, odds are you got more fuel on your 20 asf you sent to kill the first 10 than enemy does on their other group.
@ftxcommando said in What if? Experimentals end ASFs:
odds are you got more fuel on your 20 asf you sent to kill the first 10 than enemy does on their other group
Do they have zero fuel (with no ability to maneuver) or not? There's a schrodinger's cat situation here where planes have either enough fuel or zero fuel, depending on the scenario you've made up/modified and what supports the point you're trying to make.
At t1/t2
I'm in favor of anything that increases the relevancy of t1/t2 air in the later game, including increasing their fuel.
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.
I think there's value here. Let me be clear that I'm not in favor of any kind of fuel reduction that limits the ability to perform a one way mission (or even a couple of one way missions in a row)*.
*This, like everything else, is open to debate.
Your description of the intense back and forth really resonates with me, and I agree it's a core part of what makes the game good. What I'm seeing is that, if the "beat frequency" of that back and forth is 10s or so, more relevant fuel times (in the multiple of minutes--say less than 7) fit around those decisions instead of interfering with them. You know you've got so many minutes to seal the deal with your navy and still have air support. You've got so much time to maneuver your ASF before you send in bombers. Getting that wrong is a misplay, but it's a misplay that can happen every 6-10 minutes instead of every 30s.
Because land and naval units are slow there's a positional element to having them ready. Aircraft, ASF especially, are so fast that positional elements fade away next to the arithmetic (see Ftx's hymns on the snowballing effect). You'd need to slow ASF down to introduce a similar dynamic (thumbs down from me) but you can add a readiness element in the time domain by making refueling more common (it's all about time, anyway, for land units and naval units). Then it's not a question of having them in the right place, but not having them need to go back to the wrong place.
The endless polygon of patrolling aircraft is boring, and it looks like shit (you know it, I know it, everybody knows it). I'm not sure that what I'm recommending would actually rectify that, but it'd be a step away from the status quo of putting aircraft in one pattern and forgetting about them until you need them for something.
Re: Navy, let's not forget about the carriers. I'd say anything that increases the relevancy of carriers as support ships is a positive.