We all know the T3 air phase leads to giant ASF swarms, esp in teamgames. This gameplay not only slows our sims to a crawl, but isn't fun or interesting. Why does this happen?
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Losing T3 air is catastrophic. Although ground based AA does beat air mass for mass, the extreme mobility of T3 air allows it to strike anywhere and its very expensive to protect adequately across the entire frontier. Strats can't be stopped from dropping a bomb with SAMs near the target, you need to have SAMs very far out at all angles. So, ASF are necessary as a mobile counter to very strong options at T3- strats, T3 gunships, exps
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ASF in clouds all engage simultaneously, and retreat means suicide, so a small advantage snowballs into a total annihilation of the opposing air forces with relatively minor losses. The fast travel speed means little defensive advantage, and fights happen so quickly that ground based AA rarely does enough in time to make a difference without a huge investment in the particular location the fight happens.
These two combined lead players to invest enormous resources solely into ASF production, knowing the disproportionate consequences of falling slightly behind.
While I don't think its easy to fix this phenomenon, I propose some changes to SAMs to hopefully reduce the effect some amount. Here are the goals:
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Make SAMs very costly to fly ASF over, and a major influence in ASF engagements. This will allow SAMs to actually influence the air battle more, and allow players behind in air to still engage defensively more often. Think about the effect of flak on inties- you really have to pay attention! This hopefully makes keeping on top of ASF production slightly less important.
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Make SAMs more effective against slow T3/T4 air, ie gunships. T3 gunships have too much health for T2 Flack to take out until you get to absurd numbers and engagement size, and SAMs don't have enough AoE to prevent them from swarming. This means without ASF, you need enough SAMs in every location to fight the entire gunship swarm. Even though SAMs are very cost effective against T3 gunships, the force concentration allowed by mobility gives an enormous multiplier. Compare to the effect of T2 Flak on T2 gunships.
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Make SAMs more vulnerable to ground assault, sniping by other means, etc. Right now, even with the HP nerf, SAMs have so much health they're rarely a raiding/tacmissile/etc target. We want to make SAMs an interesting strategic/tactical element, not merely make them a hard counter to air.
To effect these, I propose the following handwaved numbers, please feel free to suggest changes:
- Double cost- more in line with T3 PD, more vulnerable to raids/snipes/tac missiles, more of an investment to cover an area in SAMs
- Triple DPS- slightly more than the doubling in cost, to make up for the lack of increase in HP. This should mostly come from faster firing cycles to avoid overkill, especially when fighting in tandem with ASF
- Double AoE. This should have little effect at early T3, only hard countering T2 gunships which flak already does. However, for large ASF swarms, it should roughly quadruple(?) the damage dealt, hopefully enough to make a serious dent- enough that players pay attention and don't fight over several SAMs. It has little effect vs strats unless highly clumped, and buffs them against large T3 gunships swarms but not early small numbers.
- Double projectile speed. With the increased AoE and damage, we may get a lot of wasted shots, can reduce by increasing projectile velocity.
- Reduced HP(?), all SAMs should die in 1 tac missiles (if they don't already), perhaps even less.
If the resulting SAMs provide too strong area denial in too large an area, the range could even be reduced to compensate.
Hopefully, the resulting SAMs represent more of a conscious investment in static AA, and as a result players will need to take more notice of their presence when deciding their air movements. This might slightly reduce the reliance on ASF, or at least make it possible to hold a defensive line with inferior numbers even if players still require ASF to protect against many air threats.
What do you all think? I'm far too weak a player to test these things myself at a high level.