@katharsas said in Why I think T3 air is badly designed:
Required outcome (mass for mass):
- ADF beats ASF decisively
- vs Anti-Ground Air (Bombers, EXPs), ASF beats ADF decisively (otherwise there is no reason to build ASF)
I'm not sure how that would be possible at all unless you just make them slow, and even then that's not too much of a problem late game you just spread them out a bit. If you have a flak that can kill moving clumps of asf, it'll necessarily kill groups of other even slower moving air targets
- any other AA unit (ground, EXPs) is much more effective vs ADF than they are now vs ASF (otherwise you can just mix EXP and ADF to get unbeatable combo)
The gound/navy AA specifically needs to be good at killing ADF, otherwise ADF become the new ASF.
How do you achieve that without having some special kind of resistance?
- make ADF fly lower to ground than ASF, to make T2 flak to hit ADF
- or make ADF slower (but not too much because you want to be able to punish ASFs that are out of position)
- make ADF high cost, high value units, so that SAMs do no overkill ADF as much as ASF
Any of these things except the last one mean you just use a small amount of asf to crush them and we're back to square 1 with extra steps which is pointless. How does the last one increase their vulnerability to aa?
The alternative, just giving ASF AoE without adding another unit would imo mean that there are just diminishing returns to clumping units, so it would either end up in a "who can spread-out-micro their units the best" contest, or just lead to people only building just enough to defend against bombers and never more, which is kinda not very interesting?
But even that would already be better than current ASF.
Late game air battles are now decided by who has the higher peak apm and can manage more small groups of units at once. In what way is this an improvement other than now I can do really troll builds on airslots and still beat a good number of people?