@black_wriggler said in Why I think T3 air is badly designed:
ASF just cost too little mass and build too quickly, upping both by a about a third would go a long way to making them feel less instantly oppressive against lower tiers but still dominate once you have numbers, a bit more like how swifties work.
Once you have a T3 air grid up, yes. When the T3 air HQ is first up, no. On the other hand, SAMs are extremely effective at local air control.
Before T3, combating T2 bombers without air can be quite hard. If you have T2 land and pgen + shields already, fine, or if you can directly attack the enemy base, but otherwise... you need about 2 T1 AA turrets per corsair to defend which is 3/4 the mass, assuming they are spread enough not to take splash damage. Vs Janus it's probably worse (unless really spread out). This is too expensive except as a very specific counter around a single base. T2 flak turrets aren't really better in terms of mass, except maybe with larger numbers due to the higher chance of hitting other T2 bombers. T1 MAA is a cheaper counter, but also has very little armour so you need to spread them out and have lots.
Also noticed in testing: a corsair can kill a T1 AA turret in one pass fairly reliably if on a straight approach from far. But the default attack runs are very short with corsair missiles fired just as the unit finishes the turn, and in this case the turret takes only about half the damage.