T1 bombers are too good at hunting down expanding engineers
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Just some ideas:
If bombers had a second larger aoe ring, e.g. doing 75 damage, they'd be able to kill all engies in at most two passes. The inner circle ring size could also be nerfed try and keep balance vs large armies. Now, if a bomber drops 4 bombs, it either gets 2-4 kills instead of 0-4. It's more consistent but not 100% predictable.Another change, instead of increasing second ring size, is to shrink the inner aoe size and adding partial tracking to bombs, so they always hit with at least the weak aoe against engies. Bombers would be a bit worse against groups from the smaller inner ring, but hit more consistently.
One of these could also be combined with engies having larger turning circles to be worse at dodging, then maybe aoe wouldn't need to be changed to hit.
Keeping an inner damage ring with the same damage as current bombers would help to maintain current balance against larger, stationary, or unmicroed targets.
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With tracking, T1 bombers would be undodgeable ACU-killing machines? Even if you needed twice as many of them, if they can't be dodged they would be very strong.
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Would resolving the problem from a different direction be possible? Like making it less detrimental to lose an early expanding engineer. If I were making a map with this in mind putting the initial expansion mexes closer together, with the assumption the expanding engineers are more likely to complete a mex before detonating.
Other ideas:
Cheaper T1 radar, with a boost to power consumption. Or perhaps radar installations can do an early warning 'pulse' that doubles their range and costs 5k power, for a moment. Just enough to see if there are aircraft.
Civilian AA turrets about the map to make running the bomber a tiny bit more complex than a b-line.
Tweaking it so an aeon engineer can dodge, start building an AA gun, then sacrifice itself to completion before the bomber comes back around
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@tex said in T1 bombers are too good at hunting down expanding engineers:
My major grip with them is their inconsistency with dropping and the semi-skill semi-rng ground fire&engi dodge mechanic we currently have. Micro is important, but for the same reason I hate a lab outmicroing a tank to kill an engi afterwards, I hate having an engi perma dodge a bomber for 30 seconds until an inti arrives. Having to guess groundfire locations is stupid and unpredictable. IMO the early game should not be prone to as much randomness as it currently has with unit interactions.
Personally I'm not a fan of dodge-micro. Some bomber micro options are good. Hover bombing, no.
To kill hover-bombing: (1) give all bombers low acceleration, (2) disable bomb dropping below some speed.
@ovenman said in T1 bombers are too good at hunting down expanding engineers:
If bombers had a second larger aoe ring, e.g. doing 75 damage, they'd be able to kill all engies in at most two passes.
Being guaranteed an engy kill in two passes is more consistent; good idea.
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FAF very strongly does not need to lower micro possibility more than it already does, killing hover bombing is not a good thing.
Same as holding fire a gunship so it goes under a shield to kill it, these are things that should be allowed to exist if not encouraged to reward unit play.
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Hover bombing is pretty gimmicky imo. I personally see it more as an exploit than a valid micro. I'd rather get rid of hover bombing and figure out other ways to add micro to the game, particularly in later stages.
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As opposed to the not-exploit of what I said above or using 10 hp structures to block pathfinding/shots
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Aircraft are vtol so hover bombing is correct and fun
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@veteranashe said in T1 bombers are too good at hunting down expanding engineers:
Aircraft are vtol so hover bombing is correct and fun
Then why don't they hover-bomb as standard behaviour?
Alternative suggestion: make AA more effective vs hovering units (how exactly isn't obvious, and would also affect AA balance vs gunships).
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An aircraft just sitting there would be shot down easily that's probably why it's not standard behavior as a bomber is supposed to drop first and then it gets shot as it passes over while a gunship gets shot at the whole time.
