Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF

@ftxcommando said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

Your formula doesn’t work. The faster you can get a spread of sams to protect everything the less ASF you’re going to need. That’s why hilly and canis will never see more than like 200. 3 sams in base stop all early aggression and each person can build 10 sams out to make half the map impenetrable. At that point, you just care about having enough to intercept any rushed t4 or 20 strats.

That's... what I said. You just need enough to snipe the ahwassas and a few sams will do the rest

@mach said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

@evildrew said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

10 ASF=3,500 mass 400,000 energy. 5 Sams = 8,000 mass, 80,000 energy and Sams will prioritize incoming Starts so the ASF being there wont matter much to the player who has no air.

1 sam costs 800 mass, not 1600 though

also target priority mod is a thing, so sams can prioritize whatever the player wants, which is a good thing before you argue against it

You are right I was distracted while writing it, I accidentally did multiplied the Sams cost by 10 instead of by 5.
Yes the default priority was also set to strat on Sams a long time ago I think.

@blodir said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

@ftxcommando said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

Your formula doesn’t work. The faster you can get a spread of sams to protect everything the less ASF you’re going to need. That’s why hilly and canis will never see more than like 200. 3 sams in base stop all early aggression and each person can build 10 sams out to make half the map impenetrable. At that point, you just care about having enough to intercept any rushed t4 or 20 strats.

That's... what I said. You just need enough to snipe the ahwassas and a few sams will do the rest

No, it isn’t what you said. You said there is some uniform formula of the maximum efficient ASF output. I’m saying the number is extremely variable based on how long the game takes to sufficiently shut down air aggression. On a map like senton, you need sams up pretty much in a whole pond + the middle to accomplish this because torps can win back a whole pond themselves if the opposing air player just doesn’t care.

On hilly, air aggression is shut down like 2 minutes into t3 air stage.

Surface-to-air balance in the game is just weird IMO:

• T1 AA: reasonably well balanced vs T1 air; poor vs T2 due to higher HP of T2 units (though cost somewhat excuses this)
• T2 AA: flak is great vs gunship clouds. Not quite so good as I'd expect vs inties. Maybe should have larger AOE.
• T3 AA: SAMs are OP (strong damage + AOE) except that nothing less than nukes and massive numbers of weapons can kill an ASF cloud quickly (fair enough, considering the cost)

The problem is that T3 air play is too often about getting an ASF lead and keeping it. Since T1 and T2 AA is so weak vs most T3 air, SAMs are the main counter. But SAMs are expensive, high-damage systems not anti-swarm systems.

Fix: make SAMs much cheaper and weaker. Maybe also move to T2. Maybe also remove AOE, giving flak a role vs gunships even at T3 (will take more tweaks to balance).

Additional note: there is no good T2 AA vs T2 bombers; this is also in part why a strat rush can be strong. Having a T2 SAM would help balance both.

I saw someone in game fly over 10-20 seraphim cruisers with a cloud of like 200 asf and they all got deleted in seconds

so yes flak can work vs them

Don't think making them weaker vs strats will have the desired effect. You will then rely more on asf to counter/defend against strats.
I am guessing the reason for this post is to address asf not really caring if they fly over sams.