What if? Experimentals end ASFs

@exselsior said in What if? Experimentals end ASFs:

No it's not that's not even something you can realistically do.

First, you've got two unrelated points here. "Planes without fuel facing planes with fuel" have been "outmaneuvered or forced into a bad position", point finale. It being realistic or not to achieve has no bearing on the truth of that statement.

Second, the realistic way to achieve it is "induce your opponent to fly their planes more than you fly your planes, in aggregate, in a localized time domain".

You won't do that because 80 vs 100 asf is an air win with 70 asf left for the 100 asf party. Fuel impacts everything so rather than risk an automatic game loss because you took a dumb fight, you just sit afk with your air and send a max of 5 around to deal with loose air that people are trying to bait you to do anything with. There is no outmaneuvering because it's a waste of your own time and resources to send your planes anywhere.

The best part is that the people REALLY spending their fuel are people trying to screen and micro in the middle of air aggression. So all this is actually likely to do is encourage lazy air gameplay of make 300 asf, go afk, make game ender.

@slicknixon said in What if? Experimentals end ASFs:

@exselsior said in What if? Experimentals end ASFs:

No it's not that's not even something you can realistically do.

First, you've got two unrelated points here. "Planes without fuel facing planes with fuel" have been "outmaneuvered or forced into a bad position", point finale. It being realistic or not to achieve has no bearing on the truth of that statement.

Second, the realistic way to achieve it is "induce your opponent to fly their planes more than you fly your planes, in aggregate, in a localized time domain".

I had a half written response but FTX covered what I was saying better than I was saying it, so I'll change it to something slightly different to add to what he said.

One of the biggest areas where fuel is cancer outside of discouraging air screening for long periods of time is inties in 1v1s and 2v2s. There's just no justifiable reason for inties to become useless after a few minutes of use, and is an indirect buff to transports and bombers before the t3 air stage for, again, no real reason. Bombers have fuel, but really when was the last time you actually saw an out of fuel t1 bomber?

@ftxcommando

Can we ideate on what your opponent might get up to while you're making 300 ASF and doing nothing with them?

@Exselsior

Never said anything about inties. Specifically said reduce for some/all aircraft, and for you to use your imagination--"apply this idea to a different unit to show how it won't work" wasn't the kind of imagination I was talking about.

I'm talking about air and fuel in general. FTX covered ASF and T3 air interactions, I touched on lower level air.

Your opponent is most likely either also building 300+ asf or they're in the process of dying to air after losing it all to the dude who made more asf. Either or.

@exselsior said in What if? Experimentals end ASFs:

in the process of dying to air after losing it all to the dude who made more asf

I hate to grind you down like this but "killing your opponent's units and attacking their base" doesn't sound like doing nothing.

yes getting to make ur first proactive action min 25 when u scout if enemy made air or just straight rushed for game ender is certainly not doing nothing, but it damn sure feels like it

@ftxcommando

I again gotta ask you to unpack why any of what you just said would follow from ASF having to refuel more often.

Why would you be waiting until minute 25 to scout?

It's hyperbole. The change to fuel makes any air aggression attempt prior to a total air win cheese because there is zero room for maneuvering due to fuel being impactful. You either kill enemy air so you don't need to worry about doing anything beyond afking your big asf blob next to your damage dealers or you just don't do anything. For all intents and purposes air slots become game ender slots with an air cheese win condition if it's fully ignored.

Basically: you make high level air gameplay play the way low level air gameplay works.

and you dont wait min 25 to scout cuz they other team could be making drops or nukes or full monkey rush

Returning to the fuel debate it rarely comes up with t3 air just cuz you'd have to be attacking for over 10 min for asf to start to run out of fuel and at the high level people will always send all their asf back to an air staging ground after an air fight to repair everything. It is much more annoying when playing 1v1 or 2v2 and you are using t2 air to attack something because after about 4 min all your inties will be out of fuel and you cannot attack anymore. + it takes forever for inties to actually return to an air staging ground and by the time they do the game is either over or you have t3 air.

@ftxcommando

Let me highlight again that I'm only discussing a fuel change with regards to ASF. It doesn't follow that introducing a tempo to ASF--a fundamentally defensive unit, concerned entirely with destroying other air units--would reduce the room for maneuver or impact of said other units (it suggests the opposite, very obviously). Scouts, transports, and ground attack aircraft would retain their usefulness, and would receive an indirect buff as @Exselsior said.

@TheWreck

Suggests there might be something interesting in switching those two states: reduce t3 fuel, increase t1/t2 fuel. Lower tier air units retain an advantage into the late game from a maneuver and availability standpoint but lose in a pitched battle.

Fuel needs to be removed, will only hurt players adding complexity where there shouldn't be any.

@veteranashe

We can agree at the start that bad complexity A. exists and B. hurts players, but I need some hook for what counts as "good complexity" and "bad complexity" before I can dive into it further.

Y'all can discuss your fuel or whatever, but the core idea of "air experimentals should beat ASFs at some point" is the same as with land experimentals overpowering land factory units. As to "what will counter them then?": same as what counters land experimentals: the other units in land-vs-air; so, that would be T3 land antiair and cruisers.

@melanol

I agree generally with @arma473 in their assessment that relying on ground and static defenses to counter air exps would make the game more turtly, and that's not ideal.

@SlickNixon The point of that was to show that having fuel in the game limits aggression which produces more static gameplay. Static gameplay is also inherently less complex because you simply aren't doing anything.

All those air units will still immediately die to a handful of asf. Now you can't risk attacking without a 10+ asf escort. Now you run the risk of the enemy sending 15. It just converges to you needed to send all your air, and since you have zero fuel to play around with to make the enemy take bad positioning or do feints you're just going to go in with your aggression with nearly zero asf coverage or right after you crushed enemy air totally. There is no air control pushing to take advantage of both players not being willing to risk the game swing of an air fight due to how undecided the rest of the game is.

Likewise ints would still be terrible because you're still investing ridiculous resources to compete with asf. If you invest 20k mass into ints, less than that mass in asf will crush them at those numbers. And it isn't like you suddenly got more asf because you invested into a way worse mass efficiency unit. The engagement is still good enough to respond to with your own afk AFK blob. Not to mention, at this point in the game, any relevant area can have 3+ flak, which will rinse any int blob you made, making even that pointless.

@slicknixon said in What if? Experimentals end ASFs:

@ftxcommando

Let me highlight again that I'm only discussing a fuel change with regards to ASF. It doesn't follow that introducing a tempo to ASF--a fundamentally defensive unit, concerned entirely with destroying other air units--would reduce the room for maneuver or impact of said other units (it suggests the opposite, very obviously). Scouts, transports, and ground attack aircraft would retain their usefulness, and would receive an indirect buff as @Exselsior said.

FTX already directly addressed this. It discourages on going fighter screens which is what happens high level air play.

Take any 4v4 20x20 map, in this example our hypothetical map has a strong navy component because that’s my preferred way to illustrate this. You have two relatively even air players, and one makes some torps to help his navy dude. What’s going to happen in high level games is both air players will play highly aggressive with their asf - the dude with the torps positioning his to defend the torps and the other positioning trying to both snipe the enemy torps and not get caught in a bad position. This can potentially go on for a long time and is quite fun, it’s where the true air game takes place not the base sim. It’s also fairly difficult and not something you see done, or at least done well in anything other than high level games. You can replace torps with gunships, strats, and t2 bombers all are related. There’s a lot of micro going on there and doing that well has one of the highest skill caps in the game. It follows that it reduces the usefulness of things like bombers because bombers have to be escorted by asf, and those asf have to travel further and longer than the defending asf do, meaning fuel favors the defenders when talking about late game t3 air interactions.

What does fuel do to this interaction which is one of the most complex in the game? Puts a pointless time limit on it. Literally nothing else. Just a dumb time limit and then you have to manage refueling for whatever reason.

My comment about bombers and transports getting an indirect buff is a detraction of fuel not a benefit of it. There shouldn’t be inconsistencies in how units behave vs what they’re supposed to counter. And no, bombers and transports do not need a buff in the slightest.

@melanol said in What if? Experimentals end ASFs:

Y'all can discuss your fuel or whatever, but the core idea of "air experimentals should beat ASFs at some point" is the same as with land experimentals overpowering land factory units. As to "what will counter them then?": same as what counters land experimentals: the other units in land-vs-air; so, that would be T3 land antiair and cruisers.

Only being able to counter air with surface to air fire is horrible for the game. Now everyone has to build static aa everywhere. Hopefully I don’t have to explain why that’s bad.

Also, land t4s lose to mass equivalent t3 units.