Air rework

[hybrid geode]

maybe, it's just to mention you can use ultrasound as a weapon on planes or other units, and even make it visible coz of sonoluminescence

[mental crystal]

feel sonic weapons sound (hehe) better as a water weapon tbh, then again >realism
more weapon types are really needed, but they could make air combat more flashy, wonder how it would look if T1 fighters were shoot at each other with blasters Star Wars styled

[shut pumice]

That's easy enough to test... 😄

[hybrid geode]

yeah it's weird that there is no plane shooting at another plane with lasers. Maybe it's for visual clarity, with red/green lines everywhere. What's funny is that the powerful lasers that could shoot other planes today are actually infrared, like a CO2 laser or nd:Yag and they're... invisible to the naked eye 😄

[mental crystal]

well, if lasers were realistic ingame, you would have some units just exploding 😄

[daring crescent]

lasers would be a nerf due to damage drop of at range.
or may actually be a good solution if they were in sphere rather than cylinder hitbox.

fighter to fighter at high elevation .. shorter range
fighter to ground at high elevatin .. the distance to ground means longer ranges and dmg drop off

[urban musk]

As i remember CO2 lasers have very bad energy conversion efficiency

[daring crescent]

and a single AFUS per laser to provide for the power requirements ?

[mint zephyr]

Anyone know if there are t3 air units someone has made?

[mental crystal]

There are some in...i want to say extra unit packs? they are just huge versions of existing units like an Epic Dragon or Epic Nuclear bomber plus flying flagships but thats about it

[hybrid geode]

they all do yeah, that's why laser cutting machines are so big, and why there's no laser saber yet

[hybrid geode]

yes there are, just check the experimental options and find the one that activates scavenger units. There's a mega bomber, a mega nuke plane, a flying flagship

[mint zephyr]

Ah thanks. I think there's room for added depth there. Like a helicarrier, jammer, some super weapon type of thing, emp, a against fig projectiles with cool down, other ideas?

[hybrid geode]

a mega T3 transport that can fly a behemoth

[mental crystal]

I still like the idea of a startrek looking airship for Armata with multiple beamers

[shut pumice]

#⭐｜main message 😄

[urban musk]

Maybe i would like to have something like this in extra unit pack...

[mental crystal]

[hybrid geode]

great minds... After all they had big ass flying transport for those Evangelions in the anime

[plucky quarry]

Vehicle flak is better compared to static flak in terms of cost effectiveness, which only gets better when considering you can move them around as needed. They also have way more health per cost, a single vehicle that costs half of a static has almost double the hp. They also fare better against stilettoes as you can spread them out. The downside is you can't plop them down without a t2 veh lab, which is too much effort when you just want 1 or 2 flak and you're not already playing veh. People also don't seem to look at them in detail, blindly assuming statics must be stronger because they can't move.

[hybrid geode]

Veh flak even withstands a direct LRPC hit, I saw it

[sullen marten]

Try NOTA air. Air is slower and needs fuel so you have to have pads. T1 fighters have machine guns, aa and ground missiles. Ground attack aircraft. Bombers flying at a higher altitude needing flak or fighters to kill. Napalm, stealth and focussed laser bombers at your disposal. T3 flying fortresses. It’s stronger air than in bar and has several layers of interaction. You can build light aa turrets and flak, long rang missile aa. Also carriers make sense

[hallow stirrup]

^ Based NOTA enjoyer.

[desert phoenix]

static flak prioritize bombers currently vs vehicle doesnt

[mint zephyr]

Those are some really cool concepts. Any standout elements of that game play you think work well?

[shut pumice]

I still haven't figured out why this is I wonder if the Air Rework unit type will change that behaviour

[sullen marten]

It’s a completely different air gameplay. You can micro fighters more but bombers less. Also because of the pad necessity you can spam air less

[trail oracle]

I suspected it might be, and that’s just broken. I still build static flak because then I can’t accidentally move it, tho.

[coral valley]

Could manually remove a mobile flak from its cg so it can only accidentally be moved if it's inside a box you drag

[trail oracle]

It would have never been in a command group. I don’t use autogroup.

[shut pumice]

its when you box select over a unit type and catch another one- and before you notice you've pressed select all and issued a command

[coral valley]

Fair enough

[dawn narwhal]

lol this. reason why i build naval con turrets even though pathfinders strictly better

[dawn narwhal]

oh, thinking about it, fighters will be more OP in 1v1. 1) cause no dedicated air player 2) wider open maps so aa turrets/units can be easily cleaned up with fast units 2) no need to carry your team late game so every mex snipe has a big impact

3 fighters can ignore llts and snipe every mex from one side of the map to the other

[trail oracle]

Or just move something that shouldn’t be moved for whatever reason, and forget to put it back.

[burnt kraken]

the flak turret is competitive when you compare damage output per cost (it has a larger AoE, not just better dps), but the truck getting more hp and of course ability to move, makes it the much better option generally if those matter at all

[hollow flicker]

i only use auto groups and never box select

[hybrid geode]

If we can make drones that need recharge it wouldn't be a problem to do the same with planes.

[hallow stirrup]

It's not a technical problem, NOTA is a different game for this engine, so we know we can do it.

[hybrid geode]

"Realistic warfare
Unit rescaling – ships are much bigger, stronger and more expensie than all other units
Front panzer for tanks => tanks are great for crushing the front line or for flanking
Fuel for planes – its harder to get airsupremacy, becouse you need air logistics
Advanced command features – user interface helps the player to do complicated decisions easily (formations making, unit move management, queue making, idle units selection). "

everything in there is great

[sullen marten]

Ships are t2.5 but as ambulatory said it’s another game. I only bring it up to show how air could radically different but fun if you consider different levels of elevation and interaction

[hybrid geode]

so, no fighter clouds in NOTA ? As a consequence of the fuel thing

[daring crescent]

With regard to "formations"
Ctrl+right click is formation move ? When you do this with ships or ground vehicles they all move at the rate of the slowest.

Aircraft respond differently. The faster planes just fly ahead.
Getting them into formation is harder too, "hold position" doesn't do much for anything flying like a fixed-wing

just tested that after having an idea. Air that can "hold position" moves in formation just fine.

[sullen marten]

As both basically run on the same engine I’d wager that formations and controls are the same as in bar

[hallow stirrup]

Still has fighter clouds, but they're different because they require infrastructure to maintain. You don't just build the fighter and then you're done.
Note that I'm going by memories that are something like a decade old, so my apologies if I say something untrue.

If NOTA had a decent playerbase, I'd still be playing it. It was really good.

[plucky quarry]

Hearing that reminds me of Rise of Nations' fighters/planes, having to build an airport to produce them, and each airport only being able to support 10 planes at a time. Want more planes? Gotta build another airport. And they can't fly too far from it because fuel. And the more buildings/units you have, the more the next one costs to make.

[urban musk]

What you like in NOTA?

[hallow stirrup]

Basically everything about it:
Aircraft require fuel to use, tying them to bases. This allowed them to be very powerful and mobile without being OP. Air power included T1 strike craft like the vashp, which would dump an devastating apha strike into a target and then had to go home to rearm.
Proper direct-fire artillery was available in T1, so the T1 game didn't feel half-finished.
Levellers were actually good because they had enough range to fight and could protect the aforementioned T1 artillery.
Bots in general were treated as more expendable units, and you were expected to use combined arms instead of specializing in a specific factory.
Only Core could rez, which made attrition battles favor the slow and tough faction.
Ships were very powerful, to the point that going navy in a sea with no metal was viable. There was also a specifically anti-ship shore defense artillery with no aoe so it was only good against large targets.
There wasn't a "T3" that invalidated T2. T3 existed, but it wasn't all-important like it is in BAR.
The commander didn't exist, instead replaced by a command tower with enormous weapons and construction range. Think roughly the range of a pulsar. The weapon wasn't strong, but it meant that the enemy base wasn't somewhere you wanted to be.
Buildings were built by construction towers, not freely by con units. Con units built weak defenses and the con towers.
T2 structures were built by T2 con towers. Both specialized T2 and a more expensive "everything T2" towers existed.
Moho mexes were built by an expensive dedicated bot that built only mohos. This bot was built by the T2 towers directly, not a factory.
The eco structures weren't made of nitroglycerine, so bases were tougher and you could hurt someone without wiping them out.

[hybrid geode]

where's the developper(s) ? maybe they could help us implement some of the good things of NOTA here, in BAR. If BAR devs agree.

[hallow stirrup]

It's a completely different game. If we implemented half that stuff in BAR then it wouldn't be BAR anymore.

[urban musk]

Wow, that's the pretty opposite that i like!

[coral valley]

almost every aspect of that, i can say with some certainty, the BAR devs wouldn't want to turn BAR into a different game by implementing

[hybrid geode]

we're talking about just the air for now. I'm not talking about removing construction bots and veh, I like those. Same with the commander. Just that NOTA has the altitude thing, and the refueling thing.

[hallow stirrup]

Same as if I told you what I like about Homeworld. Just because I like it doesn't mean I'm saying that BAR needs to become Homeworld.

[hallow stirrup]

Pepeampere is here, but NOTA is basically in stasis. He isn't an original dev of NOTA, either.

@weary forge Are you interested in weighing in on this?

[mint zephyr]

Ya agreed some of that sounds cool...I'd say most of it is better in BAR. I'm more interested in the ideas/balance thats been implemented/tested before regarding air.

[burnt kraken]

Altitude differences are in BAR too, varying iirc between ~80-220

Lower end is gunships, 110 for most things, 220 for t2 fighters/bombers

[lament cypress]

I wish air unit try to form their formation during traveling instead of at target.

[mint zephyr]

@lament cypress I usually do this by spreading the fighters and then when moving all of them I line drag. This keeps them spread out, but formations imply to me that the air would stay in one shape and that doesn't work out for me in practice

[vagrant zephyr]

my suggestion: revert t1 air a2g changes, let banshees and shurikan engage in a2a combat. Increase shurikan range and massively increase banshee bullet speed

so if you want a "dog-fighting" general unit, then banshee/shurikan is the way to go.
keeps the old farts happy woth their fig walls, and gives micro lovers what they want.

[dusty whale]

shuri can hit a2a 😛 , but this is more like meme sytuation

[vagrant zephyr]

webbers can stun t2 figs as well

[mint zephyr]

Ngl shuri shooting air sound hilarious and idk if it would be bad

[vagrant zephyr]

basically, give banshees the pawn attack, and shuris the grunt attack, but make it faster and weaker

[lament cypress]

Why this game have no helicopter?

[gilded owl]

comet catcher doesnt have atmosphere

[dusty whale]

and gunship/transport work like heli right?

[lament cypress]

maybe give it some kind of anti-grav engine that look like rotor. XD

No no I mean just the visual.

[vapid sable]

meanwhile legion

[hybrid geode]

then why do they have wings ? 😄

[sharp notch]

because they also fly in atmosphere

[hybrid geode]

these no atmosphere maps are annoying, coz they're the reason why we don't have blimps in BAR

[lament cypress]

maybe just anti-grav engine that look like wing. 😄

Anyway I quite like it look it's more fun to see flying units with moving parts on it.

[mental crystal]

uuuuh

[hybrid geode]

solar sails, obviously

[hallow stirrup]

Dark Matter turbofans, clearly.

[burnt kraken]

and why do all the planes have wings, if they don't actually need them

[mint zephyr]

True, make all of them bricks(plz no)

[shut pumice]

Generating lift with surfaces means you spend less energy on flight while near a graviational body with atmosphere - so more of that power plant can be spent on weapons or other things? (conceptually)

[hallow stirrup]

Somebody who isn't me should rework all the aircraft to be rockets.

[coral valley]

Rename air plant to starport or spacecraft plant or something so it makes sense on maps with no air. (We should probably get back on-topic)

[cold stirrup]

https://youtu.be/MGpFEv1-mAo?si=VZYBrGmj1ep9FST7

[dawn narwhal]

agreed fun is not realism

[gilded spear]

What I like most about the air rework is the heavy fighter I think if it stays in an improved way that would already be a welcome change in order to have a more dynamic air game

[daring crescent]

I'd be OK with flying bricks instead of exploding bombs or plasma shells. I don't want a Pawn Launcher. I want a t2 wall launcher. 8000 hp of damage thrown at that speed going through shields as it's purely kinetic ..

In this rework should there be fewer target restrictions ?

The t1 fighter can now target ground.
I noticed that t2 gunships don't (can't) target air.

I tried to tweak units changing onlytarget to "NOTSUB", and my inexpert abilities didn't get it to work.
Why are the gunships and other air class unable to fire at air ? If plasma on tanks can shoot at air .. everything should be able to shoot at everything but the likelihood of it hitting decides whether its viable or not.

You can park 50 ticks under a transport so it can't unload.
Air collision is turned off but i think if you can keep or are willing to risk 100 aircraft over the enemy nuke launcher and it collides .. that's a fair use of 100 aircraft and a risk the launchee takes.

[weary forge]

Hi @hallow stirrup , I missed your previous message in Discord mess 🙂 what is the question about?

[hazy sparrow]

hahahhahah this air rework is so funny

t1 fighters hiting ground why would you make bombers

[dawn narwhal]

Someone mentioned in-game, that maybe bombers specifically leaving wrecks (rezzable) would discourage suicide bombing
afus explosion typically kills wrecks tho

perhaps bombing armies is more interactive? but honestly eco is so OP in this game bombing is one way that can keep that in check

[trail oracle]

Eco’s op because lines are stagnant, tbh. Eco takes time to build, then 5 minutes minimum to pay off. Basically the only time building an army and fighting is worse than that is when you have negative return on it - i.e. fighting into comprehensive porc.

[dawn narwhal]

it's map dependent
t3 takes time to build, and sometimes a few minutes to even walk to other side of the map
the bigger your economy the less risky individual afus is cause you have more BP to switch into something

[lean zealot]

I definitely wouldn't say no to the idea of rethinking the speed of eco scaling
in high OS role maps have basically a 6 minute long t1 phase of the game and that is so fucking boring its unreal

[lean zealot]

because bombers do it a lot better
thing is, the hp of most eco structures is so low that it's really a case of "why would I commit a bomber to that shit when a trio of fighters will do"

the rework is begging the question of if it's a good idea to have all eco so easily btfoed because 1 tick (or equivalent) slipped through the front lines to begin with (spoilers it isn't and that's why almost nobody likes 1v1)

[dawn narwhal]

i mean llts are cheap

[lean zealot]

sure, but ticks are cheaper, and mobile
and all you need is 1 to slip through and goodbye converters

[dawn narwhal]

i don't think i ever made converters in 1v1 xD

[lean zealot]

missing the point
microing units around the map > trying to defend a handful of t1 mexes

[dawn narwhal]

i mean, micro your units around the map to defend the mexes. or pay the llt tax
radar is good

[lean zealot]

yeah, I get how it works
I'm explaining to you the consequences of these design choices

[dawn narwhal]

defending seems hopeless but there are some simcity that makes backstabs and marauders less cancer
also like if you have like 12 con turrets you can build t2 defenses in seconds. basically it's OP vs OP

ticks are OP and on open maps its lol

[lean zealot]

well think that statement through a second
the reason ticks are OP is because they're far cheaper and cost efficient compared to the things they can destroy (ie economy). the only thing that keeps them in check is that they're land based and can't necessarily scurry everywhere

this is literally the exact same problem fighters targeting ground poses. the only difference is the fighter has less damage but more mobility, and you want them because they are how you solve opposing air units throughout t1

not solving it via the game's design means it has to be solved via the map's design. the only reason everybody doesn't make more of a ruckus around it now is because everybody plays on relatively choked lane maps (strait/glitters) where the tick's influence fades once those strong defensive points get established

[coral valley]

and because they're literally the only reason to play arm bots

[lean zealot]

design issue that should be separately resolved
making arm t1 bot lab the tick lab doesn't do them or the game any favors

[dawn narwhal]

ticks are fricking op

[lament cypress]

Just finish watch some match on youtube... Dunno If the point of this new air work is to push for more air units more present on front line make me wonder why allow fighter attack ground instead of buff gunship to be more spam able with AG fighter it just make gunship become even more useless while this units suppose to be the one that hold the front line. If player fear them to be too dominate the field (or too comfortable) you can just give them some kind of ammo mechanic that can only refill on air pad like C&C does maybe.

[gilded spear]

as a rather new player, now playing on and off air rework I think with air rework its more fun! You have way more interactions as just building t1 fighters is not as incentivized even though they can shoot ground. Because they are much more expensive. Your units feel more valuable and stronger and you can make more plays

[hazy sparrow]

but if you just go pure fighters you will be abl;e to beat the air player with a larger force.

[lean zealot]

Sure, I get it. I'm just saying its still not as good at killing ground troops as bombers are

[hazy sparrow]

yeah but you almost never want to use bombers to kill ground units. you only want to kill buildings as air.

[hazy sparrow]

and using the fighters to hit buildings allow hyper flanking dmg also way better than bombers

[lean zealot]

You simply aren't going to kill an afus with t1 fighters anywhere near as efficiently as you can bombers dude
Yeah I get it, "but if I had enough fighters I could and then the enemy can never bomb because I have more fighters :^)"
And then the enemy builds a couple flak (which fighters cannot penetrate anywhere nearly as well as bombers) and the theorycraft simply falls apart

[low siren]

Ok but if enemy is building heavy AA your bombers are also useless, and if you went fighters at least you can pull them back on defense and now the enemy can never bomb

[lean zealot]

heavy aa
when talking about the level of aa needed to kill t1 fighters
Man I know literally nobody plays this shit anymore because the pro lobby already decided they hate it after 5 games but please just fire up a skirmish game and see how easily flak kills t1 fighters compared to bombers so you can not talk out of your ass

You do not need "heavy flak" to dissuade t1 fighters, basically one will munch asstons of them, you need many more than that and also have to place them further ahead of the thing you are trying to protect to stop bombers

The entire point I am making here is that bombers, with their higher hp and better ability to deliver their payload, btfo fighters in terms of being able to blow up stuff on the ground. Flak does not kill them as easily as it does fighters, which should be self evident, and I am tired of hearing memelords shit on this rework with ridiculous comments like "heh guess we don't need bombers anymore cuz fighters can deal 20 damage per strafing run to ground :^)". It is utterly ignorant and makes you look retarded.

Yes, fighters can blow up ground stuff, and I do feel that can be a problem given the explodium things like converters and construction turrets are made of. Yes, if 10k metal worth of t1 fighters enter an airspace with literally zero AA, they will probably blow up some pretty meaningful stuff. But their ability to penetrate even casual AA like a pair of flak turrets is nonexistent, making it evident there is still plenty of room for using bombers, and pretending otherwise is just insulting dishonest

I am done talking about this with theorycrafters who literally don't play the thing they are so opinionated about

[gilded spear]

I think you and the people who have decided it is bad should give it another try. The fighters have been nerfed again. So many people in the lobbies say t1 fighters are op now but you never really see huge clouds of them. Still improves the game in many aspects.

[dawn narwhal]

fighters give you safety, transport denial, while harrassing with highest mobility of all the atg units
i think they dont' affect average skill lobby much but they are op if used properly with scouts
and hurts t1 unit diversity

on a bigger map, think why make seekers hovercraft when you can make fighters

[lean zealot]

the seeker-fighter comparison makes a lot more sense to me and I can agree with it to a degree
both suffer the same issue (very basic defenses can eat them)
both have low dps but still enough to kill basic eco structures and enough of them can kill larger stuff
fighters just have more maneuverability and less dps, and you want them anyway because they provide AA for the air lab player

I am probably in the minority in that I think this means seeker should be buffed rather than fighter being further nerfed, and that eco structures should be designed such that it is more resilient to the sort of cheap harassment that such units pose

[dawn narwhal]

seeker properly pays for the mobility tax
it's balanced unit but can be good with micro
i think the current fighters could be good as an atg unit (mobile fragile atg harrasser that can sort of evade fighters).

[lean zealot]

I certainly agree that the air theatre could use more air units
limiting the interceptor unit concept to t2 tremendously limits what you can do with the t1 air unit dichotomy
in my own head, I think the current iteration of fighters is good, but there should be something like
interceptors (very fast AA only units)
fighters (as they exist, mixed anti air and anti ground slower units)
gunships (slowest units, but has the most firepower, trade better than normal with ground AA)
and set up a rough dichotomy of interceptors > fighters > gunships > interceptors
this could very easily be set up through relative HP and weapon damage/reload ratios

but this would involve designing a lot of new units. unfortunately, as it is vanilla as well as with the air redesign this project envisions, the game remains "spam fighters"
the main difference is the air redesign gives the air player more stuff to do while spamming fighters. which I personally appreciate, at least, but one of the major core issues (air feels stale because you are just spamming one unit for 98% of the game) remains

I still feel the lessened movement speed is nice and the increased air-to-ground interaction is a huge step in the right direction

[lament cypress]

It would be good enough to buff AA bot/vehicle move speed to counter air spam.. I don't understand why most AA units in this game tend to be so slow in first place consider they only have one job and have too many of them already hinder player offensive potential.

[gilded owl]

The slow speed plays a few factors
One is that they are behind all of your units when pushing into an enemy
Ensureing that your aa doesn’t get shot at by enemy ground units
When retreating your aa units are in front of your regular units and capable of really protecting your valuable ground units

[dawn narwhal]

backline eco can already build flak in 3 seconds
bp is op, so op is countered with op lol

[dawn narwhal]

is fighter a2a damage too high?
the t2's do 500 damage with potential 1 sec reload
seems like the kill speed is making atg unviable outside of friendly zones or air dominance

[burnt kraken]

That number isn't correct, arm fighter does 550 damage w 2.7s reloadtime. Cortex one does 350dmg v 1.15s reload.

Whether that's too high regardless, maybe? It's not close to the dps non-rework cortex t2 fighters put out, but that's a crazy high thing to compare to. If it was nerfed you'd see more heavy fighters probably, and make offensive air units harder to counter generally. If it's too strong a cost increase might be the best way to nerf rather than dmg decrease, to cut down on spam numbers.

[bitter temple]

you should play the version I developed

[burnt kraken]

what's that? Legion stuff or something else?

[bitter temple]

mechanics based air combat

[burnt kraken]

What does that mean in comparison to existing stuff? What is that based in

[bitter temple]

it's not based in anything, unless you consider prior air as the basis I suppose, it's a new mechanic

[burnt kraken]

That's not explaining the system you have in mind still

[hollow flicker]

It depends's complicated

[hybrid geode]

it's aerodynamic based air to ground or air to air flying weaponry with navigational movements and spatially aware targetting

[long stump]

I have been thinking about air stuff recently, and I kinda feel the biggest problems are big ol' fighter walls, and how disposable air units in general air, leading to silly kamikaze bombing runs that don't interact with any ground units at all.

What I would like to see is for air to leave wrecks, and for bombers to be much faster, and much more fragile. you can have ground based aa be adjusted to be less reliable, so as to not completely shut them out.

I feel this would make bombers act more like close air support, darting in to strike at frontlines, then running from fighter reprisal, which is much more interesting than kamikaze to hit the eco.

I understand that gunships are somewhat supposed to fit this role, but other than shurikens almost all of them are terrible units, only built when the air guy has to deal with some ground stuff and is too lazy to make his own ground.

[coral valley]

Faster bombers = even more kamikaze

[burnt kraken]

yes, goal of slower planes is exactly meant to incentivise back n forth attacks closer to front over suicide runs

[bitter temple]

air needs to be slower, not faster, and specifically a fast bomber would be a balance disaster

[long stump]

the key point is leaving wrecks

Having air not leaving wrecks is the biggest problem I feel. Well, the actual reason we have such huge fighter swarms is the lack of collision, it really skews with how things work, but I suspect that's an engine issue more than anything else.

[trail oracle]

iirc it’s the other way around: fighter collisions were turned off because of the fighter swarms.

[trail oracle]

Bombers have been tangibly faster in the past. I can’t remember many details, other than to say it wasn’t a disaster.

I also don’t see the value in slowing air down - is that about microability or something else?

[mint zephyr]

that was the intent, it is not the outcome

[trail oracle]

afaict manoeuvrability is more important for micro than speed

[bitter temple]

faster air combat has to resolve, the glassier air has to be. bomber speed puts a timer on fig battles, and figs themselves being fast, also means they can't be too strong, so you have the paper plane problem

yes, but speed inversely correlates with handling. eg with the Venator I nerfed handling -by- making it faster

[trail oracle]

What’s the venator? I don’t know air unit names :(
Speed does inversely correlate to handling, but manouvrability is a lot more complicated- considering firing angles and range, for example. Regardless of a fighter’s turn rate, in combat it must be flying almost directly at its target or it’s canon fodder - regardless how much health it has. Thus decisions are mostly when do you engage and from what angle, not what you do in the engagement - and when you disengage and what direction you fly and whether you provide any cover to your retreat.

[bitter temple]

try the new legion update, you'll see them in there

[gilded owl]

air doesn’t leave wrecks
The colvols(hitboxes) of wrecks is a complete mess
That would need to be resolved before air gets its wrecks back

Also air collisions are not cheap on cpu time so that is another blocker to address

[spring pine]

I need to do more testing but a few thoughts:

It'd be nice for fighters to have a rapid fire very light plasma for ground rather than missiles. Maybe it could be very short range for a2a dogfighting.

Turn radiuses and acceleration might need tweaking, it might be a more complex issue but having dogfights feel more like dogfights would be nice, and promote fighter micro over fight commands.

Gunships need to have a stronger a2g presence, it's still hard to choose core over arm t1.

I'd really like to have a specialized a2a fighter that has much longer range bvr missiles that could engage on radar locks.

If you'd like help testing, please dm me, I'm very interested in expanding air combat.

[lean zealot]

it'd be nice for fighters to have a rapid fire very light plasma for ground rather than missiles
I think the specific reason this isn't a thing is to avoid fighters being able to optimize dps by targeting ground and air at the same time. so if you're strafing ground units, your fighter is also opening itself up to being attacked by fighters during its reload time

[spring pine]

I'm not sure if it could be limited to one or the other, it'd be nice if they could decelerate for a2g if using rapid plasma

Another thing I need to test is if fight commands target ground units, that could cause a lot of headaches

[muted shell]

@burnt kraken
Can we do something about the altitude that air flies? Why do they fly so low? Can we try updating their altitude so they don't have to climb up mountains? Any map with elevation, the aircraft have to climb altitude when I personally think they should be up that high anyway.

[spring pine]

Fight command seems pretty good, they strafe ground targets en route but don't stop to turn on them it seems

[burnt kraken]

Aircraft regardless of their favored altitude, climb up mountains. If you type /airmesh ingame, you see the topography they follow, it's a smoothed version of the base heihhtmap. Altitude just changes how high above this mesh they fly.

Thats how it works in the engine, could be possible to change but would need more technical work

[long stump]

Not having collision is part of why fighters having a2g capability is so problematic, the fact than you can stack them all up makes them much much burstier. If you could stack 30 thugs (that don't block each others shots) into the space of a medium tank it would be terrifying. It has drawbacks for sure, making them more vulnerable to aoe (looking at you janus) but the absurd damage density and the increased ease of micro would mitigate it a lot.

I imagine it would cause engine issues, having to calculate collisions for all the fighters flying around all the time.

But for that matter, is there a reason fighters have to be always moving in the air?

[bitter temple]

jets tend to need to

[long stump]

Theoretically, if it is harder to mass up fighters, which giving them collision would somewhat address, although not perfectly I admit, there would be much less fighters to calculate collisions for.

The wrecks I will give you, but ideally air is less massed in general, thereby having less wrecks.

[bitter temple]

in theory, but that won't stop people massing them

[burnt kraken]

Only thing really stopping ppl from massing planes, is adding more expensive units that are a better investment

[long stump]

In much the same way you don't send 200 medium tanks in a wave at the enemy, because they can res them and send them back, and because they get in each others way, massing fighters in the same wayu wouldn't happen.

I was just about to mention the idea of more expensive air units. The other reason you don't mass 200 tanks is because you'd rather make 5 thors.

We have dragons, but they suck because fighters without collision burst them down near instantly.

[gilded owl]

No
It will not scale
Cpus will begin to cry/be murdered

[burnt kraken]

As eco scales up, investment in air units will scale too

Generally if a raid is able to kill lategame eco, it's really tiny effect in comparison whether you leave wrecks or not. Leaving wrecks mostly gives a bigger disadvantage to doing unsuccessful raids

[long stump]

I'll give you this one, I'm not an expert in game design, and I'm even worse at the more technical side ^^

[long stump]

Giving a bigger disadvantage to unsuccessful raids disincentives trying them at all, it changes the risk reward.

The problem I see, is that without having higher tier fighters, the lower tier will be massed. And you can't really have higher tiers because without collision they are absurdly bursty, meaning that higher tiers need to have ridiculous health pools for their cost to be efficient. This is sort of what happens with t1 and t2 fighters already, where the t2 are just massively better for the price, way more so than ground units are, something that the recent air changes have only exacerbated.

The best way I see to fix that is to make all anti air have huge aoes, including fighter weapons. Swarms of cheap units would therefore get wiped fast enough they're no longer effective, meaning you have to use the higher tiers to be useful.

I'd like it if we could decouple the a2g fighter stuff from the rest of it, because while that exists people won't be willing to really test any other changes, except for memes.

[dawn narwhal]

its' mainly their mobility tbh, stacking units up is very vunerable to splash which most units have

[gilded spear]

With the introduction of a heavy aoe fighter spamming T1 should be less of a problem even if they shoot ground in some capacity. I wonder are there any good high level player replays using the current air rework? From the beginning there have been many changes until now. So player opinions might have changed if they thought t1 fighters were op now. Instead of theorycrafting I would like people to try it out soem more and report back on the current feeling. The general idea of more interaction of air with ground units seems to work and in low OS lobbies air rework more than often is enabled. It's not perfect as there sure needs to be tweaks (for example for gunships) But I would be really interested in hearing peoples opinions after trying the new changes in more than a handful of games.

[hybrid geode]

the one thing I like about slower bombers is that it is easier to concentrate bombs on one target

so that makes bombers more effective against T3. Slower fighters seems to make them more effective at shooting planes too, coz they don't have to loop around to hit again

[mint zephyr]

So, the idea of the heavy fighter is interesting however it doesn't work. For the same metal it just loses against fighters, it's slow too, and as such is an irrelevant unit. It would need to be a much scarier unit to figs to matter.

[gilded spear]

so it could be adjusted being either stronger or cheaper to produce and then see if gets played more often

[mint zephyr]

Yep! A good test for this is, for the same investment...does it beat the thing it's supposed to counter? Usually by a large margin. After using it for a bit I think the aoe/range/reload of the banisher shot would need to go up as well as hp

[burnt kraken]

As the fighter count goes up, the aoe should make for better and better cost efficiency

And ideal composition is probably some mix of different kinds of fighters

Where the ideal price point is to allow for different kinds of approaches is, hard to say. At least it won't be totally dominating even if it's made better, as long as t2 fighters can outrange/outmaneuver it if there's room for that

And if the t2 dig can take on t2 fig easily, there isn't as much need for the heavy fig.

Though the aoe is also potentially good vs bombers if they fly in close formation. Vs figs they do much more damage than needed to kill

[shut pumice]

Could an a2a weapon which behaves like plasma on ground: aoe explosion at or near the target could make a good unique option?

[burnt kraken]

The armada heavy fighter functions somewhat like that, its missiles often miss but explode near target

[gilded spear]

problem is cant be too fast and cost effective so it doenst take away the role of t1 and t2 fighters. Maybe increasing its ability only vs fighters is the best way. I would think increasing its health does have relatively low impact against other targets except that they get better at tanking flak which could also be a balancing concern at some point. However screamers instantly destroying them are one possible way to deal with heavy fighter flak tanking.

[mint zephyr]

I wouldn't worry about them tanking flak. Flak damage doesn't get blocked. Another test case might be 100-200 fighters vs 10 heavy fighters and equal metal friendly fighters. At some point it should be detrimental to have a swarm and trade a2a with them. I'll also say this concept still applies within current air as well as im not a fan of slow air.

[gilded spear]

I wonder why are you not a fan of slower air units? Is it because it feels weird or do you have regards to balance?

[mint zephyr]

Mostly just a not as fun thing. They feel more like ground units. The speed difference is a nice contrast imho. It also nerfs air a2g really hard as a support unit b/c it is slower to arrive/never get there. There are a lot of counter plays...nuke bomber/(even gunship)/torp bomber that rely on being able to show up before the game is over

[hybrid geode]

I couldn't follow every single change but was flak nerfed or is all the effect I'm seeing due to the higher HP of planes ? Coz it takes many flak tanks to take care of a T2 bombing run now.

[mint zephyr]

Not sure If flak was changed but bombers have much more hp

[coral valley]

Pretty sure flak damage unchanged.

[cold stirrup]

Bombers are also so much slower, so flak feels stronger

[burnt kraken]

Bombers cost more too, and the hp increase is roughly so that bombers take proportionally similar amount of damage when flying over a given aa turret

So you need similar amount of ground aa to stop similar cost of bombers, but you have more time to react

[mint zephyr]

Well...when I tested it there's some nuance. Like with the damage change a t2 bomber just 1 shots a flak

[burnt kraken]

If you micro your air attack forward bombing each flak as you go, that's potentially way more interesting than just flying over

Whether the balance is right or not, it's a cool concept.

Flak turret has notoriously low hp compared to flak truck for example

[mint zephyr]

Ya I do this occasionally to make a hole with current air. Heck if you want more micro in air just buff turn rate ok t2 bombers. If you've ever tried to micro them that's an exercise in frustration

[trail oracle]

We used to play with fighter collisions enabled on an older, slower engine. It was fine back then, tho late games did slow down a bit more. Tbh I feel like fighter screens generally aren’t as big as they were back then also, since flak actually works now.

Also, that stacking behaviour is really annoying and super difficult to micro around. And even with collisions, you could get pretty power-dense air armies. I consider it a hard nerf for gunships with no tangible benefit.

Also, fighters have to keep flying coz they’re sitting ducks on the ground.

[cerulean helm]

Does the engine support fighters staying still in air like in Supreme Commander 2?

[sharp notch]

Yes, lots of flying units stay still like cons, gunships, and shurikens. It's just a matter of what stats the unit is given.

[cerulean helm]

I have only seen gunships and construction planes doing that in BAR and Zero-K, but not fighters or bombers. It's probably better for unit positioning and late game performance if they can stay still in air rather than having to circle around.

[hybrid geode]

it really doesn't, it takes much longer to kill a bomber with the HP increase. In the past, one flak tank could take care of 4 bombers passing by, something like that. Now it's more like 1, IF it doesn't bomb you. But all of this is GOOD in my opinion, it means maybe people will finally build screamers/mercuries.

[hazy sparrow]

Also Since AIR so Freaking slow everyone will just insta build flak in response. Air is meant to be a fast attack and surprise not a Slow flying tank. It makes bombers so useless since they lag so far behind the fighter screen even more so now>

Thats why t1 fighters will be better than bombers because they can actually keep up with the t2 fighters much better and you just use the t1 fighters to sinpe important chainable buildings (Build power/converters).

[dawn narwhal]

fighter speed is so important. 50% faster means you have 33% less reaction time, they hit 10 seconds earlier since they travel the map in 20 seconds instead of 30 seconds
they have the speed to get away from enemy fighters if you are sharp

so if you push in the vision, frontline has like 8 seconds before bombers hit, and backline has like 25 seconds
you can build a hella lotta flak in 25 seconds

maybe the strat is to use t1 fighters to snipe the con turrets, then t2 bombers to finish the job

[shadow matrix]

T1 fighters being able to shoot ground discourages early game runbys, which makes the early game more stable and less interesting.
Not necessarily a good or bad thing, but it will result in more games going long and into a high-tier end game.

[forest vale]

Why aren't ship battles so boring? Ships with different ranges maybe? Perhaps same with air can be done

Another perspective too, maybe adding a circular counter to air. Some concept like:

1. Fighter (ship 1) > ship 2
2. ship 2 > ship 3
3. Ship 3 > ship 1

Heck maybe different range attack distance could accomplish this idea

[bitter temple]

a bit more to it than that, but mechanic like that is very possible and works well

[forest vale]

Sea is like this with dolphin, destroyer, sub, frigates

[dawn narwhal]

ship battle is actually very skill intensive
with ship acceleration, it's like medium tanks but you have two types of tanks, destroyers and frigates
add to that commander, microing your units around your commander so it can constantly repair
not to mention sub micro

[coral valley]

Generally speaking, I feel like one of this game's strengths, particularly with combat of land units vs land units, is that almost nothing has a "hard rock-paper-scissors", just units which can more frequently find favorable ways to engage a given enemy than others. There are obviouslu a decent number of exceptions to this rule, particularly in things other than land units vs land units, but generally I'd say they're less interesting, and should only be the goal of a labs balance when a problem can't be fixed otherwise. There's a fair argument that fig spam is one of those things with only RPS as a solution, and i very much could be swayed either way, personally, but that's my personal, current stance on the general topic

[dawn narwhal]

there's RPS, then mausers + spam is the gun

[coral valley]

Yes, mausers are a problem and spam is a very good supplement to it in most cases. There's no reason to derail yet another thread into those particular balance complaints, though.

[burnt kraken]

Strict rps isn't that good or necessary. What's good is just offering different tools that people can figure out how to best use them together. And balancing it all so that you can't just use one tool for everything without a big downside.

With air, you got ground aa, with the air rework 3 meaningfully different kinds of fighter, and all the dedicated ground attack planes.

The effectiveness of fighters compared to ground aa, as defense vs enemy air is one thing to balance, and then the various fighters vs each other. Ideally it isn't simply rps, but depending on circumstance, unit composition, and micro, what beats what

[hard sage]

just come here to say that people are setting air rework ON and ranked games ON and just destroying every unit in the early game with just a bunch of T1 Fighters xD, low elo games are cursed, sometime they forget to see if the air rework is ON and the game ends in who make more t1 fighters

[coral belfry]

The gunships kinda suck. For Armada is there a reason to make the Banshee at T1 when you can just get more fighters? The gunships in general were made even slower, so roughnecks and wasps are even worse at rapid reaction to frontline breakthrough/incursion. The Hornet was made slower, and it has even less DPS than before and still minimal splash.

I really like the seaplane gunships, although the Cortex one I think is a bit too expensive plus it friendly fires itself if you forget to spread them out.

Gunships have more health sure, but they still die really fast to T2 flak so it doesn't make too much of a difference, and for the regular gunships, the speed reduction is more impactful since they are mostly defensive tools to runbys and breakthroughs where they react slower.

My suggestions:
Speed up the regular gunships (not including the seaplanes) a bit. Instead of a 25% speed reduction, make it 10-15%. The HP buff could be reduced, but I think the T2 gunships are fine since the T2 fighters do more damage and flak still shreds them.

The Banshee IMO should have no speed reduction so its a bit more competitive with the Shuriken/T1 Fighter.

The Roughneck/Wasp could also get a bit more range, since they are still overall slower than before.

Lastly, Hornet instead of the missile launchers, how about some plasma cannons so it does splash damage? It costs 1250 metal, and the DPS was made even lower. I think plasma cannons will give it more of that big burst, get in get out feel so that it can blow up big packs of Mauser/T1 spam better while its DPS against T3 units is relatively unchanged. And does Armada really need another single target gunship? The banshee, roughneck, sabre all have no splash.

Also, I realize that the Dragon buff/rework wasn't in the air rework

[shadow matrix]

If T1 fighters are meant to support the front lines, then their ground weapons should do temporary but non lethal damage, like EMP damage or low damage high impulse damage. Before I address the elephant in the room, pause and think for a moment, I think in isolation this is a reasonable take.

Of course, the problem with this is if T1 fighters did EMP damage, or impulse damage, that eliminates the need for some of cors unique units, but arms unique abilities remain unique. People already play mostly arm, so this would make the problem even worse.

Still, I think fighters being able to EMP or impulse ground units is the right thing, if they can damage ground at all.

[hybrid geode]

Then what would be the point of shuris

[shadow matrix]

Right, that's why I tried to say essentially "imagine how fighters should attack ground without thinking too much about other units". I mean, the right design for fighters should be about fighters, not about Shuris.

In general, the EMP mechanic is too broad to be limited to one unit I think.

Is it fighters job to make sure shuris have a point? Is fighter design about fighters, or is fighter design about shuris?

[dawn narwhal]

Don't plp play mostly cortex air because t2 fighters better?

Anyways shuriken is a cortex unique unit and t1 fighters perform a similiar role in cleaning up leaks, less effect on higher hp units per cost but tankier and actually kill the units by themselves

[dawn narwhal]

Shuriken is one concept: emp drone unit. A fighter that does emp dmg is just a tankier shruiken that also does t1 air control.

A unit shouldn't do both roles unless there's a good reason.

One of the goals of the rework was to make more air atg plays. If you make the fighter weaker it discourages plp from just massing fighters, as you can just go with ground aa defence against someone who went balls fighters. Buff gunships and ground aa as necessary

[hybrid geode]

btw Dragons are amazing now. Fire breath, a small AA... it's a good unit altogether, great to raid or defend.

[hollow flicker]

But that has nothing to do with air rework, that change is made by release candidates

[hybrid geode]

the fire breath yeah but I thought the AA was in the rework only ? Anyway, great if it's meant to be released

[hollow flicker]

The AA is also part of release candidates

[burnt kraken]

Both the normal and release candidate dragon are changed in the rework w the same stats, slower and more hp

[hybrid geode]

well, I like it. It's like a T3 plane, and even visually it's very cool. In defense against T3 it makes up for the lack of pulsar in Cortex' arsenal, and now it can attack bases coz it won't die to just a couple fighters. I hope its usefulness will be confirmed in top tier games

[mint zephyr]

Current hot 🔥 take is that dragon is still a meme unit even after releases candidate changes. It's better, but still a meme because of the price.

[hybrid geode]

why ? what wasn't good enough for you in a Dragon to be worth it at this price ?

[native saffron]

Titans are more of a meme

Even jagg is meme emo they’re very popular but super expensive and easy to counter.

[hybrid geode]

jugg, not jagg

[vivid sequoia]

I might have missed it but, is there anything about flying fortresses?

[sharp notch]

that's what the dragon is

[mint zephyr]

For me it's the cost compared to the alternatives ie bombers mainly. It's like 16 t2 bombers(or gunships even though they suck) or something. My unscientific guess is it's about 1000m too much.

[bitter temple]

fwiw I'd agree, but they're in a weird place where in -some cases- they can be oppressive, mostly communist rushed or enemy AFK air, which makes it hard to argue for a saner price. other hand, in most games they die to T2 figs that look at them funny.
a topic for Release Candidates thread though - my turbodragons are not related to this air project

[dawn narwhal]

So goals of the air rework
Goals

• Increase usage of t1 gunships
• Suicide bombing runs are monotonous?
• Increase the variety of air plays?

I think suicide bombing runs are not a bad thing. they are a significant cost, you can lose figs and the bombers
and there's different levels of outcomes depending on which bases you bomb, etc. maybe you get converters/BP but not afus

Increasing the usage of t1 gunships can be done by increasing their speed so that they can evade enemy fighters (think blitz can still get harrassment done even with enemy blitz)

Increasing variety of air play? well for one I think that t2 air fighters do too much aa damage. it's hard to do any kind of drop play when t2 fighters vaporize them. Maybe t2 fighters can do similiar dps but be tankier

[hybrid geode]

I would have thought an important goal of air rework would be to lower the importance of fighter clouds...

[burnt kraken]

Not necessarily lower the importance of fighters, but make them more interesting to use and smaller in number

Fighters in rework are notably worse as aa than in vanilla though

[bright matrix]

Been getting some interesting results from using Dragons vs sea. They do pretty well vs Naval units as ships are pretty costly metal wise, and it takes significant flak ships to down them, to the point where investing enough into the flak ships during parity nerfs the enemy navy's surface power signifcantly.

I was using a combo of 4 dragons, 6ish wasps, and keeping a few dozen fighters hanging in the back.

obviously its not going to work into 100+ fighter screens but in situations where you may have done a fighter trade and reduced the over all air screen in game, they seem to get alot of work done over the water, this has primariy been in FFA games

[dire grove]

Watch Chisato game on rosetta with 9 mins dragons

[hybrid geode]

has he got a youtube channel ?

[dire grove]

#1165607954611961938 message
i think he has a stream but youtube i don't know

[coral valley]

Additional reminder that dragon rework is release candidates rather than air rework

[hybrid geode]

so in the air rework is dragon different at all than RC pack ? like slower, tankier and more expensive like other planes ? or is it the same ?

[coral valley]

Applies same change to both dragons. if name == "corcrw" or name == "corcrwh" then uDef.health = uDef.health * 1.5 uDef.speed = uDef.speed * 0.75 --uDef.turnrate = uDef.turnrate * 1.5 uDef.cruisealtitude = 80

[tribal comet]

I happened to be in a match with the air rework with a friend last night, and I will say that as a frontliner, when we broke out of canyon in that match, visibly seeing those enemy air units move around above me and actually interact with me was so awesome. it felt more cinematic

previously I just dropped some AA and mostly ignored air since all the visual information is so garbled because the little you can see in your los is so fast you can't even mouse over it or see what's going on unless it's shuris or t2 a2g

just thought I'd give my 2 cents from a frontliner's perspective, since most of the comments seem to be about game balance or from the air's perspective (which is important of course)

[mint zephyr]

While entertaining I'm sure....im guessing the whole team boosted this dragon into existence so its kinda unpunished cheese.

[dire grove]

yeah he made fastest way with coop but even solo i bet it's possible to rush super fast under 14 mins

[mint zephyr]

Ya that timing sounds reasonable...in which case it should be shot down basically for free by the enemy air player

[urban sail]

He did do this in a game I played with him earlier that same day, but release candidates were off so it wasn't the good dragons and they didn't do that much.

[dire grove]

air can't do much coz it's 2v1 air and he's on a teching spot going air so he's much stronger than the dude on the other side doing air that could still be on t1 figs

[mint zephyr]

Ah he is eco.Yep eco-air very strong.

[coral valley]

Honestly unsure why eco going air isn't just completely standard, considering how many air units are solely kept in check by the fact that air player can't usually afford to stop pumping figs

[dawn narwhal]

true, air has faster impact and plp usually forget to make adequete flak/flak trucks
honestly when I do an amphib assault on an air player id' have to make like 15 trashers
good ground to air is flak trucks or bust

[urban sail]

Cuz if they made flak, gg you invested in all that air that's already countered.

When it works it destroys, but if it doesn't immediately win the game then the whole team sees two air and makes flak everywhere and now doing anything with air is impossible, so you need to switch off of air.

If it was standard for eco to go air then both teams would have multiple air players, which nullifies the advantage you get from having more air players. It's better for it to be niche.

[coral valley]

Sure, if they made heavy flak everywhere + eco only made t2 bombers rather than the rest of the air unit roster

If multiple people go air on both sides, neither team is disadvantaged. Counter would theoretically be either full team aggression on land, or team goes full land and invests in enormous quantities of land aa

[dire grove]

bombers are risky and can die to flak (trucks) can completly shut them down and then you lost the game, also killing afus will delete all the bombers unlike the dragon that can kill everything on his path. The new dragon is basically a flying razor, can't be killed by flak(coz they do little dmg and die fast), t1 figs don't do anything, only t2 figs can kill a dragon and dgun are 20x harder to do on flying units.

[dawn narwhal]

depends on the map
on large map or navy map it's much stronger

[vivid sequoia]

i mean alterations

[sand pilot]

I feel like there could be some room for a defensive fighter type that is stronger at AA than fighters but is a lot slower and has weaker reactions

I guess that's what the seaplane fighters are now, though idk why seaplanes were turned into all of the new specialist units instead of seaplanes remaining their own thing as a T1.5 and the specialists being new units

[coral valley]

there's also just legion's t2 fighters. a slow one strong vs other figs, and a fast one with high burst good at intercepting bombers

[sand pilot]

Yeah that's good too, more mechanics that make the air game a bit more interesting than "spam so many fighters there's a wall of them"

[sullen marten]

Dragon should lose aa. Battleships also don’t have anti sub

[bitter temple]

dragon unrelated to air rework
and the AA is not remotely powerful enough to save them except in very rare cases

[sullen marten]

Enough to make t1 fighters basically useless against them

[bitter temple]

if you're rallying t1 lab output into a t3 unit, then yes, it should be

[mint zephyr]

Dragon should not lose aa. It is still an overpriced meme unit(better, but still). Also ya not related to rework. Usually people die to dragon due to redistribution of wealth and not properly redistributing their own wealth.

[sand pilot]

Also dragon's entire point as a unit is an air threat heavy enough that you need actual investment in AA to take it down, it should beat T1 fighters and basic AA guns

[bitter temple]

unfortunately due to the insane bonus T2 figs have, they can still pile on it faster than it can begin to react/be actively defended. so it's basically a glass cannon, for which it is overpriced

[stray lotus]

I think the light aa that dragons have in the release candidate pack seems fine. It is not overly tuned nor is it useless either. Ended a stalemate yesterday with 15 of them going scorched earth with 300+ fighters protecting them lol

[hybrid geode]

yeah and that's a good thing

[sullen marten]

Fighters are meant to kill air

[sand pilot]

And Dragons are the air equivalent of t3 units

Dragons should be able to overpower weak AA

[hollow flicker]

they do overpower weak AA... it's just that fighters aren't exactly weak, and if you deny them the ability to counter dragons then there is nothing left to counter dragons

[coral valley]

Why is this not being discussed in https://discord.com/channels/549281623154229250/1165607954611961938 ? Dragon rework is entirely unrelated to air rework

[tribal comet]

I think because technically dragon rework is a part of air rework = 1, even though it's separate

[coral valley]

If by that you mean: "air rework applies the same modifiers to whichever version of dragon is available", then yes

[burnt kraken]

how air rework fighters work vs nu-dragons compared to vanilla fighters would be relevant here, but the messages about it don't really specify which version of the game they're talking about

[hybrid geode]

air rework is better in some ways but becoming frustrating : bombers are better, and not dying to razors is great, however hornets are really trash.

it's just so frustrating seeing hornets hover around targets for ages, firing once every 5 sec. It's just too slow, it looks ridiculous.

Liche behavior looks much better coz it's natural : it dives, drops a bomb, flies away, comes back. It looks logical. But nothing was modified in Hornet's flight so when slowing down firing rate like that, it looks like it shouldn't behave this way, circling around NOT firing. It should either have a diving pattern like Liches or go back to faster rate of fire.

[burnt kraken]

what are you thinking specifically with diving pattern for hornet? a flyover like a bomber has?

usually you want to micro it back n forth between shots, but of course there's not always time or need to do that.

ideally of course the unit has still nice looking behavior even when unmicroed, so an idea for how to improve that could be great. the reload time is not set in stone either, but getting the behavior (and balance) right for a slower loading gunship is interesting regardless

[hybrid geode]

well like I said it could be like a Liche, fly over drop bomb, fly away. But buzzing around while doing nothing just looks so useless and weird. It fit when it used to drop missiles much faster, but now it's not appropriate anymore IMO.

[burnt kraken]

fly over would be much worse behavior for combat performance, gets you hit by a lot more aa

[hybrid geode]

yeah ideally you wanna use the range of the Hornet. Then I don't know what the solution is. Just wanted to mention its behaviour looks very strange right now.

one thing could be a cloaked plane (NOT stealthy), and like sharpshooters it would uncloak while firing then cloak back, that would make more sense, it would be logical technology from Armada.

[stray lotus]

Has anyone else seen bombers be effective in high OS lobbies in peer vs peer situations (i.e., not in situations where the air player had their base raided/got nuked resulting in 1 player having air superiority)

[coral valley]

Also unrelated to air rework

[stray lotus]

im talking about with the air rework on

[hollow flicker]

give it 1 or 2 very low damage machine guns ala pawn style and call it a day, maybe reduce main weapon damage a tiny bit to compensate
shouldn't affect unit's performance significantly and would probably look a lot better

[fossil heart]

I played my first pvp game with air rework on today and first impressions are that it's fine, but I generally prefer vanilla air. Personally I think t1 figs should be remade to just be air to air, as it seems like there is too much power budget put into a very weak weapon because of the asymmetry of attacking benefits. Because of that, they just don't really feel good to build ever

I generally like the responsiveness of fast air in vanilla, so that's just a general thing I'm not a huge fan of, but well, that's kind of the point of the air rework so not a whole lot can be done about that. Bombers feel even more feast-or-famine than vanilla because of being slower and tankier. When they're good (exploiting a hole in air defenses) they're even better than vanilla, but because of how slow they are, they're less likely to find holes in air defenses imo. All in all I think that's fine

I'd like the long range aa to be buffed a bit, either range or reload speed, or cost/build time They just don't have a lot going for them right now. imo best would be to give them like, 250 more range

I don't really feel like calculating it, but has the % of bomber health done as it flies over aa changed from this rework? They're tankier so less % of health, but slower, so exposed to the aa for longer. It slightly feels like it's increased, as in bombers are relatively more fragile to static aa, but I'm not sure. If so I don't think that's good, I think bombers should be slightly more tanky to static aa here compared to vanilla

[sand pilot]

I do think that the concept of air being slower means that counters could be made less hard counters, right now AA has to be really effective because it needs to be able to effectively deal with fliers with the handicap that the fliers can pick a target to focus on while the AA has to be spread out to cover every potential angle

[coral valley]

this is true for mobile aa, but the speed of the aircraft only allows reactively building static aa if the defender either is either on a big eco with bp at the ready, or is floating way more resources than they should be yet has bp at the ready. Otherwise, preparations need to be made long before aircraft are seen, whether or not it's fast

[burnt kraken]

most bombers have 1,6x their vanilla hp, and their speed is 0,65x vanilla speed. They spend 1 / 0,65 = 1,54 of vanilla time when flying over a given AA turret.

1,6 / 1,54 = 1,04, so they have a marginal amount more HP left when flying over the same turret compared to vanilla.

With the better turning and vision, it can sometimes be easier to avoid AA, but definitely the opponent will have a moment more to prepare and pump up extra turrets while bombers are on the way

Regarding the speed, a midway value for that somewhere between vanilla and rework speed numbers is definitely possible. Or even full vanilla speed isn't totally out of the question, at least for some units

[hybrid geode]

no reaction to the idea of cloaked Hornet with the current low rate of fire?

[burnt kraken]

Cloaked air sounds a bit too strong, when most aa weapons need a direct hit and not aoe, shooting at radar dots is really inefficient

Would be really good for just soaking hits for other stuff coming behind it too, so even after nerfing the other stats it'd still be really good for that

[hybrid geode]

yeah but the Hornet comes a long way, it was a terrible unit, no one used it, bit like Dragons

[daring crescent]

a question on the Air Rework.
How supported in development is it ? Anyone can push a github change.
Is the Air rework sponsered by a specific member of core dev team ?

Is it accepted that t1 fighters should be air to ground. Is it becuase they were in TA and the design ethos here is 'revert to classic TA'.
Is it because they used to be air to ground when Spring first got developed ?

What exactly is the list of changes to give feedback on. "it feels bad" or "it feels ok" overall aren't good enough.
Do we like the general changes to health ... yes.
Do I like the t1 targetting ground ... not so much. It would be fine for 1v1 I think as you must divert the resource. But in 8v8 it's a hard shutdown on runbies with a fighter swarm you will have.
I dislike the speed changes. Air rework feels slow - but I do see how that change in speed affects the gameplay

can things get further tweaked for testing and we look at air rework v1.1 ?

[hybrid geode]

I think planes being slow is a good thing for bombers : more concentrated bombs, more damage to a big T3 unit you need to stop in a hurry. So, good against Thors for example, that people keep complaining about. It's not good for gunships though, they still need work IMO.

[dawn narwhal]

all for tankier t2 figs with lower dps

[burnt kraken]

The specific implementation is mostly done by me, but based on long discussions and backing of the game design team. But as it's an experimental thing, we don't know yet how closely a version that gets into the main game might resemble the current one. Things will be tweaked before that definitely, either by a bit or by a lot.

T1 figs shooting ground isn't set in stone, nor are the exact speeds of the units.

For speeds a useful feedback would be, do all air units feel too slow, or just some of them? And feedback on how the turn rates and other maneuvering feels aside from speed. As there is more variety in air units speeds here, with the seaplane bomber being still fast and very agile, and the heavy t2 bomber getting the biggest speed nerf. Or the heavy t2 fighter being specifically slow.
In general, if there's some units that feel really nice to use and others that don't, it's valuable to specify that. Then the worse feeling units can either be tweaked to be more like the nice feeling ones, or some new values altogether tried for them.

For figs shutting down runbys, I agree that that can happen, but keep in mind that shuriken do it way more cost-effectively.

[hybrid geode]

little nugget of info I gathered yesterday : seaplane gunships outrange razors

[bitter temple]

slow air, broadly, is a good thing for the game. the problem I hit with my experiments along those lines, is that while it gives time for air to actually be able to play rather than have to instantly win or lose, is you can very viably reactively spam AA to a slow bomb raid you see coming a minute in advance
and BAR scaling being what it is that's pretty hard to work around

[hybrid geode]

by the way how do you calculate range with plane shooting ground ? Is it as if the plane was on the ground, or do you do the diagonal, which is longer due to the fact that the plane is high in the air ?

like if a fighter has a range of 680, he will shoot another plane at 680, but if he's 200 in the air, he should only be able to shoot a ground unit that's 650 away, from your top view projection

if he's 500 up in the air, that drops to 460

[burnt kraken]

it varies weapon by weapon how it exactly works, can't say the specifics off the top of my head

[burnt kraken]

Yeah, that's both a good and bad thing. You can reactively spam turrets vs a ground assault too, and it can still be tight and exciting how succesful those are.

How successful an air raid can be, being already decided before you see them coming, isn't that exciting, you want some reactiveness - but you also want a good enough chance for air attacks to be succesful. Ideally you have air units and aa (both fighters and ground aa) maneuvering around each other, instead of just going out in a single flash engagement

[gilded spear]

Maybe this could kinda be adressed by giving flak a certain amount of ammo as well that slowly replenishes. Like 20 shots and every 2-3 seconds it loads a new one. So it doenst matter how much build power you have, if you just started building flak the moment you have seen enemy air your flak cannons might not have enough ammo to stop a raid. Could be too big of a nerf though.

[bitter temple]

what that effectively means though, is that with slow air you cannot bomb out a turtle eco player, without insane preinvestment in bombers to come in from literally all sides

[hybrid geode]

this also can be adressed very simply : have two types of bombers. One fast, one slow.

[bitter temple]

then you're back to needing fast air and the problem is just kicked down the line
unless it's -expensive-, T2.5/T3 tier, then maybe saner

[burnt kraken]

That's how the t2 bombers are in the rework

AA built right next to the target is never super effective though, ideally you want it in between that and the bombers approach direction, so they shoot all the time as they fly over. If they drop bombs while inside the AA's range, youre not getting full bang for your buck

[daring crescent]

shuris stun the unit, true that shuts it down but something else kills it. teamwork 'cos it probably isn't the air player at that stage in the game
Another 20+ t1 fighters issue is that they're a flying ball of lashers and bases are made of explodium. If you do get to do a flyby with them you'll probably blow up energy converters.

the anti-air, air feels to slow. that is the seaplanes seem OK in a defensive role if in position. truth is they are slower and getting in position is more important than whether they are better or mass efficient or anything else.

I'd really like to see Legion aligned with the air rework. Both because it breaks legion air but also because that faction has the defender and interceptor fighter roles (?) i'd like to see if the speed makes the interceptor OP.
theoretically it can skirmish and pick away at a dispersed air force (defeat in detail) with the speed to disengage and get away.

with rework on I've found more value in seaplane bombers late game. they get where I need them to be quicker. they fall out the sky with a bit more momentum - and the falling massed wreck does the damage to kill converters and build power.

[lyric remnant]

The Air Rework does not seem to be applied to Legion is that correct?

[bitter temple]

yes, so don't have them both on in same lobby

[lyric remnant]

understood, is that coming though?

[bitter temple]

probably counterproductive to, right now it's a test between main factions only. stacking extras gets weird, fast

[lyric remnant]

got it, makes sense to get air rework to “production” first

[burnt kraken]

I don't think it'd be counterproductive, would be nice to have. Just the basic speed/hp/turning adjustments, and cleaning up some inconsistencies between them.

But for now, they're not compatible

[lyric remnant]

well depends on how long it will take for the air rework to get into standard, if we are talking 2 months, it is fine I guess. However, with this approach the air rework will actually not be tested for Legion. Whatever changes would be done would only be done after air rework becomes standard - so balaning etc would be done only then. Perhaps at this point when it is clear people like the air rework, it makes sense to include already legion to include it in the testing/balancing

[gilded spear]

After playing many games with air rework on Isthmus I find that the seaplane bomber usually is the better bet when it comes to bombing an afus on Supreme Isthmus. They might have lower HP but their speed make up for it. STrategic bombers give the enemy more time to react and the element of surprise gets lost. Having a more powerful bombing run doesnt matter when your goal is to bomb an afus in a 2-3 Afus economy.

Also concerning strategic bombers, their HP helps strategic bombers against ground aa mostly I find t1 and t2 fighters have an easy time destroying them as their damage against them is very high and they are easy to catch because of their low speed.

What could make them interesting without taking away from the seaplane bombers: strat bombers in supremce commander had this: Either stealth or a backwards facing AA/ anti ground weapon or just more HP and higher cost so they can not be stopped by flak fire very well.

[hybrid geode]

I asked about AA on bombers but it seems they don't want that. They think it's overkill putting AA on big planes, so so far it's just the dragon

[lyric remnant]

Well hopefully Dragon will not be op - comparing it to Liche at the moment, I am not sure 2 Liches cosint similar to 1 Dragon are equal

[hybrid geode]

nah it's not OP coz players still have their damn fighter clouds

[lyric remnant]

Which counters Liche also..

[hybrid geode]

yes, so since fighters pretty much annihilate anything flying if you got a big enough cloud, you may not be able to judge whether Dragon is better than Liche or not... Both just get minced up.

[hollow flicker]

Liche does all of its damage in a big burst while dragon is sustained dps

[coral valley]

if there's a chance for liche to get 1 bomb off and dragon just gets to fire for 2 seconds, liche got vastly better value

[hybrid geode]

I'd use Liches to sneakily destroy an AFUS, trying to provoke a chain reaction, or to kill some big tanky units on the frontline

Liche would be an insanely better unit if it would drop its bomb even once dead, like right before crashing

[coral valley]

unless it gets killed in the middle of nowhere en route to its destination

[lyric remnant]

that would be the risk the attacker would take

[coral valley]

would also make it effectively a t2.5 version of legion's kamikazes

[hybrid geode]

yes, might be OP though, but would be funny in many situations

[coral valley]

only funny if you're not on the receiving end

pretty sure one of the main goals of air rework was to increase interaction between land and air? "kill the liche or don't, your t2 geo dies either way" doesn't really fit that bill

[hybrid geode]

it would be nice if increasing interaction between land and air meant that all forms of AA becomes useful

nettles and flak are very commonly used, but Chainsaw/Eradicator, Ferret/SAM and Mercury/Screamer, very very rarely

[coral valley]

chainsaw/eradicator/sam are kinda underutilized. obviously this doesn't account for flak's aoe, which is often easily worth all the downsides, but

ferret's performance for anything other than decloaking to kill a transport carrying a comm is abysmal, but the other 3 really aren't bad, though SAM is pretty much "i want flak or a chainsaw/eradicator but i can't afford one right now". still a lot more cost-effective than equal investment in nettle/thistle, though

[hybrid geode]

the issue is also that you don't face air players very often, so almost all players "gamble" that they won't need AA until T2 or at least will have time to react and build some if the bombers do come. Such attitude should be punishable a lot more

[dawn narwhal]

chainsaw really good against bombers if you don't carea bout killing fighters
esp the seaplane and t2 bombers
you can always reclaim the aa after if you have enough bp

[coral valley]

it's more just "is the attacking air packed tightly enough for all the downsides of flak to be worthwhile?" if you look at the stats, t1.5 aa is miles better than static flak for any situation where the flak wouldn't be splashing 3+ targets. There just happen to be a lot of situations where the flak would be splashing 8+ targets

[hollow flicker]

Reminds me of the last game i played where i had 500+ kills across like 10 flak trucks throughout the game

400 of those kills were on 3 flak trucks

[burnt kraken]

You make it less of a gamble to build aa, if air is more common

But you don't want to make it too strong either, ideally you want more frequent smaller air battles than just these huge singular air strikes

[hybrid geode]

yeah but usually there's 1 T1 bombing run and 1 T2 bombing run in most games. people are dumbfounded by the T1 run usually, and at best build nettles in panic. So ferrets/chainsaw never used 😦

[burnt kraken]

Yeah it's a question of how to balance it to encourage smaller things. Emp air units work constantly (or threaten it) near the front

Buffing gunships further could be one thing, and a2g figs ofc work towards that

[hybrid geode]

true, if banshees harassed bases throughout the T1 phase, then you'd need stronger T1 AA

[hollow flicker]

Which goes full circle back to my initial suggestion of buffing banshee speed and maybe dps/accuracy at the cost of hp
Make sky tick real

[hybrid geode]

accuracy 100 times yes

[bitter temple]

nobody wants sky tick and that's the reason banshees are so poor. ties in, yet again, to everything being nitroglass. you cannot have quick effective microable dps as it's just insanely OP and forces a large 'not dying' tax to a possibility

[sick locust]

Hornet, I have an amazing idea for a scav unit

[coral valley]

technically, we have 2 scav units which make eco less nitroglass (t2 con turret and t2 wind)

[bitter temple]

they do help yes

[hybrid geode]

are these expected to make the main unit roster ?

[coral valley]

probably not

would be a fundamental change to how the game plays once t2 starts, particularly on op wind maps

[dawn narwhal]

sky tick lol, the last thing we need is cheap air units that can do damage and be thrown away without thought

[dawn narwhal]

make them non-neglible cost but faster and microeable. banshee problem is their speed, they have zero survival chance against any enemy fighter. can make their dmg lowish but able to be kept alive. like seekers

[hollow flicker]

I meant sky tick in terms of speed and, health, and dps, not cost. I don't think its cost shpuld change. Effectively make it a raiding unit that can get in, snipe undefended mexes, and get out before fighters show up. This should end up with static AA seeing more use

[dawn narwhal]

yep
its dps needs to be kept low other wise it will be like a mutalisk in starcraft. fast and lethal
seekers are rather expensive and low dps, but they still work as raiders and can be skillfully kept alive

[hybrid geode]

another issue with banshees : don't you think they have the ugliest tracers ? It's like just a white line, there's nothing to it. It would deserve a better looking ammo

[shadow matrix]

If static AA is used more, then it will be even more important that red air units stay in the red area, and blue air units stay in the blue area. This means that opposing units cannot be in the same area, which is as much fun as you would expect (not very fun).

[edgy garnet]

I imagine not the most popular opinion, but the tier 1.5 AA options are bloat due to their lack of use, and lack of uniqueness. They aren't even OTA units either, so removal/rework wouldnt be "unfaithful".

Overall I like the air rework option, makes it less "twitchy" In a game that already strains most players ability to multitask

[dawn narwhal]

i honestly like the air being fast paced
navy is slow and calculating, land is medium, air is blitzkriek dogfight
practicing your bombing run skills is a art, and I don't think it is boring micro at all. given the strategy in clearing out enemy fighters and overwhelming the enemy air player. and you can use the wait command to precommand bombers

[hybrid geode]

what's the latest on air rework ? Are some of the modifications candidates for the main game ?

[shadow matrix]

similar question: is the air rework gathering the data you wanted? I rarely see it used

[burnt kraken]

It's on hold for a while now, I want some feedback from the GDT on what would be a state where it could be added to the main game. And Raghna is making an alternative air rework, so I have no idea what's next

[hybrid geode]

Air Rework has the advantage that you produce fewer planes so it lags less 😄

I think all bombers should stay slow like in the rework (they're more efficient this way) but other planes should keep their original speed.

[lyric remnant]

I like what it does with the gunships - kind of more useful with the rework

[dawn narwhal]

increasing time to kill on planes would be generally good imo, moreso for non-bomber units (bombers are alpha strike, other units are generally sustained dmg)

planes are quite good but it requires a lot of skill to consistently bomb the enemy, because one wrong miscontrol and flak devastates your army

ground aa killing fighters so fast, and t2 fighters killing other aircraft so fast makes aircraft very brittle
you either steamroll them or your fighters die quickly

adjusting bomber speed and HP are very dangerous, you reduce bomber speed and bomber becomes useless at bombing backline positions because double the reaction time, you buff it's hp, and a frontline player/army cannot do much against bombers as they bomb and retreat

To make air feel more stable, fighter hp should likely be increased, and t2 fighter dps definitely should be reduced

[hybrid geode]

haha I hate what it does to them, they're more tanky with a ridiculously low rate of fire which means they can't patrol, they're only useful as a kiting unit like janus

[burnt kraken]

you mean the hornet specifically I guess? not all gunships

[hybrid geode]

yeah. Banshees have issues, but they're different issues

[urban flare]

i played legion whiler allowed air rework, but all legion fighter can,t against other fighter cause there weapon give damage to vtol 25% why setted that? legion can,t against enemy air as there,s unique unit and air

[hollow flicker]

because air rework and legion are not compatible with each other, air rework does nothing to legion air

[urban flare]

did you played legion while allowed air rework? legion fighter give damage to vtol only 25%

[bitter temple]

do not use air rework with legion

[lyric remnant]

Guys I am not sure where to write this so I put it here. According to web, the heavy transports should carry 1 big unit or 4 small ones. I was just able to pick up 3 Mammoths with the Skyhook 😄 .. is that a mistake? I would say that Mammoth is heavier than Marauder and the Abductor cannot pick him..

[bitter temple]

size isn't a factor, but mass, and some other oddites, eg skuttles.
as ever, take website with bucket of salt

[lyric remnant]

OK clear.. so you are saying that the fact that it can carry 3 Mammoths is expected? Isn't it kind of unfair that Cor can transport such heavy units - also Tzars, while Arm does not have such heavy units? Fatboy being the heaviest, but not comparrable to Tzars and Mammoths..

[regal folio]

i believe max capacity is 4 units per t2 transport.
this behaviour is expected afaik.
website is old n not updated n misleading gg.

arm can carry tanks if you want to, i guess like starlights to the front or smth

[lyric remnant]

yes it can, but starlight is not Mammoth which is essentially a T2,5 unit

[small gyro]

I played a few games with the rework on, I have only done my usual strats of agrresive bombing which defenitly dont work here. I have yet to but want to, try and fight at the front with bombers, but I am afraid that it would simply be more efficent to eco as the bombers impact may be minamal, but I will have to check. What were the reasons for making air cost more metal and less e? Also would it be good if I provided replays?

In the vanilla game you could already micro bombers to attack stuff on the front line, it was just a terrible waste for a few reasons:
1 Risk: You very much risked losing a bombr to enemy figs or enemy aa.
2 forceing aa: By bombing you would make the enemy build aa, now while you would think this would be good, it is not. Managing to bomb eco is far more effective, and is impposible if the other team builds aa, so forcing aa sucks.
3 Bad damage: Other then taking out a few rezz bots or some nanos, bombing the enemy does little to nothing to thier army.

The increase bomber hp of the re work would help with problem one, but i do not see it helping problem 2 or 3. By makeing bombers more expensive it also worsens problem 3 by limiting the number you can have. As i have said I really need to play around with it more, but players don't really like it so that's hard. Also in some of my games with it I made some horrid mistakes.

What I would like to know is how air is ment to be played in the re-work, because I had far more fun playing air in default. I found the re-work boring.

[hybrid geode]

are u sure you tried it enough ?

coz I guarantee you that if air rework fixes anything, it's your point number 3. Not necessarily being tankier, but being SLOWER. Bombs are more focused in one area, which makes bombers much more efficient against units. They're not just good at killing buildings any more. I think it's THE thing that should be kept in the main game : slower bombers. Or at least, a second mode of fire for bombers that makes them slower. And btw, this is a lot more obvious with T2 bombers. Being tanky and slow, so precise, they are now absolutely deadly against big T2 units or T3.

Also, air rework has lower damage to air : so Razorbacks and Kargs are now easy prey for T2 bombers.

[lyric remnant]

What is the status of the air rework? I understand the emp rework is essentially certain to be added to the main game. Is Air rework also a candidate?

[hybrid geode]

no it's not it wasn't popular enough afaik

I suggested at least keeping the bombers modifications coz they add something, dunno if it's being taken into consideration.

[bitter temple]

tl:dr; not in this form. other air changes are in rough progress but nothing concrete

[lyric remnant]

I dont really have an opinion here. The speed is what made bombers also interesting. The only think I would complain about is Liche which could use a bit more HP - compared to Hailstorms it seems way less efficient for metal

[hybrid geode]

having diminished damage from non AA ground units to air units was good too, Mammoth and especially Razors are too OP against planes

[lyric remnant]

agreed. Dragons would be unstoppable without figs though

[hybrid geode]

well there's still long range AA like screamers. they're the real anti dragon unit, but so metal expensive...

[burnt kraken]

Not dependant on that, it's still just a rough first draft. Currently development is halted until gdt gets its shit together

[lyric remnant]

GDT?

[small gyro]

I guess the hardest part of an air rework is working out how to make bombing finacialy worth it.

[burnt kraken]

That would be a relatively simple balance issue. Important thing is first to get the unit behavior on point

[small gyro]

Oh yeah too slow is bad, feels terrible, but they need to be controlable

Makes sense

[burnt kraken]

Game design team, the guys who decide what gets into the game

[burnt kraken]

What do your bombing runs typically fail to? If you've got interesting replays yeah you could share them.

For the e/m cost difference, it's to make them a bit easier to make early but harder to mass later in as big numbers. Since early on you're limited by energy, but lategame when you're converting it to metal anyway e cost isn't so important

[small gyro]

I found out that bombers can hit flying figs in one game, my bombers also died to a flak in that game that was not there before I launched my attack: if the planes were normal speed I may of been able to fly past and get some extra damage. in one game I was silly and tried to bomb a flak for some reason, so when i said I was playing badly I mean it.

A important thing to keep in mind is that flaks will be going up far before air goes t2, as the 3k metal for a t2 is pricey and allows your opponent to bomb you if you do it too soon. IDK if air would go t2 sooner with slower bombers though. I very rarely go t2 air.

Third Game I played with rework on: The One with bombers hitting figs and the flak being built before I arrived (Third game).https://bar-rts.com/replays/3bf3da65d0b4d605af6017bd084b3ca6

First game I played with rework on (Minuse the one months ago which I probably won't look for): Me killing my bombers by attacking into flak (Why). https://bar-rts.com/replays/9ce3da65dd83a9e726d030175d1704ac

Second game with rework on: was on flats and forests but I basicaly became an air player, but I only really used shurikens. https://bar-rts.com/replays/ffedda65ed58986b5c8cff4645bcc33f

[torn idol]

I haven't tried the air rework, but I hope it would address these two points:

• Similiar to Total Annihilation, air units would never lose horizontal velocity/acceleration when ascending/descending. Air units would slowly ascend/descend when according to the heightmap differences. It's rather annoying that air units lose almost all of their speed when they are "climbing" steep cliffs.
• Air units would actually land on the position you tell them to. Currently, even if you have only single unit selected, it will not land even close to the position you tell it to, even if there's nothing blocking it.

[stray lotus]

it addresses neither of those items

Air units are also slower in the rework, so those high pitch climbs are even more deadly to bombers

[stray lotus]

the change to bombers was very unpopular amongst people who play the air position

[random mulch]

Fairly new to BAR but wanted to chime in with some half-baked thoughts.

Might be able to take off some of the pressure to perfectly balance speed/agility/hp/damage by finding another dimension of freedom for counterplay. E.g. something like the extant radar accuracy mechanic feels appropriate.

Different planes would have different radar profiles to make them easier/harder to hit for AA weapons (which themselves benefit differently from radar coverage). More+better radar coverage in an area would improve the effectiveness of SAMs, flak, fighters. Possibly the addition of a radar class like Doppler like we have sonar.

Thinking along the lines of ways that air preparedness can be made both more specialized AND more holistic than just having enough gun that shoots up.

Opportunity to even borrow from the +dmg surround mechanic, for situations where you've got a plane detected from multiple sources and directions.

[frail cove]

Fighters felt way too sluggish, on maps where you don't have a normal frontline like supreme, the enemy player being able to group all their air on 1 spot and fly over a sea that you have low vision on means you cant group your fighters fast enough to do much using the normal meta of a fighter wall on patrol line thing

tier 1 fighters felt extra useless for AA if the other player has any Tier 2s, without knowing the exact differences, it felt like Tier 2 fighters were significantly stronger vs tier 1 than before with my fighters melting without getting any hits in

the recovery time for losing an air battle seems more painful now with 1 losing air battle likely going to result in a player dying which is just going to make people hate on the air guy more since players rarely make enough AA and tier 1 AA becomes useless pretty fast

What was the goal of the air rework exactly?

[subtle oak]

this is just my 2 cents as someone who plays a fair amount of air over a few maps

i firmly believe that the rework should focus a bit more on health, cost changes and changes to missiles that would make pin pointers matter everywhere especially missile based AA.

1. allow missiles to miss more,(other then running out of fuel cause both are in an arching turn) , this should also include all missile based AA systems, call it the chaff mechanic(some RNG).
2. increase all fighters health my double and increase speed by at least 10%to 25%, they are flying around with jet engines.
3. Double the costs of all fighters, or make the current weaker ARM t2 fighter cost like 50% to 75% more, to offset the quality with quantity balance.
4. make missiles do different amount of damage depending on what flank is being hit.
5. give t2 fighters the ground attack as it is, if this is still wanting to be included.
6. give all fighters Air to Air machine guns.

This should create lovely dogfights where position and early numbers matters in early game. and micro of multiple wings late game can change a air battle. makes people think about having AA up by tier 2 timings and also helps reduce server lag as the number of planes will be half.

[bitter temple]

tuning AA missiles that can miss 'sometimes' vs 'not missing always' is pretty damn hard

[subtle oak]

its not. look at the whistler, movement matters

[bitter temple]

that will vary depending on unit speed and direction, to the point you can probably juke AA with some units in particular
wouldn't be skill expression either, just 'sometimes broken'
unsure if you've ever been hit by torpedo bombers but the way they're micro'd to avoid the AA is not good gameplay, just feels bad

[subtle oak]

thats is half the point. this is only against fighters
bombers are bigger targets and slower

[bitter temple]

sure, but if your AA is shooting at fighters that it will mostly miss, your AA is now useless

[subtle oak]

micro, targets the bombers, or build flak

[bitter temple]

not always possible in either apm or visibility/clickability
eg trying to manually target screamers vs bombers is a nightmare, you can't get at them. it's not skill expression, it's just frustration

[subtle oak]

like most things in the game
example; eating an ageo between bombs landing, huge micro play

its just a different way of thinking about this problem, i would love to have like 4 squads of like 6 fighters and dominate someone with 40 fighters cause of the strat play just like with how navy fights work and flanking damage.
honestly i wanna see dogs fights

[bitter temple]

have you played legion air? T2 specifically?

[bitter temple]

sure, difference is you can actually physically click the damn geo if you want to

[subtle oak]

whats your thought on the dog fighting gun

[dawn narwhal]

i think the missile has better visual feedback on whether your stuff is hitting or not. And allows you to dodge inside the firing arc. with guns you wouldn't be able to tell wtf was happening

[bitter temple]

better, especially for T1. see how legion air works

[scarlet forge]

Could it be added as a toggle switch for focus for AA?
To explain, toggle "Focus fire" 3 choices, bombers, fighters, utility?

[bitter temple]

I wish it could

[spring pine]

It used to be a toggle to prioritize fighters or bombers, and of course it was OP as fuck

[queen flint]

Apparently figs shooting grounds have targeting, can change so no targeting like how experementing with whistler changes

[ionic sequoia]

I think giving the fighters a type of bomb that is effective against units and not buildings might be a good idea.

[shy dew]

As someone who got to play air rework -

PLEASE increase t1 fighter speeds. In many cases its damn near impossible to react to a focused air raid on even proportion.

For example on a map like istmus, youd be lucky to have half ur fighters reach the enemy bombing run before they kill one of your fronts

[subtle oak]

too

[half pollen]

Hello, water enjoyer here.

Many people probably expressed the sentiment before, but seaplane funships and especially the cutlass feel deeply underwhelming. Their stats are inferior to T2 landplane gunships (supposedly their peers) in everything but range, despite them being more expensive. They can dive to protect themselves from anti-air, but large bodies of deep water are rare in the map pool and you'd want to send them from the sea inland anyway. The idea of a sniper and bombardment gunship are great, but they could use some buffs to damage / reload / range / any combination thereof.

On a positive note, seaplanes submerging for safety while retreating to an air pad is a great move. Thumbs up to the programmer.

[long stump]

Arm seaplane gunships are amazing, arguably the best gunship in the game, and the highest single target DPS/metal of all of them

Seaplane are t1.5, not t2, and have the stats and cost to reflect that.

Cutlass does suck big time, but the arm one is excellent

[half pollen]

I have been sniffed out as a Cortex main.

Yeah, Cutlass isn't good for siege (a shame!) because it's outranged by every anti-air, and isn't good against units because of its inaccuracy and taking ages to reload.

[long stump]

Air is too mobile for them to be viable as siege units. If you give them competitive range then they would be insane

Air support is op af irl cause of range + Mobility. Op af isn't a thing we really want in our games ^^

[dawn narwhal]

seaplane gunships are fine when rushed early / communism
they are sort of tanky so if you have them near skaters or bot aa you can get good trades, and air players struggle to respond to mutiple hit and runs at the same time

[queen flint]

Ye seaplanes very good. I have yet to see anyone try it as a strat on hellas basin (-arm seaplanes > cor. seaplanes)

[cerulean zinc]

Gunship yeah but dam buster very good though

[queen flint]

Idk why ppl think dam buster is good- deals very little dmg- hailstrom is a good bomber

The seaplane figs are good too : )

Im thinking of trying for seaplanes as the geo spot on hellas- sounds fun

[half pollen]

Dam buster bonks large, slow, single targets good.

[cerulean zinc]

Seaplane figs wreck t1 but kinda suck against t2 air. As for dam busters I like setting up a seaplane bombing run with some seaplane fig support before enemy air is t2. They're both more of a 1.5 unit so obviously not as good as full on t2 hailstorm.

[queen flint]

I mean I can imagine dam buster having uses but like the gunship has perfect accuracy- can snipe single targets quite nicely. I think my dislike comes from having tried the dam buster on a geo- where did u use ur dam busters?

[dawn narwhal]

dam buster is very good dmg on 1 target, good for killing labs, but it's a glass cannon
sabre and torp launcher is better for arm

[long stump]

dam buster is great for single target, really good at it, it lacks on ability to hit widespread eco like a wind farm that other bombers can clear easily

[cerulean zinc]

Yeah usually sniping labs on something like tropical assault is my main use for them. Can sometimes get coms too or if there's greedy fusions. (one of the few maps I regularly get the opportunity to go seaplanes at the ideal timing before t2 air shuts them down)

They're not terrible for wind farm/nano killing either but t1 core bombers are good enough at that already so I don't consider that a real use case.

[vagrant zephyr]

hfhf

[inland garnet]

feed back on the current version enjoyed most of it do not enjoy the t1 figs being able to hit ground kinda negates the point in having gunships at t1 apart form that it was fun

[spring pine]

I like it a lot, it gives me some impact and presence on the map. Gunships are just much better at ground attack so it feels good to pick arm air. I'd like to see the speed of air increased, it feels sluggish compared to old. I also feel flak has been Uber nerfed, failing to kill t1 bombers. I tried using hornets but their dps is painfully slow.

[dawn narwhal]

Atg figs invalidated shruiken, gunships, hovers, light amphibs
Utterly broken even if just for free leak defense. To use them offensively well needs actual scout control, but they just tank llts like nothing and can overwhelm nettles with a mass

[spring pine]

They really aren't that strong, even if I have a ball of 10+ they can't snipe much

[dawn narwhal]

Seekers good because they fast even with shit dps. Planes ignore terrain, require a special type of defense structure, faster, a lot more range, provide air control, don't leave wrecks, etc etc

Gunships are proportionately more powerful the larger the map is and spread the mexes are... so you might not notice much on a compact land only map

[cerulean zinc]

Personally I sorta like the fig ground interaction, it's definitely not nearly as busted as the first go around. Bombers have kinda insane HP which makes sense given their slow speed but it still feels like the higher tier static AA should perform a bit better (also not a fan of screamer changes.)

From the couple games I got to air it was quite fun trying to sneak in and snipe mexes and such, much less boring early game as the air player. A few shuris mixed in with figs was pretty nice for stunning aa and cleaning up. I still think it would be more balanced if the nettle/thistle could hit ground for a small amount of damage closer to OTA so that you can build them for scout defense early on instead and hopefully have a least a little aa without dedicating metal into structures very early on that only help against air.

With figs it does devolve into toggling hold fire on/off based on whether you are sniping mexes or fighting air which I'm unsure on if I like or not. I didn't get to experience t2 air really so don't have any opinions on how it controls atm.

[cold stirrup]

Also posting this here:

Volshok VOD: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2137208803
LDM VOD: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2137207103

• 8V8 Failed Neg: https://bar-rts.com/replays/c87c36665aca9c49d5a868dac0aa09bb
• 8v8 Hellas Basin:https://bar-rts.com/replays/928636660be9f9d3e7ca64dac747654d
• 7v7 Acid Quarry: https://bar-rts.com/replays/a0903666b11582e8fcb827886b57708f
• 5v5 Altered Divide : https://bar-rts.com/replays/fa7336667cc3b863856f833e9fdff882
• 5v5 Folsom : https://bar-rts.com/replays/25a03666e92910beae65e2ddacc9c96f
• 5v5 Pawn Retreat: https://bar-rts.com/replays/48a436661eb2b771a05361e135532d57
• 4v4 Canis: https://bar-rts.com/replays/36983666d50ae4293aab326b1d8ea860
• 4v4 Feast of Hades: https://bar-rts.com/replays/9a923666b45f4d3e1e4b272c4d482a6f
• 4v4 Center Rock: https://bar-rts.com/replays/62aa366607cc676909ae5ab2a837a957
• 4v4 Theta : https://bar-rts.com/replays/616b3666f191437ffd19dffb8b27b484
• 4v4 Theta: https://bar-rts.com/replays/7f8d366603d660a3da9ebe17eb5e36b9

Center Rock is the best game where there is a lot of air play and discussion. 8v8's were hard to get going, people tilted in these lobbies. Biggest point of contention was the T1 fig hitting ground.

In discussions, most people liked the direction of the rework, with increased micro and lower TTK, but thought some numbers need tweaking. Some timestamps you might want to find in the replays:

• LDM commenting on the air micro being better: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2137208803?t=00h17m38s
• Sabres (24:44 on Altored Divide): https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2137208803?t=01h12m18s
• Massive T1 Air Fleet vs Herrings + Nettles: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2137208803?t=01h34m32s
• Bat killing Units: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2137208803?t=01h39m14s
• T1 Bombers tanking AA to kill geo https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2137208803?t=01h42m34s
• Monsoon speed maybe a little slow vs AA (They attack the lane after): https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2137208803?t=01h44m53s
• Austin Mass T1 Fig into a base(metal prob spend better elsewhere): https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2137208803?t=01h49m31s
• Good T1 Bombing run (FPS view breaks my camera so need to find in replay): https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2137208803?t=03h08m28s
• Bombers feel really tanky: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2137208803?t=03h35m54s
• Flak vs T1 Bombers: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2137208803?t=03h39m50s
• T2 AA Bots (and some T2 Figs) Shred a dragon: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2137208803?t=03h48m35s
• Wasps felt somewhat underwhelming: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2137208803?t=03h15m04s
• Sumo vs Wasp: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2137208803?t=03h16m51s
• T1 Fighter Mex Raiding: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2137208803?t=04h24m59s
• Gunships vs Manticores: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2137208803?t=04h59m34s

[dawn narwhal]

I want a fast gunships that strafes like the rework fig

[tough mauve]

https://www.beyondallreason.info/replays?gameId=9a923666b45f4d3e1e4b272c4d482a6f

I think this is the game that struck me the most watching the air rework gameplay. In this one yellow does a bombing run on Randy who seemingly had enough AA that although he was getting bombed, I figured his ground AA would clean up the bombers. The bombers fly over Randy’s base and proceed to bomb every other base as well. Seems like they tank a little too much damage currently.

[sour gate]

is this current?

[burnt kraken]

yes

new version probably coming soon

[sour gate]

Is figs shooting/interacting with ground something you are completely set on? and if yes why?

sorry if you have answered that already just curious as personally dont think I will ever like that part of the rework. Ive not watched/played much of the rework myself but so far it does look alot better esp the fig micro

[spring pine]

Is it possible to force aircraft to dump their speed in order to make sharp turns? If that were able to be implemented, I think this rework could retain some of the speed of original air.

[burnt kraken]

It's not set, most likely there will be a version with aa-only fighters. Undecided if that will be next version or later, but will be good to be able to compare the different options, then pick whatever seems best.

[sour gate]

Nice to hear you are open to changing that if community consensus after a bit more testing is that its unhealthy for the game 👍 thanks for reply

[burnt kraken]

It's totally possible, you can have fast moving aircraft with fast turning/acceleration. Just like you can have slow aircraft that are slow to turn. It's also possible to make them more nimble at their current rework speeds.

Slower max speed just gives ppl more time to react and micro, but quite possible the ideal speed would be somewhere between current rework and vanilla values. Or differentiating more between different units, by making this plane faster and another slower (between factions or otherwise), is also something to consider.

[spring pine]

I mean that every aircraft could have a faster top speed, maybe same or increased acceleration, and be forced to decrease speed in order to make sharp (micro) turns. That way we get faster aircraft (a complaint I've heard and share) and still get the ability to get nice air micro battle rather than fight commanding swarms into each other.

Faction differences would be a delicate balancing act between cost and effectiveness, or it will turn into grunts vs pawns in current balancing, where pawns may be stronger, but are not cost effective enough to deal with grunts.

I'd also like to vouch for t1 fighters attacking ground, it makes air a lot more active for me and gives me impact early game beyond shuriken. It really is in a nice place where it's at now, they don't do too much damage, even massed but are enough to finish high value targets. As someone who plays a lot of air and has gotten very tired of it these days, it is a big appeal for me to want the air role in team games.

One suggestion I'd like to make on t1 fighters is to reduce their fire arc slightly so they need to be mostly flying in the direction of their target, I think that will impact dogfighting micro and strafing ground targets to be a bit more thoughtful.

Another suggestion to consider is for t2 fighters to additionally gain a close range, narrow arc, rapid fire (maybe burst?) for dog fighting. I found that keeping both a t1 and t2 lab running in the current air rework felt effective for having cannon fodder that dog fights, and long range a2a missiles from t2 figs.
It would simplify t2 air roster, and imo make combat a bit more interesting in that you can fire long range a2a and skirmish, or go all in for a risky dogfight, adding to the diversity of play and bringing it closer to current air, as I didn't find myself desiring to ever building any special t2 a2a units.

[burnt kraken]

acceleration is closely related to how sharply you can make a turn, I doubt if it's possible to get a system where you can do nice n sharp turns, while not being able to reach top speed fast also

[bitter temple]

I'd hazard engine could do it, would involve deceleration proportional to the angle of turn required
basically, handbrake turns in the sky. it'd also incentivise preplanning routes rather than panic U-turn micro (although one could argue a full 180 can/should be Immelmann'd)

[burnt kraken]

you can have big deceleration, high maxrudder, and slow acceleration, it just feels like crap to me

I didn't word that quite properly, too much weight put on what "nice" would mean.

[royal quest]

I liked the air rework when I last played it. (Dec 2023?) I also liked fighters shooting ground. I think fighter damage can be toned down, but the idea of someone losing control of the "air lane" early in the game and that it doesn't result in damage against the other team is kinda silly.

Maybe fighters should do less damage vs units, but the current damage vs mexes/buildings?

I think there is some in built resistance to the idea due to how people play bar. A lot of people want to treat 8v8s as 8 different 1v1s, and this air rework breaks that and forces more team play.

[eager bison]

I also enjoyed it. The point that most people said when playing is that air is slow now. It's that mandatory to have the rework with the reduce speed?

[hybrid geode]

why have people all of a sudden played a few games of Air Rework again ? devs asked them to so you could produce a new air rework version ?

[spring pine]

I really felt like the only damage I could do is units were light infantry and scouts. Most of my kills were zooming in and focusing on enemies with less than 30% HP and that was with a moddest swarm of fighters.

Otherwise it really felt like I was just plinking away at whatever they shot at.

[spring pine]

Yes, it is time to return the pain. Id happily take some air to ground bombs on fighters, or cannons for strafing but I think people would react even more negatively

Maybe a cannon with narrow fire arc is what they need but I enjoy the skirmish of the missiles

Also fighters are much more fragile than whistle, have to be constantly moving, and cannot be easily repaired by nearby com as whistlers. Just because their weapon is somewhat similar doesn't mean it is the same

[hybrid geode]

I watched the Baron stream of an air rework map, it feels like people don't think it's OP any more to have fighters sniping mexes, since one AA unit will take care of a good chunk of fighters. You just have to adapt your playstyle. They also liked the slower tankier bombers, but felt like dragons were too much. They (well, Baron) thought hornets were now even more useless since they're mega slow.

And like me, they really hate the new Screamers with slow reload instead of missile stock. One guy built 3 screamers, and they were useless against a bombing run coz of the slow firing rate.

[burnt kraken]

With Hornet speed, might be because nobody knows their stats to start with. 15% speed reduction I wouldn't describe as mega slow - how strong is it no exactly, probably better than in vanilla, but could be still be p bad since it never was a strong unit.

Screamers aren't supposed to be a defense against bombing run, more about area control - build it near front and it stops enemy air from going back n forth in its area

[spring pine]

I tried to use a hornet as base defense in the air rework event and the long reload made it feel quite useless

[burnt kraken]

in base defense, high range and high speed are really useful, compared to just normal t2 gunships

its not a popular unit either w new or old stats, could try yet another version for it if it'd click

[spring pine]

It's pretty strong in vanilla I just think they are under utilized because of their cost. They are very good at killing t3

[burnt kraken]

their dps is close to what it was before, just longer reload and more damage per missile

it's tricky to evaluate things when there is one change that's obvious visually, but also a part that's "just" a number

[royal quest]

Can't you just add more buffs to t1 aa bots to resolve this? It would make t1 fighters doing chip damage on your army more of an issue having a mono-spam comp.

In particular, buffing t1 aa bots to have a faster move speed or wider range makes this more of a positioning/micro battle between air and ground. Reducing t1 aa bots' cost would also help. I also think reducing the ground attack arc of fighters so that it is harder to micro them would be useful as well.

[dawn narwhal]

If whistler Janus meta wasn't enough now we have flying whistler janus

[dawn narwhal]

Plp don't know how to utilize a fragile super fast whistler. Now you can do nasty 1-2 punch with ground and air units. Either force wipes both defence structures, forcing a player to rebuild both

If your team has air control you can just grab some coms and com bom their bases
Force their air player to build aa, bomb their team, greed to fusions and t2, then choose lane of choice

[dawn narwhal]

Air also has op transport and best scouting in the game, now they get the best light harrass in the game. Why ever make seeker or pincer when you can make a unit that has 10x the utility. (Besides tightly clustered maps)

Low-mid os doesn't matter but when enemy air player knows how to use figs and your lane opponent isn't a potato and can punish you for losing your mex / con, gl.

There's lots of plp who can utilize land harrass well, good build, sending them to the right place immediately, not losing them unnecessarily. But basically no one is doing that with gunships or rework fighters. That's why they look harmless.

[royal quest]

All flying units are a lot slower in the air rework. This nerfs transports and com bombs.

Saying that fighters are the best light harassers in the game doesn't seem to match up with the damage done in the playtest. I think we are theory-crafting hard and testing things out with very few games. That is a recipe for making poor predictions of what the meta will be.

I think a radical proposal for the air rework (or any big rework) is to have an air rework testing weekend, were whatever rework we want to test is enabled as default for that weekend of play testing. Bar does not have a large enough community for a play test server, and any radical change requires ppl to play enough games to find some sort of meta for the change.

One should add social elements to encurage people to play, such as metals/hats for the top 10 players over that weekend.

Another option is to have a tournament with a balance rework to get more valid feedback.

[spring pine]

A small team air rework tournament actually sounds like a lot of fun

[hybrid geode]

they should have a lightning canon like thor, pop up turrets or welders. 100% accuracy and good against spam

[hybrid geode]

then what's the plan @bitter temple ? coz atm I just feel like the hornet plane is in an even worse spot than the dragon used to be. No one builds it, no one cares for it.

[mint zephyr]

The hornet is buffed in Hornets balance patch that makes it cheaper. Seems like a good start. But the air rework is different and still makes no sense

[hybrid geode]

I think its function should be clarified. At the moment people don't know how to use it. I prefer it as a defensive unit, but devs seem to think it's supposed to be a sniping unit, like a couple of them to snipe a com or an AFUS. But then that's reduntant with the Liche...

[burnt kraken]

New version coming soon

T1 fighters +10% speed, +20% cost
T2 fighters +10% speed, +20% cost
Highwind 2.7s->6s reloadtime
Nighthawk 1.15s->2s reloadtime, 1050->850 range
Heavy fighters +10% speed.

Scout planes +10% speed
Finch, Blink +20% sight

T1 transports +7% hp

Bombers +10% speed, +20% cost

Gunships +13% speed, -13% hp (excluding Dragon, Shuriken). Wasp, Roughneck +20% weapon damage
Hornet restored to vanilla stats, but with faster turning, more range (550), and more AoE (64)
Banshee got 24 AoE, to help it hit tiny moving targets like ticks

Ferret / SAM -30% e/m cost
Flak turrets -10% e/m cost

These changes are ON TOP of the changes in the OP, character limit there stops me from properly updating that. So you need to look at the OP's values and multiply by values here to get current stats. Fully up-to-date changelog in 1 spot coming soon, sorry for the hassle

[hybrid geode]

interesting. And Screamers back to vanilla ?

[daring crescent]

Highwind 2.7s->6s reloadtime
Nighthawk 1.15s->2s reloadtime, 1050->850 range

Is that supposed to be 6s ?
At 6 seconds surly enemy bombers will just fly through and then past them in that window. If their burst dmg goes up to compensate they just overkill massively ?
I'd always thought the fighters should fire rapidly to prevent overkill and simulate the ww2 fighter machine gun 'dogfighter' we think air combat should be

if someone wants to make a new combined arms static defence.

take the annilhator (extra unit pack) weapon and put it on a ground turret.
nice anti spam weapon, pretty good AA option

[spring pine]

Also wondering how the high wind vs nighthawk matchup will play out. Did high wind have even more range than 1050? If not surely nighthawk will dominate.

[burnt kraken]

yes, highwind has higher range than that by a good margin

for killing a bomber raid en masse, nighthawk is surely better, but the range can let you snipe at other fighters and aircraft near frontline more. Highwind's weapon also does more damage though, so it's not a 3:1 dps difference still. And the heavy fighters can be used for defense too, though they're harder to have in the right position.

previously they were both extremely strong, kinda invalidating the heavy fighters and to some extent also air attacks.

how well it all works out in the balance between the different kinds of fighters, can't expect it to be finely balanced yet, but most important is to see how fun/interesting the different interactions between fighter types are, numbers can and will be adjusted.

[spring pine]

I am eager to try it but I have hesitation on doing both a cost increase on air and cost reduction on AA

[dawn narwhal]

The thing about abusing rework fighters is that you need an air player plus other laners who will punish for overinvest into aa or airlabs or taking harrass dmg

Since air alone can be dealt with by playing aa porc and slow or fig spamm
Ground harraas has increased value for killing aa towers

[daring crescent]

It's of course worth testing.

With high OS micro being OP;
I'm predicting Nighthawk t2 en-masse for the general public usage. We just build a blob and fight command it into the enemy. I'm still worried about higher reload times leading to overkill or lack of opportunity.

[mint zephyr]

You can micro with the current air. It's fine. People just don't micro. Also I'd suggest making something else the balance difference between arm and core. Reload speed just makes one useless.(arm currently)

[placid lodge]

@burnt kraken you still reviewing feedback and making changes for this?
just talking about whether some more test games should be scheduled since your update before going to public test

[burnt kraken]

yeah the current patch is good for testing

[burnt kraken]

@sick locust can you pin the quoted post? No more room to edit in stuff to the old pinned messages

[sick locust]

Anyone with @Moderators can do so 😉

[shadow matrix]

What are the goals of the air reworks? Especially as related to these most recent changes. (I'm looking for answers such as "more / less of building fighters blobs", "more / less frequent air engagements", "more / less air micro", "more / less ability of aircraft to fight in enemy territory", etc.)

[dawn narwhal]

yes, it would help to make a blurb beside each unit, what is it supposed to be able to do now.

[dawn narwhal]

-rework fig: better moving shot, accurate at hitting spam, decent burst (64 damage), more range, faster
-can't be cleared for free by enemy figs, kills enemy air offensively and defensively.
even purely from a atg perspective the rework fighter being a discrete homing shot is a favourable property

[vagrant zephyr]

in 8v8s i played a game as a techer that transitioned to t2 arm air.
3.1k metal for a liche is insanity lmao.
Even then, it was certainly not worth to have 2 air players, even with t1 figs sieging ground.

[dawn narwhal]

2 air players big commitment yeah
better to boost them since the 2nd air lab is expensive

even tho i think t1 figs are op, carrying in 8v8 favours huge actions/economy. the impact of t1 figs can be reduced a lot if whistlers are common, or the weaker enemy air player just spams figs (you don't want to just trade into them since you are trying to have more impact)

regardless of the power level i guess it's good to teach/encourage players to learn how to
a) bring scouts with aircraft and not feed them into aa
b) understand which positions and timings are weak to atg harrass
c) Search for areas lacking aa
d) use ground aa to support air player

[stray lotus]

@lament plaza I love running the mid channel on erebos with bombers snaking through. I haven't tested if they don't show up on radar but it seems to catch people by surprise

[stray lotus]

@lament plaza

[wheat crypt]

Kinda random thought, but what if t1 air couldn’t cross certain heights of terrain, or could only do so super super slowly? It could climb/glide down from a higher height but it couldn’t come back up?

[dawn narwhal]

ill just do my super greed eco build from my high ground base thank you very much

[daring crescent]

it does already doesn'it ? watch the fighters ora transport go up the hill on Ascendacy or hit cliffs from sea level on other maps.

i kind of want air to be the opposite to this. Zoom around and it happens at altitude 1000+ high above everything with bombers and scout planes way up there.
To my mind bombers either have a 2nd precision bombing or it introduces a role for ground hugging radar avoiding bombers.

with fighters having to climb to engage bombers or drop to engage transports/gunships

[hard sage]

just played a game where this air rework was ON and was ranked game, gues what? T1 fighters killed every single one, even ppl that made AA in their base, they killed ground AA
after they see that the ball of T1 fighter was killing ppl nonstop they started sending the air metal
now i need check if every match have this cursed rework

[hazy sparrow]

Yeah this was an issue that was mentioned by me and a few other high level air players that T1 fighters are much better than bombers in this rework since they have the speed and spammable of them.

[dawn narwhal]

they are better than gunships, better than shruiken 😉
i mean there are plus sides in having these figs to help teach players to look for air holes, use fast gunships, and more consciously use mobile aa
large spread out maps will become degenerate tho

and like the shruiken the fig cleans up any leak for free

[visual dirge]

Curious, was there ever a balancing attempt made that included air to air aoe attacks, in order to promote more micro? Other than the Legion stuff.

[cold stirrup]

Yes, this air rework included a heavy fighter, that was kind of like a banisher for AtA

[vagrant zephyr]

heavy fighter was very 'meh'
every time i built a heavy fighter i regreted it because it could have been 4 regular fighters

[mint zephyr]

ya the it never traded in any way that made sense. not that i disagree with the premise/intent of the unit

[sand pilot]

Hmm, that is an interesting point, I wonder if T1 fighters should be given an even worse damage type vs buildings (maybe even no building damage and only able to damage units)

Losing a bunch of mexes on, say, glitters because of a few expendable fighters slipping past the frontline's lack of AA (or even through a hole in the frontline AA if everyone builds it but a ground player pushes through it) would probably feel pretty bad

As far as fighter balance, I feel like highwind vs nighthawk might be worth giving one unit that fits each archetype into both factions instead of one faction's T2 fighters consistently getting stomped by opposing T2 fighters due to their really long reload in exchange for having a better matchup vs bombers

I feel like as far as fighters go, there's ideally the following archetypes:
*Early-game fighter that can also harass ground units, but not structures (since you should need bombers/gunships), aka the current T1 fighters
*Generalist T2 fighter that has a good matchup against enemy fighters and a decent matchup against other air, aka the Nighthawk
*A specialized "interceptor" that has high damage, better range, and better speed, but significantly lower fire rate and less health, making it better at chipping away at air walls and at bursting down bombers, but at the cost of trading poorly if enemy fighters get on top of it, aka the current Highwind
*A heavy fighter/"escort" that is durable and can blast down groups of aircraft with AoE damage, but is slower to reposition against a bomber wave and can potentially be skirmished down by interceptors, aka what I think the seaplane fighters are aiming for

In a vacuum, Fighters would beat Interceptors by diving on top of them, Interceptors would beat Escorts by outranging and bursting them with high damage, and Escorts would be able to withstand the attacks of Fighters and blast them apart with their AoE attack

Throwing in bombers and AA adds a bit more nuance to it:
*Interceptors would potentially have a better matchup against bombers and would be able to get more done around ground AA, but if a player commits too hard to building them then the opponent could run over their air wall with Fighters
*Escorts can still be effective against bombers, but they'd have to be in the right position before the bombers arrive, resulting in mindgames and scouting battles if the Escort's matchup against Fighters makes them worth building
*As the name implies, Escorts are also effective at moving with a bomber wall to bulk it up and protect it against Fighters, but an Interceptor ball could quickly tear apart the high healthpools
*Fighters are still fairly versatile, if they're micro'd properly and given time to spread out their matchup against Escorts isn't that bad and they can also tear apart Interceptors if the opponent lacks the AA to protect their side of the sky
*Out of the three types, Fighters could be the only type actually given stealth, making Fighters harder to track and more able to ambush enemy air
*T1 Support Fighters might even see some play in the late-game, both as cheaper spam against Interceptors and as units that are still half-decent in an air-to-air exchange while also being able to do hit-and-run harassment against unprotected ground units to drive back pushes and force the enemy to spread out more light AA turrets

Though the problem of course is that introducing a new unit type for each faction (to give Arm a Fighter and Cor an Interceptor) would require modelling work (though it could potentially be prototyped by just giving both factions access to the Highwind and Nighthawk temporarily and figuring out the faction balance later)

Fighters seem like they should be about the same stats between teh two factions, but I could see giving the Arm interceptor more speed and the Cor interceptor more damage (making the Arm one more like a hit-and-run skirmisher and the Cor one more like an air sniper with better breakpoints for killing bombers), and the heavy fighters/escorts already seem to have good variance

Any thoughts on this big rambling wall of text?

[bitter temple]

asym fig fights are very odd things to balance, especially if one side needs more numbers to square up

the archetypes aren't too wrong, I did that mostly with legion air. an air rework branch I have also has a really good AoE unit, but that's sort of pending a lot more time on my part to get that anywhere

[sand pilot]

I think my concept is mainly just taking the highwind and nightwing and giving them to both factions instead of having to choose between one or the other at the start of the game

Ideally things outside of the fighters themselves decide which type you want (like interceptors to add poke against an enemy air wall, or escorts to protect a bomber push, and fighters being a good default option

[burnt kraken]

New version incoming.

Changes:
T1 fighter
AA only, 460 HP, reloadtime 1.3s

T2 fighter
Reduced ranges and reloadtimes, fast turning missile allows them to shoot backwards

Heavy fighter
Increased HP, AoE

T2 strategic bombers
M cost increased

T2/seaplane bombers
Stealth added

Unit maneuvering tweaks, more inertia for many units
Fixed-wing aircraft flight altitudes increased - less likely to get hit by non-aa weapons
Air-LoS of all units is 130% of their normal LoS (Was 150% for most). Makes spotting a factor in air battles, and buffs stealth planes.

complete, up to date, changelog visible here https://gist.github.com/Mitvit/52c4f9b310b849e7b5f01f983eb40bfb

[visual dirge]

I think I'm liking the new direction

A lot of buffs and nerfs make sense, to make air more interactive

[visual dirge]

Anyone tried it yet?

[sand pilot]

I still think that T1 fighters should be able to attack ground, but only units (i.e. they get a damage type with -100% vs buildings)

And that highwind-style fighters and nighthawk-style fighters should be available to both factions instead of the current split between factions, since with those two types and the seaplane fighters we'd have a bit more diversity in fighter walls

Since right now at the end of the day fighter battles come down to "have more figs than the other guy", and letting fighters shoot behind themselves if anything contributes to that

[cerulean zinc]

I feel like that breaks the wysiwyg a bit too much to fit with the BAR ethos imo. (the 100% reduction to building damage)

[sand pilot]

Hmmm, fair

[gilded owl]

that wouldnt pass ever

[shy dew]

Has t1 figs vs bombers speeds been adressed yet?

Last time i had a game like this, it was impossible to counter 2 bombers with a few figs simply due to travel speed. Couldnt even chase them as they retreated

Also, t1 figs should be capable of ground attack, but make that specific shot limited ammo.

Like, idk, 5 shots with slightly higher damage before needing to return to a airpad to re-arm. Would finally add purpose to airpads

[dawn narwhal]

screamer still useless?
why would u make a 1.4k static that only shoots every 25 seconds when it feels like

[visual dirge]

Yeah, most people that saw the rework said that that change was weird. What's mitvit's Discord ID?

[burnt kraken]

I'm not sure what you mean. T1 fighters are a bit faster than t1 bombers, as they are in vanilla. Figs have more a2a damage in this version without the ground attack, which changes that interaction.

[shy dew]

last time i played they couldnt catch up to bombers lol

[burnt kraken]

Was it a faster bomber like a stiletto then, maybe? Or just not able to catch up fast enough

[shy dew]

nope, t1 bomber vs t1 figs

[burnt kraken]

Its stats could be changed / buffed, but I don't think it's good design to have the turret with the longest range also have such high DPS (when loaded). Makes turret placement less meaningful, if the anti-bomber turret can easily cover so much area.

A longrange turret makes more sense being mostly good at area denial, not at dealing huge dps.

Do you think the whole concept of normal reload vs stockpile is bad, or just that it's badly balanced in rework rn?

[daring crescent]

The stockpile mechanic gives it front load DPS.
it has the longest range so you can draw those shots out with a wave of cheap scouts or t1.

however; we have flak for area denial and maybe the t1 expensive bomb resistant AA as the best single target dps
(that's swapped for legion as the legion t1 is flak and the t2 is awesome single target 1000 dps)

The stockpile gives it 5 shots of amazing DPS still with a 1.8 reload time. then it's 15 sec reload time on the stockpile.

each stockpiled shot does 750 dps.

[burnt kraken]

they have a 10% speed difference between t1 fig and armada t1 bomber in rework, 13% difference in vanilla (and cortex bomber is slightly slower). But the bit smaller range in rework makes it a bit harder to catch up also.

But while they need more time to get in position to fire at bombers, bombers also take more time to reach their target with the speed nerf. Still, it's possible fighers are now weaker than they should be, with the increased bomber HP etc, but bombers can't just outrun them either.

[daring crescent]

The stockpile mechanic gives it front load DPS.
it has the longest range so you can draw those shots out with a wave of cheap scouts or t1.

however; we have flak for area denial and maybe the t1 expensive bomb resistant AA as the best single target dps
(that's swapped for legion as the legion t1 is flak and the t2 is awesome single target 1000 dps)

The stockpile gives it 5 shots of amazing DPS still with a 1.8 reload time. then it's 15 sec reload time on the stockpile.

each stockpiled shot does 750 damage.

with air rework its 25 sec reload time. 1500 burst and 60 dps

at 1600 metal i cant see a scenario where its best to build the screamer.
25 sec reload time - it gets literally one shot at the very first thing that comes into range and will not reload in time

[burnt kraken]

Yes, it's frontloaded and that's perfect for defending vs a single bombing raid. You can draw out those shots with scouts first, but good players can have them on hold fire and only start firing at correct timing. Which is a skill, but question is, is that an interesting interaction?

[daring crescent]

not sure if that stockpile is free. going to go see if it drains resources to build them now

[burnt kraken]

With long reload time, it still can kill a decently high value target like a radar plane in 1 shot. It won't help much vs a big bombing run, but discourages enemy air units from maneuvering in that area

[daring crescent]

we need it to counter things like flying black hydra or dragons
if there isn't sensible targetting priority ..

dragons have got 16k health. that might change in the rework
it requites 11 shots from a screamer to kill it.

thats 3 screamers with a stockpile
that's no screamrs every with 25sec reload

and they're using energy for the stockpiling by the locks of it

[burnt kraken]

its value depends a lot on what form air battles will end up being like, whether it's more about these big single runs where ppl launch in a massive wave of fighters + bombers, or more often about air units maneuvering back n forth targeting units at front

If it did way more damage per shot, would you still think normal reload would be a bad idea?

[visual dirge]

Then it'd be different. I think this was a straight up nerf to the thing

Rn it's 1600 metal to kill a fighter and then u die...

[burnt kraken]

It's often hard to see if people are disagreeing with a unit design, or just the units balancing

[dawn narwhal]

Balancing. But say the enemy stays outside it's range. If it were 10 sec it would be really strong area denial but still underwhelming in a one bombing run

[visual dirge]

Unfortunately, most critical air fights happen over a few seconds. This encourages that even more, as it's an "area control" aa in the rework, instead of targeted burst

And with the recent HP buffs, it's needs multiple hits to kill higher value targets?

[daring crescent]

give 100 corvamp (13.5k metal of fighters)

1st test 5k metal into 3 screamers.
2nd test 5k metal in flak

fly over both.
19 made it past screamer. they fire 15 stockpiled rounds and didn't get a chance to reload.
44 made it past flak

trying it with air rework on ...
72 made it past flak
90 made it past the screamers.

from 19 to 90 getting past.
and if i sent 1 fighter in to draw out each reload .. 97 would have made it past

i know the above was no micro overly simple but the if the unit cost 500 metal instead of 1600 it might be more fairly costed
532 DPs on flak. 72 DPS on the screamer.

current screamer burst is 1500
they'd need 13k burst or a reload time of about 2.9 sec to hit the same 532 dps

[cold stirrup]

Not sure this was answered, but Mitvit is Johannes

[visual dirge]

Yep, thanks!

[gilded owl]

This is really just a case of you need to mix in turrets. Flak is much shorter range than screamers. I think people forget that range is its own tax that needs to occurred.

[visual dirge]

So the point of the screamer is just area control? Is that intended?

[gilded owl]

Yes that is the main point of the turret
Lraam turrets are good for being in the back and preemptively reducing an air attack from a long distance

[visual dirge]

Alright, so the main counterplay to offensive liche/bombers is your own air?

[gilded owl]

Yes
Another key advantage of screams is to whittle down fig walls from a safe distance

Also chainsaw and eradicated work against liche quite well

A key aspect of counter air play is always with layering of anti air units/buildings

[sour gate]

No idea how to balance a 800cost screamer which still has long range but making it cheaper would be a good change so you can more easily justify trying to use it as a front player to whittle fig walls etc

Right now while I'm aware of screamers use cases it's feel way too expensive to ever try and do in an actual game even when I have the BP/position ready

[fossil heart]

Ya i think it's fine and makes sense to refocus its role on area denial but should either be a little cheaper or a little longer range then, if the stockpile is removed imo

[sour gate]

maybe make the ammo more expensive so screamer is only costly when its doing it its job?

[visual dirge]

So how to encourage ppl to try this rework out? I have not seen it in a single lobby yet.

A lot folks still think it's the old rework that left them kind of sour.

[sour gate]

advertise that figs are purely aa again, thats what turnt most people off air rework

[gleaming fulcrum]

And the fact that it was very imbalanced.
And the fact that it still feels odd.
And the fact that just a few ppl really know the current state of changes.

It started in a bad state and ppl remember that.
It would need a lot of work to convince lobsters to try it again.

I, myself am done with this rework, for good.

It would have needed to be in a good enough state so that most lobbies play it so you get used to it. Like the EMP rework. Or the release candidates.

[visual dirge]

What are the strikes against it?

[burnt kraken]

It's a work in progress, of course it won't start out in a balanced and polished state - that's the end goal.

Trying to push it into random 8v8 lobbies probably isnt that useful. Test games with people who know a bit what theyre getting into, have read thru the changelog, maybe played around with it in singleplayer, are probably better at figuring out how it plays exactly, than making random people play it for the first time. Which has its place too, but more focused testing is generally more useful.

Whoever can organise test games of whatever size, it's appreciated. Just feedback from singleplayer testing can be useful too. It's a volunteer project so anyone can be a tester here, or suggest changes too.

In the new version, a big thing to get feedback on would be the t2 stealth fighters - with their new ability to shoot in all directions, does this make them more interesting since it gives them more distinction from t1 fighters, or rather boring since it makes approach angles less important?

[gleaming fulcrum]

Yeah...
What should I say.

Don't make it a mod then.
Honestly mods normally have a quality standard.
And a T2 fig that shoots in all directions is insanely experimental and game changing. So all this feels like a fan tweak with too little thought put into it.
Things like that just don't make sense to me and that's why I don't play this pre alpha idea bashing.

[gleaming fulcrum]

I mean just for this example:
How are target priorities managed? HP in air fights change fast.
How fast would the turret need to turn in a head on air fight? Fig are still fast.
How insane is the retreat damage bonus for defender? Having effectively double the flight time of projectiles for the attacker compared to the retreating defender is going to have an impact. Especially in air fights with comparable low health and DPS.

How will T1 fig do against "retreating" T2?

T2 Figs will now come behind T1 figs. Fly beside the and then fly away from them all while shooting. Without micro... All while taking no or way less damage and dishing out at least double the damage.

[visual dirge]

So u havent played it?

[gleaming fulcrum]

Of course I have played several interactions and lost faith in it. And even though I read through this threat carefully and looked at the change logs. It never felt right. In more than a dozend games. It has radical changes which fell rushed, without considering the impact the changes have. T1 figs shooting at ground... Without a good enough buff to ground units to counteract to this power buff to T1 air.

Might be that it is ok, now. But if someone wants play tester he should say so.

You know there are different ideas of air reworks. It just happens to be that this dev put his work out without talking with other devs or Raghna.

[visual dirge]

I'm asking if you played this new iteration. Obviously the one before didn't go well

[gleaming fulcrum]

I didn't play the new iteration.
What is your opinion on the new one?
Is it worth putting time into it?

Especially with the background that a significant percentage of the player base will not play as long as this mod is selected because of the state of the former iterations?

[dawn narwhal]

Johannes, is air rework just made by you or multiple people working on it?

[dawn narwhal]

i mean it's another data point. if nothing else it's another experiment to learn what could work

[burnt kraken]

mostly me making the details (main exception is Zecrus doing the heavy fighter models/scripting), but based on a lot of dev discussion/brainstorming which started months before the initial release

[dawn narwhal]

cool

[bitter temple]

I thought that was more general discussion of what 'an air rework might look like' rather than this one specifically
hence my talking about the stuff I was working on in it too

I still need to get my branch testable, but it needs refactoring into mod form and I just don't have time atm

[hybrid geode]

dunno if it's intended and if it's been talked before but now fighters can shoot at air labs coz they wanna shoot at the planes being built

they don't seem to do damage to the lab though, but they keep shooting at it when an air unit is being built

[daring crescent]

that's normal behaviour. you can target the unit being constructed in a lab.

its more obvious with something like a t3 gantry.

[hybrid geode]

it didnt happen before this air rework version though its new

[shell harness]

It's not normal. Air units under construction should count as landed and should not be targetable by fighters

[rare dagger]

landed aircraft is targetable by fighters

[gritty halo]

Do I just not know how to use discord or is it like impossible to know what this mod does with this 5 mile long scrollable thread? All I can tell is the planes move slow AF

[shell harness]

I see people complain about how with the reduced speed it's too easy to throw up static AA in response. Has increasing ground to air defense build time been considered?

[hybrid geode]

well planes are tankier too

[burnt kraken]

check the pinned messages, in the OP there's a link to the changelog

[gritty halo]

It must be something with Discord's side panel.. popout amazingness.. I didn't think anything was pinned. I see pinned messages now, thanks.

[odd valley]

Just checking if fighters cause much lag in late game? They certainly used to. If so, could there be a "halving" of fighters, make it so one fighter is just as effective as 2 used to be? They're always in a cloud anyway, so this wouldn't affect gameplay, but might save the game from much lag.

[distant topaz]

Yeah can still cause lag lategame

[cold stirrup]

Any mass command will lag, Like a massive area set target for example, or mass ordering spamming

[distant topaz]

Another part of the problem is there's no natural culling process for air forces, no skirmishes like ground armies have to thin the numbers. Just mass until action

Could maybe use something like a long range skirmishes aircraft. Bomber speed, extra long range to poke enemy aircraft, light damage. Kinda like the air equivalent of g2g whistler

[cold stirrup]

Screamers?

[distant topaz]

Yes those exist, but I mean an aircraft. Something to skirmish other air with, so air can skirmish and naturally cull the cloud below lag levels

Screamers and other ground AA working along with the skirmisher aircraft , like how whistlers + porc work, pushing territorial control

[fresh lintel]

Air units having more option to impact ground play without sacrificing whole advantage would remove this massing issue

And in turn it would remove somewhat the lag issue with aircraft. But air doesnt have porc or in other words porc for air is usually made and dependant on other players when they notice you are shit with air lol

[odd valley]

Could even make T2 fighters 4* as expensive and 4* as effective, to cut the number down by 4*. Only thing I can think of that might be different is long range AA, does that normally take out multiple fighters, or just one?

[distant topaz]

The super long range ground AA has pretty big AOE.

[fresh lintel]

screamer has aoe?

[distant topaz]

Does it not? I always see a bunch of aircraft die when one hits

[fresh lintel]

Honestly dunno, didnt think it does but maybe

[cerulean zinc]

You can't just multiply a units cost and stats and expect it to be balanced though. The air rework sort of does this with more expensive figs but it's part of a holistic rework so it makes sense.

[distant topaz]

true, exact numbers probably wouldn't be x4cost x4stats, but it's the general idea i find nice

i had a similar idea for t2 fighters. compared to other t2 they aren't scaled much above their lower tech counterparts. a t2 fighter is basically just x2 t1 fighter. meanwhile a tiger is more like x3 brutes, which are already like x2 incisors, which is like x3 grunts . . .

Could increase t2 fighter cost, increase its range enough to be able to skirmish t1 fighters, maybe a little bit of hp to be a bit more flak resistant. t2 fighters would have air domination, but t1 fighters better for fodder and rushdowns. (alternative to a new t1 skirmisher aircraft idea)