What we need are more test games. Not radical changes - not *yet* - but to firstly determine if there actually is a problem, what those problems are, and then come up with intelligent ways of addressing them whilst keeping the impact to the rest of the game at the bare minimum.
In terms of tech progression and overall land/sea/air balance, I believe that things are presently working more-or-less as intended. You *can* stop air with land or naval based defenses.
What the test game does show is that a well-coordinated team with a plan will smash a team without a plan. I believe that if the bottom team had gone full land, perhaps with SCUs (as they have phenomenal AA plus the ability to quickly throw down SAMs) they likely could have won. In the game, they more or less didn't know what to do once they lost air, while the top team was communicating with each other and coordinating their air attacks.
Therefore, we should first get some replays of evenly matched teams trying various tactics. Would an all-land push work? All-navy? Etc. TAGs seem to have come crawling out of the woodwork this week, so I'll try to organize some games with them to try this.
The one area that I believe may be slightly imbalanced is gunships vs navy. Hover flak obviously solves this problem, but UEF and Cybran are screwed. If this is indeed proven to be a legitimate concern, I believe that the simplest solution would be to move the Seraphim cruiser's flak weapon to the UEF and Cybran cruisers.
Now, what I believe the real issue of air is, that doesn't seem to be getting much attention, is that it's relatively
static. Basically, whenever I play air, I *never* initiate a fight. To do so would immediately put me at a disadvantage. Instead, I attempt to force the other player to fight on my terms, so that I control the point at which my air force engages theirs and therefore dramatically increases my odds of victory. Any other decent air player will do the same.
That means that in an evenly matched game, we have ASF stacking up in a cold war type scenario. Whomever loses that air fight will likely lose air, and be at a sufficient disadvantage that victory will be very difficult to impossible, simply by virtue of the fact that they lost several tens of thousands of mass.
Now, land doesn't seem to suffer from this issue because of the necessity of controlling the map, not only to control mass and reclaimables but to set up firebases and block off potential vectors of attack. Similarly, you want to push your navy as close to the enemy's base as possible to shell it from afar. But, since there is no "territory" to fight over in air, air moves extremely quickly, and air strikes are generally one-time-only frontloaded it-works-or-it-doesn't type deals, there is no point in keeping your air vulnerable until you need it.
Now, one other possibly legitimate concern raised is that strats are the ultimate game ender. This is true to some degree. 20 strats will generally be guaranteed to kill an ACU, or at least an SMD or two allowing for a nuke, assuming that you have the air superiority required to get those strats over your enemy's base.
I believe that this is likely to be balanced as-is, for two reasons:
1) It's very expensive - 20 strats cost as much as two land based experimentals, and if you're two exps behind your enemy you can't really expect to defend against them.
2) You can mitigate the effectiveness of air strikes through careful placement of SAMs. In most games, people tend to put their SAMs in the middle of their base, and their ACUs / SMDs / etc either in the center or at the edge of their base. If the SAMs are approximately 1.5x SAM-range-radius' in front of what they need to protect, it's likely that they'll have enough time to target and kill some of the strats before they drop their payload.
We need to test this! This should be our next highest priority to get replays of to determine if strats are too effective, or if players simply aren't fully utilizing the tools available to counter them.
Now, if this is proven to not be balanced, I would recommend very slight tweaks to two properties to make strat snipes easier to defend against:
- Decrease the range at which strats can drop their bombs.
- Decrease the HP of strats so that SAMs kill them faster.
As near as I can tell, this would have the absolute smallest amount of impact on the rest of the game whilst fixing the real problem.
Finally, assuming that we can conclusively prove that the status quo is indeed balanced in an evenly matched game (in the sense that air and its counters are functioning properly, and that the perceived strength of air is simply due to the fact that after losing the one major air fight you're at a massive mass disadvantage) and/or we've addressed any outstanding minor imbalances to the point where it can be considered as such, we should look at reducing the staticness of air. To that effect, I have two ideas of varying complexity:
Option 1: Encourage offensive plays.Until you have air superiority, it's generally a very bad idea to invest in offensive units such as strats or gunships. The reason is simple mathematics:
- Simplifying a bit for brevity, the ratio of ASF:strat can be safely assumed as being 5:1.
http://faforever.com/faf/unitsDB/unit.p ... 04,UEA0303- Player A starts with 10 ASF.
- Player B starts with 10 ASF.
- Player A continues making ASF. He now has 20.
- Player B makes two strats. He now has 10 ASF and two strats.
Player B has now lost air superiority, no matter what he does. He would have to cripple Player A's economy in order to ever catch up in air, and those two strats are almost assured to not be able to get through to kill anything worth their huge investment.
One possibility is to decrease both the effectiveness and the cost of strats, making them more disposable so that it's possible to cost-effectively attack with them, forcing more air fights and dynamic air combat. For example:
- HP: 4000 -> 1500
- Mass: 2100 -> 1200
- Energy: 105,000 -> 60,000
- Build time: 8400 -> 5,000
- Bomb damage: 3000 -> 2,000
Would this make strats too effective? Likely. But it would also force players to make more strats, and use those strats offensively, thus giving the defending player a chance to catch up by successfully defending against those now-paper strats with SAMs and small numbers of his own ASF.
It may, however, require increasing the air speed of all T3 air by 10-20% if T1/T2 interceptors are seen to be too cost-effective at defending against them, reducing the importance of ASF.
This is likely to be a half-fix - it might move the gameplay in the right direction, but air is still likely to be relatively static simply by virtue of the fact that playing riskily with such a huge investment is generally bad gameplay.
Option 2: Total Air Rebalance.The second, and far more complicated, idea is to completely remake air across all tech levels by adding several new classes of units. At a high level, that would involve:
- Long range gunships roughly equivalent to T3 mobile artillery, designed for slowly taking out SAMs and prevent turtling. Can also effectively attack ASF.
- Cheaper, faster and weaker bombers to encourage aggressive plays.
- Very fast, very weak Interceptors (no relation to the T1 unit of the same name) designed only for taking out offensive air units.
- Slower, expensive and heavily armored ASF that are more equivalent to flying tanks, designed to slowly secure air superiority.
- Gunships would remain fairly similar, designed to mop up areas after their defenses have been surgically removed.
Presently, the air tree looks something like this:
ASF >>> literally every other air unit
The rebalance would aim to change that to this:
Arty-Gunship > ASF > Int > Arty-Gunship + Bombers
Air combat would encourage early, quick attacks with bombers, being countered just as quickly with interceptors. ASF would then come out to slowly solidify areas of air control, and long range gunships would be used to try to snipe them from afar - causing yet more interceptor skirmishes to break out. All the while bombers and gunships can be sent out to try to effectively raid or simply to force more engagements to try to secure air control.
The biggest change would, of course, come at the T3 stage of the game. T1/T2 would likely remain very similar to their current form, as they're fairly well balanced already, with the possible exception of making T1 ints faster and T1 bombers cheaper+less effective so as to encourage more raiding with them.
In summary:
- We need MOAR DATA to work with!
- Then we can slowly change what's been proven to not work, in terms of T3 air currently being too strong/too weak/just right.
- Once the current gameplay is solidified, we can start working on improving it by trying to nudge gameplay in a more dynamic and action-packed direction, and away from "let's pile up ASF until we have one big fight that decides the game."
