Drones... droning on and on and on

[IceDreamer]

#1, if ASF can fly around your base unchallenged - Drones aren't what cost the loss.
#2, if you have a pile of drones and no Air force to challenge the opposing teams air - You need SAMS or t3MAA to protect your base and drones. If an opponent brings his ASF to your base riddled with SAMS & t3MAA, to target and kill Drones - Majority of his air should be lost.
#3, if structures and land units were immune to ASF fire, rather than the current implemented idea - Just might be the more practical approach. Is this not possible?

Drones are both a strength and a weakness; but where they stand now they are simply OP, and being abused.

#1 - Totally irrelevant. Clearly you were never the victim of it, but the gameplay situation was unacceptable and made drones completely unusable and a liability. You got drones in your base? Enemy suicides his ASF into you. In one pass, they drop every shield you have, kill half your power grid, most of your buildpower, some factories, the shield gens, and then the Strats have free reign, or whatever. The sheer unbridled DPS that ASFs have coupled with their frequent numbers led to this. It was unacceptable.

#3 Is possible, but was decided against because generally SupCom likes the fact that it has the simulated engine. Armour such as that is very rarely used. So it was decided that it's better to keep the simulated aspect of ASFs shredding your base if they are targeting, for example, landed Transports, Scouts, old Inties, or just other air units in general.

The gameplay with drones though, was different. They are present in large numbers, they can't escape because they hover so low that even when flying the ASF weapons are angled very much downwards. The worst bit is with 1 HP, only 1 shot is required, so it's the absolute worst-case-scenario for overkill, overtargeted shots smashing the base to bits.



So basically, you can't use ASFs to basecrack against anyone else's engineers, why make the UEF's totally unusable with this? Every other AA weapon in the game *should* down them in one shot. FighterBombers hit them fine. Inties hit them fine. And I think you'll be glad to know that in the past 5 minutes, I believe I have corrected the thing which meant AA couldn't hit them reliably. So now, they can't be used aggressively. Woohoo!

[IceDreamer]

Just tested. Inties are Disabled from targeting Drones, and WILL NOT fire.
Cybran ones anyways.

t1 static AA, hits it and kills it.
t1 mobile AA, hits it and kills it
Cybran stuff only is what I tested.

Regardless, the Interceptor CANNOT, and WILL not target, or kill a ACU drone.

Replay of said test

4080045-Com.fafreplay

Cybran Interceptors, if selected it shows you as you mouse over the drone that is is Not targetable. Just the same as trying to target a submerged sub with a t1 bomber - No can do.

Well I dunno what was causing that in the present live game, but it's fixed in develop. Just had a Cybran Intie target and kill it in one shot 10 times in a row from different angles.

[VoiceofReason]

#1, Who decided?
And, no - It's not totally irrelevant. I strongly disagree.

Situation is paramount and should be considered when making changes to the games base mechanics and balance.


Because someone who lost all resemblance of AIR, loses everything he has because a stockpile of drones... I guess he had no intel either to see the asf coming, maybe just return them to the Kennels when you know you've completely lost the game, I mean "air" game sorry.

[IceDreamer]

#1, Who decided?
And, no - It's not totally irrelevant. I strongly disagree.

Situation is paramount and should be considered when making changes to the games base mechanics and balance.


Because someone who lost all resemblance of AIR, loses everything he has because a stockpile of drones... I guess he had no intel either to see the asf coming, maybe just return them to the Kennels when you know you've completely lost the game, I mean "air" game sorry.

It is not possible to kill 250 ASFs outright before they reach your base and obliterate it if they beeline. The damage dealt to your base and buildpower, not to mention if followed up by stealth strats, or if they have arty, is GG. You can have 500 ASFs and full Air control, and that attack will still work against you.

[VoiceofReason]

I don't buy it, sorry.
If I have 500 asf, and my opponent only has 250 and sends them all in to my base. Unless I have 0 intel, 0 clue how to play, or 0 awareness - It wont happen.

[IceDreamer]

Oh come on man. You know how long it takes to physically kill that many ASFs. It's a good number of seconds, and we're not only talking about defending Setons rear spot here. Imagine it's the beach player. It's extremely common to see the two air forces jousting around beach and ocean in front of rock, mirroring each other. The clashes usually happen close to the defense side. At that point it's too late. I think it was Zock, Noms, and someone else who really began to bring this up 18 months ago as being a serious issue. It really was, it was horrible trying to use drones at all.

[Zock]

I didn't bring it up, but i approved the change when someone pointed out the issue. I wasn't (and am still not) happy with ASF not being able to target drones, but ASF accidentally killing your antinuke/anything important because a drone happened to assist it is worse. If ASF kill your shields, this can be discussed as intended downside of drones (even though they have enough downsides already), but losing buildings by random chance is not okay. Also Think about people who are not extremely familiar with the game and might not even know why something got destroyed despite no bombers being involved.

There were some other suggestions like making ASF shots unable to go through shields, but i/the balanceteam thought they would be worse than removing the targeting on drones. We can discuss about making land units immune instead, but it's cutting the simulation aspect of the game, and it has already been cut in favour of balance many times (not only by FAF, GPG did it too). When the simulation is causing balance/gameplay issues, removing it is always the easiest way, but at some point we might want to keep some minor gameplay issues in favour of not removing the simulation aspect further.

Maybe there are other ideas without this downsides?


Note that this is only for ASF, inties not being able to shoot drones is a newer issue and will be hopefully fixed in the upcoming patch.

[Softly]

Make structures immune to asf damage instead?

[Iszh]

Lol softly the problem i thought are not only the structures but the shields you can easily snipe a uef acu. fly with your asf over base with drones and all shields are down sent bombers behind. Naked acu says hello

[speed2]

Sparky:

• jamming
• radar
• can build defenses
• cant be killed by air
• gives mass/energy storage
• has gun
• many HP
• is cool

Drones:

• can be killed by air
• no jamming
• no radar
• no nothing
• no storage
• no gun
• almost no HP
• can't build anything
• are not cool at all

And now tell me why would you build drones when you have Sparky available?