does anyone care about air staging?

[lextoc]

Air Staging isn't practical to use. It's T2 to begin with, and in general I never bothered figuring out how it worked... Do the airplanes refill automatically? Do I've to give an order? No idea, and the lack of knowledge never really punished me, so that must mean it's not an important unit...

Making it T1 could be a good change!

[Zoram]

I used it a lot when playing campaign/ skirmish, on those drawn out battles where I wouldn't attack until I have a perfect base and the sky crowded with patrolling airplanes. Works great on patrolling planes.

It's a bit more difficult to think about it in the heat of a real human game. Grat unit still, maybe a bit clumsy to use. I think the "return to air stagging" button does work that well.

[Saxxon]

I use air staging all the time. Once my eco is robust I usually have 3-5 built.

What could be improved to make it more useful is having the aircraft use all available proportionately within the given group. Often I'll see all the ASF try to land on the closest platform while 4 more sit empty side by side next to it.

The second thing would be the timeliness of the repairs. The planes fly around and waste more time maneuvering on and off than get repaired, so the efficiency is fairly bad for large air groups even if you have a large number of repair pads.

A way to make it more efficient, but would likely involve more than a simple numbers tweak would be having the ability to land, take off and repair simultaneously. IE, while the last repaired was taking off, the next in line would already be landed waiting repair, so once the prior was done, the next would start as the repaired ship takes off, rather than have the repaired take off, next in line land, then repair. This would keep the repair facility cycling almost constantly till your air craft were repaired as they could land "on deck" so that when they were up they were already in position. So you would in reality have 3 air craft interacting simultaneously - landing, repairing or taking off one per action.

Not sure how well the model etc support that, but it would make it A) more efficient and B) more essential to use it because the player that did vs the one that didn't would reap a larger advantage.

[Lieutenant Lich]

[quote="Iszh"]Not to forget airstaging i use a template which includes the basic needs of t2 level. the first t2 engi is building this. I think meanwhile yes it would be nice if it is a t1 but that would make it to easy, better leave it as it is and use something like my template solution if you always forget it. One air staging is enough for t1 and t2 planes.

[attachment=0]Template t2 E.JPG[/attachment]

1. Air staging
2. tmd
3. t2 pgen
4. tmd
5. t2 pgen
6. shield
7. t2 aa gun
8. t2 aagun

Template is designed to fit a mex inside or a mass storage in between the t2 3x3 buildings from outside to add it next to mexes. When i am not air player i always use this. t2 survival template
I also had a template version which used 2 t1 pgens more and a radar in middle of the pgens but i always forgot to upgrade this radar so i removed it. Additional i calculated that it is not worth to built a t3 radar next to t2 pgens, better is to reclaim them later in game. So i prefered the simple version with better "space to built" options.[/quote]


How can you make such a template?

[d-_-b]

staging is kinda niche, it is useful for sure, but repairing asf one at a time when you have 100 of them, and only say 30 really need repairing, but agh... it just is more of a pain than it's worth...

also, if you are stalling, the plane will sit on the staging dock for ages or indefinitely, i have had a strat stuck on the staging for ages and the only way to get it off was for me to pause everything while it repaired... not fun. the eject/undock button didn't seem to work in that case.

[codepants]

Air Staging isn't practical to use. It's T2 to begin with, and in general I never bothered figuring out how it worked... Do the airplanes refill automatically? Do I've to give an order? No idea, and the lack of knowledge never really punished me, so that must mean it's not an important unit...

Making it T1 could be a good change!

False.

Let me tell you how it works.

Put your planes on patrol anywhere on the map. When they are low on health or fuel, they will automatically return to the nearest staging facility and fuel up and heal up. I don't know why everybody thinks you have to order all your planes to it. Just put them on patrol.

Basically, it lets you leave air units on patrol instead of paying attention to them, keeps them fueled and in good health, all for the low low price of... 0 APM. IMO one of the most valuable structures in the game.

T2 seems fair given the price and size. Your inties shouldn't be out of fuel in the t1 stage unless it runs for a very long time, and you probably won't have enough to have an effective patrol anyways. Maybe a t1 version would be fine if only inties could dock with it, and only 1 at a time.

[PhilipJFry]

Put your planes on patrol anywhere on the map.

This is pretty much where the problem starts (for late game air at least).
Putting your ASF on Patrol will result in half of your airforce chasing a single t3 spyplane and getting annihilated in the process.

[ZLO_RD]

used air staging facilities a bit recently, i find them worth to build sometimes.... but no very often often

most annoying thing that you may send part of planes to refuel and then you interrupt them before they even reach airstaging facilities

[codepants]

Put your planes on patrol anywhere on the map.

This is pretty much where the problem starts (for late game air at least).
Putting your ASF on Patrol will result in half of your airforce chasing a single t3 spyplane and getting annihilated in the process.

So... check on them once every 10-20 seconds?

Or, if you don't have enough planes to kill a spy plane before it breaks through, your ASF shouldn't be on patrol, or they should be on a smaller patrol.

Other uses: Healing strat bombers or gunships between raids. A full heal costs 3% the cost of the unit, so you effectively get free units. Kill stuff > health nears 0 > repair > repeat.

[Lieutenant Lich]

I think having air staging T1 and with more slots will make it widely used. Right now, I use them in rare cases when I have time or resources to make them. And hosting just 1 (!) T3 plane makes the repair slow if you have an air force waiting, so you have to micro. Most people don't have the time.

And, of course, inties and ASFs must not chase anything 75 km. That's really messed up. 5 km maybe? But not 75 for sure.