In a nutshell:
One of the primary tenants of balance is that each unit and tactic must possess one or more weaknesses in order to prevent it from becoming an apex strategy; one whose only counter is itself. This is where late game air in FA currently stumbles.
Essentially, the optimal strategy has always been to build nothing but Air Superiority Fighters, while your opponent does the same. If you out produce him in ASF, you can fight his ASF, and win air superiority; this leaves you with a sizable advantage, allowing you to begin building offensive air units such as bombers, gunships, or air Experimentals. If you attempt to build so earlier while even in mass and therefore ASF with your opponent, he will outpace you in ASF, and be able to easily destroy your air, giving him the advantage.
What I propose doing is adding a triangle similar to T1 land’s extremely well balanced PD>tank>arty>PD cycle. In short:
ASF: Now slower, designed primarily for base defense and constant DPS.
T3 Interceptors: A new unit class, which is very fast, very fragile, and with frontloaded DPS.
Gunship: now slower and weaker, but has long range, very fast projectiles.
-Gunships will easily kill large groups of air, but are very slow and weak themselves. They also possess longer air to ground range.
-T3 Interceptors will be able to run in and kill gunships, but if in range of ASF, will be quickly shredded.
-ASF do not possess the speed necessary to get in range of gunships, and can simply be kited to death by them. While they cannot catch up to ints, they will easily beat them.
With this circle, there are far more opportunities for interplay between various air units, allowing for interesting strategies and dynamic gameplay. In addition, bombers and gunships will be tweaked so that their anti-land roles are more defined; ideally, bombers will have higher damage but less health, being able to make mass-inefficient-but-workable kamikaze runs at AA and pave a way for other air units, helping to break stalemate situations.
The idea of making gunships' air to ground weapons slower has an interesting implication for balance - it allows us to make them better against stationary targets, but worse against mobile units if necessary. Making them actual TMLs would be very interesting from a gameplay perspective, and match the precedent set by cruiser bombardment. That would also allow us to indirectly tweak shield balance by providing, for example, a missile gunship - fires lots of slow-moving, moderate damage TMLs with low accuracy, making it great at overloading shields at the expense of sniping potential, and with its own intrinsic counter which forces defending players to diversify their defensive investments.
Note that this is reliant upon several other quality of life passes at early to midgame air balance, the most important being polishing the differences between static and mobile AA units and addressing the issue of T3 mobile SAMs. I honestly do not expect anything as major as this happening for a year or more.
Statistics: Posted by uberge3k — 14 Dec 2014, 17:46
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