T3 AA?

[Bolle]

Great game and good job faf-team.
How about tech 3 anti air units? Lets face it, air currently dominates games. Fun land war team games are often over when someone techs to t3 air and nukes opposition to oblivion.

One simply cannot counter t3 air without t3 air which causes race to air supremacy.

I remember that original FA had some nice modified t3 anti air units, Kirvesnaama´s units if I recall correctly.
Would it be possible to include those to new revisions of the FAF gameplay?

[Raging_Squirrel]

Will never happen.

[pip]

T3 Air Supremacy is certainly not as strong as you say. It was in 3599, but it's not in 3610. T2 flak can counter t3 gunships, and also T3 bombers if you have a lot of them. T3 bombers also are easily hit by T3 Sam, which are quite cheap. Give it a try.

[Kryo]

T2 AA and t3 stationary AA is cheap, and t3 air is expensive. Air isnt dominant any more.

[MushrooMars]

T2 AA and t3 stationary AA is cheap, and t3 air is expensive. Air isnt dominant any more.

If anything air is U-- Actually, I probably shouldn't say that. Pilot would inevitably lock the thread due to flame-wars (or whatever you forum-goers call it).

I must add a point however; I am a person who favors air over land. I'd prefer to win via surgical strikes and superior mobility than excessively epic hordes of land units and experimental rushing (not that those aren't viable tactics; It's just that I prefer air).

Because of the recent buff to Flak, it's almost impossible to win the game with a dedicated airforce anymore. Unless of course experimentals are involved, and they almost never are if you do have dedicated air, because you usually end up loosing.

Let's say you have, oh, 25 T2 gunships. Renegades, for the sake of the argument. You happen upon an equally sized force of T2 units, with no anti-air. You dispatch every single unit. So, the enemy wises up, and sends another force of the same size, but with 10 T2 flak units. The T2 flak units shred your now-45 gunships before they have a chance to inflict noticeable damage. The force of units moves on to wreak havoc on your territory, smashing any land-based defenses, and tearing apart any gunships with ease. Grats, your entire airforce has just been destroyed by 10 lesser-priced flak units.

So, instead of gunships, you spam Corsairs, which do more area damage and should be fast enough to evade the flak, or at least render it less effective. Nope, flak still shreds your air units. Moving on to T3, you have access to the Wailer and Revenant. Still, the flak takes apart your air units, as the initial group of units is inevitably followed by similar grouos, again, cheaper and quicker to build than any units you, the airforce commander can build.

Stupid conclusion 1: Land units are superior in every way to air units. STOP USING AIR UNITS!
Stupid conclusion 2: You are not using your air units correctly, go die in a hole.

My conclusion: Air units are U-- still not gonna use it, are insufficient no matter how they are used against flak. Sure, you can attack from multiple sides using both gunships and bombers, but at the end of the day, you will sustain incredible losses compared to a land commander. Flak is excessively cheap for the damage it can do, whereas air-land weapons have no such equivalent. I better not see any annoying arguments about land units being superior, as both air and land units should be essentially equal, but play different rolls, and be equal in different ways. I would post one of my various replays proving the point, but it's kinda... Well, midnight. Tomorrow, after I get back from school, I promise I will prove my point.

[FunkOff]

If anything air is U-- Actually, I probably shouldn't say that. Pilot would inevitably lock the thread due to flame-wars (or whatever you forum-goers call it).

That seems unlikely. Nonetheless, allow me to correct some of your misconceptions.

Because of the recent buff to Flak, it's almost impossible to win the game with a dedicated airforce anymore.

Well, it depends how you use it. Air is arguably the best/only way to snipe an asset mid/late game. Whether mercies, FBs or Strat bombers, they offer a unique ability to destroy any single target very quickly, be it an ACU or an SMD. Also, aside from T2 flak towers being reduced in cost, there has been no flak buff.. and T2 flak towers aren't exactly crazy OP right now.

Let's say you have, oh, 25 T2 gunships. Renegades, for the sake of the argument. You happen upon an equally sized force of T2 units, with no anti-air. You dispatch every single unit. So, the enemy wises up, and sends another force of the same size, but with 10 T2 flak units. The T2 flak units shred your now-45 gunships before they have a chance to inflict noticeable damage. The force of units moves on to wreak havoc on your territory, smashing any land-based defenses, and tearing apart any gunships with ease. Grats, your entire airforce has just been destroyed by 10 lesser-priced flak units.

Your anecdote is essentially correct: Flak kills hordes of air units very effectively. However, in your implied assertion that this is not ideal, I implore you to look at the example of Supreme Commander 2: All AoE against air units was removed and, as such, air units are exceedingly overpowered. As mentioned above, the speed that allows air units to pick and choose where and when to engage enemy units is exceptionally valuable and is, in military parlance, a "force multiplier". If AoE attacks such as flak were not effective against hordes of air units or simply were not AoE, there would be no way to stop massive air spam. Flak makes building land units possible.

Stupid conclusion 1: Land units are superior in every way to air units. STOP USING AIR UNITS!
Stupid conclusion 2: You are not using your air units correctly, go die in a hole.

You have to use air units correctly. Using them as a replacement for land units is not using them correctly. It may be intuitive to new players to think of land/air as equal pieces of the strategy puzzle, but air isn't. Air is strategically much shallower, due to the design of FA, and it is therefore necessary and proper that it take a backseat. How is it shallower? Simply because there are fewer roles that air units perform. Air units have essentially four types, the unique "transport" type, the direct-fire anti-air type, the direct-fire ground-attack type, and the scout. There is no support air unit (cloak/stealth/regen/etc), their is no siege air unit (flying MML/arty) and there is no AoE anti-air air unit (no flying flak). Because of this, air-versus-air is just a matter of spamming a single unit: the Anti-air air unit, either the tech 1, tech 2 or tech 3 varieties. Land combat is more deep, involves the use of direct fire, siege, support, aoe and maneuvers.

That isn't to say that this is a theoretical problem... there is no reason why air can't have those many unit roles while land only has a few, or both having equally many, but in FA, land is strategically deep and air is simply not. Therefore, the present balance of land having more significance is for the better.

However, it's not like there's nothing you can do. A mixture of gunships/bombers can be effective against AA, you just can't expect air to siege fortified AA positions because no such unit exists (and I doubt Ze_Pilot would let me add one in the next patch ) and should therefore simply try to avoid AA fortified positions with your air units, rather than expect to simply mass a greater amount of gunships to break through.

[Ze_PilOt]

If anything air is U-- Actually, I probably shouldn't say that. Pilot would inevitably lock the thread due to flame-wars (or whatever you forum-goers call it).

I'm closing mercies threads because all has been said over and over and over and over again, and it's not useful to clutter the forums with that.

[Kryo]

hm I think, FA is still a game. And a game needs to have cool gameplay.

In reality Air Force is overpowered. In FA Air is rather supporting. And I like that. But this is of course only my opinion

[Isen]

land is slower than air, so you will need to spam flaks everywhere, while with some gunships you can raid everywhere. So finally you will need to invest more mass on flaks than the guy on air.
Also you can avoid flaks with gunships easily, just giving a look to where they are. Also t3 bombers can fly over flaks without taking much damage.
I would say that air is the most viable strat.

[uberge3k]

MushrooMars, I think the problem is that you're trying to scale air where it isn't meant to. 45 gunships is a bit ridiculous as they're so weak to flak - but 3-5 gunships made early on can be devastating.

Flak is great vs gunships and T2 bombers, but it moves incredibly slow compared to them. That means you need flak everywhere on the map - gunships and bombers can move around it and hit unprotected areas, forcing your enemy to invest more and more in flak. And if you catch your enemy without flak, you can cause massive damage until he manages to rush it.

It's also possible to snipe flaks with gunships before they are massed - a handful of T2 gunships can pretty quickly kill one or two flaks before they kill the gunships, giving you a few more precious seconds to cause damage with them.

Air is best used in conjunction with a decent land force - if your enemy switches everything over to rush flak, that will create a softness for your ground units to exploit.

Once there's flak everywhere, you shouldn't continue making gunships and bombers - they've done their job, now you need to press your advantage instead of trying to overwhelm their counter.

Also note that T1 air is very, very good, even in the mid game. 4 T1 bombers can "snipe" a T2 flak, for example. And nothing wrecks havoc with your enemy's BO better than a couple bombers killing their expansion engineers.

At the T3 stage of the game, T3 bombers are perhaps the best of breaking heavily entrenched bases on very large maps.


The thing is, in 3599, air was really, really overpowered. You could easily rush T3 air with a T1.5 eco, and due to the expense of SAMs, it was always better to rush T3 air of your own rather than making defenses to kill those first few ASF. The gameplay wasn't nearly as dynamic as in 3603 as very nearly every single game that was longer than 15 minutes was ended with blobs of T3 air.