How to counter early air as Aeon?

[Darth_Google]

Thats a thing i do struggle with around half of the time my enemy pulls something like that.

Basically, i go for micro'ed Aurora with radar tower or Spirit support. It works fine on T1 stage, and when enemy tries to transition to t2 ranged bots.. i either hit those with air, or transition to my own t2 like Obsidians mixed with Blazes. Works qute reliably unless enemy goes for ghetto or bombers.

Thats where i'm really not sure what to do. Because when i go second air.. i cant have this critical mass of interceptors for a while for them to be able to respond anywhere i want. And enemy is basically is being more flexible. He can go for ghettos, he can bomb auroras, he can drop my base or snipe some MEXes.

What shall i do to anticipate this better? Or how do i counter this air?

[Vee]

If you make inties from your second air he should not be able to bomb you or build ghettos, since you would have more interceptors. Can you post a replay where you had this problem?

[Darth_Google]

If you make inties from your second air he should not be able to bomb you or build ghettos, since you would have more interceptors. Can you post a replay where you had this problem?

I will try. Thing is, i decided to get back to FAF after a year's break and thats the problem i had when i decided to make the break. Not the reason behind it though.

Watched replays myself.

Well.. 1st it was FFA and 2nd - each time i went for third air, not the second air.

But the question actually stays. Can you fight against second air with third air as Aeon? Or its a bad idea?

If lets say i want to kill a commander on T1 stage, should i try to do that with artillery, or aeon arty is no good against com?

And last question: im trying to develop a habit of playing a com aggresively, getting veterancy and so on, When it is good time to get a gun upgrade? Does it require some specific BO?

[Cuddles]

Wasn't it Zock that said you should get air as late as possible but always before your opponent?

try going 2nd air and building your own bombers. it will make him build inti.

[Darth_Google]

Wasn't it Zock that said you should get air as late as possible but always before your opponent?

try going 2nd air and building your own bombers. it will make him build inti.

Thanks, gonna give it a try.

Any tips on aeon gun commander? Or maybe i can watch some specific replay that focus on agressive com play or read something?

[Flamingo]

How good are you with intel? As a rule, the question of what to do next tends not to be a matter of checking your mental play books, exactly. You need to be scouting the enemy base and trying to predict what's going to happen based on what you see. If you fly overhead and see way more inties than you can handle, you now have a bunch of options going forward and you've got to decide, under pressure unfortunately, what to do next.

If your enemy has air control, here's a few things you can try:

If you are at T2 and still have some claim to air space, place a little flak where you can afford it. Your opponent won't fly a squadron of inties over flak if he knows what's good for him, so you can intercept bombers before they arrive then retreat to your flak. Be careful with this, though, since the flak needs to be near enough to fall back to, and you never want to over-commit to static defenses. This works best on small maps where there's less ground to cover.

Check how your ground army compares to theirs. If your macro is equal and they have strong dominance over the air, they're likely suffering on the ground. Mix some mobile AA with your ground forces to deter bombers and gunships, then go tear up their base. If you don't think you can penetrate the base because they're turtling, break your ground army into squads and wipe out their outward mexes. Depending on the situation, you may also be able to outright win the game if your opponent over-invested in air control, provided you're bold and punish them for it.

If you're having trouble with air harassment, then attack them. The purpose of harassment isn't just to damage your infrastructure, but also to place you in a reactionary mindset. If you get frustrated and start building defenses at every mex, you've been tricked. Now you're responding to your enemy as they decide what the next move will be. Never allow this. Always scout and look for places you can attack. If you can't regain control of the air, then that's sour grapes - I hated air anyway, so let's play with tactical missiles! Being cut off from one of your options is very bad, but you need to avoid being reactionary at all costs.

Finally, if they have more inties and you've lost air control, you can still express some power in the sky by splitting your attacks. A large singular force beats a small force, but many small forces beat a single large force. Bit of a paradox, but it works if you've got the micro skill. Basically, send two or more small squadrons to attack in separate locations. Your opponent will do one of two things. They'll either attack with a blob of inties at one location at a time, giving you time to destroy some things as the intie blob moves from mark to mark, or they'll split their inties. If they split, take your whole intie force and attack the split inties - you can make up for your disadvantage in size using this kind of tactic. I don't often see players split their inties, to be honest, and anyone who does is likely good enough at micro to feel comfortable with it, so be careful, but even if they don't split the important thing is that you're attacking them and forcing them to respond to you.

The bottom line is, in a lot of cases the answer is to be aggressive and paranoid. If you feel under a lot of pressure from harassment, it's not because you need to defend better - by nature harassment will always be hard to prevent - it's because you need to scout and attack more. Get your opponent to feeling flat-footed instead of the other way around and things will come together for you. The idea isn't to create harmony in your own base, it's to sow aggression and pettiness around the battlefield like it slept with your girlfriend and deserves any conniving misery you can fling at it.

[ColonelSheppard]

[Flamingo]

Is it bomber first or early gunships that are specifically the problem? He was talking about transitioning to T2.

If you're going air second, you should have inties to react to gunships, ghetto or jesters, because they're vulnerable to inties and all that stuff is kind of expensive for the early stage. Bomber first can't be bombing auroras - bomber first comes too early for you to be building tanks already and it can easily hurt their economy worse than it hurts you.

Darth, are you power or mass stalling early on? It could be a basic macro issue, and it's easy to do to yourself. I played a game with a friend not too long ago who casually entered a power stall for about a minute during the early game. The results were terrible. You would not believe how much that can put you behind, and my friend kept asking me "How do you have so many units already?".

[Darth_Google]

Is it bomber first or early gunships that are specifically the problem? He was talking about transitioning to T2.

If you're going air second, you should have inties to react to gunships, ghetto or jesters, because they're vulnerable to inties and all that stuff is kind of expensive for the early stage. Bomber first can't be bombing auroras - bomber first comes too early for you to be building tanks already and it can easily hurt their economy worse than it hurts you.

Darth, are you power or mass stalling early on? It could be a basic macro issue, and it's easy to do to yourself. I played a game with a friend not too long ago who casually entered a power stall for about a minute during the early game. The results were terrible. You would not believe how much that can put you behind, and my friend kept asking me "How do you have so many units already?".

Depends, but i tend to mass stall when t1 stage prolongs too much - usually when on 12-15 minutes in the game i still have only t1. And then i usually going to stall mass. Can counter that with reclaim though. I hit power stall only if enemy specifically targets my pgens.

Ive heard about some bomb-resistant pgens. Is it just pgens spaced out or something more advanced?

Also, though i never seen it used against me, ive heard about hover-bombing or double bombing. Watched a tutorial, tried to do that in skirmish,, and horridly failed. I can make bomber hover.. for a while until it just turns, and seems i never can manage to fire it twice, let alone three times.

Whats the trick im missing here? Im sure its something crucial.

[Flamingo]

Well, maybe just post a replay and someone can look at what you're having trouble with.

Upgrading your mexes to T2 at fifteen minutes in can be a bit on the late side for a lot of maps, but there's not any magic rules for it. That wouldn't be strange for winter duel, for example, but on other maps you'll want to upgrade earlier. I was asking more about the first five minutes of the game, though. When you're laying down your opening build order, do you power stall? If so, that would explain why you can't keep up with air aggression. Even if it's just for thirty seconds or so as you're building your second factory, that can put everything behind. The stall doesn't just delay the building you're making right then, but also slows down your ability to send engies around the map.

Also, when you say you have trouble with "early air", how early do you mean and what's the trouble you have? If you're playing against ZLO, your trouble with early gunships could have an entirely different meaning than if you're playing with someone less skilled, for example.