On BA air - Page 2

On BA air

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Pxtl
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Joined: 23 Oct 2004, 01:43

Re: On BA air

Post by Pxtl »

Bladewings only seem OP because T1 veh is especially weak vs air. T1 veh anti-air unit is also their spotter, fire-support and light-artillery unit, a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none.

I think there's a fundamental disagreement about how BA is supposed to work. For most experienced players, they accept that there are 2 tiers of units - the main-line units and the situational units. Mainline units are things like the 3 T1 attack tanks, the T2 fighters and bombers, the Rocko, etc.

Situational units are things like the gunships, most of the artillery units, and almost every faction-specific unit.

I almost think they should be highlighted as such in the buildmenu.

Some developers want more units to be viable in a standard game, and others are happy to see most of the units get left for exotic scenarios.

@Baracus

t1 transes, transport COMMANDERS and small stuff. 99% of the time you see a T1 trans, it's carrying a comm.

As for the Blade, I have a simple, completely game-breaking suggestion that would make it into a new role with one minor change: make its missiles home, and let it shoot aircraft.
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Johannes
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Re: On BA air

Post by Johannes »

I don't know about such split into mainline and situational units. Because when you've got such huge amount of units, nobody has the time to properly test every one of them. So if a something is not used very much it's often not just because it's worse than something else, but because it's an unfamiliar unit. Mines would be a good example of something that's clearly powerful but is not used cause people aren't used to using it. If you try a totally new strategy of course it'll start out worse cause you don't know the nuances to it yet, but give it a few games.

And same thing when someone figures something new out, it might take a moment for people to come up with proper counters. Like with emp bomber for example.
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HeavyLancer
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Re: On BA air

Post by HeavyLancer »

Gota wrote:...
So are you making suggestions about BA air balance or are you just discreetly promoting your own mod? I mean, all of your talk of 'vision' and 'focus' is what you should be applying to your own mod. BA doesn't need another cook spoiling the broth.

I do agree on the extraneous units part though. Who here has actually used the Blade (flak-resistant gunship) in any game? Or the Juno?
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Wombat
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Re: On BA air

Post by Wombat »

ground AA takes care of fighters, enemy fighters will have a hard time in uncontrolled area's because they die to AA easily.

Well now, if you want to bomb the enemy, you need to make sure you have a path you control to fly over. = you need to push someone back, and only then you can bomb.
someone explain to me why is it wrong
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knorke
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Re: On BA air

Post by knorke »

Gota wrote:Look at the QQ about emp bomber that hardly anyone uses anyway, people nerd-rage for ages just cause "a unit was removed",
Gota wrote:you should be thinking how to focus the unit arsenal and making sure every unit has deep and engaging control mechanics.
i.e. that every unit is fun to control and has a clear place.
But the emp bomber was one of those few units that were actually different and had interessting mechanics. That is what the baww is about.
Compare emp bomber to ie Bulldog is a stronger Stumpy is a stronger Flash is a stronger Jeffy.

Of course BA has way too many units if you look at it realisticly. Most units do not even have anything special like a "spell" or "abilitie" to make them stand out and they are all avaivable right after building the lab.
But if you changed that, it would not be BA anymore. (not judging if thats good or bad, just saying)

If you want a game that is somewhat rooted in TA but with more of a "vision about the way they want it to be played and what kind of gameplay it should be focused around" you would have to look at CA/zeroK.

Nixa wrote:BA air is effectively disjoint from BA ground. It will need a serious restructure to fix this problem.
imo because of the way air units fly in BA you can not really micro them: They are too fast for that and make many loopings&turns beyond the players controll.
(yesyes, so sometimes somebody controlls a bunch of bombers to kill multiple coms and its very lol)
Most of the time air units are used as fire&forgett weapon: Select all bombers, attack-click on enemy lab/geo/fusion/com, bombers die to AA or blast, repeat.
Fighters vs Fighters air combat is also boring, there is not really anything you can do to influence the outcome, compared to say a tank vs tank combat.
And I dont know, but I always felt that emp bombers (and less, also emp drones) were one rare way to kind of provoke combined air/ground battles: units get emp'ed, send in fighters to scare off/kill the drones/bombers, other site sends in their fighters etc...
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Johannes
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Re: On BA air

Post by Johannes »

What do people think of lower cruisealt btw? It takes away some nice micro possibilities, and it matters less if you're hitting a target at the edge of someones aa coverage or inside it. Sure in a sense it's easier to balance when stuff always happens the same way, but it's more boring too.

And gotta agree with Knorke on most points.

A note to devs btw: planes don't use acceleration and turnrate tags in any way. So changing those doesn't do much to balance air units. :)
Manmax
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Joined: 19 May 2011, 13:57

Re: On BA air

Post by Manmax »

I tried Blade once... and quickly found out, to my despair, that they are not very (ground) missile resistant...
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Niobium
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Re: On BA air

Post by Niobium »

Johannes wrote:What do people think of lower cruisealt btw? It takes away some nice micro possibilities, and it matters less if you're hitting a target at the edge of someones aa coverage or inside it. Sure in a sense it's easier to balance when stuff always happens the same way, but it's more boring too.
The point of the lower cruise altitude was to reduce the effectiveness of drop-and-turn bombing, mainly done through a widget, which let bombers take very little/no damage on bomb runs with no micro required. Imo it achieves this nicely as it reduces their bomb drop distance -> evasiveness without touching damage/speed/maneuverability/cost/etc.
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Johannes
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Re: On BA air

Post by Johannes »

Niobium wrote:
Johannes wrote:What do people think of lower cruisealt btw? It takes away some nice micro possibilities, and it matters less if you're hitting a target at the edge of someones aa coverage or inside it. Sure in a sense it's easier to balance when stuff always happens the same way, but it's more boring too.
The point of the lower cruise altitude was to reduce the effectiveness of drop-and-turn bombing, mainly done through a widget, which let bombers take very little/no damage on bomb runs with no micro required. Imo it achieves this nicely as it reduces their bomb drop distance -> evasiveness without touching damage/speed/maneuverability/cost/etc.
Yes exactly. Turning as you drop the bombs was nice, regardless of how you commanded them. It was micro cause you had to consider the best way to move them, how to take the least damage. Now you just fly close over, not so much choice to do there. As I said it's boring.

It's much bigger change to totally alter the way a unit can be used like that, than to change its cost a bit or something like that.
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Niobium
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Re: On BA air

Post by Niobium »

Johannes wrote:Yes exactly. Turning as you drop the bombs was nice, regardless of how you commanded them. It was micro cause you had to consider the best way to move them, how to take the least damage. Now you just fly close over, not so much choice to do there. As I said it's boring.
I wouldn't call it 'micro' (especially as it was queued + executed by widget), but of course there was some choice to be made in how you used them, and that is still present now.

I'd argue that there is more depth to it now as well, as a bad choice could result in taking a lot of damage, where previously a bad choice would just mean you got scratched a little. Either way; bombers attacking units with relative impunity, even when AA is present, was unacceptable.
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Johannes
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Re: On BA air

Post by Johannes »

Moving units = micro, no? If the widget makes it easier to queue doesn't make it less micro imo.

I do see where you're coming from but I prefer that there's situations where you can get away with just a scratch if you play well, ie. find and target areas where enemy doesn't have much (long ranged) aa. But if you're running anywhere near a chainsaw for example, you'll get hit no matter what -> better distinction between aa turrets, and their positioning more important. The turn after dropping bombs only helps if you're targeting something near the edge of their AAs, which I think should be encouraged over targets deeper in the territory.
I do agree there might be issues in how effective they are at this, even with 7.4 AoE, but I'd rather see the currently problematic mechanism made better than outright removed. For example lowering fighter dmg vs bombers together with decreasing their hp, or just more cost for them.
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Lolsquad_Steven
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Joined: 27 Jun 2006, 17:55

Re: On BA air

Post by Lolsquad_Steven »

Make it so air cannot see, i think this is enough to place air in a soley support role which it seems is what most people want. Air will then only be able to attack areas that have already been scouted and will need ground units to act as forward observers to attack moving targets. Or whatever.
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HeavyLancer
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Re: On BA air

Post by HeavyLancer »

Or just reduce LoS on all planes except for the peeper/fink perhaps?
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Wombat
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Re: On BA air

Post by Wombat »

or just send flakkers, rape fighters and just bomb shit out of them... should be much easier after nerfing bomber
Aero
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Joined: 31 Dec 2010, 21:27

Re: On BA air

Post by Aero »

You could do that, or you could learn how to use the blade in it's current state. I've used the blade quite a bit recently, and to be honest, it's a bit clumsy when left with default move commands and blindly sent into enemy territory. That's not its purpose. The blade, (IMHO, mind you) is meant to be a tactical porcbreaker and, dare I say it, comm and sometimes even t3 killer, and also for defense. I've used it for all of the above uses, but only in situations where they can't be shot down in large numbers (you will lose some of them, accept that fact). They're a SURPRISE, FLYING VIPER FROM NOWHERE unit that should be used discreetly and only in large groups, because once discovered, they're easy to counter. As for micro, you have to CONSTANTLY give them formation commands for them to be effective as strike gunships, and you have to tell them to hold position and hold fire to use them as comm killers, The biggest turn-off they have is their terrible default move system (as it is with many other units, gunships get out of control when left on roam and fire at will. If people knew how to correctly set movement parameters for and micro units, there'd be no balance or nerfing/buffing needed for gunships, they're fine. I also agree that bombers should be much slower though, but fly much higher. If it's a precision bomber, it doesn't need to fly 50 feet above the target. Again, I'm looking at BA from the viewpoint of a general and not a gamer.
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Pxtl
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Re: On BA air

Post by Pxtl »

The problem with high-flying bombers is that the higher they fly, the further they are from the target when the bombs drop. A low-flying bomber can't shoot until it's almost at the target. A high-flying bomber can drop the bombs before it even hits the enemy air defenses. It's the most important knob for determining if you want bombers to be something you can defend against or not - if you give them crappy armor but a high altitude, they'll still destroy the target, they just won't survive the experience.
Aero
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Re: On BA air

Post by Aero »

Which would be ideal, making it higher risk. If they're quite slow, but still high altitude, the bombs won't have as much momentum and will also be more precise. Thus, t2 bomber = high risk precision bomber and =/= multirole killer
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Nixa
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Re: On BA air

Post by Nixa »

The T2 bombers role now has effectively changed from previous versions. Over 90% of cases people used T2 bombers for killing a specific or group of specific targets (be it a com/fusion/geo etc). This was because of their single target damage up around 1400 damage (example used is hurricane vs com). The remaining 10% of use went to laying waste to entire mobile formations of units which generally frowned upon because it was almost impossible to counter from the ground (and has become such a OP strat that people will defend it with their lives).

The role of the T2 bomber in 7.50 has been taken in an interesting direction. Single target damage for the example listed above is ~1400 --> ~750. This is obviously a massive nerf, so their primary role has been massively nerfed.

There has also been some nerf to the ground bombing case, due to the mygravity function which forces bombers to drop there bombs closer to the target before they turn and fly away. Effectively now ground anti-air will be able to fire off a few shots before they get obliterated. Their damage has also been reduced for this situation (as they drop less bombs) but the area of coverage still remains effectively the same (more spread out).

So if you want to snipe a com or single building, go ARM, it has liche 8)
Last edited by Nixa on 31 May 2011, 03:22, edited 1 time in total.
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Nixa
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Re: On BA air

Post by Nixa »

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