Caydr wrote:Peepers/Finks now have a 20-second reload and only .5 efficiency, meaning that only half of the flares will be effective. This means you won't be able to indefinitely screen against mercuries with a couple of scout planes.
YOU COULDN'T. This change is pointless and stupid. Now Peepers will be totally useless at their assigned role once the enemy gets a pair of missile towers up, but
will not be any worse at screening against Mercuries.
Do you even understand how scout planes were used to screen against AA? Since you apparently don't, I'll explain it to you. You build a wing of 10 or 15 and send them in just ahead of your bombers. Every Mercury in your enemy's base wastes its first missile on them. Your bombers then hit their target and destroy it, the Mercuries reload, and your bombers probably die.
This is good. It introduces an interesting use for a basic unit, and means that Mercuries/Screamers aren't the be-all end-all of anti-air. You need other solutions as well, like fighter patrols or anti-swarm turrets, to catch the scout planes before all your Mercuries waste their shot and to help take down the bombers.
Your change does nothing to prevent this behaviour. So flares are now 50% effective. Whoop-de-doo. Now I just use 20 Peepers instead of 10. Even if they had no flares at all, they'd still be useful for this, simply because they're a cheap aircraft that can force the enemy's Mercuries to waste a shot.
What your change
does do is make Peepers useless at their supposed job -
recon. They used to have a reasonable chance of getting past light AA defenses to spot what was behind them. Now they won't be able to.
Might as well change the description from "Scout plane" to "Long-range missile tower decoy", because that's all they're good for after this nerf.
Third, air plants have been made more affordable by reducing their metal cost by 100. Fighters have had a corresponding increase of 10% to all their costs so that spamming fighters won't be too much easier. This doesn't amount to much, but if you build 15 fighters you'll have paid the difference.
Why bother? Seriously,
why bother? Air plants are already the cheapest L1 factory (by a large margin, IIRC) and are easily affordable with pocket change at any time after about 10 minutes into the game. I can see no possible balance improvement from this change, and a significant problem.
Fighters or just a good number of anti-air guns (especially flak) will keep them away very effectively.
And here we see the significant problems.
1) You've just made the counter to your new super-air-transports significantly more expensive.
2) The other counter to your new super-air-transports is
level 2 and not exactly cheap. So now you don't just need flak for gunship defense, you need it almost as soon a you hit L2 for airdrop defense. Wonderful. That's going to make big games a total pain in the ass.
This is just one of many changes for the better you'll see in the next version of AA.
For the better? Really? Have you playtested these? If so, who'd you play against? They don't even seem particularly well thought-out, never mind a potential improvement.
Hellspawn wrote:I'll give you example. You have 2 armies on different side. One army is in base (porcing player) and other one is atacking it. Both armies get damaged. Autoheal is off. Who do you think will reheal his army. The one atacking or the porcer which has units in his base where there aswell many cons. Let's be honest. Noone will bring cons with him for atack porpuse.
QFT. Especially since cons are the first thing to die when the plasma cannons open fire.
And hey, guess what? With the airdrops, you can now porc, mass an army, airlift it right past your enemy's army, and wipe out his base! Awesome!
Yeah, big games are going to be shit if these changes go through. 1v1s probably won't be affected, but anything bigger than a 2v2 is going to be a total porcfest. But that's what you get when you listen to people who don't play the damn mod.