Spring RTS Engine

Min3mat wrote:T2 Air

T2 fighters need to be more useful
Gameplay changes in air would be quite cool

Give the T2 fighters 2 machine gun weapons with a 30 degree or so arc of fire (keep their missiles too), which do 1/2 damage to structures, commanders and T2 ground units and a little bonus damage to Krows / Liches
Give Hurricanes some hawt damn flareage .1 sec reload 5-10% efficiency
Buff the Liche some more somehow, make them useful pls
Small buffs for the Krow
Give the peeper its flares back!

And then rebalance costs etc accordingly
Thoughts? Actual discussion on this could be interesting

Hmm. For L2 fighters, I think a better approach would be to give them some weak flareage. Then you could use them (a) for offensive AA support, and (b) in patrol routes that may get them fired on by Screamers. Not enough that they can resist the antiswarm missiles, but enough that it makes them damn hard to bring down with fighters, screamers, and scattered MLs. Otherwise being standard fighters is fine (although making all their missiles surface-to-ground could be fun, since you're suggesting more ground weapons for them).

Hm, this talk about flares made me think that maybe some air-to-air weapon that doesn't react to flares would be apropriate, something like an AA lightning gun on a fighter.

well remember that t2 fighters are useless cuz they deal the same damage as normal fighters... you usually build fighters to kill gunships right? without damage they cant so balance them around damage.. IMO they dont need flares

oooh i know something that could help make t2 fighters useful
now i think in a recent patch you can mess around with a units speed via script
so, make them better
make them slow to half speed or so when firing
this will make them AMAZING vs air units
and slightly better vs ground too

say erk..its a 'advanced fighter' and um it has 'advanced computer routines' or some shit :D

Remember that L2 fighters are currently missing a missile. So they do half the damage they should.

L2 fighters now have more than 2x the damage potential compared with L1 fighters because I've given them back their second missile. I'll also give them a very low-efficiency flare.

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Flare stats: fires every 0.8 seconds when under fire from tracking weapons, is effective once every 5 times (0.2 efficiency). Seaplanes have 0.75/0.25.

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Getting really close to being done the big sea/amphib/hover rebalance.

I think L2 fighters withe weak turrets would be interesting.. Kinda like the phoenixes, it would distinguish them from l1 fighters, and counter the l1 ones at teh same time.

Also fixed the aiming height on vulcan/bertha, they were extremely low before, preventing them from targetting properly. *especially* on the vulcan.

I don't think krows need a buff.

MR.D wrote:1 mercury + 1-2 flakkers = dead Krow faster than you can blink.

On their own they're actually fairly easy to take down without causing a ton of damage.

As it should be. Krows eat anything that's not protected by heavy AA. And I do mean eat.

Once MErcury start popping up, you might as well just forget using a Krow, and go with smaller groups of Rapiers or Blades, or scracth gunships all together and start making bombers.

Yes... And? Or you could just spam scout planes.

Caydr wrote:Flare stats: fires every 0.8 seconds when under fire from tracking weapons, is effective once every 5 times (0.2 efficiency). Seaplanes have 0.75/0.25.

Hm. I think that's a good idea. It makes them even more viable as interceptors.

I would agree that krows don't need a buff - but I think maybe mercuries/screamers need a slight nerf *against* them... currently it only takes a very low number of shots to take out what is basically a level 3 air unit...

maybe you could give krows a very slow firing (ie refire rate slightly slower than the mercury/screamer) but very efficient flare system? That would have almost no effect against standard AA due to the RoF, but could prevent krows from getting sniped off before they get anywhere near a base...

EDIT:
even better, make an invisible shield system that only targets long range missiles (they're big) and shoots them with point defence lasers

IMO screamers/mercury's need a bigger reload time.

TBH at this rate there wont be any point building mercuries/screamers, seems like people are asking for most aircraft to have some sort of flare to specificly protect themsleves against htem.

flares won't help vs screamers/mercury's

Caydr wrote:Also fixed the aiming height on vulcan/bertha, they were extremely low before, preventing them from targetting properly. *especially* on the vulcan.

Could you check for this problem on the Buzzsaw too? I noticed it didn't seem to "want" to fire if there were any friendly buildings in front of it for a rather long distance.

Caydr wrote: You... ehh.... are in possession of the old version....

lol, i meant side-by-side, i wasn't in possession of a compy that could run spring when i posted

t2 fighter changes sound good

I thought that lvl2 fighters were stealth(radar invisible) already, isn't that enough?

MR.D wrote:I thought that lvl2 fighters were stealth(radar invisible) already, isn't that enough?

Given the large jamming fields everyone throws around in AA, that doens't make a whole helluva lot of difference.

And the problem with Screamers is that they can shoot into your forward patrol route and pick off your fighters that you use for defense. Weak flares on the L2 fighters means that you can use L2 figthers for the forward patrol without them getting whittled away by screamer fire. The screamers will still be very useful for my favourite use of them - blowing up defensive gunships.

The big thing I would love would be if the engine could be tweaked so that weapons explode when they hit flares. Then, large forces with flare-throwing spoilers would still be hit by the screamers - they'd just be glancing blows instead of direct hits - which would be far better than the screamers just flying around in a circle and getting lost when they hit the flare.

Plus, this tweak to L2 fighters reaffirms their OTA functionality. In OTA, stealth fighters were so fast that they could outrun MT missiles. In AA there are so many more SAM weapons that the stealth fighter's ability to outrun MTs is less useful. Being able to flare-off one or two missiles would help replace their use as the offensive-fighter. Vanilla L1 fighters can still be used for interior base defense.

edit: bombers are still flareless, right?

I think a lot of this "XYZ needs flares, Screamers need ROF nerf, etc. etc." could be stopped if the AdvSam range was nerfed down to Annihilator range.

So what's the plan with seaplane swarm fighter? Just load them out with a dozen AA missiles so they can blast anything out of the sky, flare or no flare?

heh, if its a big enough swarm the missile may circle and hit one of the other planes

I remind you, the flares will be only effective once out of every 5 shots, unless you can agree on a different solution. Maybe slow-firing but with high efficiency would be better.

Anyone else want a 15% or so reduction to mercury/screamer range? From what I can remember, it's currently 2600 or something, roughly double that of a Guardian.

The changes in this version are just huge. I wish I could call this AA 2.0, because it's such a quantum leap from everything before it. I'd hate to jump to v3 already. I wish I could release it now, but many things wouldn't work right because they need the new version of Spring.