Spring RTS Engine

I have been noticing that a lot of players use gunship swarms. That is not a bad thing, but what I do not like about is that there is no way a player could ever get ready for an attack like that while also fighting an army from another player. I just want some feedback from other TA players about some ideas I have and feel free to post your own ideas here.

One:

Take the Fast Firing Flakker from AA and make that the standard T2 flakker while making the OTA Flakker T1.

Two:

Increase the health, lower buildtime and cost, of flakkers.

Three:

Increase the buildtime and cost of gunships.

Any comments are welcome! and this is just to see what other people think and if it should be fixed.

Seems too drastic to me. That sounds like it would nearly obliterate the point of building gunships altogether. Instead, you could leave the anti air tech tree as it is right now, but reduce the cost of flakkers and increase their fire rate just a tad like you suggested. Then tweak the missile towers to do a little bit of extra damage to gunships, and/or maybe make gunships do a tad less damage to missile towers and flak just so they don't fall immediately. Once you start adding units like that it becomes too much of a slippery slope, so it's better to adjust what you already have instead of introducing new balance problems into the mix.

What about making Guardian style Flakkers that fire long range and do alot of area damage?

i like the guardian style flakker idea to discourage brawler swarms
but otherwise there are loads of counters to gunships
sorry, gnome but imo a lvl1 air defense shouldn't mash up a extremely expensive lvl2 GShip i mean pulverisers are supposed to be good against fighters and bombers gunships are supposed to be dealt with by flakkers (although i think samsons mixed with flakkers are needed to defend your attack force as flakkers have so little health and the brawlers will have loads of targets making ur mobile AA slightly more effective)

I didn't say smash up. I just suggested on the order of maybe 4-5 damage extra to brawlers (compared to current values) for missiles from MTs and/or samsons. I agree, it shouldn't be so high as to make the brawler useless, just enough to make the MT not useless in that scenario

yeah if its a small change like that then i'd rahter it be made to samsoms as they are the most effective AA (in numbers)

Frankly I'd say the role of Gunships is harrying units in the field, not as a base assault unit. Doesn't much bother me if stationary flak emplacements tear them apart (obviously within reason); that's a bomber's job. Gunships should be able to tear up an undefended army en-route, but I doubt they were ever meant for a heavy base assault role.

Warlord Zsinj wrote:Frankly I'd say the role of Gunships is harrying units in the field, not as a base assault unit. Doesn't much bother me if stationary flak emplacements tear them apart (obviously within reason); that's a bomber's job. Gunships should be able to tear up an undefended army en-route, but I doubt they were ever meant for a heavy base assault role.

Exactly! I say they should have low armour, but keep all their other current stats!

FireCrack wrote:

Warlord Zsinj wrote:Frankly I'd say the role of Gunships is harrying units in the field, not as a base assault unit. Doesn't much bother me if stationary flak emplacements tear them apart (obviously within reason); that's a bomber's job. Gunships should be able to tear up an undefended army en-route, but I doubt they were ever meant for a heavy base assault role.

Exactly! I say they should have low armour, but keep all their other current stats!

I SOO agree. Gunships should be awsome for what they were made for, not awsome all round.

yeah, gunships could still be as deadly as ever, but you'd need to back em up wityth fighters and bombers if you wanted to wreck someones base. In the feild they'd be self suficient, but in order to crack AA somthing else should be used.

this has been rererereaddressed in latest 3 or more releases.

you aint traying hard to stop those planes!

(hint, flakkers cost lots of ENERGY).

if we decrease the energy flakkers use, mabye, just mabye, it will make brawlers weaker, but more likely it will just make all other planes useless.

Just mass level 1 missile units. It is an easy counter to the early brawler rush.

Maybe, just maybe .. there would be use of a unit specific defence unit, something like the spy in stratego .. ? (for those who dont know stratego rules: the spy loses to every unit, except when he attacks the marshal, and the marshal is the highest ranked unit)

Ewww paper-rock-scissors balance...

Ewww paper-rock-scissors balance...

Meh, is pretty good. As long there is no all winning unit combo, i would play it.

Gnome wrote:Ewww paper-rock-scissors balance...

The "one HP value for everything" approach isnt really that much better, either.

Because it is the source of the samsung sickness of OTA, and the brawler problems in spring.



Different weapon classes HAVE to do more/less damage to different units. It just doesnt make sense else. A flak is DESIGNED to down aircraft. A tank cannon to kill Tanks. 2 tasks exactly opposite in their requirements.. Even if both have nominally the same damage value, if both hit the same target the first _should_ do more damage to a plane and the latter more to a tank.

And so on. To much RSP leads to bad stuff like earth 2160 (where some weapons do 50 times as much damage vs one target than vs another), but
completely omitting it just thumps down gameplay (and breaks logic for many weapon effects, by, for example, the arbitrary use of HPs to somehow bend it together to be balanced).
There should be just some guidelines per weapon category, like "all emp 1.5 damage vs buildings, 75% vs kbots, 50%tanks" or " all anti-air missile 100% damage antiair, 50% buildings, 25% mobile units" (for example). Because nobody could really remember the "which is good vs what" for every 100+ units with its units^2/2 combinations. That way a MUCH better balancing would be possible.

A plane's defense normally comes from its speed and altitude, since altitude does help defense in TA or Spring we have to find another way.

My changes would be;

- Fighters and gunships, 50% smaller.

- Gunships, reduced damage to buildings.

- A fighters weapon does not need more damage verses planes it just needs to be better at hitting them.

- Health for fighters and gunships should be very low, any decent AA weapon killing with one hit. Bombers and contructors should be a little tougher being bigger and slower.

Ideally, weapons should do more damage to specific kinds of units for physical reasons. For instance, an anti-building weapon could do more damage to buildings because it is very slow and has almost no splash damage. An anti-tank weapon could have low splash damage, and a poweful upwards-oriented explosion that would send a large, flat unit flying. An anti-kbot weapon would do less damage than the above ones, but would be faster and have more splash damage, to catch the small agile units.

For aiplanes, weapons should probably have huge splash damage, and should disturb the flight path of the planes, sometimes causing them to crash. IMHO that would be better than "hidden" extra damage.

These are just basic ideas.

As needed we can add new physical rules to the engine that justify the particular damage a certain unit suffer; this way the rules are known by everybody and apply to all units. Also, these effects should be visible if possible, so you don't need to remember specific weapon vulnerabilities.