AA attack ground

Balance. Realism and simulationism are never valid arguments.

It's a stupid idea, honestly, and s44 is simulationist (not bad, just simulationist).

If we were to integrate land and ground weaponry, there would be no point doing it unless we had everything working with the same weapons and damage type. This is not impossible, and defender was sort of a test in this direction, but the insane speeds we have on air in Zero-K (In small part due to the fact they have to reload between shots) means we need insane ranges on AA weaponry so it's not really possible unless we want it all to be artillery (and high RoF artillery that is perfectly accurate vs moving targets is generally bad).

thats why i sugested he do it and give us a test version once done or at least has some examples

to see how it will really effect gameplay

If you want to attract new players, you should consider what first-timers think when they see situations that are odd. Like, vamps targeting landed planes but stop shooting when plane is hidden by some building.

Realism/simulationism may not be a valid argument for you, but when things are strange... they look like bugs/implementation sickness for newcomers who may consider game isn't polished enough for them.

AA statics could have a restricted targeting cone that would prevent fleas baiting it. And a switch to restrict target, air-only / everything it can target, so when you make your RK beside a cliff, it could target spiders coming down the cliff when they enter the targeting cone, but RK cannot be used to defend against ground targets. Unless a tall unit enters the cone, such as a detriment.

Google's list of interactions is not complete. Never seen pyros igniting avengers or llts targeting them? And bombers shot by banishers. All this is not obvious for new players. And what about shadows targeting krow... or faraday's stunning bombers mid-air?!

A lot of arbitrary decisions have been made... so "realism and simulationism" is at least as good an argument as "just because".

i would kinda like it if vamps and avengers had some form of ground attak Dgun, like a pack of ~4-6 defender missiles that they need to land to rearm
(playing for air superiority with fighters is sometimes really really boring)

also screamers could do targeted long range bombardment (linked to another Dgun command)
(basicly a longer range behe with clusterfuck ROF and ammo)

as i said razorkiss could have llt range crown controll weapon

and chainsaw/hacksaw/flack would be pure aa, having them ground attak would be op and counterintuitive, they look like tehy are made to shoot air

>I think AA should avoid landed unit, because this will make "land at idle" option useful.

This is the key point that we should take away from all of this. I agree that "Air-only" attacks are good, but when a plane is landed, how is it any different than a tank? Or a robot?

I get so pissed watching AA-only units fire away at landed planes while ignoring 200 other grounded units around that plane. If anything, a pure AA unit should be more likely to hit a jumping robot than a landed plane.

quote: XTA uses this model. There flak and AA missiles shoot ground too. But to apply this to ZK you would have to redesign all air/AA units. That is like throwing 5 years of development out of the window.

Tbh I always rather liked XTA's approach.

Although as I recall, in XTA anti-air had tremendous bonus damage against air, and ZK is trying to avoid these kind of artificial armor classes.

quote: It would be cool if Spring has Cone targeting instead of Cylinder or Sphere. If we had Cone targeting, we can make realistic AA that can shoot everything that fly (including flying skuttle)

IIRC something like this already exists and was tried back in CA, but the end result was basically that things like razor kisses were stupidly over-powered against things on hills, where it could shoot.

I do agree that AA shooting grounded stuff seems weird, but it is useful and it can have a in universe explanation Eg. All the units are robots, AA robots are programmed only to fire at aircraft even though they can hit ground because their weapons are not effective against ground targets.

Yeah, anti-air weapons ignoring landed planes have been on my wishlist since the first release of AASpring.

In some other game on some other engine, I'd look into having weapons that have double-range vs air (just like airLOS has longer view than regular LOS), but it would be too hard to implement in Spring and adding that kind of semi-flex weapon in ZK would be too hard.

"If we had Cone targeting, we can make realistic AA that can shoot everything that fly (including flying skuttle)"

Ive caused enemy's chainsaw to blow up their own singularity once by hiding my gunship behind it. problem? This game is stuck in the ancient HP damage model, its kinda depressing. I dont care how many times you shoot a tank with a machinepistole, its not gunna run out of HP and blow up randomly. AA guns are designed to sacrifice firepower to hit a distant, fast moving target. All this game needs to do is understand armor and this (and many other features imo) would be easily and effectively balanced. I think 10 flak guns peppering a detri doing little but make it stumble would make the game better, not worse.

Besides, if the AA guns are OP when they aim down, then what idiot decided to program them to shoot at aircraft only? isnt this the future? Just bad game design is all.

Also, vamps can only shoot air unless its air on the ground? all kinds of dumb. the damn things dont fly more than 10 feet off the ground, nothings stopping them from hitting it. Just sayin...