guys everyone knows ravens are more annoying than anythign else, right? well i suppose its tiem to nerf them cause ravenspam is too freaking good i propose lets raise their price to 600 and give it only 600 dmg
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Fair point. Raven monoculture is annoying. Why not split bomber into your all rounder and precision/antiheavy bomber? There is Kerstel in the files already :\ The trick with air balance in general is to allow airstart to be viable yet not overly powerful. That is hard to acheive. The change you propose would mark it as bad antiheavy :\ I don't think this is necesserly good especially considering how fragile it is.
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quote:
everyone knows ravens are more annoying than anythign else, right? |
That's a really hard question.  or  hmmm.... quote:
The trick with air balance in general is to allow airstart to be viable yet not overly powerful. That is hard to acheive. |
I'm not sure about that. Didn't the whole problem with air becoming OP start with devs randomly assuming that all factories, including air, needed to be viable on almost any map.
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If you want more variability think of bomber that drops several HE bombs (like that silly Phoenix, but not napalm ones) for carpet bombing and another craft for anti-sea warfare, dropping torpedoes (seriously, I loved Lancet in TA as it was nice to watch it in action) or depth-charges. Of course as reloadable ammo, these torps should be quite powerful compared to shitty torpedoes of Hunter, etc.
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Phoenix doesn't drop napalm bombs. Napalm stays on the battlefield. Fire disappears after a while. In my mind antiheavy missile aircraft would be also a torpedo bomber.
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quote:
If you want more variability think of bomber that drops several HE bombs (like that silly Phoenix, but not napalm ones) for carpet bombing |
Oh we used to have those.
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I too think we should double the cost while taking away 1/4 of it's power, effectively reducing it's cost efficiency by 62.5%. The magnitude of a nerf should be proportional to the volume of noob BAWW. /sarc I do think some of its power could be given to other units in the fac though. I don't think air fac is OP in 1v1, most of the time I don't think it's even viable. Nerfing ravens seems fine, but it will relegate it to a teams-only/second fac if that power is taken away entirely instead of redistributing it.
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I don't think we ever planned for air start to be viable on many maps. It's just sort of a consequence of air being good. Frankly I think air start is more viable than it should be. It's obviously a support factory.
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Assuming someone really nerfs the raven (not really needed imo), it shouldn't be damage or cost but rearm time.
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Speed could be an interesting nerf. The fac would still have Swift to respond to light threats and the Phoenix could get a speed increase as a compensation and differentiation too.
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Just to share a thought I had: In small team games (this includes 1v1s) any new factory should be viable as a second choice, not just air. To give an example, imagine a 2v2 with cloaky+vehicle start on one team. For their third factory it's common to pick planes or gunships. While I'm fine with these two factories being picked more often than others I think in some situations picking a third ground factory (that is not a strider hub) should still be a good alternative. quote:
Assuming someone really nerfs the raven (not really needed imo), it shouldn't be damage or cost but rearm time. |
Yup,    hokomoko has a good point. Increase Raven rearm time by 10-20 seconds or so. Right now Ravens are extremely fast to reload and bomb ground units that are attacking the factory/rearm pad the second they lift off. Increasing rearm times would massively decrease DPS against nearby units while only having a very small effect on long-distance bombing runs. Making destroying rearm pads a viable counter to Ravens could be exactly the kind of healthy extension to the air-ground interaction the game needs and balance-devs were looking for. While we're talking about  , why do they come in 2x2 and not as single pads?
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problem started when weight was reduced by 30% and a small hp buff was included. the rest of the air fac already has been nerfed significantly, and ravens are the only bombers that arent on the fringe of uselessness in most circumstances. suggest if you see ravens as a problem to revert the change and give other bombers a place too, specifically adressing phoenixes - that still have broken targeting, and are weak overall.
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Air is always going to be the best second factory because of the counter relationships. Most units the eneny has made cannot hurt air, and if he makes AA, that cannot hurt your other units. You go air to abuse this, try to do damage before he can field enough AA, then switch out of it again to render his AA investments useless (This is how the air start works, you quickly switch to land if you haven't won to exploit any AA investments). The other factories offer at best a vastly reduced version of this, as counter relationships of your new factory are never going to be as hard as the counter relationships or air > AA > land. The only way to change this would be more land units hitting air/more AA units hitting land (IE more stuff like Defender).
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Excuse me but when you are up against banisher spam you wont switch to air because that is a suicide... Mayby removing dedicated AA is a way to go? (or at least very limiting) Atm defender is also the only way to counter airstart really (besides uber fast expansion but that gets killed as soon as enemy switches to ground). This is one of the reasons defenders are so good.
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quote:
Excuse me but when you are up against banisher spam you wont switch to air because that is a suicide... |
Why shouldn't you get air when the other guy makes Banishers? That's like saying you shouldn't switch to air when the other guy makes Slashers or Moderators. Flex AA in ZK is a mild annoyance or at best a local deterrent to air, not a counter.
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Oh HA! I knew I suggested increased reload times for Ravens before! Straight from #zktop20 logs: quote:
*** 20.12.2014 20:00:33
[20:04] Skasi hawabout higher reload times for bombers? then air would be less efficient at defense and raiding might be possible again
[20:04] Skasi it wouldnt affect offense as much as defense |
I brought this up back then because (at least in teamgames) air ruins the raiding game. Light raiders get shut down by Swifts, while Pyros & co get 1-shot by Ravens. Plus Ravens shutting down assault units could be one of the reasons Defender spam is so viable right now, so maybe upping Raven reload times also breaks the current Defender-meta (-> more raiding possible again). Initially I thought the "air pads no longer refuel & repair simultaneously" change that happened some weeks ago would already have similar effects, but it turned out Ravens don't really take damage from raiders.. duh.    [ISP]Lauri, to be fair 5k metal worth of "mild annoyance" can be enough when you just completed your air factory and don't have enough metal in bombers to out-burst flex AA. I never tried new Banishers, I'm assuming old ones. Maybe the new one is weaker against air.
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 Tiny Hippo for lead balancer!
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Oh oh oh hey since someone mentioned a HP nerf for Raven in #zk: "Buff strengths, nerf weaknesses" - having to land on a pad and reload is a unique weakness for bombers, so clearly that's yet another reason to increase its impact. Unique means it's special and you have to use it over other things to nerf a unit, no ifs, no buts!
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I say that slightly buffing damage bombers other than raven and nerf of rearm time would be nice :)
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Keep in mind that for Wyvern rearm time per cost of bombers is already lower than for Raven. [neonstorming]Or - since rearming is unique to bombers - give them another way to rearm.. like from Singularity reactors. :D[/neonstorming]
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