Air factory and AA rework suggestion

Static AA either sucks or hard-counters air. Bombers either devastate key assets or are useless and pushed into corner. This is bad. AA should be designed to be attritional. It should be hard to wipe out entire airforces or totally control an area with AA, but also hard for AA defences to get overwhelmed or destroyed. AA should protect key assets very well (singus, coms), but on a wider area they should apply attrition to provide interesting manoeuvring for bombers and gunships trying to find a cost effective way to attack.


GENERAL AA CHANGES
-Static AA is cheaper
-Static AA generally has reduced range
-Static AA get HP boost
-All AA AOE is removed except for flak, to make AA more attritional.

STATIC AA
-Screamer: widearea anti-bomber. No longer all-powerful. High range, high alpha, but low DPS, very low ROF. Reduce cost to ~1000m. Use to wear down groups of bombers operating in your territory.
-Cobra: widearea aoe/attrition. Weight increase. Range boost. DPS nerf. Inaccurate at longer range, misses fast aircraft. Use against gunships and bomber death-balls.
-Chainsaw: low range DPS. Loses most of its range, but gets ultrahigh ROF (like this model should have). Put near your singus. Good against gunships and shadow spam.
-Hacksaw: low range anti-bomber. Alpha increased, reload increased, cost reduced. Use on front lines to stop com sniping. Good against Lichos/Stilettos.
-Razor: Unchanged.

FIGHTERS
-Vamp: Anti bomber - Weapon changed to razor's AA gun (inaccurate). Slaughters bombers it manages to catch, but somewhat inaccurate against avengers.
-Avengers: Air control - Anti-vamps! They're fast, and they twist, turn and dodge when fighting to avoid inaccurate fire. This makes for spectacular combat with larger vamps. However they have poor DPS against bombers which generally shrug them off. No ground weapon.
-Air warfare: Bombers? Spam vamps. Vamps? Spam avengers. Avengers? Spam bombers.

HIGH ALTITUDE BOMBERS - Defensive attrition attacks against ground over time. They are slow, but they tank damage well, and have time to turn around if you hit heavy AA. Shrug off a few losses against screamers and flak, while strategically avoiding low range AA. With a squad you can do gradual damage in lightly defended areas with small losses.
-Shadow: Precision (guided bomb with less damage, increased HP)
-Phoenix: Saturation (reduced damage, increased number of bombs, increased HP, increased cost)

LOW ALTITUDE BOMBERS - Surprise! Tear-in and devastate your enemy, but facepalm if you lose them! They're powerful, fragile and expensive! They fly low to ground and very fast to avoid inaccurate AA and outrun vamps that aren't in the right position. Just don't go near screamers, chainsaws or hacksaws, or get caught by avengers.
-Licho: Precision (aoe removed, cost reduced to ~1200m)
-Stiletto: Saturation (40% normal damage added, increased cost, speed boost)

VULTURE
-Cheaper (100m), faster, less hp, reduced radar/sight range.
-Outruns everything except avenger

TRIDENT
-Should have to 'face' the enemy, and turns slowly. Has slight advantage against vamps. Can smash avengers when in correct formation, but require attention so as to not get flanked and picked off.

True that would be a nice way to cover retreat actually, though I think you still want a workhorse bomber with something like napalm for reliable light area damage.

Whatever weapon is used, making at least two of the bombers more defensive (tougher, lower damage) would make air less 'volatile' - less OP but more consistantly useful.

Your post lacks structure.

The entire explanation on what problems you are trying to solve and in which ways takes simply 5 lines without any line-breaks.

Changes are sweeping, but largely unexplained in their intention.

Therefore only response you get is Failer's neonpost.

The opening paragraph attempts to state the problem. There is also a structure, with clear headings. Changes are sweeping, yes perhaps that part is true. But the changes only make sense as a group.

The core change I am suggesting is that the relationship between AA and the basic bombers (shadow/phoenix which should operate from high altitude) should be attritiional and more defensive on both sides. I am proposing various methods that do that while keeping various aspects of air factory well balanced.

This solves the problem of air being either massively overpowered, or utterly useless at various stages of the game, while keeping a unique play style. The low altitude bombers retain the high risk elements but are too fragile and expensive to be used as the mainstay of the fac.

It's completely unclear how this fixes anything. Having two separate "targeting groups" of bombers (high/low alt) doesn't seem to offer any real payoff... And how are tanky units "defensive"? Tanky units are almost exclusively offensive in practice.

I mean, I get that some of the anti-air could use a re-work (particularly the high-end AA which are simply 2 tiers of higher-ROF/longer-ranged Hacksaw... plus the Cobra that doesn't seem to ever be useful against good players) but otherwise? I don't get it.

By defensive I mean lower-risk, better defence, less powerful. Pxtl
As stated before, it is a suggestion to fix the suddenly OP, suddenly useless roles air often seems to swing between.

I find avengers are better at countering bombers. Being able to react to bombers with avengers D gun boost is a massive advantage and are on par with vamps when it comes to intial damage but lack the consistant damaage of vamps.

I think personally we need more planes. A fast fighter plane with D gun boost that shoots missles at ground targets but needs to reload could be a good idea. A fast fighter plane that is able to hit targets but has to reload. Could be just 2 missles. Doesn't have to do that much damage. it can have really weak air combat ability lazer gun just to give it some means of defense.

Another idea is a bomber plane that drops mines on the ground.

Also I think another area that planes is really lacking in is that air is used mainly as a way to deploy stuff quickly. Look at SAS, helicoptors, tanks being transported. stuff like that. Currently the transport system in zero k is way 2 unpractical to be used for combat zones, and in a sense a waste of metal considering the size of most maps being medium sized. command and conquer, supreme commander have games where transports can be a game changer by allowing quick relocation of ones forces into another deployment zone.

what air really needs is a zepplin bomber

Low altitude planes are called gunships. That's meant to be the whole difference.

I do think Plane-AA interactions are a bit sloppy, Planes are countered only by AA which becomes useless the moment they make a fac switch, which is why people are forced to make defenders with air rush in 1v1. Commsnipe is also possibly another issue.

These sort of problems would not be helped by the proposed reworks, they're overreaching for what the actual issue is.