Gunships

Gunships have too many duplicate roles and boring units without any special ability, cool weapons or interesting usage atm, particularly the brawler and black dawn - they have almost identical roles and optimal targets (AoE antiswarm).

It would be nice to change this, esp considering new players often use this factory exclusively (and poorly). Specifically, I think it would be nice to rethink the black dawn.. its current execution is functional but little more than a brawler duplicate.

I have an idea of sorts for it; turn it into a form of artillery, that is, remove its strafing, reduce its speed, and give it a semi-accurate long range weapon. Its usage would be similar to that of other artillery, with the exception that it can be positioned almost anywhere and escape ground pursuit easily.

not that I want people to sperm tl;dr neonstorm-esque ideas all over the thread, but thoughts?

Also: this would allow you to leave cool little traps if you know a heavy enemy is coming your way: Black Dawn could plop down a big load of mines in the path of the incoming enemy.

Put a shield on the brawler, because a flying shielded unit would be awesome... then again, there's already two "tanking" gunships in the Rapier and the Brawler.

And in 2-faction CA there was, in fact, an impulse-mine bomber. It wasn't popular.

Areas where we can differentiate the black dawn and the brawler include cost (900, 850), flight height (210), HP (2800, 2900), turret arc (90, 100), AoE (96, 40), range (450, 500), speed (4.65, 4.7), DPS (195, 192).

Areas that are already differentiated is basically reloadtime (9, 0.45).

Wow that was enlightening. If anything I think these units have CONVERGED since CA.

I think the Blackdawn is the more interesting unit. Its micro is much more engaging with its skirm mechanics. They actually have identical flight heights. At one point I really did differentiate them by cost and flight height, but people keep balancing their costs up or down which has converged on a 50 cost difference >_>. Licho also hates low flying gunships, (Because 'everything can hit them') which is the whole goddamn point! So that got reverted.

Cloak is bad on gunships, they are AT and fast, and they fly high- it would need to fly very low and/or have a huge detection radius and even then I don't like it on a gunship.

I'd like to give the blackdawn an artillery d-gun type command that emits highly inaccurate ranged missiles, the way you used to be able to FPS it to do that. Doesn't change its usage otherwise, but gives gunships some capacity to fire into AA zones, so you can still utilize some of a blackdawns DPS while you arent taking AA fire.

Otherwise... we can balance them more towards a riot vs assault role, with one having the AoE and damage, and the other having the flight height and HP. Turret arc is also a good candidate, the Vindicator is used very differently than other gunships, and it is a shame that it has to be nerfed into obsolescence (and the only similiar unit is the krow). Perhaps Brawler could get a wider turret arc.

+1 to Saktoth suggestion, although whats the use of changing flight height? Most AA units are either homing or rapid fire, and as an assault I would think it would want to be first target in a mixed squadron.

I like the mine dropping black dawn. With reload time and 20ish mines dropping. Gives the gunship player more options.

Ick, no. Dgun commands shouldn't appear on any unit that costs under 2000 metal. Too much obscure micro for a mainline unit.

Changes I'd do for gunships:

Blastwing:
Make it be able to stay underwater, and improve the interface, give us a new command that can place mobile bombs in a proper formation that can avoid the chain explosions.

Valkyrie:
Reduce its cost to 50, and give it higher flying altitude, I really want the possibility of spamming Valkyries to block the missiles.

Brawler:
Give it wider turrent arc.

Black Dawn：
Reduce its range and flying altitude, so "everything can hit it", and give it higher speed.
It should be a lot weaker than Brawler on constant attacking, but be able to store rockets and fire them all at a time, this would make it a interesting hit and run unit without much micro.

BD with a lower altitude would be a smaller Krow, but if it fires it's missles more horizontally, it could hit more likely.
Razzor would hit less likely, because BD is a horizontal unit.
Riots are supposed to hit fast, light units. BD hits big units.

Brawler needs to be more assault-like: against ground targets it is only a better banshee!!
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Some experiences:
* A single Banshee has a break every 2 seconds if it fires at cloaked units.
* You need 9-10 AA-gunships to kill a shadow - that are 10 times the metal as you need with Hacksaws.

* Blastwings sometimes don't kill a mex - especially with newbes. If we buff the damage by only 5%, we can reduce the micro. It is way too micro-intensive to counter glaives with Blastwings - they slow down in front of the target ( they should NOT )

* 1 Banshee + 4 gnats counter 2 BDs/Brawlers - 500m to counter 1800m is the most effective AA.
* Banshees can't raid Welders.
* Vindicator with 2*50dps*1100HP > 1*35dps*1300HP Rapier? => But Vindi dies!!!

I wonder if all BD needs to get better would be a nice autoskirm behavior that pulls out of firing range between shots.