Current Raven is horrible. Balance-wise, its semi-OWLed. Aesthetically, the dive looks and feels appalling. Not to bang on about the past, but the pre-dive 400m Raven of old felt really elegant. Moreover, it really felt like a high flying plane, in the same way that current Ravens feel more like stupid Moths, stupidly flapping into units. I even loved the old com dodge quicktime event and hacksaw interactions. Since we've effectively established that a low weight raven capable of countering all mobile units makes the game practically no fun, could we consider moving in the other direction with it? Strip out the ugly, stupid dive and turn it into a straight-out slayer of immobiles? Then we could bring in a separate plane (the.. kestrel?) for attacking mobiles. This would be awesome, because then you wouldn't be building a single unit for all roles > defending territory > attacking enemy high value targets > deep striking to blow up singu > harassment I prefer the game with the Raven out and economy nerfed to no end, it plays really great, but I do sometimes wish we could turn the clock back on air.
+3 / -0
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Changing Raven won't fix the planes fac sillyness. We'd need to add the one more plane to fill the gap, and rework them complitely so they don't overlap with each other. Currently: - Raven is anti heavy/structure, and it's not bad at it. It used t overlap with Phoenix at killing mobiles but it no longer does, which is good. - Phoenix is anti swarm/anti light porc, and its horrible at it - Licho is anti-everything, and it's good at it... Personally I think that we should: - Get an attack/assault aircraft, mix of avenger and brawler, for killing single raiders that manage to get into your lines. It'd be capable of hurting enemy aircrafts aswell, but wouldn't be very good at it. It would overlap with avenger a bit in hurting groudnd targets, but avenger is a scout plane, isn't it? - Then Raven should be reworked as ivory said - high altitude anti-heavy/structure bomber. - Phoenix - give it 2 rows (one from under each wing) of 6-7 clusterbombs (the Krow's ones) instead of napalms, for being anti swarm, becasue napalms suck. - And rework Licho a bit so it's not ''spam this if u dont know what to do'' unit anymore.
+1 / -0
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I have been complaining about how terrible Phoenix is in every Air thread and i will not stop until it gets fixed. Using a swarm of old pre-napalm phoenixes to bomb an enemy unitblob was one of the most satisfying feelings ever.
+1 / -0
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Existence of efficient cheap area bombers means that any unit blobs stop existing just as much as existence of efficient cheap precision bombers means that nothing gets by. Both options hurt the land game a great deal. The things i dislike about current raven are mostly aesthetic. The melee bomb plane is irksome, and it doesn't even deign to use a chainsaw/lance/sword. My own take at precision bomber would be ~400 cost low-altitude (shootable by at least leveler, maybe even glaive) flying scalpel: - ground interaction - not being a melee plane - no slow-motion dive - no quick time events, missiles are inevitable - can shoot other slow air (brawler, krow...) in a non-stupid (e.g. non-melee) fashion - slightly too expensive to use against raiders frivolously - can easily be made to shoot submerged targets reliably - doesn't look back at explosions, like all the cool guys
+1 / -0
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  FailerLicho isn't anti-everything. It's anti-midgame units. Compared to ravens it's single target damage per cost is rubbish (2000 metal in ravens gives over 5000 damage, compared to wyverns's 2000, and its weight is too heavy to justify hitting the light stuff. It is very good though, and has high generality in a pinch. Has anybody noticed how good "bad" ravens have been going of late? Especially in teams. People seem to be using them for what they're good at, and the meta has shifted towards less raven caution. They seem viable again, despite how very much worse they are now. I still take issue with how silly the slow dive looks.
+0 / -0
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    Anarchid I think that precision bomber is a huge evil to everything that stands on the ground in ZK. In ZK precision bomber = a generalist bomber. If it's fast enough to catch up with Glaive, it'll be fast enough to lose only few planes while passing enemy AA line and bomb whatever is worth bombing in the back. That's why I think that we should avoid precision bomber and create heavier version of avenger instead. A plane which could deal with light and medium units quite fast but wouldn't be able to insta kill singu, giving defenders some time to react. Then for killing structures we should get a high altitude heavy and slow anti-structure bomber which can withstand some AA fire, but needs escort and softening enemy AA porc beforehand.  SnuggleBass I didn't say they are OP, but they indeed are anti-eveyrthing. You can kill cluster of light units with it, you can kill heavies, you can kill light adn medium porc. Yes, you are right, Ravens have more DMG/cost, but to kill incoming ball of whatever you need a few Ravens, and only one Licho. It's worse at killing structures like Singus or Nukes tho.
+1 / -0
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I don't think a plane stuck at a sufficiently low altitude to be shot with levelers will be very efficient at killing Singus, or working against any kind of an entrenched ground position.
+0 / -0
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Most of the maps have a point where there are no units, becsaue it's either not worth sending units there or its not passable by any fac but spiders, or air. But spiders are slow giving more time to react. Such bombers would need to catch Glaive, so they woudln't be slow. It's like Jack with Flea's speed. OFC you CAN deal with it. But most of the times you wouldn't do it in time.
+0 / -0
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I think Licho is AOK where it is, same for rest of planes (except phoenix, but that needs its own thread). Raven: quote:
think that precision bomber is a huge evil to everything that stands on the ground in ZK. In ZK precision bomber = a generalist bomber. |
Bang on imo - precision bomber being a cost effective (and well weighted) answer to mobile land units is harmful to balance unless it is OWLed. And if it is not able to hit mobile land units, because phoenix blows the fac is semi useless. It just felt better designed when Raven was higher weight.
+0 / -0
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quote:
Existence of efficient cheap area bombers means that any unit blobs stop existing just as much as existence of efficient cheap precision bombers means that nothing gets by. |
The only major difference between napalm phoenix and concussion phoenix is that napalm doesnt scale. In earlygame, where you only use 1-3 bombers, napalm is actually better due to DoT damage and area denial. And by midgame the oppponents should have at least some basic AA, and with phoenix's meager HP it means losses. If you suffer 33% losses on average run, your bombers must fully return cost in 3 or less runs to be viable. Having to minimise losses is one of the reasons the bombers are more commonly used for defence - enemies usually breakthrough with a mix of assaults and raiders, bombing these costs you nothing once they are outside of AA-covered zone. And guess what? Phoenixes suck against those classes. Assaults are just too tough, while raiders can usually at leas partially dodge the bombs.
+0 / -0
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what about a more fragile, bombing plane, slow weapon/no tracking flying at high altitude (2-3x like current planes) to deepstrike statics (limits ground interaction) slow speed (AA planes eat them, long range statics AA too)
+0 / -0
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quote:
what about fragile plane that can only attack statics which are not even covered by defenders |
Sounds useful.
+1 / -0
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Expensive Raven (450 metal) felt too swingy. Losing even one of them in a bombing run was a big deal but they had the health to lose none. This made the attrition very binary in that you would either lose a lot of your investment or get away for free. The cheaper Raven makes attrition possibly without any non-0 attrition hurting a lot. The quicktime event was just a bad mechanic. If you split Raven what are the relative powers of the two planes? Is the anti-static bomber better than Raven is now? What can the anti-mobile bombers hit? How do you stop people just spamming the anti-mobile bomber and forgetting about statics? I am not convinced that a single flexible bomber is a bad thing.
+1 / -0
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quote:
How do you stop people just spamming the anti-mobile bomber and forgetting about statics? |
quote:
In ZK precision bomber = a generalist bomber. |
quote:
That's why I think that we should avoid precision bomber and create heavier version of avenger [to kill units] instead. |
Do we need to have only bombers dealing damage to ground? We could have heavier version of Avenger to deal with single lighter to medium units/porc (it overlaps with Avenger a bit, but you're not gonna kill HLT with avengers, unless u have 100 of those, tahts why we should have heavier version of this). With such plane you wouldn't insta-kill HLT, in imaginary situation you could start attacking then realize that enemy brought up AA so cease the fire and run away. With bomber it's either all or nothing, with such plane there also can be a draw. Then for clusters of lighter porc/units we would have Phoenix with Krow's cluster bombs (just not so many, and dropped in more planeish way), which would work versus clusters or rows of targets, but wouldnt be very efficient vs single ones (no matter heavy or tiny) as most of the bombs would miss, or hit only with AoE. So we're left with those big buildings that should be dealt with heavy strategic bomber, which would be a new Raven.
+0 / -0
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The anti static bomber has attributes useful for deep striking (resilience, payload). The anti mobile plane has attributes useful for defending (speed, accuracy) quote:
How do you stop people just spamming the anti-mobile bomber and forgetting about statics? |
by.. beating them at the game? I mean, how do you stop people spamming glaives and make them use Zeus? An anti mobile bomber doesn't need to be resilient, it just needs to be accurate and fast. An anti static bomber doesn't need to be accurate (or to be specific, doesn't need to hit a moving target). It just needs to drop its payload and preferably survive. One isn't going to cover well for the other. quote:
I am not convinced that a single flexible bomber is a bad thing. |
So with a landfac, against an enemy composition I have to use a precise mix of different types (raider, riot, assault, skirmisher, artillery, utility, chaff) for the best result. An an airfac fighting a landfac, I press the raven button and the repeat button, perhaps alt-adding a thunderbird to the front of the queue every now and again. Isn't that a bit..
+0 / -0
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Raven change was good, I was surprised that it worked as well as it did. It completely solved the issue of mandatory raven monospam winning every game by simply being able to mass bomb everything from glaives to lvl 5 coms with super effectiveness regardless of any amount of AA. With this change ravens can still counter the types of units they are supposed to counter, can still bomb coms and tanks and things, but they just dont do it with perfect efficiency and speed. They are by no means a useless unit now, they just stopped being all-purpose OP bombers. With the old raven, they could be used on big maps in 1v1 as a 100% safeguard shield for invading units, this was such a boring play style. Precision bomber to me is something that smashes heavy units and buildings, so it is a lot more fitting for it's role now imo.
+3 / -0
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quote:
]If you split Raven what are the relative powers of the two planes? Is the anti-static bomber better than Raven is now? What can the anti-mobile bombers hit? How do you stop people just spamming the anti-mobile bomber and forgetting about statics? |
The Raven I suppose would be like the 450m Raven, but without the accuracy. The anti mobile bomber would deliver single target precision against mobile units just like the current Raven, but without the resilience
+0 / -0
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Why are you sticking so closely to bombers? If every unit in the game had plasma cannon ZK would be boring. Also with bombers you either deal full damage or none. There is no risk factor like with ground raiders in example. Just pure calculation. <- something like this would 1st of all add more fun to bombers spam in air fac and also bring some new way of balanceing and dealing with problems.
+0 / -0
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quote:
If you split Raven what are the relative powers of the two planes? Is the anti-static bomber better than Raven is now? |
Anti-static: Moderate cost (400), high altitude, high health, relatively slow speed, doesnt dive. Drops a very tight cluster of 1-4 bombs that travel in proper ballistic trajectory and explode kinda like a small banisher missile - small AOE, but decent damage and cool loud explosion. Anti-mobile: Relatively cheap (250-300), medium altitude, relatively high speed, very low health (20%-30% lower than current raven), low damage, can dive. The point is that the anti-mobile bombers should suffer losses even against position with very light AA, so bombing shit within enemy AA line of fire is a bad option. The reason you'd use anti-static over anti-mobile: Enemy has some defenders, or maybe 1-2 mobile AA units. Reason you'd use anti-static over Licho: cheaper, higher damage per cost, doesnt have a tendency to fucking miss, flies higher.
+0 / -0
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What's this obsession with dive.
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