AA units shooting ground - why/why not

Considering that most other units weapons consider physics interactions, is there any reason why dedicate AA units can not target ground units? (and do not have ground force fire either, which would have a similar effect).

I tested and if you land a plane behind a land unit, and come with the AA such that it hits the land unit first (see picture), the land unit will get damage from the AA fire (tested with gremlin and toad).

I have no preference either way, but seems inconsistent with the rest of the units. One solution would be to limit AA to fire only at targets above a certain angle (like 30%). This would have the effect that landing planes would evade ground AA, and that you could use AA for high/tall land units.

The angle restriction would have extra drawback like you could try half-burrying the chainsaw to enable it to shoot ground. Similar to how some people used to bury Stingers to exploit line of sight.

It would also cause the adverse effect if you built your AA chainsaw on hill it could cause it not being able to shoot anything at all and that would be hugely counter-intuitive.

I could accept the idea of AA being able to shoot air everywhere (apart from landed) and all units above certain (high altitude).

Such behaviour would patch some hard to counter tactics, like using some strategies to send things to "space", using newton ramps to rain some units like puppies or pyros and have some few interactions with jump-jets discouraging the use of jump in rage of heavy AA. Could also be used to open those Razors to kill them easier without bringing in actual air - I don't mind that interaction.

If chainsaw could hit anything with even very low dps like 5 per shot - it would be kinda game breaking.


AA shooting landed, non moving units is kinda not fair to be honest and looks silly. I'd be glad to remove that thing. It would also make Reef slightly more viable and some sense to use.

In general I vote Nay.

Zero-K has flex AA, which means actual AA has to have great range and/or damage for cost in order to be worth the trouble. If you allow current AA to also fire at ground as is, it would be OP.

Zero-K's entire air game would have to be redesigned to solve this inconsistency.

That aside, it would indeed be nice if landed air units were not shot at by AA.

I can understand the arguments against generally letting AA damaging ground units (then we should use less the argument "but it is physics", in other discussions), but then maybe they should never deal damage? Did not check, but how large is the AOE of ettin (heavy tank aa)? Can it damage ground units as well? Would that expose cloaked ground units?

Scenario: 2 coms, 1 ettin on one side, another side 1 ulti, 1 raven. Raven approaches comms while ulti close, ettin fires at raven, un-cloaks ulti. Is this something desired? (it would be very hard to observe "in the heat of the battle")

For the record this is mostly nit-picking, I do not think this is essential, but thought about it and is interesting to discuss.

Ah, so in the end we have damage based on unit types for something. Did not know that. Indeed the gremlins hitting the cyclops in my image felt like they do not do enough damage, but did not check the numbers.

Not sure it is the only way to respect that goal. Idea: AA can make plane fall and hit the ground taking damage. As units on the ground have nowhere to fall, such an AA would not be flex AA even if it shoots ground. (in fact, bonus points if they can make ships/hovers sink beneath sea surface :-p).

ZK units are smart on their own, but you can give manual commands for special cases.

Ex: Ground units can fire blindly to detect cloaked units (plus the automated annoying widgets that makes lotus fire around). You would not expect those ground units to start firing on their own to the ground, but they still can.

Can ground AA do the same? Ex: can you detect Athena without air units?

I think now you can't target ground because then you could hit ground units, not because there are no cases in which you would want them to fire (see example above).

I understand the current situation, was just thinking and commenting on other, indirect effects. I am not suggesting that we need to do soon one thing or another.

An AA unit targeting ground shouldn't probably fire at the ground, but could fire at some default sky altitude (to make a barrage, same way you can do with ground units)