Swifts firing when landed

Yesterday evening I have seen landed swifts used as "generic weapon" multiple times. This increases their efficiency (in air, they need to turn back to fire again at a target). I feel this is against the unit design, and mostly a "hack".

As I prefer not to use things I perceive as "hacks" I did not use it, but if this is considered part of the unit design then will probably try to use it more - hence the question: is this intended/approved/desired or not? If not would suggest disabling it automatically for landed planes to avoid "discussions"...

Ideally this could be automated, or designed away.

quote: they are pretty strong but very easily countered by AA.

My question is: are they balanced for this kind of interaction. In air their DPS is different than landed, due to "fly by".

quote: Ideally this could be automated, or designed away.

Automated as in make them land at largest distance from target?

quote: That would be an inconsistency. And a widget would be created making the plane constantly land and liftoff to prevent this "fix".

As soon as you start "landing procedure" you should stop firing. Not sure what is the inconsistency, there are other units that require a certain state to fire (ex: fencer whom fires only when stopped).

quote: since the Swift laser ground weapon creates no fun gameplay interactions

I like that, if nothing else, air player can (slowly) kill raiders. But you need quite an overwhelming number of swifts to do that...

Edit:

quote: Or at least one of the worst offenders :P sorry.

No need to be sorry, I think we better abuse/clarify behaviors/what to expect.

So as the supposedly aggrieved party in this situation, I don't feel that what was happening is unbalanced in any way. I was using halberds on hold fire to run past everything in the front to raid. I tried bring flails along, but they were just too fragile and would all die, and yes, the swifts did seem to do a pretty good job of stopping the raids, but let us consider the other aspects of the situation. First, our team was loosing and basically not contesting air superiority or making significant amounts of anti-air. Second, there was way more metal's worth of swifts than of halberds. And third, this is a map where the little hills separating the flat terrace areas of the map are barely pathable by hovers. Actually, I feel that it was the pathing up the hills that was creating the most problems. If the halberds had been able to just charge past the swifts into the base more easily I don't think the swifts would have been nearly as effective, but the hills just bogged the movement too much for this to work well.

I agree its a hack and would prefer this to not be a thing.

Swifts could maybe have a battery to discourage this use. On air they don't run out their battery when firing because they do flybys. On land they fire continuously so their battery runs out. This reduces the DPS disparity between flying and landed swift.

Part of it is also that halberds don't have much range. I doubt that bandits or glaives, for example, would have been as shut down by landed swifts.

quote: That would be an inconsistency. And a widget would be created making the plane constantly land and liftoff to prevent this "fix".

Are you certain? I don't think we'll know what sort of weapon block would be required to stop a widget. I'm pretty sure Swifts not firing while landed is possible, it just takes someone to write it.