Phoenix too weak now

I think nerfing the AoE and burn at the same time was indeed too drastic.

this shows me a blank page :)

Iirc, the fireball of the Phoenix is purely graphical fluff, isn't it? All the damage is done by the initial explosion and by the units burning to death... imho, that was big problem of the Phoenix - it's too good against light skirms and raiders, but worthless against slow-moving clusters of heavier units. The fireball buff would fix that.

I think it needs to be less powerful to let weak units be massed again.

but why does it need to be weaker against small units? its after all a bomber, it only has 1 shot and it can be shot down very easily. you could already spread out your raiders to be relativly safe, and you could protect them with aa as well. if people dont spread out their units, they will fall victim to pretty much any kind of area attacks. this goes for any kind of riot unit, you might argue riots are too strong but really the only thing that can go wrong is that somebody walks his raiders right into a bunch of riots, in any other case the raiders just go someplace else and are safe.

its very similar for phoenixes actually, you can mass up weak units, as long as you spread them out the bomber can only ever hit a few of them. given the risk involved and the limited ammunation, why would you want it to hit even fewer and then maybe not even kill those that were hit? not to mention the fact that not having aa with your units is, and should remain, a bad idea. a player using light units shouldnt be able to just ignore a phoenix, he should be in great fear of beeing bombed and thus invest in aa.

ok, but isnt it good that theres a counter to skirmishers? i always wondered how youre supposed to kill them, anyway. most factories have problems to kill skirmishers, unless im mistaken here and doing something terribly wrong :) so its a good thing that theres a factory thats good at it, and even then, you can just pack some tarantulas to your recluses and then napalm bomber isnt a big problem anymore. i dont see why this fine mechanic needs to be owled to the point that napalm bomber is hardly worth using anymore - its no longer good at killing swarms of units, nor is it particularly good against buildings. you will now need 2 napalm bombers to kill a single mex, you cant set on fire vast amounts of structures because they dont actually burn anymore. it was already bad at anything else.

and i may add, i just played 2 games against google in which he used napalm bombers and it was not worth it at all. he killed 1 mex in two attacks, he lost it in the second because i had aa already. he did bomb some outlaws and thugs, but since they dont burn anymore, they basically just ignored it. they took like 300 damage each(if even), thats just ridiculous for a unit that needs to reload after each shot and dies to 3 defenders. to make considerable damage to anything with phoenixes now, you will need lots and lots of them and then youre at the point where you probably just make some stilletos or a licho. you are not going to make 2 napalms so you can bomb mexes, you will make a prec bomber instead or just not do it anymore.