Ravens and air in general is broken and almost unusable

1. Factory "land" mode is broken
How to reproduce: Set factory mode to "land", set way point out of factory somewhere nearby
Happening: Planes fly out of factory and CONTINUE to fly over way point
Expected: Planes fly out of factory and LAND at designated way point

2. Ravens fail to bomb fat moving targets half of the time when set to DIVE mode
http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/702122

3. Area attack command mysteriously fails to work in some cases while perfectly working in other
https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/700767

4. Existing bombers in need of rearm do not pickup freshly built air pads unless u manually order them to re-arm
Non critical, but damn annoying

5. And most importantly - there seems to be design/balance issues with air

- Ravens are awful vs bombing moderately small units, read rovers, warriors, zeuses etc
they are painfully slow while diving, dying to glaives and scorchers, but can't hit anything moving while not diving

- Phoenixes aren't designed for this kind of task and made from paper

- Lichos are too expensive and can't deal with high HP units anyway due to low damage

- Hawks are problematic as superiority fighters - die even to damn brawlers and black downs and are soooo painfully slow in reaction time on big maps.

so... all shit considered I'd think twice before starting air fac ur next game unless u are into mindless swift spam, this shit seems to work great

2. Lets try reducing the perceived horizontal size of their targets: https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K/commit/9a408ebd0373b6ea923a7ebd55b3ca11bb0d7a80

I wasn't able to reproduce the issue.

I think he meant it is bad that swift is too good at stopping raid

My biggest problem with air is that Swift are much better at AA than Raptors due to their AA rocket that gives them high alpha damage as they can just fly past other air units and fire their rockets destroying half of the enemy air force (depending on the swift squad size) before taking a single loss and can then proceed to boost back home.
Overall, I think that the Swift speedboost is too strong, because it allows really strong scouting possibilities by simply sending few swifts to fly over enemy base and scout all antinukes and factories before AA gets chance to take them out. Do we really need a unit that can cross the map in one second?

Raptor, like mentioned is too weak AA unit compared to Swifts, and fails pretty easily against a squad of Harpies that will drop their DPS and movement speed to rock bottom with slow damage, while a squad of Swifts can just come and alpha the harpies and then proceed to outnumber them. On the other hand a squad of Swifts could easily fire their rockets at harpies without even going to harpies attack range.

whats bad is hawk,its literly hopeless against anything except slow gunships,and even there they suck they loose to brawlers they cant even kill locusts and even struggle against proper microed harpy :)) they cant even kill radar plane cause they are so slow and will never protect you against bombers or wyvern because those are faster than them worse part is they have even shittier dmg than swift for cost.Might as well remove them imo swift dose everything better and can actually do everything.

Im uncertain how raven is anti heavy when u need 2x the cost in bombers to kill a goliath or any strider.

Regular airplay strategy - spam swifts make + 1 radar plane and eventually wyvern gg job well done

Sigero

quote: Im uncertain how raven is anti heavy when u need 2x the cost in bombers to kill a goliath or any strider.

No you don't need 2x cost. You need two passes with 1x cost.
Except Funnelweb, it dies to Ravens easily.

Rearming the missile is a great idea for kicking down Swift under Raptor in effectiveness as AA, sure it'll still be able to boom'n'zoom past all enemy air but only once per flight and if enemy is fielding a lot of them they'll have to invest into airfields.

Alternative is to just give the missile to Raptor as well, since there's literally no reason currently to build Raptors when Swifts do their job better at lower cost AND can attack ground.

Sigero: You can rearm Ravens in about 20 seconds. How much AA can the enemy realistically get in that time?

i do not think either hawk is too weak as AA or swift is too stronk.

you just need a critical (unholy) big amount of hawks to dominate air. area attack (if it works!) all swifts (all hawks pick one swift at a time) and they all are forced to escape or die. they got no time to turn around and flee when damaged. this compensates even for the slowlyness of hawks.

what i would like to see is swift rocket remove AOE. i dunno if this is already the case. rearming swift rocket is an interesting concept, which i do not have yet an opinionm. needs a tryout phase.


####


brawlers's AA capacity is ridiculous. it is meant to be "artillery" right ? so either remove its AOE or make its bullets even slower so it has no chance of hitting faster units.

Hawk dominates small maps where swifts cant maneuver. Hawk also dominates vs krow spam and some gs balls who are slow and can be detected enough fast.
Swift dominate in large maps with their hit and run attack. They are bad vs meat target like krow or even brawler spam. And if bad players also vs rapiers.
They are fine.
Only rework need for phoenix who still is unused except in some cases. For 360 metalz it could be bit better. When few enemy fighters appear phoenixes start fall like soviet planes in WW2. And they are not resurrected like phoenixes in HooM3.
Raven seems fine.
Licho seems fine. At least reload time is shorter.
Thunderbird seems fine. But wit new fellon buff it can be debatable. But i didn't try disarm shield ball yet.