Likho dominates air play

I don't play air myself, but I have noticed that airplanes that aren't Likho seem to be an early game thing, and past a certain point all you ever see are Likhos. I find that rather boring.

Its possible that their attack is too good or too flexible. Its a massive guided punch with a large AoE. Likhos are used to take out anything and everything, even raider swarms trying to penetrate enemy territory.

I would say that Likho should be more specialized, but I guess airfac as a whole would need an overhaul to support that. Thoughts?

I have to partially agree, and disagree at the same time.



Most beginners/inexperienced air players just go for swifts into full likho spam all game. Thats true.

The reason for this are simple:
Likho admits mistakes: it does not die so fast
Likho deals great damage: 2000 dmg is enough to kill all basic units, and even some more tanky units
Likho does have aoe: unit clusters are no problem for likho

As you can see likho does provide an easy gameplay.




But to truely use the full potential of the air factory you need to use the other planes too.

Lets look at the other 3 main planes used offensively:
Phoenix, Thunderbird and Raven

Raven costs 300 metal and deals 800 hp dmg, but only to a single target
Thunderbird costs, i think 650? and does stun basically everything for +-17 seconds.
Phoenix has napalm that does deal 500 dmg including the burn dmg, and the aoe ability is considerable

All 3 planes have the same weakness or relatively low hp. With Thunderbird being the best and Phoenix the worst in that aspect.


The best way to understand how they can be bether then Likho is to go with examples:


1st: One of the main jobs of the airplayer should always be to snipe retreating big units that are nearly dead, but your team is unable to finish them off. Yes likho can deal 2000 dmg, but thats often not enough. Raven is king in this area.

2nd: Sniping commanders, especially early game. You can get 5 Raven way earlier then the likho at the beginning of the game. 5 Raven deal 4000 dmg, Most coms have less or only slightly more hp, so snipe them and if they survive finish them off with swifts.

3rd: Wide spread out units. Shure Likho has Aoe, but honestly the Aoe is very small. And good air players are aware of that weakness. The only reason why Likho is so good against balls is because people tend to cluster units, but if you have good players that spread out their units, then they are quite useless and overexpensive. Therefor Phoenix is the way to go here.

4th: Sometimes you dont have alot of metal, and your team just needs an opening. Then its thunderbird time: If you can stun an army for 15 seconds while your teammate runs 20 glaives into that army the army is dead for a cost of 0 metal. And that is the true power of air gameplay.

5th: Spread out single units, and no teammate can stop them. Use area-attack-command and Ravens will punish the fool that has no aa. Raven has such a fast reload time, and such high dps, with 5 ravens you can kill at least 20 units in a minute. (if you have enough spots for the reloard)

There are certainly more examples, but i think this clearly proves that there are just so many situations where the oither planes are bether suited to do the job then likho that they definetly have earned their spot in the factory.




Just my personal opinion but there are about 10 active players in Zero-k that truly know how to play air. I think that is because of the very hard learning curve, and the lack of understanding what air gameplay is all about.
Air is not only about dealing most dmg.
Air can do so much more:

Air has the fastest units in all of Zero-K, so the airplayer can help everyone at anytime!
Air has the best scouting abilities. Owl is key here, and we all know the Swiftburst for the basescout.
Air is the factory that allows for some of the best teamwork there can possibly be. (Stun, bomb defenses, kill that 1 annoying unit etc)
The airplayer is also the eyes of the whole team! Most players focus to much on "their" front. But the airplayer normaly watches the whole map. So they should be the most actively communicating player in their team, because they see everything first.

Air is an amazing factory, but it takes time to rly understand it.
And experience! Air is not a beginner friendly factory!
Which is partially a reason why there are only very few good airplayers.



If i were to suggest something to people that want to try out air, then it would be to start in a small teamgame, like 4v4 or 5v5. Then there isnt so much anti air, and you wont loose your planes so fast.
Also keep in mind, that there is 1 important thing that you need to do: Make cost overall! Most people play air and wait to make that 1 big hit. Thats why you often see the airplayers charts look like stairs.
But often they do less dmg then they could have done if then just went for the small stuff too.
If a Raven bombs 2 mexes and 3 solars it also made cost! Shure, it takes 5 shtos, but bether do those then fly around the backyard ;)


Ok that post became way longer then expected.
If someone wants any advice towards airplay, dont hesitate to contact me.

I don't play air that much in big team games but I use it in small games frequently as a facswitch, and I rarely make likhos then unless I am against dense shield balls or some other things.

I think that in the big team games people like likhos for their hp.

Licho is super generalist and robust. Raven + Phoenix are both situational and fragile.

A top player can get the most from situational and fragile units, but most players won't (and so quite sensibly stick to Licho).

Imo the most boring factory.

IMO air just needs Raven splitting into two different units so there is actual meaningful choices in plane composition.

[Spoiler]

In heavy team games, range effects become more powerful, because its easier and easier to deal crippling damage to shorter range units before they engage.

You see this with less raiders, more skirmishers and artillery, and the like.

This extends to anti-air as well, which has much more range than air. Eventually it hits a threshold that you cannot efficiently engage in its domain, this threshold is higher for licho, and smallest for phoenix.

If we want lower weight air to be able to engage in these areas, we need something akin to the armored mode of halberd, or perhaps even the inverse, aircraft that lose the ability to attack below a certain percentage of damage, without dying. Then you can naturally create attack forces that will suffer lower attrition but still interact with AA sensibly.

These sorts of units are somewhat unintuitive, but this is what I feel needs to be done if air is to be 'noob friendly' or more versatile in large games.

I suspect one of the reasons less-experienced air players avoid Thunderbird (and to a lesser extent Phoenix) is that setting up a bombing line is fairly jank/unintuitive and micro-intensive.
One of the first things I tried was drawing a smooth approach curve with line move - which resulted in it flying straight to the first point at the wrong angle, overshooting terribly and then doing crazy S patterns along the rest of the waypoints on the line. Until you get a proper feel for the handling of line bombers you can't accurately waypoint them and your only option is to babysit them and make constant corrections to get them to go where you want.

I suspect if a nice widget were implemented that allowed players to draw a target line and have the pathing work out how to approach that, Thunderbirds (and maybe Phoenices) might see a lot more use.

Ravens don't have this problem, though the (lack of) retreat pathing does give them a level of babysitting that makes small numbers of Likhos more attractive than large numbers of Ravens.

I don't have time to comment now, but I am thinking this way too and previously pushed this: https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K/commit/10ccc5be01f7eb63f0bf9289b54da7bd6f84f320

Is that a phoenix nerf in the commit? Wiki mentions reload of 1s for phoenix, did that become 5s?

ZK Midgame (and endgame really) is about trying to trade damage efficiently. Land game revolves heavily around skirm/arty wars, trying to hit enemy units without getting hit in return; with the losing player then trying to find a way to deal with opponent's arty superiority.
So it is only natural that a unit with best ability to trade favorably is the one to dominate the air play. The ability to deal with clumped and individual units is a nice plus, but the real advanage of Licho is its ability to safely return home after a bombing run. Licho has a better chance to pay back its value thanks to its survivability, while with other bombers you need to kill a lot of value within first run or two because their chances of survival beyond that are near zero.
Shadow is especially prone to catastrophic losses with its dive mechanics, which suddenly make it weak to flex-aa and also to any form of AOE. So you need to constantly manage it to make sure it hits the target and survives, while with Licho you can keep "set target and forget" attitude for a very long time until the opponent finally gets enough AA to make you worried.

In my opinion, shadow (and probably phoeniz too) would really benefit from heavier weight and a buff to speed or HP to boost its survivability. Also perhaps the dive mode should be disabled by default? Missing a target sucks, but losing all your bombers to a mismicroed/misjudged dive sucks much worse in my opinion.
If the devs are concerned with earliygame viability of the fac, they should consider that it's not viable anyway due rearm times and repair costs not being affordable in earlygame. I'd really love to see some sort of A10 Warthog-style assault fighter to better fill the earlygame anti-ground role. Perhaps give it very low hp so it dies even against even light AA so it doesnt scale beyond earlygame.


Also, while we are on the topic of Air units, does anyone actually like the way Raptor slows down to absolute crawl (and also clips into other raptors) when chasing enemy air units? It looks so incredibly dumb holy shit. If it can go so slow, why not just let it stop midair and call it a fucking gunship?
The funniest thing is that Air used to have really cool combat (In extremely ancient CA times), but then some dumb fuck decided to make air vs air combat ugly as shit with some dumb excuse no one cares about, like streamlining raptor behavior or something. I will NEVER stop being mad about this