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Gunships feeling too easy to shut down

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Atm it feels very difficult to make cost with gunships if the enemy is being even slightly competent at AA coverage. It doesn't take a lot to shut down gunships.

Almost any AA shuts down everything smaller than Nimbus/Revenant.

Nimbus can endure some AA coverage mostly due to its long range, but if it has to enter an AA zone or is being zoned out by something like Chainsaw, it has to choose between either suiciding at a loss, or getting minimal returns shooting at stuff for a few seconds at a time before having to retreat and repair. Large Nimbus groups fare better, but those are highly vulnerable to anything with AoE and tend to suffer a lot of attrition. I guess its something to win the game with if your team is swimming in metal, but it doesn't feel like something that can ever trade evenly against a reasonably competent opponent.

Revenant fares a little better, it can usually dive deep into, say, one razor's range, drop some rockets on the head of something, and retreat. However, 2-3 razors or equivalent firepower will shut it down.

All of the above is compounded by the miracle of flex AA, and the fact that all sorts of weird units besides AA will hit gunships hard unexpectedly. For example, Lance makes a great, long-ranged flex AA against heavy gunships.

Krow just doesn't have enough health to get anything done. Its decent at bullying areas with low-to-moderate enemy presence, but you don't need a 4500 metal gunship for that. If you fly it into a high-density zone, it just gets insta-gibbed, even if they don't have a lot of proper AA.
+2 / -0
3 years ago
gunships seem to play nice with cloak and even shields but ye aa is very good.. if its not then gunships are op
+0 / -0
3 years ago
I feel gunships actually impact shields negatively if the enemy has a decent amount of AA. AA weapons have a high DPS and long range, so gunships inside a shield give the enemy an ez way to drain the shield.

I dunno, there is so much flex AA atm that maybe dedicated AA doesn't have to be amazing anymore, at least not against gunships. Gunships struggle even against regular armies, I frequently have even the likes of skirmishers, artillery and assaults giving my gunships trouble. It can be difficult to make cost anywhere even against regular forces, let alone when proper AA is involved. Heavy gunships don't move that fast despite being airborne, on sea or flat land they're only slight faster than a land/sea army, so they can't even leverage much of a mobility advantage.

I guess that would make you think "use them on hilly terrain", but hilly terrain tends to give great spots to place AA in.
+0 / -0
3 years ago
Let's buff Krow. It's a noob trap currently. Do you even remember when was the last time you see it? If you got 4500 metal, two likhos are way better.
+2 / -0
I made cost last time I used a krow in a team game, but in general I rarely see krows making cost.
+0 / -0
Can a Djinn teleport Gunships? Asking for a friend. ;p

More seriously, I wonder if AA turrets could have an energy cost to keep them functioning well?
+0 / -0
3 years ago
quote:
All of the above is compounded by the miracle of flex AA, and the fact that all sorts of weird units besides AA will hit gunships hard unexpectedly. For example, Lance makes a great, long-ranged flex AA against heavy gunships.
Completely agree with this. Maybe they should fly higher, to avoid some of the flex AA?

I don't agree that much with the turret argument, gunship should work great only on larger maps/maps that have hard to access parts, where they can go around statics. The way I view them is: if opponent is decent with AA, make them sink resources in turrets, and win with something else... Rather than statics, mirroring and spamming tridents might be better on the long run anyhow.
+0 / -0
I think gunships themselves are fine. However, I've always thought that Razor is extremely valuable for its cost, especially compared to Hacksaw. Maybe it's too valuable. I mean, how is it ever NOT gonna make cost with its effective HP, range, and DPS? That is assuming it's not being built to simply stall enemy artillery for twenty minutes or so.
+2 / -1
Duke_of_Mnisek
3 years ago
I think the problem is that dynamics between air units and aa in general is not complex enough.

I am not an experienced player, but from what I have observed, if you play with normal land units in big team games, players start with cheap scouts, these are destroyed with riots, followed by assault units, then comes that porc phase, porc is countered by arty, which is countered by even bigger arty or likhoed, at this point some porc outpost gets usually obliterated and we are back to riots/assault units, etc. What I am trying to say that all land units are counterable, which creates this huge paper>rock>scissors mechanism.

When you play air, air gets heavily countered by aa, and that is it, once there are like three chainsaws in play, the only air unit that still has some use is likho, because it shoots its missile from some distance, has decent hp, and most importantly, retreats imidiately. And 8 mins into the game even using likho becomes difficult (and likho is the only reason why air factory is not mentioned here besides gunship fac, imo).

Of course, 1v1 or 2v2 is something different than big teams, and when you play on some big flat map, where land control changes quickly, air in general is more useful.

The point is, it would be nice if there was one more air fac or some other unit, which would bring another element into air play. This fac should be a counter to heavy aa, with little or no option of air to land units assault. Something, that would for little cost occupy chainsaw for likho or another bomber to get the job done. You may think, that if there was some counter to heavy aa, air would just become ridiculously powerful - but for example, this unit that would counter heavy aa could be easily countered by air to air units, and that would create some paper>rock>scissors mechanism.
+0 / -0
3 years ago
Air having a simpler RPS than land is intentional: land is the main theater of battle, other theaters, such as air, need to be simpler to not steal away its spotlight.

To be fair, dense team games are indeed not the best situation for gunships or air in general. It still feels like gunships are a little too toothless though. Also, aerial forces are often stale-mate breakers, but atm it feels like they can't do that on the most stalematey game mode of all, the dense lobsterpot.

quote:
I don't agree that much with the turret argument, gunship should work great only on larger maps/maps that have hard to access parts, where they can go around statics. The way I view them is: if opponent is decent with AA, make them sink resources in turrets, and win with something else... Rather than statics, mirroring and spamming tridents might be better on the long run anyhow.
This is a fair point, but like I said gunships are now struggling even with non-AA units.

I think flex AA may have gotten to the point where Zero-K would perhaps be better served by transitioning away from dedicated AA, and just having some units that are good at shooting air instead, without that being the unit's only role in existence.

The current state of affairs, where air units on paper have to watch out for AA mainly but are also randomly vulnerable to a lot of flex AA, is just confusing, and makes air/AA balance really difficult to get right.
+2 / -0

3 years ago
so? Reveal your real account and GF will accept your request?

Do you really think .... ?
+0 / -1
3 years ago
wot
+0 / -0
3 years ago
This became soooo much off-topic...
+0 / -0
Duke_of_Mnisek
Who do you refer to? Which real account? Who here is the impostor?
+0 / -0


3 years ago
Is this thread about dense teamgames? Gunships seem to have trouble in such games, but I think they are still surprisingly useable. Got any replays or use cases?
+0 / -0
3 years ago
I mostly play dense teamgames, so mostly yes I'd say. In hindsight, I suppose it makes sense that they're better on lower densities. That has also been my experience in recent memory. I guess I expected them to work better than planes in high density situations because the're slower, but that doesn't seem to be how it works. The get-in-fast get-out-fast nature of planes seems to allow them to survive high density better.

I think I will try to use them in lower density games in the future, and less flat terrain, and see how that goes.

I do think the flex AA/dedicated AA dichotomy is confusing atm, though, and that a change to how AA works to account for increasing amounts of flex could be beneficial.
+0 / -0


3 years ago
I don't know what type of flex/dedicated AA confusion you're talking about at the moment, but in the past the solution to gunships being a bit bad at high densities was to buff them vs dedicated AA.

I recall making dedicated AA worse against gunships twice over the last decade.
  • 04/12/2010: Fixed Wing HP reduced to 75% as well as Dedicated AA damage reduced to 75%.
  • 21/06/2014: Reduced Plane, Drone and Krow HP by 1/11th (it makes some nice round numbers). Reduced AA damage by 1/11th except for Trident.

The first change gave gunships 33% more health against dedicated AA, while the second compounded that to 46%. This stuff is like adding armour classes, except it makes sense. However, planes become worse vs flex AA as a side effect, so there is a limit to how far it can go.
+0 / -0


3 years ago
A better question is when was the last time you saw a Rapier/Harpy in team games?


Then there's blastwing that people like to make 100's of only for them to all instantly kill the entire line.
+1 / -0
I'm talking about the fact that a lot of non-AA things shot at gunships quite well, but dedicated AA is also a thing.

I never really try to use Harpy as it seems underwhelming, specially when nimbuses and revenants are already tricky to keep alive as is. I rarely see others using them, and when I do they indeed seem unimpressive.
+0 / -0
3 years ago
quote:
I don't know what type of flex/dedicated AA confusion you're talking about at the moment
The favorite flex anything: felon (but reaver, mace and redback also do much better than expected against gunships without being dedicated AA). Might have been a problem of unit AI though, I remember I had nimbuses killed by reaver if I do not watch them for 10 seconds...
+0 / -0
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