This game is a very good showcase of why I think air needs to be nerfed, or maybe mobile AA buffed. I sadly do not find ressources to fight 2.5 ground players (the 0.5 being purple as well) AND have enough AA that bombing my army would be too expensive to trade for.... Especially when the airplayer can just bomb your reclaiming constructors as well.
Now, in this game there were 2 enemy airplayers. Our team had none. That is another point. You could for sure say that it is strictly mandatory now to have at least one plane-fac in the team. But I do not think that this is a good thing in terms of game design. There is more to be said on this, which I plan to write down a bit later this month.

Okay, then I am allowed to resign immediately, yes?

First, why do I still complain about it? Because I tried to give it a chance, and I still disagree with the decision. Contrary to what you might believe, I DO use the air-factory a lot, in my bot-games. I can compare how the units were before and after the changes directly. That is one thing. And occasionaly I play air in clusterfucks too.
Look, I am not arguing that air being good is a bad thing. But it simply is overtuned. This has a ton of sideeffects. Anyone noticed how the use of dante went down significantly after the buffs to phoenix? Because phoenix takes care of situations you would need a dante for way cheaper, faster and with less risk...
Air used to be ALMOST mandatory, but if a team played well, the chance to win was at least not soooo low that the game was still worth playing. How do you reliable scout antis without air? Or superweapons? Who provides vision? I think that the old state of air had a lot of positives that just vanished. The meta was mainly to provide protection and vision, with the option of dealing damage. Now, air is an almost completely detached from the rest of the game. Most air-players I see mostly monospam either phoenix, raven or likho.
If we want air to dominate, then make more factories and units, make interactions more than: airplayer clicks, stuff gets hit. My games for almost a year are mostly the same expierience, I fight ground, then air-players kill my com, my army, my constructors... Okay that is surely my personal opinion. But from what I see, I am not the only one that gets bombed into oblivion regularly.
So who really enjoys playing AGAINST air in a clusterfuck might step forward and explain why... Please.

quote: Personally I think that planefac being mandatory in a 10v10 on a 22x14 map isn't terribly unreasonable.

I do agree with this statement in isolation, but not in context. There are already quite a lot of things that need to come together to have a decent game that is not a curbstomp for one side.
Less than (estimate) 3 players not directly participating, and at least one of the remaining making eco in an effective way, so a quite specific role. Someone making storage? Better hope THEY have one of those as well. So, I can live with those things on an individual basis, but it is not that there was noone complaining about the precieved randomness of these games BEFORE the air changes. Games like these feel to me like a total waste of time.


Going back in time to this point:

quote: Artemis and AA in general is strong - too strong - because ground players want to counter air without playing air.

from https://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/36893

to which I already had 2 remarks:

- Because air is countering ground without playing ground.
- because you do not want to switch to ground in a later stage of the game,
EVERYONE ELSE has to go air?

And now I can add:

- In the utmost majority of cases, switching to another factory is virtually impossible for a ground player, since they are constantly fighting attrition...

- Sorry, TechAUmNu, I assume your comment about me "losing to a red player" was not made out of the pure desire to annoy me. It still is factually wrong. I lost
my com to an airstrike at 4.54 min, somehow a allies wind-turbine manages to be build on the plate I made (my fault, didnt notice I was not spending metal at all for way too long.) then we have to move around to try to fight back DasFapitale and ansia99, which is when you make your comment - and then destroy a significant portion of 3 players army with air. SinisterMexis played way above expectations, and maybe I would have lost to him in some isolated lane-fight, who knows. Its just that I did not get to fight him really.
So, what do I make of this situation? You either try to pretend that you air-players had no influence on the outcome when it was actually strategically pretty substantial. Or, you just didn't pay attention and made that comment because you didnt know better. Or, you knew better, but the intent was just to annoy me. IDK. The thing is, none of these options give me any reason to take your opinions on the topic serious. You actively work AGAINST it.
Sure, I am biased. Still, I think thinking that stuff through for a week, watching the replay 5 times (should be more, I know), thinking about it from the perspective of a ground and that one of an air-player and how it fits in the overall design-philosophy of the game, at least my interpretation of @GoogleFrogs posts. I am far from demanding you put that much efford into your argumentation. But it would be more useful for BOTH of us if there were actually clashing positions that are both representing the same reality, just from different angles.

quote: I certainly think that planefac being mandatory at the stage in the game when you are worried about antis/superweapons is a reasonable place for the game to be.

Absolutely. Maybe it got cought up in me slapping this together in a hurry. What I meant was that this factory is mandatory anyway at some point, and it was pretty much a must-pick when it was basically only swift and maybe likho. I do not want to go back to these times, but I think that the these 2 points mean that there is some leeway for air to get another slight nerf in total without immediatly destroying the factory.
The catchy, short thing I can come up with now is probably too exagerated, but I don't have the time and mental capacity right now to write another whole article, so take this as a polemic and exagerated statement to make my point clear:
For a very long time, planes and gunships were treated as support factories. I think treating them as equal is absolutely valid. But IF we want to go towards a state where 8 groundfactories become the support for the planes and gunships for almost all the time exept the first few minutes, and you as devs are okay with that, sure, thats fine with me. I am fully aware that no dev has any obligation whatsoever to listen to me. Just, well, if the majority of players likes that state and it stays like it is now or is even more heavy... then tell me in advance, so I can stop writing all this shit if its for nothing. Because right now, I have like zero fun when playing. But again, I am unimportant, and I respect that things change. So I would just stop playing without any gripe or so. I might be impulsive, but I think I retained my sanity.
So, simplified again: It would be very thankful to either get a direct answer or some "brainstorming" for this question: Is there a realistic chance that the game gets more groundfocused, even if just slightly, again? Does it make sense for me to still stick around? It has been almost 9 years for me here, and with all that time I do not even expect to be entertained anymore. On the other hand, I really really like the vast majority of people I have talked here very much. I got to talk to, know and even meet people from all over the world, that I would have very likely never ever met any other way. Irl I still am quite a sociable person. I have a reference when I say that zk made me into something like an otaku (my time's word for shut-in). The weird thing is, that that did not result in social isolation, but to this day my life feels so much richer because of all of that.
Sure, not everything is perfect, but we all are human. Things go wrong either in communication or in some heated moments, but if I ever pm'd you more than once in these 9 years, be assured I have no doubt that you are a good and well-meaning person.
Things would need to change pretty dramatically before I would leave the Lobsphere completely, but probably never fully, because it includes people that are not active in zk anymore.
But I would also like to avoid sticking around for another year just in the mere hope that the game will take up a state I find attractive again.


Great, now this is why you don't start to write text like this when you can just barely stay awake. I will try to separate the christmas-praise-the-pinchy-speech from the the game design part ASAP when I am awake again, k?
Later!

Just watched it back, in summary:
Worried about 2 air, made 5 vandals immediately and half finished razor.
?Accidently moved com away and nothing queued in fac?
Spammed pickets at front with com, com then got bombed by a boatload of ravens.
switched to making spiders, pushed back the ground assault.
Got bombed by my phoenix
... army builds ...
Pushed lower top with others, got killed by crab and cloaked snitches
... army goes to help the juggle with crab
gets bombed by now ridiculous air but the bombing doesn't really kill much
east gives up the hill at top and pushes bot instead
west bot loses
game over

I would say that I do think phoenix is super op at the moment, in large groups you can bomb a huge area and kill all the light / medium units in one go. It does take a bit of micro to get it to bomb in the correct direction with a waypoint at the end of the bombing run.

In this particular game air just got out of control because there wasn't really any scary AA in spots that made sense to bomb. Vandal is pretty rubbish AA. A few jump AA or Spider AA is much more of a deterrent, or at least I would be trying to take those out before doing a big bombing run. The combined air army was like 5-6k metal, so countering it needs more than a single chainsaw way back on the high hill. On big maps like this I really think air is absolutely required otherwise you will waste huge metal on AA to cover the whole map. There was a gunship player with some AA but it wasn't in the right place at the right time and is very short range and slow so easy to fly around it.

My comment was a bit dumb on reflection as you were really fighting 2-3 players, one of which was purple, and the red at top basically just sat there, you did make the mistake with the build queue which seems like it really screwed up your game :( sorry.