Refumble: Planes

This post talks about the changes to planes (and Trident) in my refumble mod (boatcarmod), and the goals and ideas that lead to those changes.

Mode Link: https://zero-k.info/Mods/Detail/186

Repo Link: https://github.com/Stiofan-K/ZK-Balance_Testing_Mutators.sdd

Links to related threads:
Refumble: Amphtank factory
Refumble: Striders


There are a few different directions being covered by the changes, and I want to get feedback on the individual ideas presented even if I have them all packaged and implemented in the mod.

Things covered:

* Aerial AA health buffs
* Raptor flak
* Tossbomb Magpie
* Strafing Swift
* Nebula, again sorta
* Phoenix changes noone noticed
* Loopback attacks


Overall, I think bombers are in a good spot. All of them have their usecases as different tools in a diverse toolbox and are quite powerful in their own right.
They are also interesting with how their single shots and reloading works, with extra infrastructure being needed to fully enable damage throughput contrasted with the possibility of keeping them in reserve as a kind of backup squad.

With such great power come great counters!
As in, ground AA is pretty strong since even individual phoenix or thunderbird can be quite devastating.

Hovever, issues arise there for the concepts of air superiority and aerial AA units.

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Aerial AA health buffs:

Especially Raptor and Trident but also swift often are quickly crowded out by ground AA, where trying to contest the skies with air units is more often a trap than not. I think there is relative consensus on Raptor and Trident not quite being able to live up to expectations. Swift is also quite squishy

So, the intent here is to give our Aerial AA units a little more room to play, both against eachother and in presence of ground AA, to open up more space to fight for air control and retreat repair to take advantage of the interesting infrastructure planes come with.

To try and give that extra space to take risks and fight eachother:
Raptor, Trident and Swift have 1.6x more health.

There are some caveats to this of course.
Swift scouting is stronger.
Raptor is just above an Artemis one shot kill. (which feels fine/bad target already accounts for)
Better AA of course makes bombers and gunships worse. (though Harpy still kills 2 swift)

I think it would be nice if we ended up in a place where Aerial AA, or switching to gs/air is better than just making ground AA.
It technically already is! But from a sort of practicallity and qol standpoint it could improve.

In practice this seems alright. Theres more space to have your swift and raptor poke into enemy AA. Committing to Aerial AA feel a little less at risk of falling flat immediatly.

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Raptor flak:

It's what it says on the tin, replacing raptors lasers with equal damage flak guns instead.
Comes with some extras in range to accound for the leading Raptor will need to do with physical cannons and no friendly fire.

Intent was to give Raptor something that fits it's role as an Air superiority fighter and beat down multiple things.

It also adds some more flavor to raptor fights, as you do want to spread out to minimise splash damage, though in Raptor vs Raptorit doesnt quite play nice with the nature of Raptors wanting to snuggle up on their target.

In practice this seems okay. It is a little more interesting to use and fight, while not increasing raw dps into things like krow.

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Tossbomb Magpie

Current Magpie is good already, but sits in a weird spot where it steps on both Ravens and Swifts toes.

On Swift, in the sense of being a better, albeit less flexible raider poking tool in the earlygame that also scales out of that.
On Raven, in the sense of being a safer/better even if more expensive sniping tool for the 700+ cost artillery of your choice.

Stack enough and you get to play a point and click adventure, sort of like lance balls with less steps, which some had expressed frustration with.

I think the most interesting parts of magpie was the relative survivability compared to other bombers, with it's biggest drawback being that it takes some niche space from other planes instead of truely carving it's own.

So, I tried turning magpie into a sort of standoff tossbombing plane, that uses unguided projectiles with relatively high aoe on the same damage.

A tradeoff from guranteed singletarget damage to uncertain but great area damage potential.
This Magpie benefits from denser target areas, while being worse at picking of lone and/or fast units.
At small scale it can mostly only soften up armies, but when stacking a few you can start taking some bites out of squishier armies with that only ramping up further as you stack more.

The benefits of this concept are I think pretty worthwhile, since:

* Magpie gets to keep it's relative safety (I kept it at 900 hp compared to base 740 atm)
* Swift and Raven get a some space back to do buisiness in
* Magpie does something other planes didn't/couldn't do before
* On the receveing end, you can try to evade the unguided projectiles (up to the point where there are too many magpies to dodge)
* On the using end there is a little more to how and where you aim your magpies, since you want/need to predict your enemy.

The major drawback howveer is of course:
* An unguided weapon you pay E to shoot is a little meh.

Planes currently are all based around relatively guranteed damage, so not having that can be a bit jarring even if the underlying weapon is sort of op.

There are some ergonomics to be figured out with the current implementation, since it may be letting physics do too much of the work to feel reliable in function to the end user.

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Strafing Swift:

Swift has to do all the lifting for anyone wanting to do strafing runs.

With the above mentioned health increase it's already more possible to lean into swift more as a ground poking platform, but I wanted to further encourage those who really want to just micro swift strafing and make it possible for it to be "effective" (something you can do rather than something that doesnt work at all).

For that I've increased swifts range and fireangle by a bit. This is also an effective dps increase due to how strafing works, so slightly scary.

In practice this feels okay. Swift aren't too scary, and I think needing a dedicated AA response for a significant Swiftinvestment, instead of shrugging it off and letting riots do it is fine.

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Nebula, again sorta


Coming back to air superiority, we can fight for it sure, but what does it gain us?
I see this done in base zk with swift openings alot where, most of the things swifts kill are other swift, where it wouldve been better to get ground units and AA and then go into bombers.
Contesting air is fruitless unless you can gain something by holding air superiority and it becomes less worthwhile doing the denser the game gets.

Ideally it's gunships and bombers that get denied or degraded by enemy air superiority, but ground AA on both sides both already stop the normal bombers and gunships, aswell as prevent the enemy air superiority from acting offensively.

Magpie, both base and modded are I think things that I think should benefit from ally air superiority and die to enemy air superiority, but in base are pretty safe in ally ground AA.

Here I want to advertise my Nebula version again, since it's another thing that benefits from ally air superiority and dies to enemy air superiority.

Having more things that can leverage an air advantage would be cool to see and I think help foster a space where contesting for air is more worthwhile.

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Phoenix changes noone noticed

I adjusted phoenix to be more based on burndamage than upfront damage of it's bomb explosions, to try and diminish effectiveness of stacking phoenix in one strike while enhancing consecutive strikes. A single phoenix bombing run is mostly the same.

This has gone unmentioned by everyone, so I think is a sort of success? o,o"

But I don't know if this is a worthwhile difference to note, just something that has stuck and may be interesting if for some reason phoenix stacking becomes popular to unbearability somehow.

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Loopback attacks

I've enabled loopback attack for swift raptor and magpie. Aka an Immelmann_turn
I'm unsure if this is benefitial, but it does look cool.

In practise it leads to furballs also spreading out vertically, so less aoe hitting indiviual planes.
For magpie it allows for a pretty cool looping attack, even if it's not any more effective.

Have there been any experiments or thoughts around this behaviour? It would be interesting to hear if there is a stance on it.

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And thats it for now!

I've not gotten to gunships yet, but I think planes being as strong as they are has knock on effects on the viablility of gunships due to ground AA needing to be strong.

Another idea would be making bombers less individually damaging strong, and instead of relying on a single suicidal strike, getting their value from multiple sorties and repair infrastructure. But that seems tought to implement without a plan.

Any thoughts? Feel free to ask stuff as well.

quote: quote: I think it would be nice if we ended up in a place where Aerial AA, or switching to gs/air is better than just making ground AA. How so? Air-based AA is its own counter, so if it is the go-to counter, then whoever makes more of it just wins. Ground AA does not cover the whole map in the same way as fighters, and can be raid targets for ground forces.

The nested quote misses the following bit:

quote: It technically already is! But from a sort of practicallity and qol standpoint it could improve.

I acknowledge that fighters are already more efficent AA than ground AA. They don't need to be better at killing planes, and ground AA will always eventually crowd out fighters.
The critique is not that they cannot do their job in isolation, but that they have too much difficulty doing their job in context with even little ground AA. Investment in fighters only has an efficent window at the very start of the game, or when introducing air to a ground only game.
The intent is to move the threshold up on how much ground AA is needed to deny aerial AA from usage, to give people more room to use and be effective with those units and interact in aerial combat.

Air to air combat even in, or more because of context with ground AA and flex AA, is interesting when you get to do it, probably the most interesting air combat can get.
Issue is that you quickly get into a position where trying to to use fighters in that context bleeds them off too quickly to be useful/a good trade.

Hm, though I think Magpie needn't necessarily be like Raven, since we do just have Raven.

If you want consistent results, making the precision bomber makes sense.
If you want to prioritise safety, making concession on reliability of damage feels okay, but then the safety needs to be worth the tradeoff.


The current implementation uses the low burntime trick to allow for a missile weapon that behaves more physically and keeps it's spray angle, since missiles don't actually have inaccuracy to my knowledge (outside of wobble, but that is missleading too).
That makes for interesting looking and behaving bombs, but carry uncertainty due to coming from an aerial frame.

The current version is quite inaccurate but could easily be tweaked to be accurate evenif not tracking while keeping a long flight time to allow for avoidance, would that be of interest?

Are there any other ideas for a magpie niche outside of survivability, and/or sort of skimrisher behavior?