Reduce all air fuel time to 5 mins

[noobymcnoobcake]

At the moment except for early game with interceptors refuelling your aircraft is not a problem. get 1 or 2 platforms and your sorted. Then once you get into T3 air you don't need to refuel. ASF last 16 mins and 40 secs. They dont live long enough to use that up. What I am suggesting will make Air staging play a vital role in the T3 ASF spam war. You will need to pay more attention to your swarm and on the 40k+ maps you will have to have a small air staging base or a carrier to be able to use your ASF over the map effectively. The infrastructure required will indirectly nerf to ASF swarms and will make later game slightly more interesting as opposed to ASF blob vs ASF blob. These bases will be good targets and you could stop your opponent having air coverage over parts of the map by destroying them. To compensate for these changes carriers should be able to refuel every type of aircraft.

What are your thoughts on this? any other effects it will have on gameplay? are they positive? negative?

[rootbeer23]

What are your thoughts on this? any other effects it will have on gameplay? are they positive? negative?

that would be a change for the better. It would be even better to have more than one subgroup selector, not just:
still has fuel + will be running out of fuel soon.
With 5 minutes max fuel time, i would like to select all planes that:
have less than 1 minute left
less than 2 minutes left
less than 3 minutes left

so depending on the current game situation i can send a matching number of aircraft to refuel, i.e. i can choose what my tradeoff of availability now / availability in the future would be.
And if it is possible: assign a waypoint to refuiling stations / carriers where refueled planes land.

[noobymcnoobcake]

I like that idea, the less micro the better! A few more non balance related micro removing ideas
-Cybran ASFS to have stealth automatically turned on when built
-A toggle on the carrier to change if the aircraft stayed in or flew out when they were built.

[Napalm175]

I agree with that second idea, but not the first. IIRC Cybran ASF takes up -60 power for stealth. That is massive if each plane you produce takes up that much power and you can't do anything. I don't want to have to pay 6000 power every second just to have stealth on my 100+ asf.

[Crayfish]

This would be a nice way to make carriers more worthwhile. It also means that spamming air would require great investment, and risk in protecting, ground structures.
I remember some ideas from back on GPG forums that took this a stage further by only allowing planes to land on Carriers or Staging Facilities, not on the ground.

Fueling planes could also come with an energy cost, and so have adjacency bonuses for your staging facs, while making it much cheaper for carriers.

[noobymcnoobcake]

Its -25 power for ASF, - 60 for bommbers. The advantage you get from stealth in ASF vs ASF battles, surprise attacks on bombers and ASF vs sams is so huge it would be stupid not to utilise it

[FunkOff]

I think fuel should be 5 min for interceptors/ASF and higher for bombers/gunships... 6 for gunships, 7 for T1 bombers, 8 for T2 bombers and 9 for T3.

This makes sense because, IRL, bombers are larger and can carry more fuel than fighters, so this gives them longer range/more flight time.

[noobymcnoobcake]

Ok, makes sense. The main issue here is ASF, the others aint spammed in 200+ swarms and so refuel is not such an issue.

[microwavelazer]

This was brought up a while ago on gpgnet but what if we fuel times decreased with each tech level, instead of increasing. So if interceptors would have a 11ish mins of fuel time and ASFs would have 5ish mins. Its not realistic, but it would add more meaning to to air staging and expansions on big maps as high tech air forces could no longer be everywhere. They would be pinned to wherever you had air staging. not to mention T1 air may be marginally useful(They still get slaughtered by ASFs) as they could spend more time away from base raiding.

[Crayfish]

This was brought up a while ago on gpgnet but what if we fuel times decreased with each tech level, instead of increasing. So if interceptors would have a 11ish mins of fuel time and ASFs would have 5ish mins. Its not realistic, but it would add more meaning to to air staging and expansions on big maps as high tech air forces could no longer be everywhere. They would be pinned to wherever you had air staging. not to mention T1 air may be marginally useful(They still get slaughtered by ASFs) as they could spend more time away from base raiding.

Like this line of thinking ^