[Malorn]

Originally Posted by wildcat140679

However, I for see many problems with aerial vehicles like a bomber that can throw down bombs, while being relatively safe from ground based AA, until properly countered by and air to air vehicle. You only need aerial superiority, control the skies and you can control the grounds as well. You simply carpet bomb the cr@p out of everything, push the enemy back in to there base and have ground infantry clean up. This kind of game play will get really old very quickly.

This is precisely why there would need ot also exist ground-based AA that specailized in countering high-altitude aircraft, much like flak guns of WWII. The key difference though is that those AA guns would work on high altitude but not low-altitude. You'd have to make a decision on what type of Anti-Air platform you wanted to build, one for ground support or one to counter strategic bombing & dropships.

So if an enemy were to control the skies and come in with lots of libs, the counter would be two-fold: 1) scramble your own aircraft and 2) pull out / build high-altitude AA. I am imaginging engineers would be a class suited to set up a stationary high-altitude AA turret or augment a base turret for that purpose. Likewise some infantry classes may have the option of AA, if so they may have different ammo types for different ranges. Most of the time they would likely run around with low-altitude AA since that is the biggest threat, but if the enemy swarmed bombers they could swap out to high-altitude AA to counter it.

I think there should be options to counter such a thing but due to the fact that typically a few libs won't be a significant threat to ground forces they will prefer to have low-altitude AA ready to go (if they don't it would be easy for a few reavers/mossies to come over a hill and farm the heck out of them).

That said, if one empire is just completely dominating the skies then they should get some benefit for that...like being able to carpet bomb the crap out of stuff and force the enemy to counter with high altitude AA and aircraft of their own. But carpet bombing wasn't all that effective in PS1. It killed the idiots who weren't paying attention but the best use of a lib was strategic bombing of AMS or suppressive bombing of a specific location (like a base wall overlooking the back door, the vehicle pad, or the main entrance). The bombs were too slow to do damage to targets if the lib was at high altitude. That's one reason I favored low-altitude bombing as a lib. More dangerous but you could get a lot more kills since infantry/vehicles have far less time to react to the bombs.