Balancing Aircraft/AA with Altitude

[Malorn]

I'm going to venture into sensitive territory for a lot of planetsiders - Aircraft / AA balance!

As some may have surmised from my other posts, I subscribe to the religion of Tradeoffs. Tradeoffs are the key to balancing games effectively and making player choices meaningful and impactful.

One area where tradeoffs seem a bit lax is AA & Aircraft. Having been a longtime Liberator pilot and a longtime tank driver, I have a love-hate relationship with AA. I hate it when I fly and I love it when I'm on the ground. One idea presented to me by an outfit mate is the idea of Altitude being a factor in aircraft and AA balance, and the more I thought about it, the more I liked it.

The core idea is this - most AA is effective close to the ground to medium altitude, while very little ground-based AA is effective at high altitude.

What this does is give pilots tradeoff decisions on where they want to fly as well as add a whole new dynamic to the game. For example, high-flying galaxies and Liberators will be largely unaffected by ground-based AA, making aircraft their primary threat. You'd have a sort of WWII style combat where fighters (wasps, skeets, reavers) go up to take down the bombers and galaxie and dogfight each other for control of the skies. And while they do all that they aren't really affected by ground-based AA. As a lib pilot I think this is a really cool concept. I think those pilots who enjoy dogfighting would enjoy that as well.

There would be a whole different battle going on at high altitude where the ground-based battle would have little effect. But you'd still want supremacy up there because he who controls high altitude controls Liberator bombing and Galaxy drops. Other than gals and libs, high altitude aircraft pose little threat to ground forces, so the lack of ground AA being effective against them isn't a penalty to ground forces either.

At low-altitudes pilots have other ways of defending against AA, mainly using terrain and hills and buildings to break line-of-sight or sneak up on ground targets. But low-altitude is also where Infantry-based AA and other ground based AA is effective. This then makes it a game of cat-and-mouse at low altitudes, where the advantage of flying low altitude is accuracy on ground targets (a high flying lib's bombs are rather easy to dodge for infantry and vehicles, so even Libs may want to go low-altitude for more accurate bombing).

There's more to the idea too. Consider the possibility of having AA weaponry that has different levels of effectiveness based on altitude. Most AA should be effective at low-altitude, but you could also have some rare and resource-expensive stationary AA structures that are also effective against high altitude (the rough equivalent of WWII flak guns). The tradeoff would be that the ground-based AA that is effective at high altitudes is NOT effectve at low altitudes. Meaning low-altitude air-to-ground would be effective against them. So combined-arms becomes a lot more relevant in the war to control the skies and have effective air-to-ground supremacy.

So you could have a flak gun that could either be high altitude effective or low altitude effective. Ammo type might be a factor as well. Consider a skyguard having to swap out ammo types to shoot at aircraft of different altitudes. You could get fancier as well and have flak guns specifically have a range-adjustment where you choose the altitude at which the flak will be effective, so switching between high altitude and low alitutide is difficult and requires some gunner skill to properly estimate target distances and set the appropriate flak range (so if you die to it you know that at least the gunner had some semblence of skill).

That last paragraph was just me brainstorming - I haven't given it too much thought but overall I believe altitude has a huge potential to add a lot more dynamicism to the aircraft / AA game by giving pilots choices.

The core Idea is this - break things up along the z-axis (that's vertical for non-techies), and split AA effectiveness up along those lines.

Flame on!