ledarsi wrote:Because there is only one faction, and every player can always build any units that they want, it's not really even appropriate to talk about "balance" since it's always a fair contest. The design might be poor which would make it not a very interesting contest, but it can never be an imbalanced game, by definition.
And on the design front PA has made a lot of progress and developed a lot of interesting interactions in the last year. I still think there's a ways to go, but it's now subtle stuff and nothing along the lines of 'this entire dimension/feature is missing.'
The biggest design problem is that air (and orbital) are really not very tactically interesting. Fighter vs fighter is literally just comparing group size, with no tactics whatsoever. What PA needs is to have a robust ground war which determines what happens in the skies, and not having an air war that allows controlling huge land areas, ignoring terrain and sea obstacles when they are an issue.
Every single planet is the same in an air war. That needs to change. Powerful, long range surface to air weapons, and in a perfect world, air staging for flying units that gives them a need for you to control land features instead of totally ignoring them.
I think that adding a couple of carefully-selected units like the Marauder can make the air game more interesting.
The "powerful, long range surface to air weapons" he speaks about are also possible. We can just mod the Legion anti-air to be longer-range, and make it more expensive.
The "air staging" he speaks of is I think air having to land to refuel, etc., which sounds great, but I suspect is not possible with modding.