Weekly Feedback: Air Units

[Guest]

Now that Air Units have been out for a while, tell us what you think! What do you like? What could be better?

As always, please be polite in your feedback.

 

[Magnifico]

I'll get access to Zeppelins in a few days so I'm not as experienced with air units as some. My main feedback so far is that it's annoying to have air units listed first in the unit tray. I have already accidentally deployed my biplane a couple of times when I meant to hit the "next" button. With, say, a rifleman selected there's a decent chance that if you misclick in that situation it'll be somewhere the rifleman can't deploy anyway, but air units aren't idiot-proof like that.

 

[Martine]

You just saved me from having to type out this very same thing. I like mowing down the defenders with the plane, but that gung ho attitude of the pilot to attack any base is the reason why I don't use this unit.

 

[leoelephant]

Me too. It is a design defect

 

[Hunter Killer]

Please put air units on training blessing and they would be perfect!

 

[Nathan Win]

Can EA base get some sort of pre anti air defense? These archer towers and redoubts are no match for the IA's army with air units. Regardless, of how well my base layout, these air units destroy 1/3 of my base without effort. It's pretty hard to save up resources. Granted, I just got to EA so I haven't had enough gold to upgrade my towers and redoubts, but not sure if it'll make a difference since the DPS increase is small.

I feel because of the lack of the anti air for EA bases, it's hard for us EA to go to IA. I want to upgrade everything before advancing to IA. When IA wasn't released, those in EA can advance to IA easily without IA to attack them. Now, those of us who are in EA now, it's harder to advance. Could explain why some in IA can't find opponents to attack since more people are stuck in EA.

 

[MadFury]

I think everyone will agree that it's time air units become part of the Training Blessing. After all you're army is your army and should include your Air Force. At higher levels you need your entire army for a battle. Aside from that I think air units are as strong as they should be so I hope they are left intact. I sincerely hope you don't give in to the crying children and nerf something that doesn't need one.

 

[Ravenlord]

Yes it's time the air units came under the training spell - and stop being so stingy with the unit allocations - 4 units for the airstrip would be very welcome. Even if you take 2 Zeps to battle there are plenty of base defenses that can take them down.

I could also argue they use too much oil but that's really a commentary about how little oil our wells produce .... a discussion for another time.

 

[Parmenion]

Don't you just love it when they take out several defence buildings with a zeppelin before sending in everything else to flatten your base?! I've noticed the same issue and even with buildings at EA level it doesn't help much.

 

[Quovatis]

Move air units to the right side of the tray as others have said. So annoying to deploy them by accident, just when trying to move the screen around for scouting. And yes, put them on the training blessing. Otherwise, they are pretty good.

 

[Aurelius...]

Yes. That would be good. Air support changes the game for those of us who are working on mixed armies. If they're not in the tb, It's one zep per session.

 

[Aurelius...]

Yes. This is a serious issue with an easy fix.

An alternative would be to have no troop selected pre-battle, so that a click on the screen wouldn't deploy anything. I can't remember who suggested this originally, but it's another good idea. I'd suggest doing both, move air support to the right, and have nothing selected pre-battle.

 

[Aurelius...]

As to a general response, I like both biplanes and zeps. Both are powerful, but not too powerful. The fact that they are easily killed forces us to use them carefully. They are critical when trying to 5-star above one's level.

Two good suggestions above: add to the tb, and move to the right of the troop tray in battle.

Also, another suggestion from a previous post, air troops should return from battle unless they are killed. Since they are airborne, they can return to base easily, and if not killed while deployed, they should return with un-deployed troops.

 

[Ravenlord]

Don't they already return if not killed ?

 

[XeroMaxx]

Air units are a particularly powerful unit that requires one to truly rethink certain aspect of their base design. Although powerful, we can mostly only use 1 or 2 so I think it's actually balanced that they are powerful. A single Enlightenment Age tower is more than capable to take down a zeppelin and two of them are just death unless your sabotage them. I've lost plenty of zeppelins to we'll designed Enlightenment bases and due to their high train time (regarding both the zeppelin and biplane) and cost, I think they fine. They are extremely dangerous if not thought about during the base design process. But again, we can only use 1 zeppelin at max. For now...

I agree with all the above posters in regard to the air units being placed first on the tray. It doesn't seem like this was tested enough. My thought is this.

Since air units give us an ability to use at all times in battle, it would make sense to put it in a separate bar along with rally. But make sure they are spaced away from each other. (Lol) This would give us easy access to active battle utilities and separate from deployable units.

Other than that, I wish there was an indicator to show where an air unit would enter the map from. I used to think it was closest edge of the map, but I've been surprised a little too many times. It would be a huge benefit to know where it will fly in and make strategic action more... strategic. I prefer as little randomness as possible when it comes to strategy games.

Training blessing on air units? That's your call. Hell, throw the training blessing on my employees while you're at it.

 

[GailWho]

I had this same problem with being blasted by IA so instead of totally maxing out my EA base as I usually do before moving up in age I got my offense and storage upgraded then made the leap to IA to work on getting my tanks and crazy flying machines. What did I have to lose? I wasn't gonna sit there getting slammed on a useless defense while it is even more useless because I had buildings upgrading.

 

[GailWho]

Air units are a particularly powerful unit that requires one to truly rethink certain aspect of their base design. Although powerful, we can mostly only use 1 or 2 so I think it's actually balanced that they are powerful. A single Enlightenment Age tower is more than capable to take down a zeppelin and two of them are just death unless your sabotage them. I've lost plenty of zeppelins to we'll designed Enlightenment bases and due to their high train time (regarding both the zeppelin and biplane) and cost, I think they fine. They are extremely dangerous if not thought about during the base design process. But again, we can only use 1 zeppelin at max. For now...

Easy to say when you have the ability to try them out and know how they work so you know where to put your towers. Unless you have someone with Zeppelins in your alliance to tell you where to put your towers it would be a lot of trial and error to do any damage. But I suppose that's the way it was in real life scenario. Certain societies were enjoying their Enlightened period of beautiful aesthetics, good food and wine when all of a sudden some more advanced warfare society comes in with their flying machines of death and takes it all away. Which moved them to come up with a way to defend what they have. I'm sure the game was designed that way for a purpose.

 

[Eddie F1]

Err, me.

Nothing selected should be easy to implement and relatively bug free

 

[Cielmers]

1. Retrain time is too long. (Attach TB to the air strip)

2. Zeppelin is so paper even a defense tower will easily shot it down. (Buff zeppelin healt and AA gun so only AA gun will easily shot it down, but I'm not meaning that tower will not affect at all just reducing the effectiveness of tower on air unit).

3. troop space is too small for zeppelin. (Just 1 zep and 1 plane I think is too small add just 1 space so we can train at least 2 zep or reduce the zep cost to 1.5 so the maximum number we can train 2 zep. 3 biplane are enough for me)

 

[xGraves]

Agreed. It seems ridiculous that the defenses should all need to be destroyed, for them to return safely. Just my opinion though.