[Campaign] Defense against air raids

[Lord Siler]

As many of you know me and a few others are working on a campaign, this question has probably been asked before, but how do you make the computer effectively defend against air raids? The current solutions we are using are 1) creating special footman like soldiers who are cheap in terms of food cost and can attack air units, 2) having strong tank units that can attack air units, 3) filling the base with towers, as well as 4) filling the base with light aerial anti air units (like gyro copters), 5) having multiple heroes with various orbs who can battle aerial units anyway I need some advice from experienced campaign makers about this, any and all feedback is welcome.

 

[Mechanical Man]

anything you listed, depends on campaign theme

 

[ArchDuke]

Besides the things mention you could place a number of siege engines with barrage inside the base, this should deter any any raids

Create a special defense tower that can 1. shoot at multiple air targets, 2. has a very short cooldown against air units

A long while ago me and a friend attempted to make a campaign and ran into a very similar problem; one of the chapters featuring a hardcore battle could be won within ~25 minutes if the player masses air units and took a certain route & attacked the enemy from the west.

What we did to deter this strategy was to increase the food cost of the dragons (which were the player's main aerial unit) to 9 to prevent dragon massing, gave the enemy a tower with a very short cooldown for aerial attacks, and gave the enemy this unit called "dragon hunter" which was a re-colored rifleman who had a very long range and did very high damage against aerial units.

 

[Lord Siler]

9 food cost? How powerful were those dragons?

 

[ArchDuke]

I dont recall how much damage they did, but they 1500 hp, I hope that answers your question, at first they cost 7 food, but after this mission we changed that to 9, also we slowed down their movement speed somewhat to prevent sudden rushes

 

[Lord Siler]

Your solutions are good, however what I'm working on has air units that have 1100-1200hp and are basically somewhere between a frost wyrm and a gryphon (a lot more towards the gryphon) and cost 6 food, we cannot increase their food cost as that would make no sense (they are not that powerful, think of like a gryphon with some added hp and slightly stronger attack) These units only pose high threat when in groups, I think I'll go with the tower solution to prevent this, any other advice regarding the scenario?

 

[ArchDuke]

one detail I forgot to mention was that our dragons had resistant skin-- that was another reason we made they have 9 food. We tweaked the critical strike ability-- made it only target units that had the air & hero classifications, such that these units would be dealt 2 times the normal damage 100% of the time and gave the ability to our special dragon hunting riflesman, and this really did wonders.

 

[Lord Siler]

I see

I wouldn't increase any unit's food cost to over 8 unless it was so OP that 7-8 of these units alone could wipe out an entire well defended base.

 

[ArchDuke]

well how many of your air units would it take to wipe out a base?

 

[Lord Siler]

Difficult to say, even if the player would only spend his food supply on them, an attack consisting only of these units (12 or more of them) would not wipe the base out, rather it could weaken it enough by destroying enough towers and/or structures that it could be easily defeated by a ground assualt, or by subsequent air raid, and these two scenarios are exactly what I want to prevent:

1) the player using an air raid tactic to "soften" the enemy base such that a ground assault would be much more effective

2) the player launching multiple air raids the goal of which would be to wipe out the base (I've done some testing and it seems that 3 or more air raids would be sufficient to wipe the base out as long as they are done within a short time frame of eachother)

 

[Razorfang]

i got a good counter for air raids. if i remember properly there is a tower called 'advanced boulder tower' which you can build when youre trying to defend against garithos in the secret elven mission. you can access it by going to human > campaign > buildings

tweak this structure such that:

i. it launches boulders at ground units, including structures as its 1st attack
ii. it launches arrows with a very fast (.6secs) cool-down and a good range (600+) at flying units as its 2nd attack
iii. it has a slow poison ability that only affects flying units, thus its arrows do more than just inflict damage
iv. it has fortified armor with a high armor count as well as high hp (1,000+)
v. the structure repairs itself

place 3 or more of these in a cluster and place several clusters around the base and you should no longer have any kind of air raid problem or vulnerability

 

[cleavinghammer]

Lots of units with Aerial Shackles.
A trigger that pushes back player air units, preventing them from entering the base's airspace.
A trigger that slowly damages player air units.

 

[Lord Siler]

I like the aerial shackle idea, no one proposed that before

 

[Rem]

wasnt there a knight unit that Blake originally used that had an anti air attack?

 

[Lord Siler]

Ye, but that was on the rebel's side

 

[Nowow]

You have plenty of ways to make a base impervious to air raids, depending on your tools and how much work you want to put. Here are a couple of ideas (regardless of whether they're doable or not):

- AA units and towers. OP is easy to design - barrage, quick attack rate and projectile speed are your friends. Creating a single OP tower with barrage for 5 units, very quick rate and high damage output for a long range will easily down enemy units at whatever rate you want.

- Poison cloud aura: a slightly more triggers heavy method is to damage all player air units in the base area. This is ideal as you can control the exact region where this will happen, the health decrease per second rate, negative buffs, and whether or not the cloud is always there or dispensed from towers.

- Thunderstorm: a trigger which detects player air units and casts chain lightning or the naga ability whatitsname from a dummy caster for every x seconds. The more raiders, the more damage.

- Air eater: if you're willing to experiment, I suggest checking the devour ability: if you can cast it on air units, and make the "digestion time" cooldown extremely short you can create an air unit which will chase and eat other air units.

- Crosswinds: extremely trigger heavy - create a knockback for air units away from your base or into a death trap.

Any one or a combination of these will do the trick, as long as you're willing to put the time to it.

 

[cleavinghammer]

How about a caster with a flyer-only Charm?

 

[ArchDuke]

Creating a single OP tower with barrage for 5 units, very quick rate and high damage output for a long range will easily down enemy units at whatever rate you want.

This plus mass siege engines

 

[Lord Aiden]

@ArchDuke : If you dont mind me asking, how effective were those towers that can shoot at multiple units (using barrage)?

 

[ArchDuke]

As effective as you make them, since you control the damage, the cooldown, as well as the number of possible targets this is all up to you.

You can make them 100% effective against aid raids by giving their attacks high damage, setting them up so that they have 10 targets (9 targets in barrage actually means 10 because it adds the units original attack to the target list), and reducing their cooldown to .7, plus giving them 1000hp with fortified armor and an armor of 12

On the other hand you can make them defeatable by giving them low damage, allowing them to target only 3 units, longer cooldown, and much less hp

It's all up to you and what you want.

In my case we made them sufficiently strong enough to repel multiple air raids consisting of 8 dragons

I'm guessing that if the player was persistent enough he could potentially take out 2 towers on the west side in about 7 raids, but this strategy would take over 2 hours as the dragons take long to build and cost a great deal. Point was that by doing the mission normally you would probably win much faster....plus the player would still have dragon hunters to worry about, but they weren't that hard to destroy with a pack of dragons

 

[Lord Aiden]

Thanks man

 

[ArchDuke]

@Rem Thanks for the rep, I was gonna thank you in your profile but it appears unavailable

 

[ArchDuke]

@Lord Aiden Im not promising anything but I can try to find the map if I still have and send it to you, so you can see the air counters for yourself, again I'm not making any promises because the map was made years ago and I don't know if I'll even be able to find it

 

[Lord Aiden]

Thanks man, I really appreciate this