Stormgate is going to really prioritize team play so if that takes off, it'll be interesting to see!

@lolsteamroller

honestly the best way I can think of to balance Air in a strategy game is fairly close to exactly how it works in real life: back here in the real world there are a LOT of weapons that can shoot well past the horizon, generally speaking the way to actually do something with that range is to have an air presence or at least ground forces in the general vicinity. it would make a game go a lot harder on building information networks but that's not really a bad thing if you can do it without it turning into an AMP=win situation. similar story for most other forces: even when you're just talking about guys with guns having more sources of information of different kinds and ideally different patterns of acquisition provides some pretty massive advantages.

If that's your only takeaway your intelligence is the issue. Not the game/how it was played.

Terrain deformation is available in this game so yes, you could make a wider river by blowing and ressurecting as you said.

Yeah, or just use nukes 😋

Hell yes. Restricted participation makes sense in some situations, in particular, in the sense of insider advantage and false advertising. If I run a lottery, and I tell everyone there's a million dollars to be won, but in reality, I already know the winning numbers and I enter myself, I am fundamentally defrauding my ticket buyers. But what's going on here? It's not like this guy is dropping balance patches the morning of these tournaments. It's not like he is playing by different rules. It's not like prize money is being fraudulently distributed. what's the harm here? The obvious benefit is that everyone gets to play with more skilled opponents and gets to watch higher skilled games. If you want to get better, what better way to learn the meta than to play against the balance team?

@@timmietimmins3780 very true and good points, I was mostly memeing but I agree that having a competitive eye for the balance is great.

That isn't really true for BAR because u have usually balanced teams. In tournaments like this there is no autobalance and therefore there can be a huge discrepancy between teams. Anyway, the top teams where not so much spreader when u look at the rating of the single players but it seems one team developed a unorthodox strategy and team play that is beyond any of the other teams, which lead into a domination every single game.

The game was over when Malady came in with bombers and there were no fighters to defend.

That’s not necessarily true, there’s always comeback potential with the reclaim mechanic

One team hits the opponent at 3 minutes with air, doing nothing. The other team hits with air at 6 minutes, destroying so much stuff because the opposing team had no AA (despite having full knowledge that their opponent had some air). YT commenters: No answer to small rush. In truth, if you did the equivalent in AOE2 (arguably the most boom/fast tech friendly rts) and lost a ton of Vills to fuedal age harrass, a high level game would be over, too.

I for one had my wires crossed, thought we’d have fighter support even though I knew our air factory had been reclaimed. Very costly blunder on my part.