Pro's/Con's of Air vehicles in Invasion

Well, I've made one Invasion map already (and the second is well on its way) so I have a few tips.

First, air vehicles are extremely useful on large Invasion maps such as Spire, where it is imperitive to have quick transport. On smaller maps such as Boneyard, there are only Banshees. Falcons aren't needed.

There can be some balancing issues when you implement air vehicles. The Banshee's FRG is extremely powerful to infantry and to a slightly lesser extent, vehicles. To counter this, it's helpful to place infantry safe areas like tunnels made out of rocks or forge pieces, but it depends on you which one you would prefer. You could also make some tunnels for smaller vehicles like ghosts and warthogs, but it's not as important, because they have a way to fight back. Also, areas with heavy rock cover are good at blocking the Banshee's view.

For the Falcon, cover on the ground could simply be rocks or forge pieces jutting out of walls. The Falcon's turrets are deadliest at medium range, so a few rocks would do the trick. In my opinion the Falcon is easiest to balance because it requires a team to be effective, unlike the Banshee which is a single person vehicle.

Another thing to note is that both air vehicles have trouble aiming directly down. Due to that you could simply have a tunnel type structure without much of a roof.


On to weapons. Placing weapons to balance air vehicles (or any vehicle for that matter) is a necessity. Generally I place one lock on capable heavy weapon per team in Invasion (Plasma Launcher for Elites, Rocket Launcher for Spartans). That way it is fairly easy to take down air vehicles granted you have someone distracting them. Still, the air vehicles can dodge rockets fairly easily, which is good to prevent them from always being shot down.

Another thing to note is that in Invasion, both species have classes that are more than capable of disabling air vehicles. Elites always have a handy plasma pistol as a secondary, which can EMP vehicles at a decent range. Spartans gain access to a grenade launcher class which can also EMP all vehicles pretty easily. So in a way the vehicles are already fairly well balanced. It never hurts to put a few spare Plasma Pistols or GLs on the map though.

I hope that wasn't too long of a read...

 

A lot of what you need to factor when considering placing aerial vehicles is the elevation of the map that you've built.

If you have a map that has maybe a couple tiers like Boneyard then an aerial vehicle is rendered almost useless because a.) the ceiling of the map should definitely be low to keep players and vehicles out of orbit and b.) a flying vehicle on a map with that many tiers can't really do anything that a ground vehicle couldn't accomplish. Hence why it is highly for there to be a Banshee at all on Boneyard.

Now, building on what Ice Pinata said, Spire is an entirely different story. Spire boasts several different tiers and elevations (one of them being a friggin tower) as well as a lot more distance to cover getting between them. Distance alone, would be satisfied by a simple mongoose or ghost, but the drastic elevation changes on the map can only be resolved nicely by quicker transport between them i.e. an aerial vehicle.

tl;dr format: On short maps (especially Invasion), no aerial vehicles. On large,multi-leveled maps, aerial vehicles may (but not always) be necessary.