
Thanks to a discovery by the Thrawn’s Revenge team, we now know that infantry units in galactic conquest were being tracked individually. One of the main changes to infantry is an overhaul of how they are handled in the codebase. Shielded higher-tier air units will require a more dedicated Anti Air counter to take down. Lower tier unshielded air will now be chipped away from standard groundfire, and shut down completely with dedicated anti air. The standard AA turret is now a fast firing laser which is quite effective against unshielded targets. However, we have added new ways of killing air with the addition of a flak battery to the medium build pad which will essentially shut down aircraft across large sections of the map. Now non-AA weapons will slowly chip away at air armor so that aircraft can safely strafe run non-AA units. Along with that aircraft will also miss small ground targets more and their weapons are really only effective at the target they are designed to hit. Non anti air weapons would also have a tendency to be too effective against Air, so we lowered the accuracy dramatically. Air combat have a lot more to do with the positioning of the units during a dogfight. Also, the changes to movement have made Air vs. Anti Air must be cleared around a good amount of the map before they can begin to dominate the battlefield. We have redone the speed and turning of all air units, so that they require a lot more room to operate. We also wanted Air to feel a bit more natural and also need a lot of clear airspace to operate correctly. We wanted air to be a dominating presence on the battlefield, but something that could be easily shut down if properly defended against.

Ground aircraft have has a tendency in AotR to be either really good, to the point where it is all you ever need to build, or easily countered and rather pointless. Ground air combat has been fully re-evaluated. The majority of changes revolve around changing a few key elements of ground combat that we thought were lacking depth or balance in the previous release. Let’s start off with the main focus of this update. This update will break previous saves from 2.8! so if you want to continue a campaign from 2.8, make a backup copy of the previous version. What started off as a small effort eventually became something bigger as we started tinkering with more and more stuff.

Before moving on to the next major release for updated space combat, we wanted to bring a small update to further balance ground combat. Soon (TM) we release the 2.8.1 Update for AotR! While the team loves the positive reception to the 2.8 release,we were not entirely satisfied with some gameplay elements.
