What is the value of aloft?

There has been an ongoing discussion over just how powerful aloft is and whether it is being properly valued in terms of creature balance. This doesn't necessarily mean that the ability itself is unbalanced but instead perhaps that not enough ways of dealing with it exist. Aloft gives creatures two things: The ability to treat all movement spaces as 1 including ocean and what amounts to a slightly lesser form of camoflauge.

Taken together that gives all aloft creatures a startling immunity from attack and a very high mobility. Of these, the mobility seems undervalued and the most likely to be abused. Particularly when you unavoidably have buildings in high cost terrain or surrounded by water. Aloft creatures seem to have an inappropriate capacity to harass those buildings and tie up resources with no feasible means of counter. Probably the best example is watching aloft creatures ping away at your buildings from over water while your creature sit adjacent and useless. (Rather than being an issue with aloft alone this may also be that Battle Back needs an adjustment to allow any figure that melee's another to be meleed by all other figures.)

The recourse? Better itemization of flyers and ranged attack (particularly early or at least mid-game options) for the domains lacking them is what I'm hoping for although a higher flux cost might be warranted alternatively. I would suggest early and maybe mid-game aloft creatures should not have a movement of more than three. The ability to move over any terrain without penalty is large enough.

I agree. it's clear from how annoying thistle falcons can be.

now what? nerfing all fliers is a bit extreme, I think it might be more reasonable to have aloft creatures remain grounded until they move again. this would cut out the water-attack problem and also let you more easily get a few shots in (in theory).

I think the solution is just to have more ranged creatures in upcoming expansions. I like the mechanics of aloft now, and would hate to see it tweaked.

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-Minds

I have to agree with minds, i think it all took us a little while to understand how to handel them, but having more access to ranged units in some clans is needed.

I play Sylvan quite a bit, so I'm confident I've harassed most of the people in this thread with my thistle falcons. From my perspective, it seems like people save their creature control cards for three things when playing against Sylvan: fliers, beefy trees (lol), and big range cards. I think each clan currently has enough creature control cards to handle all their anti-sylvan needs.

That said, here's a potential nerf idea, if the community deems it necessary...

Give the falcon "cannot attack buildins" and take this nerf away from the low cost sylvan elf that currently has it (and maybe bump the elve's cost up to 2 flux and not 1).

There's no call for that.

I agree with minds (scary thought)- There need to be more ranged options for dealing with flyers.

I did not write the post with one particular card in mind although the Thistle Falcon is the poster child example. I'd prefer to see some comprehensive thought put into the idea rather than individual nerfs.

Ug, is it too late to change my mind?

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-Minds

yeah thristal is really good, i so wish it had only 1 hp, but dwarves and dark ones have no access to early game range. dark ones have the obolisk but thats all i know, the dwarves have next to nothing, there easiest play is volcano against flyers, but they do have higher attack and hp then other clans so they tend to survive it better with the exception of their buildings getting attacked. I have taken out so many dwarf buildings with loan well placed sleet mogis over water.