I’m brainstorming what the original AoE4 would have been like under Ensemble Studios, as they had planned it to be (modern warfare RTS/future wars). In SWGB the air units are fairly powerful (watching videos only… Sadly I don’t have the game right now) and if the original WW2/modern era RTS had been made, how would air have been balanced?
StarCraft does this by making the units effectively weak, with battlecruisers being easy to take down cost - effectively, but in real life it’s far more like chess what with SEAD/DEAD. Air units also need a lot of space to use effectively, but they’re not 3d like Homeworld… They move on a (locally) 2d plane.
I could think of a couple ways it could work, but I would appreciate feedback. Maybe we can end up making a mod with this idea some time 
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- Low loiter times. Would need micro of air refueling
- SAM IADS. Somehow
Fog of war sorta plays into this, maybe make sams only partly reveal fog with like an alpha opacity so you have to overlay them? - Air units are extremely expensive or have very long train times compared to infantry.
- Huge maps meaning they have to navigate over huge spaces making their speed less relevant
5 ??? - Profit?
Although I feel like to model modern wars it would need to more heavily model logistics… Looking at you, Russia 
But air units being balanced is kinda an important first step lol.