A light bulb came on

You are absolutely right. To make it fair for the player, there should be a go there faster command and that would add unnecessary complexity to the game.

So giving the player options is unnecessary but forcing them to work around an automated system that tries to do something they don't want to do is okay?

Mike

I think you misunderstood me. I think my idea is not good. It does not add enough depth for the complexity it brings with trying to get past the automated system without a specific command or with it. I don't think my idea should be implemented.

There is definitely going to be an air transport. I want it to be cheap enough you can move armies around with it, one transport per army. We'll see how that works out

Erh? lol

I think my sarcasm detector is going off, but it's speakers are broken so it's hard to tell. I'm in support of mechanisms that make transportation more streamlined, and I'm ok with the idea of transports naturally ferrying units from A to B, but it shouldn't be automatic in terms of units moving from here to there, and the transport will automatically ferry them instead of the units going there themselves. It creates more problems than it solves.

Perhaps instead of SupCom's ferry icons that units have to specifically move to, you can have areas that ferrys will naturally transfer if units are told to move to/from, like across bodies of water or over long distances. If you make it as a controlled ferry system instead of 100% automatic, you won't run into any problems from the automatic process, and you still have the entire premise of what the automatic system would have given you anyway.

Fair enough?

Heh, I see my response was hard to understand.

Like I replyed to Knight, after what you said I realised that an automatic system would be more hazzle than it's worth, so there was no sarcasm. I would like transports automatically ferrying land units when I order them over an ocean, but then again, the ferry action works well enough in these situations.

Very glad to hear this do you have a plan whether it's going to be a beam up type of transport or will the transport actually have to land when loading/unloading? What numbers do you mean by an "army"? An ant army of 200 units? 50 levelers? I realize this might be too early to ask such numbers.

That's... a lot of eggs in one basket! What's wrong with building 2 or 10 transports to get the job done?

Supcom had fairly decent cargo capacity for transports, even if they were perhaps a touch too expensive. The major problem with Supcom transport was due to interceptors being so absurdly powerful and inexpensive. It destroyed the viability of everything in the air.

~~~~~~~~~~Design:~~~~~~~~~~~
The factors to adjust transport power are capacity, speed, health, altitude, max size, and cost. Capacity determines the average strength of a 1-transport skirmish force (make it defendable by the Commander). Speed is the most critical as a survival booster, a skirmish booster, and an overall transport booster. A speed boost improves pretty much everything about a transport. Health is pretty clear to survive attacks (but the best defense is to stay out of trouble). Altitude can be used to tweak how well the transport can hide behind hills/etc. Max size can be used to lock out specific raiding units until the T2 level(make the troublesome unit too large to transport at T1 i.e. Commander), or to lock it out all together (like with super sized units i.e. Krogoth). Finally, cost determines how all of the previous factors work together. As transports are support units that don't attack, their cost can be low (10-35% of cargo value).

A sneaky bonus is to use transport cargo as "ablative armor" to protect a transport. This is definitely a Tier-2 ability, for transports that have very high capacity and the ability to move large units.

When transports stop working, it's time to bring in the unit cannons. These too can be fairly cheap as they are useless without paying for viable "ammo". Unit cannons are balanced around burst capacity, fire rate, range, max size, energy use, and cost. Burst capacity determines the size of a skirmish force- increase for base raiding and decrease for field use. Fire rate and range determine the overall power of the gun. Most units can be launched at T2, but max size can lock out the biggest and most troublesome units. Energy use and cost determine the overall price tag of bringing a cannon to bear.

Energy use can be further refined if energy is planet-specific; for example unit cannons are needed in large numbers for gas giants. That energy use can be paid with the efficient He3 generators, reducing the cannon's overall cost where it is needed most.

Sorry I mis-spoke. One tranport PER UNIT not army. One word makes all the difference!

That's a relief. I doubt massive cheap army carriers would be a good thing for gameplay.

I'm not sure how I feel about single unit transports to be honest, even when you streamline the process to control the 50-100 transports I'm skeptical that it'll be practical to use because of the factory time they would require.

Is there any particular reasoning for the departure from the SupCom style for transports? Aside from the minor control issues inherent to SupCom overall the whole Transport workings seemed really spot on to me.

Mike

Gotta agree with this. I'm curious as to why you would limit transports to carry one single unit instead of the SupCom setup that allows transports to carry multiple units.

If these units are already The Best™, then after thousands of years, I would expect that transports would be efficiently able to carry entire armies.. Though TA's setup was simple, it wasn't efficient, and efficiency is part of being The Best™.

Because implementing multi-unit transports was a bitch. There are a bazillion issues that crop up when trying to do that which we simply don't have time to work on. Someday we'll add this but it's not required for the game and it's an ultra expensive feature. Avoiding this kind of stuff is one of the few aces in the hole we have on budget.

I hope you guys aren't using SupCom as a baseline feature set for this game. Our budget is fraction of SupCom and we have both less people and less time.

Note that we will have ways of transporting units around like teleporters, unit cannon etc. that won't have single unit limitations. This is because we'll use a cargo container type scheme were the units don't have to be shown at all times which is a lot easier to implement. Multi unit transports could be done using that system but you wouldn't get the racks of dudes hanging off of the side shooting type of stuff.

As we get closer to ship you are going to see me being even more ruthless with features that I consider to be expensive. I'm just going to continue to be really clear about this even though people seem to complain when I talk about resource constraints.

transports are really important to this kind game,or try find other solution plz

I honestly don't think shooting from transports is necessary. Multi-unit transport ships in TA hid the units anyway.

Yep, so we may be able to do that. But we are starting with single unit transports and I'm not guaranteeing that we are going multi unit before launch. Certainly that was never a feature I intended when conceiving of the game (other than of course unit cannons and teleporters which should fulfill these purposes).

That's sad to hear, the way units attached and just the way the transports behaved was really great, will we see that more "realistic" behavior return at least in some fashion? I'd rather avoid the 'magic teleport' style transport mechanic.

Mike

Hmm, I didn't realize attaching units to other units was that big of a technical hurdle. It's just a bunch of arrays/tables and some angles and offset vectors, right?

I'm very happy with single unit transports so long as ordering them is easy enough. Making transport orders (and to that extent, build orders) first class entities would be a must. Group transport would be a must. Ferry would be a must.

A "Transport Me" button for ground units would fulfill all of those categories, I think...

See to me that isn't a huge issue and I'm a bit more worried about the idea that single unit transports will require a slight shift in thinking as a player, with single unit transports the building of the Army and the Transports need to happen in parallel which is a shift from most other transport mechanics.

But we'll have to wait and see for more details before we can judge it too much.

Mike

I am guessing it will be a basic unit. If that is the case, then it wont be hard to spam them out.

Single unit transports will also be a lot less of a gamble when it comes to AA/fighters.

It's not just the attaching, it's things like lining them up to be picked up, how to handle different sizes, all the wacky combinations of units etc. Doing a single unit transport is the iterative way to handle this problem. Multi-unit transports were one of the most expensive features we implemented during the development of SupCom.