Air Transports?

One quick question. Will there be Air Transports? I don't have the game so I don't know if they are in there or not. Haven't seen any in the many many matches I have watched. I loved setting Air Transports on a Ferry path (in SupCom)and having like ten factories linked to them so I would have a constant flow of units headed somewhere.

They are being worked on, but it doesn't seem like they'll be done in the exact same fashion of SupCom's.

Mike

So what would that mean........ the only reason I ask that is what other way would a transport work?

Word on the street is that it's going to be single unit transports.

Neutrino has talked about it, do some searches.

Mike

Single Unit Well that sucks.

Do a search. Been talked about.

They're being worked on. We don't know too much about them.

They talked about them on a screencast. Code wise transports are tricky, so they're taking longer to develop than other types of units.

I think the best way to do transports is to abandon the idea that transports have to work the way modern transports do. PA lore is so far in the future we can justify whatever we want, and transports are definitely one area where a realistic implementation may be more trouble than it is worth. Coming up with something new which makes transports integral to the game, and where they work simply and effectively, is better than sticking to realism.

Transports are one area which is tremendously important for large-scale strategy games, but which has really never been done satisfactorily. Efficient transport management would allow fast transports to be used to add strategic mobility when combat units are all relatively slow, enabling relatively larger maps, and creating strategic maneuver using transports in addition to army management.

But historically, transports are awkward. Especially in TA, they were dreadful to manage. The Atlas, single-unit flying carrier was always an awkward unit, especially for moving a quantity of units, purely because of how annoying they were to produce, manage, load and unload, and so on. However, monolithic transports also don't really work for economic reasons. Large, expensive, and tough transports are pathological because they can drop an army right on top of even heavy defenses

I imagine a large sea transport like The Hulk in TA. Except instead of using a crane (which was awkward), or using lander vessels or something, the transport spawns tiny helicopters which act like a large number of cranes acting simultaneously. This concept makes the relative positions of the load/unload target irrelevant. An air transport doesn't have to fly directly on top of the unit and pick it up; it sends a lifter, and it can use lifters to pick up or drop off multiple units in different places simultaneously. This system can allow a high-capacity carrier unit that is actually cheap, provided it is relatively fragile to make hot drops a bad idea for the carrier. Have the carrier send its lifters into hot drop zones from a safe distance.

Lifters allow the player to execute large-scale airdrops with minimal micromanagement of quantities of small transports. Small, disposable lifters could also be used to load or unload larger air transports that never land. The same principle can even be adopted to orbital transports, using suborbital units like dropships.

So what I propose is to have the Atlas' role be filled by extremely cheap lifters, possibly with a hard leash in distance from their carrier. Lifters can be used to deliver units a significant distance from the carrier, but can also be shot down individually. The carrier constructs its lifters, and when they are destroyed it automatically builds more.

This arrangement gives all the gameplay benefits of a large-scale invasion using lots of little transports, instead of a few large, tough ones. Players also get all the strategic-level management benefits of few transports, and don't have to micromanage a large fleet of transports. When they launch a large airdrop invasion, they only need a few orders to execute it, and the management and replacement of the lifters is automated by the carrier unit.

The key with transports will be automation. Combat is fast paced and happens in multiple places at once. We have enough to think about rather than clicking on individual units or small amounts of units and micro managing their movement.

Just think about moving between planets. You've invaded a new planet and you have conquered a small section of the planet. You're trying to pump out factories, but are in danger of being overrun. You have 50+ factories on one of your other planet, so getting all of those units to the new planet is key to holding off the attacking waves. When you're hardcore focused on expanding and holding off attacks at the same time, it is imperative that you don't have to hop back and forth from planet to planet making sure transports are on the way.

This needs to happen automatically.

Something like setting up rally points. Where all units that go to a certain area are automatically loaded up onto transports. When the transports are full, they fly to a specific destination on the same planet, or if they have space flight capabilities, then they'll fly all the way to the new planet. Then they'll unload, and fly back and pick up more units.

Be it on one planet, or across multiple planets (if there will be such a transport), automation key.

I think automation should be, and probably is, Uber's primary focus when developing transports.

I think the key to transports being interesting actually has nothing to do with the transports themselves. The real key to making transports interesting is to make a sufficiently large map (relative to combat unit movement speed) that we have a real distinction between tactical mobility and strategic mobility.

Tactical mobility gives a unit tactical options in a local fight. Its movement speed, essentially. Higher movement speed allows a unit to retreat, to chase, to flank, to maneuver in all ways more quickly whenever an opportunity presents itself.

Strategic mobility, on the other hand, is the ability to deploy units to the theatre where they are needed quickly. On a large map, even units that have excellent tactical mobility are still very, very slow compared to the map's size. It would take a prohibitive amount of time for those units to just walk all the way. So players invest in transports to enable those combat units to move around the big map in a timely fashion. The ability to carry units to another continent in minutes instead of hours, for example. And the players know that they are paying for movement speed, not combat power, when they build transports. Strategic deployment using transports is actually more efficient than covering the entire area with troops (which may be totally infeasible), as long as you have good information about where they will be needed.

As a corollary to the above on strategic mobility, it is important that managing transports is not actually a frustrating micromanagement-intensive APM sink like it was in TA. Because transports were manually controlled, finicky, and annoying, the game was played on smaller maps with combat units that just walk across the entire map. If transports were better automated and easier to manage and use, TA would have been a much more pleasant experience to play on truly EPIC sized maps.

It seems to me that PA is going to make transports essential; at the very least for use between planets. As a result, integrating them into normal gameplay and coming up with good automation and effective control systems seems necessary.

just give me a way to make a ferry-route from A to B and set like 20-40 transports onto this route. fully automatic, with some addition that if i add combat aircraft to that route they patrol there and defend the transports.

i just look at supcom how it does that and it worked like a charm for me

Yes, cheap to build single-unit-transports and a very well coded ferry system would be fine for me - no need for a transport that carries more than on unit.

The main issue with the SupCom ferry system is that it could be deleted if the original transport was destroyed. And then we go back to "Order as First-Class Entities" as abstract orders have come to be called on this forum. Without it, your ferry system collapses at some random point in the future when a single transport is destroyed. Even if you make it copied to every transport on the route, it would still disappear if every transport were destroyed.

The ability to issue orders to the UI, instead of to a specific unit, is necessary in order to implement the kind of ferry system you mention. That would allow you to create routes independently of any units, and then assign both transports and units to be transported to the route.

I personally dont see any reasons against multiple unit transports, but i see plenty of reasons for them. How else do they expect us to play on the larger planets? i certainly am not waiting 10mins for my army to stream across to the other side of the planet to my base. I just wont be playing anything over scale 3 in that situation.

When you find the thread where it's already been discussed you'll see what the real issue(s) are.

Mike

if you are talking about this thread: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/ways-of-planet-transportation.52084/
there is absolutely no discussion about planetary transport, its all about interplanetary. From the plans that uber has, i dont see any problem with getting between planets with units, i only see a problem with getting around large planets. Unless you want to point out to me which issues about interplanetary also affect planetary travel?

The idea of setting up a ferry line and then adding transports (regardless of single- or multi-unit) to it that pick up units at point A and drop them at point B is certainly interesting.
At least more interesting than building factories at/close to the frontlines.
If a mechanic like that is implemented (which I hope will be at some point) it could also be used for patrols:
set up the route, select some units and assign them to that route.

It´s this threat:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/a-light-bulb-came-on.51138/page-2#post-783402

well then i hope to god these other forms of transport are not expensive. It would turn large planets into a no-rush esque game mode.

This is what i think. But as i understood John Mavor they will be cheap.

It's more than just being cheap, it's also being quick to build, otherwise if they take about the same amount of time the units you want to transport do you'd maybe need just as many Air factories as you do Land factories to supply those transports.

It does have the upside that you transporting force is a bit more 'resilient' in the air as each transport(although much weaker I'm sure) must be targeted individually.

I'm still hoping Uber can come up with something that results in multi unit transports while avoiding the difficulties of SupCom's implementation.

Mike