Transport Difficulties: More Detail?

Though I don't want to stress the team out, I'm curious as to what the specific difficulties are that I keep hearing about with multi-unit transports. Is it a graphical issue, like trying to show units being transported a la the Astreus? Is it a code issue, with stored unit values going screwy at the drop of a pin? Is it a mechanics issue, with loading/unloading somehow being stubbornly wonky? Inquiring minds wish to know.

If worst comes to worst... it's okay if you cheat a little. The visual fidelity of seeing units constructed in their factories is great, but if you have to get tricky to make unit transports work, that's (probably) fine by most of us.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/a-light-bulb-came-on.51138/

Mike

I think Uber's difficulties with transports stems from two things. Firstly, the idea that the unit being transported must be visible while being transported. And secondly, that the transport itself must do the loading and unloading work.

Honestly, I could care less if the unit being transported is visually displayed. It can walk up a ramp inside the transport and disappear for all I care. Or the transport could just drop down on top of it and disappear the thing. Heck, it could magic its way vertically into the transport by magical beam transporter or just disappear. It doesn't matter, as long as the transport actually works. Same for carriers; why not just have the aircraft be stored inside the carrier instead of limiting yourselves to only the carrier's deck, and say they're launched by catapult instead of just lifting off the deck?

And it also does not matter to me if the transport flies over to each unit individually and picks them up one at a time, or if the units to be picked up all stand in nice formation to get picked up simultaneously. This is all really unnecessary work. A functional transport system is much more desirable than having loading and unloading look good.


My proposal for transports is to have disposable lifter "copter" drones that can fan out and pick up units, and carry them back to the transport. These drones then enter the unit's hold or some other aperture, and you don't see them again until you unload something. The transport itself doesn't even have to land, or it could be a ship and pick up or drop off land units using the same drones. Think of a Hulk with a hundred arms, only each is an independent copter drone instead of being attached to the Hulk model.

These expendable single-unit drone transports would be managed by the transport. You can issue a load or unload command to a target area, and they get to ferrying. You could even use them for a hot drop aerial assault on a defended beach or whatever.

Using such drones load/unload a transport means the transport itself can store an arbitrarily large number of units in its hold, and can load or unload a whole bunch of units at a time depending on how many drones it is allowed to maintain. You don't have to merge a transport and a lot of unit models, tell multi-unit transports how to load or unload several units at once, or do a lot of other complex work to make multi-unit transports functional.

The choice between visible and not visible units is HUGE in this game. Why? Because What You Shoot is What You Hit. A transport carrying a tank can absorb a TON more damage by using the tank as a shield. The alternative is to die and lose the tank anyway.

That sounds... somewhat unintuitive. Unless you're referring to air transports. I understand that visible units and avodiding "pop stuff out of nowhere" is an artistic choice, but I hardly see it as a gameplay one - except to see what your enemy is building. For example, factories. You can't shoot in-progress units in factories, to my knowledge.

This has never been the case in any TA-derivative game.

Transports which visually display the unit or units they are transporting seldom change the behavior of the transport in any way. The closest you'll get to what you describe is the "ghetto gunship" from using a transport to lift bots in SupCom, since they can shoot from the transport.

Transports have never become actually tougher in any way because of the unit they are transporting.

Furthermore, as the scale of the game increases, visually displaying which unit a transport is carrying matters less. You can't expect another player to zoom in to manually inspect enemy transports to visually confirm what they are carrying- nobody even did this in SupCom. The feature of being able to see the unit model is not very useful, but is very difficult to implement.

Why not just say the units are stored inside the transport?

Thats quite the assumption. Knowing whats about to be dropped on you is very helpful in organizing a defense. I for one used visual recognition all the time when I played supcom.

I completely agree with this mentality. As far as I'm concerned, the transport is a blackbox. Yes, sure it looks great if they look like SupCom. But really, who cares? It's just a cargohold.

Exactly. Functionality over aesthetics.

I like the idea.

The other thing is you could just have the transport eject units over the target area - the units are all stored in the cargo hold, and they just get kicked out over the LZ. Like the kickstarter unit cannon, which splits into separate units on arrival in the atmosphere.

I do think there should be multiple unit pickup - but I don't really see why you couldn't do it by magnetism and just have them "suck up units" as they flew over them. The nicety in appearance would be from having your units in ordered formations prior to pick up, as opposed to a random ball, but it wouldn't be part of the core transport mechanic

False. Start up Supcom and pick up a bunch of ****. T1 AA will be physically blocked by the transport's cargo. You likely have not noticed because:
1) T1 AA sucks and flak is SO much better (flak ignores this).
2) Interceptors shoot horizontally, avoiding the cargo and hitting the transport directly.
3) Transports have paper thin armor regardless.

This also happened in TA, but it was not effective because nearly everything had splash damage (even if the AoE was pixels).

Cargo blocking can be a very useful factor to average out the risk associated between large and small units on a transport. A heavy tank transport will be much more difficult to destroy from the ground, making that type of unit more viable for a drop. Cheaper units will not block as much, making them more risky to use.

The alternative was to use size in Supcom, with large units taking up more space than small units. This helped to average out the amount of mass each transport could carry.

By accident, TA had SupCom-style transports. If I recall correctly, you could order an atlas/valkyrie to unload a unit onto a carrier's aircraft pads. It's not really a transport, but if you step back and squint really hard...

Who knows, maybe developing aircraft repair pads in TA took 3 months.

Air repair pads were expansion units.

So yes.

Carriers have aircraft repair pads and they aren't expansion units.

Yeah TA carriers were just floating repair pads.

The air transports need to show their cargo. The reason is that it's 1000X cooler that way.
A bunch of dropships screaming in to drop off a wave of troops looks totally cinematic and rad.
A flying mystery box looks doing it with teleportation nonsense looks lame.

Air assaults with UEF transports were pretty much the only reason why I played Supcom for so long.

Yes... but flying mystery box is better than no transports.

If it comes down to it, I'd still rather have single-use pre-loaded multi-unit transports (which pretty much eliminates all of the coding complications with transports), or transports that could only be loaded at a building (which presumably must be possible if the Unit Cannon is ever to be implemented) than TA-style single-unit transports. Mystery box transports would also be acceptable.

Single unit transports have balance problems since there's no flexibility/capacity trade-off. Given how unpopular construction aircraft are already, any transport worth using would obsolete them almost entirely. You don't have this problem with a multi-unit transport, since its capacity can justify a higher cost, so construction aircraft still keep the "building stuff in hard to reach places" role because it's rarely worth sending six engineers to do those jobs, and sending mostly empty transports makes the construction aircraft the cheaper option.

If anyone remembers the game Ground Control, the corporate dropship would be something great to use here.

It's a big flat box with engines, the whole bottom was a big door, it landed on top of units and picked them up or dropped them off. I'll go find some pictures when I get home.

I agree that having a means to do transportation is more important than how it has to be implemented. If using teleportation style is easier, then go for that for now and improve visuals along the way then.
A nice example of teleportation-like ships is the Wraith Dart from Stargate Atlantis. The beaming up and placing down, can have nice visuals. If you would like to have a visual indication of what is being transported, you could add eg. 6 lights on the hull to indicate that there are 6 available slots. Eg. colored green when transporting a T1 unit, colored orange when transporting a T2 unit and uncolored if the slot is free. Anyways, it's not up to us

I'm ok with cargohold style transportation. Just make it look good and hold lots of units!

I'm not opposed to single-unit transports at all.
I actually find it rather amusing to see a transport carrying something huge underneath it.



A humongous swarm of transports scattering in all directions to pick up and transport your equally large army would be amazing to see.

For maybe smaller units...





And for a much tankier one like a TA Sumo...




I think the UEF Stinger's transport capabilities are totally underused because they look so damn cool.


I would love to see a Gunship/Trasport hybrid like it return...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the difficulty here about multi-unit transports being able to visibly transport multiple units? Surely it'd be easy as pie to make multi-unit transports if the payload is hidden. Then there's no need for magnetism or any of that crap. Sure we'd lose ghetto gunships, but I'd much prefer multi-unit transports over single-unit ghetto gunships.

EDIT: And if the pickup / drop animation is a concern, well lets just either have the drop ship land and take off with the units appearing on the ground beneath it, or just have some teleportation effect. Neither require magnetism.