Gunships: What We Know

There is no fundamental reason that forces Gunships to always be overpowered, it's just a matter of balance. Gunships can be just ans OP or UP as any other unit.

Mike

You are correct, I just say this because in most games they end up overpowered. It's not an intrinsic property of gunships themselves. Thanks for the correction.

Well the reason gunships end up overpowered is the possibility to micro them much better than any other air unit. So their value can be increased dramatically. Just think of mutalisks in Starcraft.
This huge benefit isnt usually accounted for properly. Usually they are thought of as slower but better armoured bomber.

So if you define a gunship as an air unit that has the ability to change direction instantly and float in the air, I agree that there is no reason why they should end up overpowered.
If you add the relation to the bomber, roughly same cost lower speed and higher armour, I have to disagree.

I think when commander snipes are countered by advanced robotic technology gunship balance and air balance in general will be far less overwhelming.

The sooner Uber adds commander cloaking or some other advance anti-com-snipe technology the sooner Uber can work stronger more meaningful air combat into the game without forcing highly competitive players to rely heavily on them.

You are a blessing for this forum mate. Thanks.

No source. Just speculation. A very sound speculation since it's a very good balance move to prevent the "death clouds" that everyone is afraid gunships will become.

Very sound speculation since bombers require energy and Uber is using the energy ammo system rather heavily.

Even with an energy-fire system, limiting them to burst/surgical strikes, I'm more pleased that ground-based mobile AA can eat them for breakfast. The "mutalisk effect" mentioned in Starcraft exists because those units are fairly cheap, static defenses aren't cost-efficient, and only the densest of anti-air ground armies can deal significant damage to the "ball"... if they stand still, and haven't reached a critical mass capable of killing said ground army.

Gunships look like they'll work well as glass cannons, provided there are enough hammers to make their usage risky.

We now have two massively awesome air units (bombers and gunships)

Can we now get some awesome land units?

I hope gunships have a "t1 version". By T2, there are fighter swarms out that the gunship will supposedly not be able to do **** to, in addition to masses of missile turrets.

Having gunships at t1 make it much more viable to start with air early. It gets you into the action faster, at the heavy cost of a less efficient economy and gunships costing much more than a dox or ant. It seems pretty easy to balance these things; only issue is balling, which would be a detrimental effect if there were flak.

The lack of Rocko or equivalent also makes it hard to balance gunships. I'm gonna go ahead and say the Bot AA unit should be able to attack ground units as well, of course its going to be much less effective against ground units than dox, ant, or gunship.

A proper "gunship" is a flying unit that is meant to attack ground units. An Apache is a gunship, but so is an AC-130, so the use of 'gunship' is ambiguous. So instead I will say helicopters and fixed wing aircraft, even though in ZK the "helicopters" (gunship factory) are not actually rotary wing, and neither are they all actually gunships, such as the anti-air Trident 'gunship.'

Fixed wing aircraft are very fast, but must always fly forward. TA used a quite strange system where aircraft must fly forward, but could stop in order to land, but could not stop at any other time. You could not have a bomber stop directly above an enemy and drop bombs on it while floating above it, but a bomber could stop and descend onto the ground. I consider TA aircraft to be fixed wing since in combat they behave like fixed wing craft should. Aircraft in SupCom mostly function like TA aircraft.

Helicopters are perfectly capable of stopping in combat, and in fact should stop outside of the range of enemy anti-air, something which fixed wing craft are completely incapable of doing. A helicopter works by skirting the edges of enemy anti-air, engaging targets of opportunity and using its mobility and range. They behave mostly like land units that are targeted by anti-air weaponry. Missiles from a helicopter are very useful against heavy tanks, for example, because the tank is designed to attack enemy tanks and will have a hard time dealing with a gunship.

By contrast, a fixed wing aircraft flying towards a region covered by enemy anti-air is going to fly through that anti-air, but should break off and get out as soon as possible. Fixed wing functions primarily as air support, which is quite different from helicopters that stay on the battlefield. Planes drop a payload of bombs or fire a missile or two, and bail. They don't stay on the battlefield and advance or retreat like land units do- they scream in, unleash hell, and return to base.

It doesn't really matter to me whether fixed wing aircraft are VTOL or not, but it does make a difference whether they can stop or maneuver sideways or backwards in combat. A bomber that can stop above its target (like a ZK Krow) is a very different creature from a bomber that is a fixed wing aircraft which must fly forward at all times.

I would like to see PA fixed wing aircraft not just stop in midair, with the caveat that they might be permitted to stop in midair immediately before landing only. Ideally they can't even do that, and must fly into a bay which catches them on an airbase or aircraft carrier.

Helicopters would be VTOL craft which can stop in midair, can land anywhere, and can fly sideways or backwards in combat. Such as to kite an advancing enemy, or maneuver to stay out of range of anti-air.

Helicopter gunships would be like the AH-64 Apache. Which is an extremely different unit from a workhorse strike bomber like an A-6 Intruder (I would say A-10 but that's almost a pure CAS aircraft), a big strategic bomber like a B-52 Stratofortress, or a sophisticated precision bomber like a B-2 Spirit.

I'd love to see that implemented.

Some planets no atmosphere. You can't fly wing aircraft becouse no air. But i think they have antigravity system too. Not only wings. They fix wing aircraft. Planes can't fly whitout atmosphare! Gunship have antigravity system too.
No atmosphare: the expolsion dont have a shove wave, the area damage smaler. No atmosphare or in space we need splinter bomb they mutch better becouse no air "presure".
What do you think?
But this is a game, not planet simulator D
Sorry my bad eanglish!

I wonder if the gunship could use a modified version of knight's "LongBow Overwatch Gunship" as a model. I really liked it, and considering how the gunship in the game works I think a modified version of KNight's gunship would fit pretty well. With KNight's permission of course.

KNight, if you don't want me posting this here, just message me and i'll remove it. As soon as I get your message, of course.

EDIT: huh, the quote didn't work properly, so whoever doesn't yet get it, the quoted text and images belong to KNight.

They definitely require some form of buff or dropping to T1. Using the video as my reference, they were very underpowered compared to their t2 bomber brethren, as well as low armor. Seems one would rather just keep using bombers.... perhaps their cost is significantly lower??? Idk obviously not a finished product with their Lego structure, but that's my speculation from the video.

Also @KNight sweet model!!!!!!

emraldis, just replace

Code:

[QUOTE]

with

Code:

[quote="KNight, post: 726043, member: 1968"]

And that will fix the Quote and add the little orange arrow linking it to the Original Post.

As for my Longbow, Eh, I haven't been focusing much on Gunships because we didn't have any official art yet for me to base the style off of so the model itself is far from final or optimized or anything proper really.

The More important part is the Function and Role rather than the art.

Mike

There, fixed it.

I was just saying that I think the gunship art you had already made looked pretty good, and that with a few tweaks Uber could just use that as a model. Might save them time if they haven't finished their own yet.

Except as I said, I have not idea what Uber's intent is for Gunship design, I've mostly been doing a modified SupCom:FA UEF style....more or less but it's entirely possible that UBer has something else in mind. Not to mention that my model is far from 'complete', it's roughly functional and communicates all the main points but it's hardly at the stage where I'd consider it "game ready".

Mike

Yes, I understand that. I'm not saying that you have to do the modifying. I'm sure Uber could ask you for the model, and with your permission, they could modify it however they want it, and then implement it.

It's better than the model we've seen in the videos at least!

I wonder if actual rotary wing units might be in the cards. I think having slow, hovering, and maneuverable would be a significant enough difference to justify a completely different art direction compared to fighters and bombers.

Correct.

Because that's BLATANTLY their extreme placeholder model. It even says on the description something along the lines of "Flying Template Unit: if you're seeing this, you haven't made this unit correctly"