transport

Other then the already existing orbital career and the orbital bot launcher soon to come there is no way of transporting a unique group of units around a planet. (not including the teleporter because in almost all circumstances it is normally unless in preventing a already attacking army/harassment building)

Is there any plans on making a unit that transports a limited amount of units to a certain area (that can't go into orbit)?

A flying unit that does this would be great for harassments and catching a player off guard. Adding something that does this would add a risk/reward element and would add more available tactics.

Yes this has been confirmed. Please use the search function ( I know it's not that great sometimes).

Yeah. This is talked about and confirmed quite a bit.

You should browse the confirmed features list: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/confirmed-features-list-2-0.44950/

Transports are being worked on. Uber has said they're having difficulty with them. Something about it being hard to turn two units into one and then back into two.

They've said that we'll likely have single unit transports and may not have multi unit transports. However, transports will be tied into the area command system so it'll be easy to automate transfers of lots of units, including having factories queued into ferry orders.

Pretty cool stuff.

That's what's always bugged me about transports. They require too much work. Sounds like that won't be the case for PA.

I'm looking forward to it.

It needs to be upgraded.

Google search does a great job when the forum search fails.

I'm really looking forward to see how it will work.

Am I the only one who's not thrilled about hordes of single-unit transports? Maybe it's because I'm not neck-deep in the code and can't see the difficulties they're having with multi-unit transports, but it seems that it'd be fairly simple to me. Remove a unit, count two variables for its unit type and HP, use those two variables to create a new one when you unload. Boom! Done!

We'll get something sooner or later, though. Don't you worry.

It really depends on how we're combining the unit and the transport, and what level of fidelity we're talking about.

I imagine it wouldn't be hard to have the transport "absorb" the units into a black box. Those units are removed from the map, and they are added into an array property of the transport. When the transport unloads we just dump the contents of the array onto the field. That part is easy, but it is very low fidelity.


If we want to see our units hanging off the side of the transport, and have incoming fire hit the transported units like a human shield this gets much more complicated.

There's also the issue of supporting area transport and ferry commands. There is a lot of granular unit AI to be scripted when the transports need to chose their own unit for transport. And if several transports are cued to pick up several units we need flags and pointers to help transports know who is already getting picked up so they can move to the next.

We should all familiarize ourselves with this thread in particular before we discuss this topic further has it's been covered pretty well already...

Mike

So... the devs said pretty much the same thing I did. I hadn't read that topic, but I've done enough game work to know for myself.

The real barrier to using a thousand tiny transports is the micro involved, and a clever UI can reduce that to pretty much nothing. I'm fine with a single unit transfer for a single planet. An air factory married up to my tank factory gets the job done.

That said, I'd still like to use the "black box array" to build massive interplanetary assault ships. I have the suspicion that's something that will be facilitated for mods, if not in the main game.

Orbital or air fabbers building a teleporter at the end point work well enough in most situations. A mobile antinuke coming through the gate ahead of the army could solve a lot of the problems with teleporters getting nuked. Do we really need massive interplanetary transports?

Aren't Asteroids supposed to be that?

Mike

I'm not sure we NEED anything, but I for sure know I want them.

My problem with assaulting via teleporters is that when the enemy has locked down a smaller planet there's no real opportunity to build one. His umbrellas and avengers will ensure your fabber has no time to do the construction, and his uber airforce on super patrol will make sure that it always gets bombed the moment you start it.

These are really problems with the current state of interplanetary invasion and are addressed endlessly in other threads. The actual act of transporting is a little different than the application of said transports.

Doubtless this has already been thought of, but as a non-programmer I don't understand why Uber can't take the principles of how SupCom transports worked and then re-write it so it doesn't infringe any intellectual rights.

Well I actually do kinda like the idea of a flock of transports in order to mitigate AA fire on a hot landing.

But why would you do that? Just drag the unit along for the ride. If it gets shot, it gets shot. If anything, the meat shield allows transports to be even more aggressive.

Probably the single largest reason is because of the server client nature of PA. SupCom was peer based and unit locations were calculated locally. In PA any adjustments need to be made server side and then updated back to the clients. This is done in batches and runs the risk of your transport and units getting out of sync with each other.

PA mimics the play style of the earlier games and inherits a legacy of inspiration, but under the hood there are a mountain of major differences that make it a little more unique than saying "round maps"

I might be barking up the wrong tree here, but I understand it as the units need to be 'combined' so that the properties of the transport are inherited to the unit being transported. Otherwise you'd probably get weird exploits where you could make e.g. a tank fly orbital without a transport.

That. And you also need to route the UI interaction with the tank over to the transport. If you have the tank-hot keyed to a group it needs to select the transport instead of the tank, or if you give an attack order the transport needs to set the tank down so it can attack.

If you're setting up a single unit transport you can cheat by making the tank the primary unit and changing it's behavior to act like it's being transported. Or you can make the transport look like it's carrying a tank, but making the transport genuinely carry the tank is a little more complicated than just flipping a flag.

Since members of Uber worked on SupCom, I'd say they've thought of that.

They're good at their job. If it were easy, it would have been done by now.

And I'm sure the simplest working transport is easy. But that's no animation and polish. Making a transport right. With smooth animations, easy usage, now that's hard.

Of course they've thought of that.