Air Craft Fueling

What if flying craft had no flight limit? Consider the following: resources and energy magically get dumped into a single stockpile, without any physical means of transmission; that implies teleportation from the start, on a limited scale; also, ground vehicles don't need to refresh themselves, which follows the previous example. By having planes fly and fight without restocking, it makes them more consistent with the first two examples. Their uniqueness could come only in the form of greater speed, reduced defense, and greater specialization of roles; where as ground vehicles have more generally applied roles. I'm not a fan of rock-paper-scissors style play, but if it's only partially applied, as above, I think it makes an interesting addition by really separating the thinking required for use of air assets from ground assets. Further, Ground Control, used the above system to good effect, as in aircraft which never land.

If planes can fly and fight indefinitely, as with ground vehicles, then the only purpose for landing is for repair. That would make carriers nothing but repair facilities, for expediting mid-battle repair. Wouldn't that reduce micromanagement to some degree, by having only one purpose for landing, rather than two?

There could still be an advantage to riding a ship into battle: moving under the radar, that's if the game has sensors horizons based on planetary curve. This way, when approaching the enemy field of view, planes could fly low to reduce radar range, but not as low as being carried into battle on a ship.

Thoughts?

I assumed the game had no fog-of-war after you get, say, spy satellites or a base on the moon with a certain sensor.

"We're not shooting for realism, We're shooting for AWESOME!"

Seriously, you're over thinking this. Aircraft carriers and land based aircraft repair stations existed in TA for repair only. There's no need to unnecessarily complicate this thing with fuel requirements.

Nothing needs fuel, not planes, not ships, not robots. They're all powered with nuclear fuel cells. Why do you think everything is so explodey?

It would be nice if satellites and a moon base only gave limited coverage, rather than full coverage.

Thanks, I really wasn't sure of it, because I vaguely recall aircraft having to return to base, but it must have been for repairs. I'm glad it will be consistent.

I still found aircraft repair pads to be a bit wonky in SupCom:FA. If you needed to repair a large flight it could take ages.

How about instead of a repair pad that the aircraft land on, make something like a huge ring or gateway kind of like a stargate. Aircraft fly through the gateway at top speed and are repaired instantly as they pass through. Seems like a stretch, but it would make the process much quicker.

A more balanced way to approach it would be letter lots of aircraft fly through at once, but have them slow down a fair bit when they do. That way you can't just build tons of them and have an essentially invincible airforce wherever you wanted, there would be some risk in using them, as your aircraft would be relative sitting ducks while getting repaired. Seems like a fair tradeoff to me.

I don't think fuel is a bad mechanics at all actually. I know it was a mechanic that was somewhat reviled in supcom. In effect it just meant you had to build another building at T2, and it was sometimes annoying when you forgot it. Aircraft carries usually weren't really used for the role they were designed for, if they were used at all it was as a factory, not a support unit.

However I think some changes are needed from the supcom model.
1. Air Factories should have a free air pad standard.
2. It should definitely be faster
3. The penalties should be higher, maybe just let aircraft crash if they don't make it. (unit ai will automatically refuel obv)
4. Planes should generally have less fuel.

A major problem in PA I think will be to differentiate the different theatres of war: sea shouldn't just be a carbon copy of land warfare but with slightly different units and a different fac. In Starcraft it just means some units can't shoot each other, and some hard counter others, thats not really interesting imho. You should play a different game on each different level, and they should interface in interesting ways: torpedo bombers, coastal artillery batteries that are vulnerable to fast land units, air units are fast and high damage but generally low health, naval is long range etc.

Fuel would do that for aircraft I think. It would make aircraft more of a mission oriented unit instead of copying land war in the air. So instead of territory conquest, air would be geared to fast destructive strikes, as it is in real life. It would also interface in interesting ways with sea and land power. You'd need to protect air pads or your aircraft carriers to be able to execute air strikes in enemy territory.

EDIT: Some people favor air pads only as a repair mechanism like in TA. However most aircraft are usually so fragile -and they should be- there is little use for repairing. It would also make air warfare more like land warfare.

Having fuel for aircraft (in a simple way that minimises micro) could counterbalance making aircraft reasonably destructive, I like that.

I like the idea of factories also having a repair pad too.

I liked the ammo recharge (instead of fuel) for aircraft, as done in most of the C&C games. That way you were sure that your aircraft could make it to target and back in terms of fuel, and you couldn't destroy an entire tank force with one plane.

Maybe it won't work on a larger scale such as PA's, but worth considering imo.

Ammo is how we've done in in ZK and I think it works fairly well. Basically every bomber carries one load of bombs which it must return to a pad to regain. It means aircraft pads are relevant and frontline pads reduce downtime. Bombers become more distinct from gunships in that they are more for strikes rather than constantly pounding a base. It is also clear to players what is going on, instead of checking the fuel of each of their bombers before an attack they can glance at them and check for the 'out of ammo' icon.

Sounds interesting! It essentially changes the air game into a punctual "strike mission" thing - after the fights happened, there is going to be downtime for the planes.

WZ2100 did ammo. on aircraft exactly like that. It was quite effective as a balance measure to limit rampant force projection, though it didn't stop player (or the damn AI) from building a massive wing of bombers and wailing on your base, one building at a time.

I really wish we could have modded SupCom's fuel system to work like that.

Limited ammo seems like an excellent idea.

I also like the concept of moving 'through' a repair area, but what if instead of flying, they landed as if it were an actual airstrip? Slowing to land, then speeding up to take off after getting repaired. Landing in this fashion would make them even more vulnerable to ground attack, but would be much faster to repair and rearm than whatever other method there may be (engineer repairing?).

On the other hand, if they managed to improve the repairing design so that planes would properly use every available landing pad (and making the pads more common), there may be no need for a change beyond the implementation of ammo.

I for one would prefer to forget about aircraft fuel, in supcom/FA it was rather wonky, even modded finding the right fuel times for air craft was tricky, too little and they were useless too much and it was the same as before, no need for carriers or pads other than repair.

I would like to see an ammunition method instead, like in WZ2100, would force a player to make sure they had enough air pads to resupply their VTOLs constantly, would also be a good way to cripple an air force if you manage to take out your enemies air pads.

Obviously the ammo idea sounds like a great solution, but could you elaborate how other units than bombers were done? Gunships, radar planes, ASF's etc.

I don't have ammo for units other than bombers and I don't see the need for it. Bombers naturally work with ammo because they can have a single unit of ammo for a single bombing run. A single unit of ammo is easy to keep track of and fits with how bombers are used with bombing runs. Gunships and fighters are tend to be more of a persistent attack type unit rather than a striker.

I can agree with using ammo for bombers only. Specifically, 1 load of bombs.

I just assumed they used hydrogen fuel cells

I liked the bombers in TA, they had no ammo requirements, but likewise they were also made out of paper and easily shot down. In SupCom, the tech 3 aircraft (StatBomber)became this almost indestructable death machine that was hard to shoot down, unless you had technology that could equal its power.

If PA is going to be more like TA I would like, I would like no ammo requirements, but if this is going the SupCom route, then special requirements for certain aircraft. However this would lead to micro problems, especially if the bombers don't reload (if theres no landing pads close by)

I dislike the idea of one unit, or one set of units, having ammo when nothing else has it, but if it were only bombers, that wouldn't be bad. However, in the early stages I would prefer the only attack which requires ammo are nukes, that way, bombers don't get to nuke spam, but ICBM's and commanders are no longer the only means to nuking. This way, all sorts of units could carry nukes, and their careful use would take on tactical importance.

Hopefully that would be the precursor to an antimatter stage which turns all attacks into big and small nukes.

Fuel has a far more important task then just limiting attack strength.

It limits the action radius of air units. That became quite important in SupCom when playing on 40x40 or 81x81km maps. Planes were efficient mobile defenses which you could relocate easily (and use to defend 1-2 adjacent bases), but it was impossible to perform a rush straight across the map with T1 bombers since they didn't have enough fuel to make it that far. On 81x81 you actually needed some type of mobile carrier even for T3 bombers just to extend their range!

You wan't to limit the attack power of bombers? Fine, set their fuel to zero after an succesfull attack so they have to return to base. But don't mess with canon boats and such, you shoudl't be able to move planes to far from your base or otherwise their movement speed makes them unbalanced.