Planetary Assaults and Interstellar Transportation

Yes, the focs of my idea is thus on moving troops to hostile planets.

It would also be nice if you could build units while the dropship/carrier was in transit / orbiting.

If the time it takes to traverse from 1 planet to the next is long, then you really need the ability to keep making tanks while you fly there. Additionally being so far from the nearest friendly base, having the ability to make T1 units from a carrier would help you get a foot hold once you arrive (assuming your not shot right out of the sky).

I vote for rockets and cannons like in the video

Lots of cool ideas here

I agree that one star system per battlefield is plenty, and that binary ant trinity stars per system are a good option to spice things up

The idea of a few varieties of drop ship is great. The visualization only showed a single unit rocket transport. I feel like that is a good early game interplanetary transport, and that we should get bigger options at higher prices and tech levels. A medium size drop ship that can ferry a dozen tanks around would be good. I would love to have a massive mothership capable of carrying hundreds of ground units and squats of orbital defence satellites or orbital to high atmosphere bomber planes and maybe even orbital bombardment weaponry that it could swarm and lay siege on a planet.

I am thinking that since the guys at Uber are pretty much against the idea of travelling through space particularly in conventional space ships.

I think an expansion of the unit cannon might be a great idea for transporting units, structures and resources alike.

I think drop ships and carriers are too much along the lines of conventional space warfare. So much so that they promote the idea of space combat, which again Uber is against. It's a whole new mechanic for them to write.

Essentially, with that in mind, the carrier and drop ship method means a way by which an attacking commander could besiege a planet in close proximity with no means of the defending commander repelling the attack. Particularly with multiple carriers and drop ships the problem is increased.

IMO for the system to work there needs to be some kind way to defend against these attacks. Perhaps some kind of satellite defence system or planetary based anti drop ship batteries.

That said, the unit cannon seems to have no apparent system to defend against it so maybe it's a non-issue? Personally I think that there needs to be a way that an attacking commander can get units planet side, but I also feel that the defending commander must be able to fully repel the attack one way or another.

Source? That would piss me of a lot.


Concerning the ground to orbit defense installations: Why not have such a thing? It's actually a neat idea. That would force an attacker to not drop right into an oponents base, which would be a good thing to prevent anyways.

It all depends on what you consider as a spaceship or orbital unit, or how finely you interpret devs responses on the forums what exactly is a space battle, etc..

Will there be interplanetary transport, yes. Will we have orbital units, yes. Will we have space battles, no Anything much beyond that is speculation, and we should just chill and let the Devs make the game. THEN we can rant and be angry with justification!

Drop ships would be like air transports, so considering drop ships to be elements of space combat would not make much sense.

THEN in any case it's too late to improve things.

I'm certain there will have to be some form of inter-planetary transport ship, because it's infeasible for only rockets to deploy armies of units to different planets, moons, and asteroids. I presume the reason a space transport wasn't shown in the KS trailer was because it hasn't been designed yet, and/or it wasn't applicable for the trailer's "story".

I don't think there needs to be many different sizes of transport craft, especially not for inter-planetary travel. One of the few things that SupCom2 got right was just two air transports, a small one for regular units and a large one for large armies and/or Experimentals. In PA, a small air transport should be restricted to atmospheric flight, whereas the large transport would also be capable of inter-planetary flight.

A minor quibble, but I take issue with "Dropship" for inter-planetary travel, because the OP is apparently thinking of the dropship from Aliens, which was transported by the Sulaco starship. A dropship can takeoff and land on a planet, but lacks the range to travel between planets. But I don't think it's necessary in PA to have a large carrier ship to transport smaller dropships between planets. Keep it simple: A large interplanetary transport ship, similar to the Republic Acclamator-class Assault Ships in The Clone Wars (but not as large, obviously).

Perhaps for balance, the IP Transport has to pay extra Metal and Energy for a boost into orbit. The way it would work is you'd select the IP Transport, and click on a "Boost to Orbit" button (or something), which would bring up the interplanetary travel UI (as seen in the KS trailer), and you'd select the destination. The IP Transport would then fire its booster rockets and takeoff from the planet. I'm uncertain if there should be a recharge time before the IP Transport can travel between planets again. I suppose since it has to pay to takeoff from a planet each time, probably not.

I don't think there needs to be smaller "Dropships" or a "Mothership" to carry them -- keep it simple.

OK so the motivation behind the things that I said was drawn directly from the Dev team's comments. Apologies if that upsets you, but remember it's just my interpretation and my opinion.

My personal feeling is that although they are talking about a game that scale wise has never before been made, the ideas behind the game are at their core the same. Just scaled up. I believe that if you start to take things too far away from surface combat then this ceases to be what they talked about in the videos: A game most in the spirit of TA.

Saying that, there has to be some kind of explicable and workable way to transport units between planets. Drawing inspiration from the previous games most people are saying why are we creating something new when there are already things that exist that can fill the gap? We have a game mechanic and units/structures that provide such a function.

Here is another reason why I believe that transports are not the solution. Think of the game mechanic behind transports in previous games. You load up the units, give them a drop destination or create a ferry point and send them off. So far so good. However, what is important about the transport feature is that there is a risk to the pay off of speedy travel: the danger of being destroyed in transit. With no space battle mechanic this risk of losing your transported units is gone. And a planet based defence battery would all but guarantee the loss of your transports, making them useless. I find this notion undesirable in any game.

Galactic gates, unit cannons and even teleporters have already been used to effect in previous games. Why not expand on that idea? TA has the uniqe position of being a forerunner in it's time. Expecting this game to be revolutionary is a tall order. I have no problem with being innovative. After all that is what TA was known for.

in the end more an issue of visual representation and transport/time.

Under the assumption that the space between planetoids is bridged more symbolically than by means of player steered space flight/combat, any way of transport is a concept based on start/endpoints, travel time and amount transported.
This hold to a certain degree for troop movement as well as some issues discussed concerning resource sharing.

How it looks like ((drop-)ships, portals, catapults, magic...) is more a design question - which style you want to represent.

Additionally, you might want to consider player expectations when choosing a style. If you give them space ships, they expect to use the more freely than if just shoot stuff from A to B.

There is quite a difference between teleportation, warp-/quantum-/hyper- gates and conventional transport with vehicles gameplay wise. With an warp-/quantum-/hyper- gate you could bring your troops on a hostile planet without the risk of transportation. So an invader has not to decide if an assault on the planet might be risky. Just if attacking a certain base can be risky, as he can absolutely safely bring his troops on the planet. Needing to use dropships on the other hand naturally bears the risk of losing your troops in transit.

So you simply assume a player could cover the whole surface of his planet with 'anti orbital cannons'? Why so? Those things should be rather expensive and not spammable like SAM launchers in SupCom. Maybe there is even a hardcap for them depending on the size of the planet.. what ever. In any case I think you were depicting too much in black and white terms there.



Also:

As you (many guys in the forums) always come up with this super-quote about awesome (I don't dare write it) - what do you think is more awesome: A massive planetary assaults with dropships breaching through a thunderstorm of Flak and laser beams from the ground based defenses, the air space above the landing zone rattled, shaken and on fire of hundreds of explosions going off, disabled ships falling from the sky, crashing on the surface; a furious inferno of raging fire and bursting metal in the skies!

or teleportation:

*click*, *zap*

I admit that it would be more in keeping with the TA roots to have all that sort of thing going on. Certainly the massive explosions and such. Debris falling from the sky. But don't forget we only gave them $2.2million to do all this with. I also agree that while a hardcap is unlikely, it is true that a player might not cover an entire planet in anti orbital arrays. I will say though that late game it will likely be possible simply because the resources will be there to do so. And if it's possible people will do it. That said, it's nothing an asteroid wouldn't fix.

I don't like the idea and that's just my opinion. I see problems with it but I accept that teleporting (something I haven't really championed) is not the answer. Galactic gates are a great idea for moving around the galaxy and the thing about them is you need a gate at each end - therefore cannot be used for assaults on planets. So it's back to unit cannons and rockets as far as I can see in the video. I suppose we'll have to wait and see.

Perhaps there could be orbital mass-drivers as a solution to cheap inter-solar travel (we aren't travelling between stars, after all). They could function as very large scale unit cannons that can transport a whole squadron of units rather than a few at a time.

They could be balanced by being a direct-only flight, meaning that once the target is set, it's set and cannot be changed.

you're forgetting something, who cares if they cover the entire planet with orbital cannons, its planetary annihilation, if you cant assault the planet "invasion style" then destroy it and move on, give up the resource gain and settle for denying the resources to the enemy

Is it me or did you just tell me I forgot something you just quoted me as saying?

I like the idea of ​​having interstellar transport. To complement this concept, I imagine having to load ships with enough energy to complete the trip.
The greater the distance, the greater the energy that must be supplied in the ship.

I don't think this is quite correct, yes there isn't any deep space combat but I think that's viewing it wrong, the way I see it and Neutrino has kinda led me to believe based on some of his comments regarding KEWs and planet/moon/asteroid movement(with engines) leads me to believe that the Orbital layer kinda fills in and the game doesn't allow any interactions in the deep space area.

There is still some risk landing a transport on a planet, there could be land based defenses, thought it's be hard to protect an entire planet with those, a moon maybe, but anyways, you could also have Orbital defenses, being in space they could have a much larger range, meaning needing fewer to protect an entire planet but still not easy. Also a Moon/Asteroid based turret so that you can pull in asteroids around your planet and use them as battlestations.

Obviously a lot depends on balance and implementation, But I just want to point out that the risk you mention can still be there.

Mike

maybe bro, i really just skim when i read

anyway, i like the idea of fleet transports, i really like the mechanic of fighting in orbit and then landing ground forces, give a range of tactical options ie. sending in some ships to smash orbital defences and lure away defenders then bring ing in ground forces etc...

it was a great mechanic in sstar wars empire at war, even though the ground combat sucked

Yeah, slow interplanetary transport is inherently dangerous because time is power. Getting there 30 seconds too late can cost you the battle, because the enemy will that much more ready for you.