Any word on the naval or orbital stuff?

Naval has consistently since the days of Red Alert, been the red haired step child of RTS's. It's about time we move to larger maps and stop making boats that are simply floating tanks on flat terrain.

OrangeKnight, your battleship is nice, but it seriously lacks the sense of scale and immense power that a real battleship can project. It's very reminiscent of TA, and honestly I'd much prefer it if PA could move away from that mindset entirely. A battleship with a cannon that is no more powerful than a tank cannon isn't a true battleship.

Imagine for a moment that defensive technology has advanced to the point that offensive weapons are as effective as a cannonball. Ignore modern day advances which make it possible to sink a ship with a single torpedo, and imagine what naval combat would be like if there were a futuristic version of the Ship-of-the-Line broadside. Add to the mix an anti-shell defensive system for boats and land based units, and you could rather easily balance out a strong, long ranged cannon on a battleship versus shorter ranges on land units. Throw in a capture mechanic and you could return to the glory days of ramming and capturing enemy ships too...

Who would say no to swarms of little robots leaping off your ship and fighting hand to hand on an enormous battleship while its cannons decimate half your fleet?

But realistic battleships are mobile firebases. They've got PD/arty in their main guns, and AA and TMD painted all over them. Having one unit that does everything is rather boring.

There's a recent RTS game that many of us have played that featured units that could do everything. ;P


Mind you, boarding action would actually be entertaining to watch. And if done well is a great way to differentiate yourself from other RTS titles (not that comet rockets aren't already one of those).

You should define what aspects lead to your sense of scale and power, to me my version has much more perceived power due simply to how large the turrets are compared to the rest of the unit, look at some schematics for an Iowa and see how the ratios differ.

Also the cannons on my Bismark each barrel(6 total for the Main Turrets)would each be at least several times more power than most Tank's, not to mention the AOE they'd prolly have. I think you also aren't thinking in terms of the scale of the units, admittedly I haven't really done any kind of scale chart(yet) but rest assured I'd make the BShip proportionally larger than a tank to properly communicate it's overall power level.

Mike

I'd love it if battleships were in fact assorted with every possible weapon that could be fitted on a 300-400m long vessel. Indeed, why couldn't they have torpedoes as good as the best sub, AA as good as the best cruiser, deck guns to defend themselves against small targets, and of course massively front-loaded long range main cannons. Why couldn't they have all this? Because lo and behold you've either made a unit that supersedes all other units or you've made a unit that possesses a tonne of small useless weapons that take development time to make and resources to run ingame.

Which is why Mike's Bismarck, and the old TA style battleships are eminently preferable in my mind. The problem then is that they're not really battleships but more floating artillery, and calling them battleships is a bit of an injustice.

In other words, down with battleships!

On another note, it would be nice if ships and planes could be transported by some sort of dropship. As well as making conquest of water worlds easier, the possibilities are astounding.

Imagine a planet with a small pool of water that the planet's owner justifiably has no interest in building in. The player had better be careful, or they could find a swarm of ships in the small puddle tearing nearby units to pieces. Or even worse - an interplanetary combined air raid.

what I always didnt like about Setons Clutch (supcom 1 map) was, that the two oceans arent connected. What I suggest are bridges (if the PA engine can do that). If not, I would like some other way to transport navies between oceans. Either by transforming them in land units (with or without fighting capabilities) or having them air transported or having jetpacks

A transport picking up a huge battleship. Has to look hilarious xD

How about beaching ships for a defense boost and immunity to torpedoes?

And again, if you need to put land stuff in the middle of the sea, why not save micro and make it amphibious?

Historically, battleships were giant floating artillery. Stuff like AA was added on some, but their main function still was "bigger guns". So the OK's Bismark is fine on this regard.

I heard about an interesting feature in the Spring game NOTA, with naval guns. Basically, they are powerful but relatively imprecise cannons, but with very small AoE. It means that they are effective only against big units they can reliably hit, which are ships.
This would also work against big buildings, so it could also be used as a decent short(ish)-range siege gun, though only mobile units could effectively do that. But against a land army, they wouldn't hit often enough (and overkill when they do) to be really effective for their cost.
I'd expect battleships to be equipped with those. They would still have some effect against a land army due to the sheer amount of projectiles in a salvo, and do a decent job against shore bases, but they would probably really shine in taking other ships down.
Note that we could have a second battleship unit, with large AoE, fore more dedicated artillery ship (let's call it the dreadnought). Or a ship firing volleys of missiles, though this may look better for a submarine.

Well, if Supcom style air combat was inspired from WWII combat, not modern day combat, why not take a page out of that book and take the feel of naval combat from history as well?

What IF your battleship WAS the pinnacle of your naval fleet, and you deployed maybe one or two at a time, with huge banks of guns to bombard the enemy fleet from afar, and they were literally capturable floating fortresses that would be focused on destroying other battleships. What if we had huge ships that used the same engine as the metal planets, where smaller units could land on the ship and capture & control various components of the ship.

You could also have anti-shell defenses that block shots based on how far away the target is - big ships could block the shots of other big ships until they got face to face with each other.

It lacks the detail to look like a large battleship, now it looks like a cruiser.

If you want to see naval done wrong, just look at Age of Empires. The land battle works decent enough on its own, and the naval battle does fine too, but when you mix them together it's a complete disaster. Boats had a natural range and health advantage that set them a class apart from land units. In effect, they acted as a completely separate theater of war, nearly incompatible with land battle.

This happened in Supcom as well. Remember the Cybran battleship? It's decent enough on the water. But as soon as those legs sprout it rolls over everything T1, T2, and stresses T3 as well. Water was balanced on its own accord, and it caused massive balance glitches whenever one unit moved from land to sea or vice versa.

Totala did one thing right in that the vast majority of naval combat was done with fast, lightweight ships, on a similar scale to ground units. They didn't really trump land units, nor did they pelt from a million miles away. Larger gun platforms did exist, but they were very expensive with extremely limited damage potential. Their cost was on par with any other artillery(they were basically artillery platforms), so it was easy to swarm them down and rare to use them efficiently.

That's putting a LOT of burden on the orbital layer! If orbital mechanics are enough to stand on their own, then that's great. But we already have hints that the orbital layer is going to be less developed than the ground. That's why I think adding "ocean" to the gas giant surface can help a lot. It gives you two gameplay layers to work with, which is clearly more than one and deliberately excludes ground units from messing things up. A gas giant allows for truly ocean style warfare compared to a pure H2O "Swamp", which is filled with all sorts of reptiles and amphibians.

Oh yes, did I mention? An ocean also lets you move big things around. Such as guns that provide planetary defense(or orbital attack, whatev). Or beachheads that manufacture units. It's also a great destination to drop in big things from orbit. Such as battleships.

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Hmm. In fact, I think that could end up being really neat. Say, for example, that the biggest ships are for some arcane reason too cumbersome to build directly in the water(or in the gas giant atmosphere). For example orbit is less liable to be raided during a large, vulnerable construction project. Instead it is better to manufacture them in a 0G environment, then drop them from orbit directly into the deep sea. Why do this? Because Science! What you get in effect is a tier of high level ships, which can only be planted on maps with large, deep seas. Maps without deep seas can not provide safe landing spots, so the big ships go boom on the surface, locked out from the planet.

Naval combat kind of is a theater apart from ground combat. As it should be.
Giant artillery behemoths are satisfying to see in action and use effectively.
You'll notice also that through history, naval guns usually outclassed their land counterparts. If we wanted floating tanks we'd play Aeon.

Bobucles does have a point about balance problems it can cause, though. After all, reality doesn't have to be balanced.

What I'd like to see is a T1 boatyard, building boats comparable to heavy tanks in weight. Then, having a T2 shipyard, for the comparatively massive (and expensive) but slow ships.
(Note that I'm in favour of 'soft' tiers, with T1 and T2 being called 'main' and 'support' factories instead, and where you don't need a T1 factory to build the corresponding T2 factory, it's simply cost and over-specialization of the T2 that prevents you to build it first. But T1 boatyard and T2 shipyard would probably work either way.)

Now, there is the problem of submarines. I'd call for having a separate shipyard and submarine (and submerged) yard. After all, both are as different as kbots and vehicles. That is, if you don't decide against submarines at all.
We should also have more variety with submarines, as 'long tubes throwing small tubes at each-other' is simply too boring.
We could have small, agile, fighter-like submarines. If you played Aquanox or other submarine shooters, imagine the same kind of craft. It could be armed with short-range submarine guns, bomber-like short-range torpedoes...
We could have, obviously, the 'long tube' torpedo-shooting attack submarine. As well as the stealthy nuclear-missile submarine.
We could have a saturation artillery, the arsenal submarine : twenty tubes for a salvo of high-AoE, imprecise missiles.
We could have another missile submarine, but with depth-charge warheads instead of HE ones. Against surface targets, it would work like a naval gun (imprecise, high-damage, tiny AoE), making it effective against ships but not land units.
We could have varied AA-submarines, with semi-guided rocket flack for gunships or long-range AA missiles for bombers. Or even anti-orbital missiles.
We could, obviously, have the high-precision tactical missile submarine. But enough missiles for now.
We could have escort/riot submarines : armed with sonic guns (so you have an underwater beam), it has a high-precision, high-RoF, low DPS weapon for taking light crafts and submarines out.
Submarines should have as much variety as other types of units like, say, kbots.

Similarly, anti-submarine weapons should have more variety than simply torpedoes and the occasional depth-charge. I evoked depth-charge-mounted missiles, submarine light gun, sonic beam, but you can also have special projectiles or lazors that can cross water surface, semi-guided rapid-fire bullets (I like the name 'gyrojet' for those, but that's just me - also works above water, btw), short-range directional blast or even shock-waves damaging every close units...

On the visual side, there is also the problem that things under the surface aren't visible enough. For that I'd suggest to outline underwater units (and maybe interesting landscape features), similarly to what some games like AoE do for units hidden behind trees. Or you could also make the surface completely transparent between the unit and the camera, thus making submarines and effects clearly visible. Or both.

Constructing a canal would be interesting. Dont know if the game engine could do that or not...

I remember the anti-subs from FA. They were basically just T2 or T3 submarines and could only be countered by more T2 or T3 subs. I think that the UEF was the only faction that got the "right" anti-sub ship. Basically a fragile boat that spewed missiles. That way they could be countered by surface ships but still ruined the T1 subs. I think that concept would work well for anti-submarine combat in PA.

I'm fine with this mostly. The land and air war is going to have no small "toys at war" inspiration, why can't the naval stuff?

I know this is a discussion that may have been had before, but how can subs be made less boring?

What kind of details are missing then? Your comments are worthless without actually explaining them.

Mike

That's why I wrote that it's an asthetic note. It just looked amazing to see all those little AA gatling guns spit death (perhaps more bullets than death ) into the sky once air moved in. You are right though, that it was useless at this aspect! It was just for show. Perhaps a possibility would be to give bigger ships weapon systems that work good against slow flyers like gunships but bad against fast flyers like jetfighters.

But balancewise I would recommend making the units more powerful in terms of range and firepower, but slower (= easier to target by enemy artillery). Perhaps some more futuristic weapon plattforms (like railguns) could be used?

@your weapon model:
First big compliments for your work. I really like most of your models. I think turpiini thinks more along the lines of WW2 battleships that had a lot of fluff (my beloved little turrets, radars, no stealth features) while your ship looks very modern (like the proposed stealth destroyer for the us navy).
I have no real preference between both styles but your battleship design struck me as odd. Perhaps its the difference between the back (1 smaller turret) and the front (2 very big turrets). Would you consider something like a phalanx missile system for close range / anti air support? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS)

That's what I just tried to answer to, you know?

Well with the way I think PA is leaning towards with unit roles and such there will still be plenty of lead flying around, in terms of AA you'll likely have AA Cruisers and Escorts with some AA as well. Basically I think the better gameplay aspect of good unit composition trumps extra visuals. ;p

I kinda pictures it as a very specialist style design, emphasizing the long range fire power almost exclusively, it does have the smaller rear turret, primarily to help deal with being chased and ambushes, but can also supplement the main gun's DPS so long as the range is short enough and the target is to either side of the ship. This would give the most(or close to it) DPS for it's mass cost compared to other ships, but this is offset by it needing support from other ship types to not be straight up countered by a handful of Gunships or Subs.

Not that we can't mix up roles on a single ship, one ship I want to do is a Missile Cruiser, large VLS Cells with some moderate Missile-based AA as well, or an escort that has a smaller deck gun or 2, some AA, Anti-torp and TMD as well.

Also randomly I want to do a double hull design for something, not sure what yet.

Mike