The problem with fighter planes

I like ammo.
And i like to say: if a real life plane gets hit by a rocket it is dead.

but its not the realistic that we are after. its the awesome, you don't want one plane to get blown up by a rocket you want that rocket to explode like flak and kill any planes that crash and leave craters and kill things when they impact.

Anybody else now find this utterly infuriating?

I more find it... meh. Useful and correct in the right circumstance, but thrown out at the slightest hint of resistance now. =(

I did like the way some planes in TA had lasers to shoot at the ground when they flew by but i felt they did no damage. and i also likes the way sea planes were in the game that some had missiles and torpedoes that were a hybrid. so they could do many things at the same time wile still having the strong punch of their main attack.

Not only now, but from the start.

I agree, one should take ideas from real-life. Limited ammo for planes, limited range, and high cost. It would make aircraft carriers useful.

I dislike air craft carriers in that its just another unit that i have to build to send planes to my foe and destroy them. But that is a good point of having them if you did have fuel and ammo.

Now that I think about it, I really like the idea of fuel and ammo... Assuming it is easy enough to queue up an attack. Here's the way I imagine it:

Player sends his 4 aircraft to attack
4 Aircraft make their strike
4 Aircraft either automatically RTB after they are done (avoiding enemy AA), or follow a pre-determined RTB path set by the commander
4 Aircraft take a few seconds to reload (they already have to spend a majority of their time in-transit, why should they have to take forever to reload)?

What would also be great is either making aircraft extremely expensive, or adding a veterancy system for them. This way, players are encouraged to support their aircraft and handle them carefully, as opposed to just sending hordes of bombers on suicide runs against enemy targets.

AA should also be expensive.

I agree that aircraft should have a limited fuel supply, as long as it lasts somewhere between 2-40 years.

Every time I read "Just make AA bigger numbers" I want to cry. AA should be COMMON. Just because a unit CAN be used doesn't mean it has to be EFFECTIVE. Soft counters are the king of good strategy games.

There are countless ideas around the forums for killing aircraft and attacking their role:
- spot them at long range
- shroud their vision (stifling their attack)
- zap them with lasers(hybrid Anti-ground/AA guns)
- stifle their speed (perhaps with ash or airborne dirt)
- paralyze their controls (stun guns)
- pull them into the ground (grav gun style)
- attack their bombs (boom)
- scorch them with planetary engines (fwoosh)
- or swat them out of the sky with nukes (EMP + shockwave = GG)
And that's what aircraft have to deal with on a GOOD day.

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IMO, gunships work on a totally different playing field from those of winged/fast aircraft. Where the fast craft are built on hit+run tactics, a gunship is made to endure in direct combat. As they differ in their fundamental approach to air warfare, so too must their counters differ in meaningful ways.

I'd say to give the gunship all the direct combat it can handle! Throw everything at a gunship- tanks, missile launchers, AA guns, even some arty- and it'll become quickly obvious that being a gigantic flying bulls eye isn't all it's cracked up to be.

If AA will be expensive. the bombers should be as expensive and that they can also avoid the AA. The AA guns should have a smaller area so you need to know your placement on what you are protecting. either that or instead of the small area be less damage so they can fire at a larger area for gun ships and bombers alike.

Guys... future... Lasers probably the dominant form of weaponry, kinetic weapons (small projectiles) rendered obsolete by the fact you can throw mass quantities of energy in the form of a laser at your opponents.. so remember these future robots capable of teleporting armies across planets probably don't stick with our convention of combustion fuel... and because they can generate but-loads (infinite) of energy it kinda leads to the train of thought that these... current day... logistics we are talking about aren't really applicable..

Why not both?

Just use particle beams to fire nukes at the enemy..RAPIDFIRE!

fire all the guns at once and the robots left standing win. lasers and bombs and missiles oh my.

So...

Looking back to the start of C&C (one of the first good aircraft implementations) and Red Alert following it...

Helicopters had limited ammo. They needed to return to base to rearm. They were slow as anything, could deal a fair amount of damage, but after a few shots (except, of course, the laser orcas which were just odd), they had to go back and reload their missile launchers.

Jets (the MIG specifically) in Red Alert were a PERFECT (or at least exceptionally good) implementation of aircraft. With enough of them (although they weren't too cheap and you could build a far longer-lasting tank force for the same price) you could operate a surgical strike to take out one building. Perhaps two if you split your aircraft into a couple of groups. You couldn't, however, send them to attack 'just anything'. If there was shroud or fog-of-war, you could tell them to operate a fly-by (and they'd instantly fly round and go home), but you couldn't tell them to target anything on the ground. This is where the 'spy plane' came in. A common tactic was a spy-plane flyby (which instantly told the enemy which direction your base was), followed by a surgical mig-strike on the highest value target uncovered in that area (assuming your migs made it that far).

In short, you couldn't win a game just with jets (because as much as anything else, there's no way you could build enough airfields to pull that off given the size they were and the size of the maps), you could defend against them if you built your base properly, but they were fast and surgical, exactly like a real-life air force is. You couldn't tell them to hover around an area because the game mechanics simply didn't allow them to fly circles all day, and they wouldn't land on the ground because again, mechanics prohibited it. They would only land on an airfield or a repair depot, both of which fulfilled different functions - repair depots only repaired hp, and airfields only rearmed.

Personally I think modelling air combat on this initial concept would be ideal in terms of controlling air and preventing the air assets from becoming too overpowered. Anyone got any thoughts on that?

Think of air as the cavalry

IMO a large part of the reason air behaves so weirdly is that they're just land vehicles that ignore terrain and don't collide.

Add mid-air collisions and a sensible formation AI.

Take ideas from real life if they improve gameplay. I only use that phrase if someone proposes something stupidly "strategic" or "tactical" or "cool" that would just end up being really really infuriating.

I was about to say that this applies to the above, but with a decent formation AI this could work.

I think the key here is to put some serious thought into all the alternatives being proposed here, instead of just playing with numbers.

So you fight fire with fire.