Transports

Today you mentioned transports, but that you don't like gunships. I had an idea that I think might be cool. What if you made it possible for units to shoot while being transported. For example, in TA if an Atlas transported a PeeWee, and the PeeWee could shoot, you pretty much made your own gunship. The mixtures and possibilities are endless with this concept. A sniper and a transport, a rocket launcher and a transport, etc. What do you think?

Also, sorry if transports have already been discussed. There are a lot of threads to wade through...

This was done in Sup Com, but they ended up limiting it to a single unit type that could fire, for balance reasons. However, transports in Sup Com held lots of units, not just 1, so it may work. I'd imagine only bots would be physically able to shoot while being transported, if it was allowed.

This has been done by modders before in TA, in Earlier versions of the Escalation mod the T3 air transport allowed units to fire from it. The problem was it caused a ton of balance issues, especially when people started loading it with t3 KBots and tanks, also it made the unit being transported selectable letting you have a flying D-gun. It was very fun to play with but removed because of balance issues.

Maybe limit it to T1 units. Imagine a transport that carries 6 coming in with guns a blazing. It would be powerful, but you also risk losing 7 units if it gets shot down. I think it would work well and be cool.

What you describe is a ghetto gunship, and was used extensively in SupCom. Not really a significant feature in my opinion.

I do think a gunship that is a transport is a very interesting role. Attack transports could easily exist as a distinct class of unit from dedicated high-capacity transports. The Blackhawk, or the Russian Mi-24 are good examples of transport/gunship hybrids, used to drop troops and then provide local air support. Whereas a Chinook would be a dedicated transport helicopter, or a larger cargo aircraft such as the Galaxy jumbo transport jet.

Ya, I had blackhawk in mind too when I was think about transports.

Giving a unit the ability to shoot while transported presents huge balance issues. Thats basically combining two units into one much better unit.

For a game of this size I don't see how is that affordable. It would take literally weeks to balance it out and we know that good balance is one of the most crucial aspects of magnificent RTS games

From a balance standpoint? It would be a nightmare.

From a fun standpoint? I think I would enjoy the heck out of it. I'm imagining getting 6 hammers/thuds on a transport and just flying it around bombarding the heck out of everything...

There are many issues with active units combined with a transport.

Heh... This isn't that huge of a balance issue if the units capable of doing this are limited. The reason that LABs were allowed to fire from transports in supcom, and not anything else was because they were an inefficient use of transport space compsaed to tanks, and because they were fragile and vulnerable to AA, especially flak.

The only issue with this compared to dedicated gunships is that Transports always have ridiculously large amounts of fuel. They wouldn't be useful otherwise, but that isn't a very gunshippy thing.

As I read this post I immediately thought of the Nomads' experimental Ghetto Gunship...

*desperately wants nomad mod*
too bad it's still in 'closed beta'

What if the transport only carried the gun? Everything else is pretty much expendable.

Making transports have guns may be an interesting option. That way it would be able to fulfill the gunship role as well. What's important there is whether the transport role is a full time job, since you do not want to be paying for guns you do not use. In this scenario gunships would have to be rather easy to kill by air fighters, this is to make sure you can still prevent drops. I loved the drop capacity of the t3 uef drop ship.

About what was mentioned in the stream by uber on gunships, I am wondering what they will do with gunship implementation. I felt gunships in fa were needed to deal with heavy land attacks from the air, never really felt bombers were up for that task.

I would like to see the return of the SupCom transports. T1 maybe 4 T1 Units, no guns. T2 transport can carry 8 T1 units or 4 T2 units and has some medium guns that are no threat to T2 units but to T1 units. First it would look cool as a movie if a T2 transport comes in guns blazing and loads of 8 Pewees. And it would annoy T1 unit spam if you have some T2 transports shooting. A T2 transport won't be as good as a gunship, but as I sayd it does annoy T1 units. Maybe the T2 transport can have shields, too.

4 and 8 is a farrrrr too small number for PA. Your armies are going to be hundreds in size. Having 50 transports isn't going to be fun.

That is my concern with the 'transport'(I can see the shape being similar, but it's way to small for a transport) from the Whitebox sheet, it's so small!

Mike

True. If we think about dozends and hunderds of units then 4 and 8 is way too less. So how about T1 transport 10 T1 units, T2 50 T2 units? I would say 6 Transports is ok to have.

My calclation would be 6 transports, goal is 200 units, so 200 / 6 = 33,3 units.
Ok, then T2 transport can transport 35 units has has guns.

What I would like to do is. I queue up 100 units, the finished units will go to the 3 transports that are waiting. When all 3 transports are full they will fly to the drop point and load off the units. So a 100 unit reinforcement. That sounds nice. in TA transports where to much micromanagement for me. I could set transport lines but every transport flew on its own. meaning 4-6 units a time. That is no reinforcement but canon fodder.

What's wrong with having a huge number of transports? If anything it would make transports more organic. Losing just one of your 100 transports is not the end of the world, and you can replenish your transport fleet's strength like an army, instead of having binary transport/no transport for fewer numbers. They're more like workers than experimentals.

Transports are, and should be an extremely common feature in large scale wars. You need them to move your very slow combat units across strategic-level distances at a reasonable speed.

I have no problem with a Chinook type transport that only carries one tank, or might carry a dozen little infantry bots onboard. Yes, you're going to need a ton of them on an entire planet.

I did not know that the mech marine gunship was mention in live stream already but I liked to use it in Supcom and I hope I can see it again in PA.
For the balance, I agree with mushroomars' idea that making it exclusively for LAB (It will make peewee style unit more valuable in later game), I do not know why we would need experimental tech transport plane though...
(Will be there fuel system in PA?)
I believe that T1 unit as transport only and T2 for gunship would be enough.

If there need actual gunship, I think it should be like Act of War style for balance (Great firepower with very low health).

I think people will not build hundreds of transports, when they have tons of resource enough to manage such a huge transport fleet, they will be able to access the unit cannon which is more convenient and efficient way to transport.