Gunships

Yeah, it's more about area denial and control instead of going out to attack, so you can use them to play defensively in terms of air units.

Mike

Unless it points ever so slightly down, in which case everyone's screwed. :lol:

I see no inherent reason to restrict a weapon to pure AA. Multi purpose weapons aren't that big a deal if the theaters are set up properly. For example, fast air units might have 30-70% of a typical tank's HP(being fast with an immunity to many weapons isn't cheap). This means an equivalent AA weapon works with the same level of damage(30-70%). Anything designed for high speed AA will automatically become weak and inefficient for anti ground roles. Using units outside their specialty is a fast way to lose. Problem solved.

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Alpha strike damage might help with restorer issues. High burst with low sustained DPS just doesn't hold out in the long term. It is naturally most effective against fragile targets that rely on hit+run to succeed. It fails against tough tanky things, especially ones allowed to shoot back. This gets even worse if ammo is included, as the unit is wasting its limited supplies on bad targets.

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The Restorer TRIED to be a multi role unit in Supcom. It ran into huge problems because ASFs were flat out stronger than tanks. Killing ASFs required so much power that dedicated AG gunships were put to shame. Lesson learned. There's a good chance to nail a sweet spot this time.

Seriously? One of the major differences between TA and Supcom was the hard limiting of which layers a unit could shoot at. The Restorer completely ignored that design philosophy and as a result FA was left horribly broken by the last official (3599) patch.

It is possible to make the Restorer unbroken, it is now in FAF not a game-breaking horror story, but still it did not fit the overall design of FA and it certainly didn't fit the design of Aeon (limited use units that are exceptionally good at one thing).

I don't know, maybe I'm just being trolled here, but an AA gunship is a fundamentally bad idea.

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The idea of ammo for air units I quite like - these games are set in a world where everything runs on nuclear fusion, constructing things at the nanoscale is the norm and converting energy into mass is relatively trivial.

So it makes perfect sense to me that every unit has onboard an ammunition fabricator that uses the excess from its fusion engine to create ammo as and when it's needed. It also makes sense that a plane would need more of its powerplant for motion than a tank would, because the plane has to overcome gravity and travel superfast and therefore be unable to generate ammo as quickly as a ground unit. It also makes sense that an air unit would be able to pre-fabricate and hold less ammo than a ground unit due to weight considerations.

It is therefore justifiable that air units run out of ammo but ground units do not. The air units would need some time to regenerate their ammo before they could go out shooting again, but this would be automated and would be a matter of 30 seconds at the very most.

Fuel limitations are a very bad idea, the way they worked in SupCom ended up being pseudo-random, and in a game where everything runs off nuclear reactions it is utterly implausible.

Whether you describe ammo limitations as I have above, or if you call it overheating and cooldown, or any other plausible explanation, I think the game would be better if aircraft had a limit to the amount of fire they could put out in one go.

Returning to base or having to use refuel pads is unnecessary and should not be in the game.

are you crazy?! to make just the mass of a suger cube would need IMENSE! energy, like 1000 nuclear powerplants for years!

Yeah, but bear in mind that we're several thousand years in the future, and we do have energy-to-mass converters which, well, convert energy to mass. Not in large quantities, and certainly not efficiently, but it still happens.

Anyways, what do you think was the excuse for Cybran units with rockets being so expensive, and not having an ammo supply? They have a built-in synthesizer.

Same goes for pretty much all artillery units but those of the Seraphim. And some of the Aeon's.

sry but i dunno what you are talking about.

The gunships in TA where just fine in their niche, they were destroyed by fighters easily, they couldn't hit the fighters, they were only truly good against anything not guided missile and not mobile.
Another reason I want physics based weapons: allows the geddan thing to miss because of other complex factors, pitch, yaw, roll, angle of fire, speed, the movement of the enemies foremost.
But yeah, they're fine.

No. The ASF was horribly broken. The Restorer got screwed because of it. It was impossible for the Restorer to find a proper middle ground for its hybrid role, because its first job was to defeat the most overpowered unit in all of Supcom. A middle ground CAN work, but it can only work if you have firm, established differences between ground and air. Watch this:

Interceptor: Fast, 35% power, immune to many ground threats.
Hybrid gunship: Moderate, 50% power, vulnerable to most things, shoots air and ground with equal ease.
AGG gunship: Moderate, 75% power, vulnerable to most things, shoots gunships.
Tank: 100% power, shoots gunships.

See? The hybrid beats the interceptor, it loses against the AGG gunship, and it loses even more to tanks. It took hardly any mathemagic at all(these numbers were exaggerated for emphasis), and I didn't even get started on ground based AA! A full complement of ground based units would maul its way through a gunship cloud, and if that's not enough then flak offers a clear killing blow. Countless other options have been proposed elsewhere, showing that air units and gunships can differ in unique enough ways to justify different roles with unique combinations of counters.

Some support roles are ideally suited to low altitude aircraft. The more popular options from Supcom were to attach stealth and radar systems to transports. Why not cut out the middle man, and just make flying units with these roles? Construction cranes and lathe support will undoubtably make a return as well.

Anything an aircraft can do, a dedicated rearming facility can do faster. Even if the aircraft can produce its own ammo, returning to base represents a dynamic that is fast and effective.

Bombers likely would benefit the most from returning to base. They tend to have the most front loaded damage.

The Seraphim were cheap SOBs. :lol:

I think the biggest issue with gunships in previous games was the whole hovering attack pattern. Because they hovered, they were incredibly easy to concentrate - essentially flying tanks which could be massed as much as you liked. The same pattern made them harder for fighters to deal with, as (when gunships were attacking) fighters would fly past and overshoot, unlike bombers which, with their long sweeping attack runs, could be pursued. And because of that attack pattern, in order to make them last long enough to be tactically viable they were given obscene amounts of health in Supreme Commander (&2). Aircraft in slugging matches with ground units, standing up to concentrated fire, just doesn't seem... right. As lots of people have said, and I agree, aircraft should be fragile!

But, clearly, regular bombers aren't much good against anything but stationary targets and really big easy-to-hit clusters of mobile units, because of the same long attack runs, and the time it takes bombs to fall.

Something I was wondering, which was once done as a third party unit for Total Annihilation (the Ganymede), was replacing gunships with a fast, low-level "attack bomber" that fills the air-to-ground anti-unit role more effectively than regular bombers - it makes similar (though maybe shorter) attack runs, using a weapon which works against moving targets - fast-falling AoE bombs, guns, or missiles with some small homing capability. Because they fly low and fast, attack windows are short enough that these bombers don't need to be made incredibly tough to be useful - thus regular fighters are again the best way to deal with them, rather than requiring masses of AA (Supcom 2, TA to a lesser extent) or overpowered ASFs (Supcom 1). Regular bombers, doing much better damage against fixed targets, would still be preferable against hardened bases.

Forcing them to attack like bombers also limits the amount of damage a gunship can dish out in one pass - both stopping overwhelming gunship swarms (though admittedly making them better at a concentrated "unit snipe"), and avoiding a complicated ammo/cooldown system to limit their damage output.

This is easier to balance than gunships, much more tactically interesting, fills the important anti-unit ground attack role, keeps in character with how all other aircraft fly (assuming in PA planes will behave sort of like aircraft as in TA & Supcom 1, rather than the terrible hovering crap in Supcom 2, Starcraft etc), and doesn't lead to horribly durable air units which can be spammed and concentrated without regard to terrain.

Thoughts?

I would like to point out something: In both TA and Supcom the Nuclear Fusion Reactors (which in supcom were T3 power plants) were bigger then the gates used to transfer commanders between worlds, and the Commanders themselves dwarfed the size of even T3 aircraft. Even then energy to mass conversion was not trivial and immensely inefficient. It was just not economical to fit nuclear fusion reactors in anything bar experimentals. Not to mention its highly volatile nature of destroying everything around it when it goes critical.

If every unit had a nuclear fusion reactor in it, just killing one unit would result in a chain reaction of death that would demolish entire armies.

For ground units the lack of ammunition is justifiable because they are on the ground, they can extract mass from the terrain itself below them and then use the fabricator inside to alter the mass into a shell for low energy cost. Similar for Naval units, deploy stealthed drones to extract materials from the seabed.

Aircraft are not so lucky, they would have to land first (which leaves them incredibly vulnerable on the front line) in order to get the mass to restore its ammunition. It would be safer to just return to an airpad where the ammo is already made and quickly loaded onto the gunship and any damage can be repaired.

Further because of the ammo system you can make gunships faster, they may not be as fast as fighter craft or high speed bombers, but they still well outpace all but ground scout units.


@brosencrantz: You are talking about Ground Attack Fighters, such as the modern day A-10 Warthog. With the ammo system we are discussion applied to gunships, the gunships do not need to be flying tanks, they will only be in the area for a short period of time while unloading their ammo to remove a dangerous target then leaving. Instead of the flying tanks we had in other games.

gunships are a must imo ... they are the working horses against groundtroops and single units ... the ammofunction shouldn´t apply to them ...
ammo should only realy apply to bombers since they are your actual heavy hitters with propper aoe and/or vs structures damage ...
and of course the main air counter for gunships should be interceptors and/or ASF´s ...

what do you guys think bout fighterbombers though? good alternative with ammo?

http://youtu.be/tYnK07J_TgQ

Some brawler action, just because.

AA-Gunships have a lot of potential for more dynamic air battles as well. Since AA-Gunships have turning turrets they could beat the front mounted guns on fighters but still be weak to front loaded interceptors such that Fighters>Interceptors>AA-Gunships>Fighters. This would far more interesting than the existing ASF>All or the proposed ASF>Interceptor*.

Id like to see some more exotic gunships as well.

Some with more dedicated anti ground weapons like stun beams, other with bombardment capability's like AC-130 gunships or like the supposed AA weapon on T2 arm and core bombers (The ones that were like rapid lasers).

And finally sub hunting, anti ship gunships that carry powerful short-range torpedoes or anti-capital drones that eat away at the hull of ships.


Really cementing in how powerful gunships can be in specialist roles, without them simply just being a precision alternative to bombers (Not that precision attack gunships to compliment AOE bombers was ever that bad of a thing.)

... well ... that was quite some RATATATATA ...


bout exotic or aa gunships ? well suprise me ...
i just at least want my basictype of antiground gunship in there ... maybe a specialized antiship/sub version wouldn´t hurt aswell ... BUT PLEASE GUNSHIPS!!!

I just had a evil idea, what about a gunship with a supped up capturing device, designed to clap onto enemy carriers and battle ships, and capture them?

You could have a flock of them surprise a unescorted ship and with some team work capture the behemoth within minutes!

You could use them to rapidly capture undefended bases as well, even tanks might be vulnerable to this tactic.

like this? http://zero-k.info/Static/UnitGuide#unit-Dominatrix

Yeah!

I've had a few ideas;

Renegade

LongBow

Mike