Carriers: Strategic Impact

Wargame, for those unfamiliar with the game, is fought at the battalion scale in the Cold War period. In Airland Battle, you have access to aircraft, in addition to the tanks, helicopters, mechanized infantry, artillery, etc. from the first game. However the map players fight over is a single battlefield, which might be 50 to 150 kilometers square. Aircraft are called in from some off-map location, presumably a base or aircraft carrier.

When you pay for an aircraft, it is made available on standby. Instead of boxing an air unit on the field, you order them in from outside the battlefield. They fly in, drop their bombs or fire their missiles or whatever, and immediately evacuate the area. And good thing, too, because they can be destroyed with only a couple AA missiles. They have loiter time limited by fuel, and a limited payload of bombs and missiles before they need to go home. As long as they get out alive, however, they'll be refueled, re-armed, and repaired reasonably quickly and ready to sortie again.

In Wargame:AB, aircraft are extremely powerful because they can project lethal firepower anywhere on the battlefield on just a moment's notice. A single air strike can destroy a target, like an expensive tank or entrenched infantry unit, and aircraft are untouchable to the majority of enemy assets on the field. But, every time you commit a plane, you are concerned about the possibility losing a valuable bird to a salvo of AA missiles. This makes AA extremely important, as well as scouting and map control. Reconnaisance to determine where the enemy has missile batteries, and by taking out enemy AA you can give your planes free reign to do some serious damage.

Anyone who says limiting fuel and ammo makes aircraft require too much tedious micromanagement should just compare any bird in Wargame:AB to any plane in SupCom and decide which is more fun to use. Smart, careful, and aggressive use of just a few planes can get incredible results for free, but foolish play will lose you all your planes for nothing. Limiting fuel and ammo, but having its management be abstracted away from the player creates all the depth of having them as factors (i.e. a plane with one bomb payload, or 4 missiles) without the player having to give any orders other than "sortie here."


PA could easily import this style of aircraft as true air support, not just a normal unit that moves very quickly and can only be attacked by some weapons. Furthermore PA would also incorporate the base where the aircraft are coming from, as well as the factories that build them. The number of planes you have would be determined by how many you built, and how many are in the area. By tying aircraft to airbases and carriers, and having planes sortie instead of roam around in a blob, the player has to decide where to put their planes on the map, and how to use them in battle. Then the player would have multiple battlefields with competing needs for air support for birds in the bases/carriers. One thing that must happen in PA: Kill the airblob from TA and SupCom, once and for all. And that is going to require an overhaul of the way air units worked in those games, not just tweaking their cost, HP, and DPS.

Well that's an easy one. Fuel was already tried. It doesn't and can't work as a limiting factor for air. Ammo can, and it's been highly successful with other RTS titles (primarily CnC).

Yuck. No way. Breaking the fundamentals of PA's predecessors is a bad thing. It's time to figure out real answers that attack the strengths of air units at their source. Air units are gifted with exceptional speed, front loaded damage, terrain crossing, and scouting ability by simple virtue of not being on the ground. Attack any one or all of these things, and it'll crush air units handily.

- Speed: Air hazards like ash clouds can cripple the speed of air units. Physics weapons like tractor beams can cause aircraft to veer into the ground or each other, go boom.

- Scouting: Shroud generators (hey, ash clouds again!) can blind air units against the ground, ruining their vision and ability to attack effectively. Let cloaked units be undetectable from the air. For a cloaked Comm this is a game changing boost to safety. Keep the most effective scouting options vs. ground on the ground.

- Terrain crossing: Air units are far above the horizon, making themselves easier targets for visual and radar detection systems. They end up naturally in range of direct LoS weapons (lasers, jethro missiles) more often. Placing AA capability on more units forces air detours and allows easier ground coverage on map. Land mines are naturally effective against units that cover more land, so create mines that intercept air units.

- Front loaded: Fight front loaded with front loaded (but not too much). Heavy AA weapons should hit early and hit hard. Use defenses that intercept bombs or blow them up ON the bombers. Create defenses that excel against massed projectiles, such as with AoE , chain lightning, or cones.



See? There's a lot of things you can do against air. It's more important to deal with air units from multiple angles and create soft solutions that scale well. A DPS race won't work, and it didn't work in previous games.

This would encourage a lot of air micro, not sure I'm a fan.

Front loaded AA encourages sending sacrifice units ahead but it's likely an inevitable tactic. This suggestion boils down to air space denial via ground AA. I'm sure it will be included but it's such a boring binary mechanic. As opposed to air space establishment via logistic requirements.

Cloaking is an interesting approach but it would requiring removing radar from aircraft, do we really want to gimp spy planes?

Confirmed not happening, as you likely already know. I do understand these suggestions were intended more as a demonstration than full solutions though.

Ultimately I have to agree with ledarsi that the best way to balance aircraft is with logistic limitations. And as you already noted ammo is a solid solution so there's no disagreement there. I don't think base tethering (or fuel) would be bad but I'm also not convinced it's yet necessary. I'm curious to see how uber implements its planned design as balance will heavily depend on implementation.

On base tethering: I think the main gray areas are how planes operate before airbases are laid down, how long range scouting is done (e.g. spy planes) and what happens when a local airbase is lost. Fuel poses its own problems with difficult to read gauges and unclear cruising ranges.

Yup, that's occurred to me as well. It's not a bad idea if they go that route.

I think having a strong ammo mechanic side steps these issues which is probably why uber went that direction. We'll see though, I'm sure everything is on the table at the moment.

That doesn't even make sense. I'm calling bull on this one.

A unit that can't be attacked is always going to win. You fix that by enabling more options to attack AND to defend against air. There's nothing micro-y about it. It's about making a game that isn't based on a fickle rock-paper-scissors balance where the biggest guns win.

Gimping the unit that gets used once or twice? OH. No. How ever shall we manage.

Air units don't NEED scouting utility. Everything with speed and eyes is already a functional scout. If anything, the scouting ability of air needs to be toned down, as base scouting is a trivial task with huge returns. Removing spy planes would be a sad and not terribly effective solution (just use intys lol), so the best way is to have direct defenses against air vision. All of a sudden, air units can't see and attack everywhere. It's a HUGE restriction on what they can do, and forces them to have ground support/spotters as part of a task force.

Spy planes can still be excellent as counter-intel craft, providing stealth, jamming, or some other visual protection for an attacking force.

Weather isn't happening. That doesn't mean base defenses can't create air hazards as a means of defense. Hell, AA weapons are an air hazard, and we know those are going in.

The problem with binary "too good/terrible" air is a direct result of trying to solve conflict between the layers with pure weapons. You NEED some utility on the field to iron out the explicit issues caused by air.

mhmm i'm must be too tired to properly respond, i'll look at this in the morning

edit: Okay, so if anti-air is particularly prolific and on many units then aircraft will have to constantly pull back when encountering small contingents of units. That is because, as you explained, anti-air no matter how weak is a hard counter to fighters. That's what I meant by micro intensive, having to babysit given orders because there's a constant possibility of running into one of your opponent's prolific anti-air units.

:? I used scouts plenty in Forged Alliance. It was the most efficient way to scout because they would out run most AA and ASF were expensive. Also it's just a design consideration, we could be fine without dedicated spyplanes as you suggest. It's important to consider the implications of these ideas though.

I reread your post and I retreat my statement. This kind of stuff would be indeed be interesting.

Fighters might be able to attack ground targets. We don't know that yet.

Oh yeah. Fighters that could shoot OTHER fighters on the ground, but incidentally could shoot nothing else. That's certainly something to repeat in PA!

Hard counters are nice and all, but fast nimble fighters can ALWAYS choose their battles. They are by no means bound to sit back and die.

Should fighters have missiles for extra DPS like in Top Gun? Seems legit.

That's not the kind of thing you want to broadly apply to all units of a type like that, these kinds of things need to be used to help identify units. For example a Fighter that is designed around Missiles(and the ammo system put forth by Neutrino) would function very differently from a Fighter designed around a 'gun' with no missiles.

Mike

i voted yes.
i think carriers should have some strategic importance. I like the idea of having a FARP (Forward Arming Refueling Position) in land and sea.
The fatboy was slow, but you very well could setup a lovely repair bay just outside an enemy flank by knocking out a few engineers real quick.
The submersible carrier was garbage... great idea, not very many practical uses for it.

UEF Fanboy obviously =] (but i really like the idea that there are no more races)

If you don't apply it broadly to air then the value 'Carriers' will fulfill will not apply broadly and may be extremely niche which is unhealthy. I would like to postulate all forms of air craft would utilize carriers in some future reality.

I agree that a fighter designed around both ammo system and none ammo system might or might not be good for game play. It's not obvious. The main issue is if the fighters release their missiles and then are engaged, they lose the ability to easily restock ammo weapons unlike bombers. Machine guns would deal a lot of damage to enemy fliers trying to restock. Missiles could have a strong range advantage for first strike or take a few seconds of being in range to fire. There is a lot of elements of both reality and fun that could be played with here.

Bobucles, fuel has scarcely been tried in RTS games, while ammo has been tried a few more times, but still not extensively. And SupCom's fuel limitations were laughably lax, and largely inconsequential. If I had to pick just one limitation on planes, it would be ammo, but I still think fuel adds more depth than it costs in complexity.

I think I should be a bit clearer about the difference of perspective of air units for SupCom and what I propose. SupCom air units were designed to create a certain kind of air combat. "WWII dogfights are cool" type design reasoning. What I propose is that the nature of the fight isn't actually what is important unless the player is going to manage the actual fight, i.e. Starcraft-style micro.

What is important is the kind of strategic concerns the unit creates. Dogfights of arbitrarily large blobs of independent craft don't really create much strategy- it essentially boils down to how many planes you have, more is better. But if you have to worry about base range and capacity, island-hopping with airbases, protecting aircraft carriers, etc., then the player has lots of strategic concerns to weigh at the strategic level, not micromanaging the fight.

My point is that strategy is created from having limitations and needs. Giving players more abilities is boring, giving players more limitations, more needs, more concerns to weigh, creates interesting decisions as the player has to make tradeoffs between them.

Airblobs are boring because they can be everywhere, and it is precisely this ability to be omnipresent that must be eliminated, forcing the player to make decisions about where to deploy and where to move their air forces. Since it is nonsensical and contrary to their nature to do this by limiting their movement speed, then it makes sense to limit their independence instead.

Sums up my own thoughts very well ledarsi, well said.

Yes I loved this in NOTA, would be great.

NOTA really did a fantastic job on two of TA's weakest areas- air and ships. Unfortunately it's not terribly popular because not many people play it, and thus there aren't that many games available. And ingame NOTA players really focus on the planes and naval because they're unique to NOTA. i.e. shore to shore... again. Map choices, strategies used, etc. focus on the bits of NOTA that are especially interesting.