Disable air units on the moon/planets without an atmosphere?

Okay, its just an idea/Gameplay element i'm thinking about.

Do you think on the moon or on planets without an atmosphere you should be able to build up air units?

In my opinion you should only be able to build ground units.
If you compare it to real no atmosphere planets you never ever could use an aircraft because there is no lift to take off. But PA isn't the reality isn't it? If you think about the gameplay resulting out of this idea you are forced to use ground units.

But what is about balance?

To disable air means focus on ground combat, people how dislike dogfights or bombing the enemy to hell got the chance to flee on a non-atmospheric planet or even spawn on them from beginning. Now the enemy how wants to conquer the planet is forced to land on it or bomb the planet to hell with asteroids or something else.

The problem of turtling in

Its much more easier to defend a planet where nobody could use air units because air units gives the ability to do some fast strike breaking through defence lines or slow down economy. Turteling is easy you just chose the planet as a start location, start turteling, build up ground units and a lot of anti orbit weopons like astroid defence. If you are doing it right nobody can land or attack the planet from orbit. To get out to conquer other planets you start to fire your ground units to orbit and land on any planet you want to.

Edit: added Poll
Edit2: added new option in poll
Edit3: Changed title

Re: Air units on the moon or planets without an atmosphere

Some discussion on the subject.:
Planets without atmospheres or moons with atmospheres
Planet types as gameplay limiters
Thoughts about gravity, and atmosphere

I believe disabling air on specific planetoids would be too hard to balance correctly, as they'd basically have to balance the game on having no air, and then balance air into it somehow.

Re: Air units on the moon or planets without an atmosphere

okay, now i'm confused I was searching through the forum and there was nothing similar.
So next time search harder ... Sorry

Re: Air units on the moon or planets without an atmosphere

You only need to balance the game for people to have a fair start, or nerf units that are so powerful that there is no reason to build anything else. So the only time what you said would happen is when one player starts with no atmosphere and the other with an atmosphere.

I don't feel comfortable talking about this because aside from visualizations, we have seen nothing on this topic. Lastly, I think that when players can pick their own start locations, if they lose because of something like this, it's their fault and they should choose a better spawn point next time.

Re: Air units on the moon or planets without an atmosphere

I don't think there is even a realism problem with having "air" units without an atmosphere.

I assume that ultra-futuristic robots are not using prop engines. They could easily be using directional solid fuel rockets or something similar and so the wings of the craft are functional in atmosphere, but not needed. They basically become rockets with superfluous wings in worlds without atmosphere (like NASA's space shuttle).

Re: Air units on the moon or planets without an atmosphere

Well if you're assaulting a fortified position in space, wouldn't it just be best to send in spacecraft, which would obviously have no problem moving around an atmosphere free environment.
However, since the aircraft are VTOL capable why shouldn't they be able to move around the environment? Just need something to launch them towards the object(ie mass driver)

Re: Air units on the moon or planets without an atmosphere

The problem is without air there is no lift. I know the aircrafts are VTOL but to move forward the need some air to generate lift without any lift the need to move in VTOL mode like a helicopter.

There is another idea in my mind, maybe just make them much more slower? So you can use aircrafts but there comes some disadvantage with it. Because the aircrafts can't move the normal way owing the missing of an atmosphere the move more like a helicopter.

Re: Air units on the moon or planets without an atmosphere

No, you just need enough thrust, that's how rockets work after all.

Mike

Re: Air units on the moon or planets without an atmosphere

still xanatosx is right. On a moon you could use engines to hover all the time, resulting that less thrust can be used for horizontal movement. But I would rather like, that no air is able to fly at all.

After all, aircraft engines are air breathing!

Re: Air units on the moon or planets without an atmosphere

I guess giving planes wings implies using an atmosphere, so reduce/remove the wing span and add lots of thrusters to sell the idea of a plan that can fly in any atmosphere (but not enough that you can imagine it breaking orbit).

Hey, that gives me any idea! Air launch rocket for breaking into orbit! Like Virgin Galactic. Instead of a huge rocket launch from ground. Though I can understand the huge rocket would be easier to do - just a thought.

Edit. Further thinking about it, if you made it so you have to fly the thing half way round the global before the rocket fired it would give other players a chance to intercept. So you might have fly an escort wing to protect it. Means getting to the moon is a little more than just first person to build a rocket.

Re: Air units on the moon or planets without an atmosphere

It is not just about having functional engines, you could argue that the planes are using fuel combustion engines because those engines benefit from the oxygen in the air.
If you have no atmosphere and you can keep something above the ground it also means that it can break free of the planets gravitational pull making it capable of interstellar space travel.
The fact that is ignored by much Sci-Fi, like Starwars or Homeworld 2, is that space craft doesn't behave like planes. A space craft have unlimited speed, it is just a matter of how fast it accelerates. In Starwars the fighters also change direction just by turning the craft. IRL the plane would have to turn itself, keep the thrusters on and slowly start going in the new direction while slowly changing its' trajectory.
If the craft would do a 180, it would turn around the thrusters to the opposite side, start decelerating, stopping and then acceleration in the opposite direction.

Re: Air units on the moon or planets without an atmosphere

Maybe the aircraft use calibrated particle inverters to reverse the effect of gravitons around the engine nacelles, generating lift even in an airless environment. Wings provide additional life due to the high gravity of planets with an atmosphere.

Or something else like that. I'm not really opposed to either idea, there could be an option for it.

Re: Air units on the moon or planets without an atmosphere

There will be planets without water and planets without land. What's wrong with taking away air? You can still use orbital units, nukes, asteroids, unit cannons, artillery, and hordes of tanks.

Re: Air units on the moon or planets without an atmosphere

Exactly.

I think balancing ships is much more difficult due to the fact that water can be distributed very unevenly on a planet.

With air disabled for all players, all face exactly the same disadvantage, so you just get different (slower) gameplay.

Why not give it a try during alpha?

Re: Air units on the moon or planets without an atmosphere

You guys are missing a very, very important thing that makes this whole discussion pointless.

Space objects without atmosphere lack it because of (for the case of this game at least) negligible gravity. You wouldn't need to VTOL because gravity wouldn't be sucking you down at a rate which would pose an issue.

Re: Air units on the moon or planets without an atmosphere

I would like the gameplay implications of a no air environment, much like water worlds that have a no land environment, or lava worlds that have a no naval environment.

The only constant is orbital.

Re: Air units on the moon or planets without an atmosphere

One of the nice things about TA's airless maps was that they were good for teaching newbies how to manage the very basics of the game without having to figure out air defense. And if you want to tighten up your openings there are worse practice maps.

Aesthetically, it's also nice to have visually distinct environments play differently. I would be willing to bet that any problem caused by the lack of air units can be remedied by adding in new orbital or land units - very low-orbit gun platforms perhaps, or jump-jet tanks.

Re: Air units on the moon or planets without an atmosphere

There ain't nothing more fun then a little moon base commander.

Re: Air units on the moon or planets without an atmosphere

eh you can always go with Star wars reasoning behind having wings (S foils) on everything and the lack of directional thrusts. Theirs are just filled with coils of space time knots which provide anti gravity and some how interact with dark matter or something of the sort.

I mean technically space is not empty. just filled with unique matter and such. so if you make a wing that interacts with space time/ the material of reality. then it will work just fine...

that said. it would be neat if when planes were hovering we could see bottom thrusters running like the Supcom cybran t4 gunship

Re: Air units on the moon or planets without an atmosphere

I dunno, I would like to first see what a low gravity, no air environment has.

While artillery would have greater range, their ordinance could also take longer to come back down, so we could end up with different 'metas' in different environments, like tactical missile/bot spam on moons, Tank/gunship on lava worlds, sub/torpedo bomber on ocean.