A light bulb came on

Hi guys,

Im not sure if im in the right section or not. If im in the wrong place give me a shout.

I was playing on a metal planet with a friend, and just so happened to look at the poles of that world. I looked at it and said "Dude that would be the best place for a planet fortress, to bad i cant get my commander in there" . So I was wondering if the developers were thinking on putting in like a helicopter that can pick up the commander and move it quickly.

I also was wondering if the developers were going to put any spaceships in the game? Maybe it could work like this ... you build a orbital launcher, you launch a builder of some sort into orbit, and it builds a space station. After that you use the station to build spaceships(battleships, cruisers). Only for the purpose to defend the planet for outside attacks. Like the could shoot down the robots being thrown at the planet they are protecting.

Or you could just scrap my last idea and just use orbiting missile launchers or something.

Just food for thought

I'll just say you should probably spend a little time reading the forums. Many of these things have been discussed already.

Welcome to da forums the place where peoples hopes and dreams get shot down by various members of the community

Yup, it was my hope that the effort I put into sticky threads would help new forumites to get caught up but no one seems to ever use them.

Mike

The lander, i believe, can lift a commander, it might not be able to lift him anywhere other than out of a planets atmosphere but picking up a commander is a sure thing.

PEW PEW!

Transports should be in at some stage. They're quite tricky to code though, I'd guess, and not really a core feature of the game, so it's understandable that they're not in yet.

Transports are a major component for enabling multi-planet play.

I know it seems a little ridiculous but will they also be able to transport units WITHOUT leaving the planet? As in Pick up unit on Planet A, Continent B and deposit in on Planet A, Continent C.

The first part of the tech needed is the ability to attach one unit to another unit. Right now we can place a unit on another unit (land units on factories for example) but if the factory were to move for some reason the land unit would not move with it.

Having a unit attached to another unit is a huge multi part technical and behavioral issue.
How does the client move attached units? Are they updated like they currently are with their own position or do they stop updating and just give a location relative to their new parent unit? What happens at the transitions between attached and detached? Do land units fall from the transport hoving i the sky or does the transport have to land?
How do units get orders to move via transport? Does the transport get movement orders to pick up units and drop them off manually, or do units just use transports as part of path finding? etc. etc.

We probably won't answer all these questions, but once we have some of these features implemented the same tech for moving a unit from one planet to another on an interplanetary rocket could be used to move a unit over a crack in the ground.

An interesting non-answer... It clarifies the difficulty but fails to say one way or another if the end goal includes Non-orbital transports. Is it possible to have that clarified or is this a Wait and See thing?

I don't know what transport units we do or don't have planned at this point. A point to point same planet transport of some kind is of course not out of question though.

Thank you.

Probably the most effective transit option was shown in the video. Put units on an asteroid, fly to another site, and shoot them down from orbit. You can move a virtually unlimited number of units (literally unlimited by placing factories on the asteroids) without the cost of transit spiraling out of control.

Weaker transit options are more about building specific things(like weapons/kews) or seeding another world(using Comms/engis). Building a huge wave of space transports is great, but when those transports start costing half of your attack, it just isn't worth it. Cheap is the watchword. You want players to use these things liberally when the opportunity arises.
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This is actually the primary reason I think that separate energy economies is so important. When transport is cheap, there is little cost difference between moving a dozen fabbers vs. moving a dozen ants. Each option has wildly different potential in the long term. By splitting energy down gravity wells, every new well requires some infrastructure that either has to be built (like with the Commander) or transported to site (such as by asteroid). The high cost of expanding remains, while long distance skirmishing gets to be cheap.

It also has more potential for balancing different worlds around high energy (gas giant)/high metal (terrestrial), which is TL;DR material at this point. Suffice to say that it's very difficult to emphasize energy or metal with the current economy.
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IRL, the gravity advantage of an orbiting unit means it can always shoot down while an equivalent grounded weapon is out of range. That could cause major problems in PA, if artillery becomes too important for battles (one possible solution is to have artillery damage diminish with range, so this advantage only allows the weakest attacks). It's still a powerful way to ensure that attacking bases have a major advantage against a planet, as by this stage a defending world will have thick defenses that need to be broken. For example if you can launch units down, while the enemy has to use transports moving up, means that he has to pay much more on the defense.

Between Planet yes that would be the most effective, however going and grabbing an asteroid just to transport units across an ocean to another continent would to... Uberkill to say the least.

"stop updating and just give a location relative to their new parent unit" sounds like the most dynamic way to do this and least hard on the server because a reference is always cheaper than a new variable memory wise right? It makes sense that the land unit is "standing still" while the air transport moves it and allows you to more easily trigger events like falling when the transport dies instead of constantly having to check the parent unit for state changes for each child unit.

"What happens at the transitions between attached and detached" I'd say borrow from FA here. Use a little tractor beam effect to pull the land unit to the transport when it gets close, preventing you from ever having to deal with the situation of a landed air (or orbital) unit.

"How do units get orders to move via transport? Does the transport get movement orders to pick up units and drop them off manually, or do units just use transports as part of path finding?" Both? FA had a ferrying option on transports (it could just be a general toggle in PA on transports without having to specify a start and end point). Thats a good way to enable their use in path-finding without forcing people to use them that way IMO.

I would love to see units automatically taking transport ferry routes if you order them to move to a location that would be impossible or slower to get to without transports. I loved how the ferry worked in FA however you could still streamline that by not forcing the player to order units to the loading zone.

As for whether they should land or not, I don't think it makes a difference gameplay wise. You can make the landing as fast as beaming the units up if you wish, so it's more about what looks more cool. I would prefer landing.

That is, if on planet transports get implemented of course

Thanks guys for the replys. But all I now know is that it is possible for a in-atmosphere transport to be implemented into the game, but at the same time i just might not happen. I just thought it would be a good way to cheaply get your commander the hell out of the way of a incoming barage of T2 tanks

Before I get into my post, going to state that I have absolutely no problems with this personally, and think it would be a great addition to streamline transportation. I also think it would be an amazing addition to SupCom and FA if it were possible.

Unfortunately, it's not as easy for me to take one side. What if the enemy has air superiority and you have transports going from A to B? He can wait until you tell your units to move from said A to B, and shoot the transports down easily. If it didn't automatically do this, your units would reach their destination instead of being shot down by the game's theoretical Get there faster mechanism.

I agree with Bgrmystr2, I think this is a case in which the player is better off overall if the existing tools are streamlined as opposed to automating the process.

Mike