Air Craft Fueling

The reason we're considering limiting fuel or ammo on aircraft is to prevent them from becoming seriously overpowered, given that aircraft are faster and more agile than any other unit in the game.

Limiting fuel on aircraft will limit their range, which would require players to build forward bases for refueling, or to make use of carriers in amphibious assaults. However, for close-range attacks, fuel affects only the amount of time that a plane can be in the air, but leaves aircraft virtually unrestricted in the amount of destructive passes they can make.

If you limit only ammunition, the aircraft's range is unlimited until it attacks and runs out of ammo. This restriction is based more on combat, and will limit the amount of damage a plane can do both in short-range and long-range assaults. Limiting ammo more directly limits the amount of damage that a plane can deal over time, because it always has to reload after a certain amount of damage is dealt.

The problem with limiting only fuel and not ammo, is that one merely has to build a single forward base or bring an aircraft carrier in close, and they are basically granted virtually unlimited destruction on an insufficiently defended base. Fuel is an indirect restriction on damage over time.

Limiting ammo also serves to reduce micro in that a player only has to reload a plane once they've seen some action. With limited fuel, they have to refuel their planes after they've been doing any degree of wandering, which makes exploring the map with an armed air force extremely tedious.

Whether or not something like limited fuel or limited ammo on planes is necessary ultimately depends on how their other properties will be balanced in the end. Generally I am not against any of the three options. But, since with TA we had none, with SupCom/FA we had fuel... may be I simply want to try ammo this time around . And see how that feels. In principle I can see what coldboot is talking about, limiting ammo seems more meaningful.

You are not meant to see the full map within the first 5 minutes, thats a common missconception. Bombers and ASF are no scouts and they are not meant to be either. You have special scout units for scouting which can travel across the map but have low HP and no attack. Neither are planes meant to be used for rushing, except for the late game when both players had the chance to build propper air defenses first, therefor the action radius of aircraft must be limited in the early game.

Choose one: Either remove aircraft completly from early game or limit the mobility. But you can't make a unit fast without giving the enemy a chance to defend himself, so the enemy needs either natural defenses at start (that would mean all commanders start with quite powerfull AA and fog of war becomes pretty much useless...) or the game mechanismens must prevent you from attacking with aircraft from the beginning.

So you are left with finding a mechanism which prevents you from abusing aircraft in the early game. Now you have two choices again, either you can hide aircraft in the higher levels of the tech tree or you can introduce it in a more defensive form. And again the first choice makes trouble as it means, that aircraft appears in the game from one second to the other which means that you enable rushing again since unexperienced players will never build AA until they see any aircraft, the strength of any unittype must always be progressive over time. That means that aircraft must be present in early stages of the game too, so you are left with the only mechanism which allows you to build and use aircraft (including platforms) without enabling rushing: Fuel.

Actually Extermintus, Ammo helps to solve the Air rush thingy too. think about it, if a rushed bomber can only attack X times before it has to return to base to rearm, giving the player a change to build the appropriate response, and if the rushing players waits to build up a critical mass of bombers he's exposing himself to getting scouted.

Obviously there is a lot still up in the....well air when it comes to Air units soo it's hard to say exactly how they'll be done.

Mike

How about this, just make it a gameplay option. Possibly if they go through with the galactic warfare they can just make that something you have to use. That would allow you in skirmishes and the rest of the multiplayer battles to choose instead of it having to be entirely there or not in the game at all.

But if you set fuel to zero after an attack, how does the bomber get back to base, because it has no fuel :?:

I think the concern about "rushing bombers" across a big map is getting way out of proportion, because realistically, on a large map, by the time your bomber actually flies all the way across it, your opponent will have had the chance to put up some AA defenses. Bomber rushes are much more of a problem on small maps.

I dislike the idea of fuel and having to track it for individual units. I slightly less dislike the idea of bombers having a single payload to drop and then needing to return to rearm. But, in that case, those bombs better be powerful, and also, bombers would have to be pretty darn strong to survive long enough to fly in and out of an enemy zone without getting shot down. My gut feeling is that limiting ammo on bombers will make them not a very popular unit. They may as well just be a guided missile.

Pretty much every game with fuel makes the planes fly really slow when they're out of fuel.

They won't have time to put up sufficient air defenses to thwart a large force of bombers with unlimited ammunition. You at least get a break from the destruction if you limit ammo, and can rebuild for the next wave.

In practice you don't have to monitor each individual unit, because you tend to send aircraft in large groups, so they deplete their fuel and ammo all at the same rate. You can easily tell a whole group to replenish in one click. The whole idea behind limiting fuel or ammo is precisely to make bombers and fighters less popular, because in Forged Alliance they were way overused and hard to counter in the late game.

I think that fuel and ammo should both be used but not for all flying units, and there should be flying refueling units and flying rearmament units. Repair, rearmament, and refueling should be automated.

A possible setup would be something like:
Tech Level 1:
Construction Aircraft: In addition to construction of buildings can refuel, rearm, and repair aircraft in flight.
Scout Aircraft: No or light weapons, unlimited fuel. Fast, long range, high altitude, for spotting enemies.
Air Superiority Fighter (like F22): Unlimited ammo, has short range missiles, limited fuel. Very maneuverable, for destroying interceptors and other fighters.
Light Interceptor (maybe like a Me 163 with AMRAAMs): Limited ammo, limited fuel, has medium range missiles, for quick short range bomber countering.
Light Bomber (like FB22): Unlimited ammo, limited fuel, has bombs which do good damage but do not effect a large area or something.

Tech Level 2:
Adv. Construction Aircraft: As construction aircraft but bigger and slower but faster at replenishment.
EW Aircraft (like AWACS or AEW&C): Unlimited range, light or no weapons, Has powerful radar and jammers or something.
Heavy Interceptor (like a F14 or MiG-25): Has big powerful missiles for taking out targets, particularity aircraft, from a distance but limited ammo. For destroying strategic bombers and defending large areas.
Strategic Bomber (like XB-70 or Tu-160): Has a huge bomb/missile load that it can drop all at once but need to be rearmed before it can attack again. For destroying densely packed bases.

I don't think fuel or ammo is required to balance planes.

I do not think it is "required" either, but I think it could be useful and interesting.

So would your land units be more interesting if they had to return to base after firing a salvo, Or ran out of fuel half way to the enemy base? What is it about air units that makes this solution interesting for them but not for other units?

Would planes simply fall out of the sky or fly at diminished speed like in supcom when they ran out of fuel?

I think it depends on the unit. A mobile ICBM vehicle, or other vehicle that holds a huge missile, that had to return to a base or a tender to reload would make sense to me. I do not think fuel would be useful for land vehicles.

Air units traditionally have very high firepower to weight/size. They also have very limited endurance. A tank may have an actual shorter range compared with a jet but it can operate for days without refueling. A jet may be able to traverse to world on one tank but it can not loiter (without refueling). The inability to loiter is one of the things that makes land units useful in real life.

I vote fly at diminished speed, but I think the refueling AI should be good enough to keep the planes from running out of fuel in most cases.

Which is lame. And not fun. I'd rather just self destruct the planes and build new ones in that case.

If my opponent has enough time to build a "large force" of bombers than I absolutely have enough time to build sufficient air defenses. Especially on a large map. Not wanting to have to worry about AA is not a good reason to nerf bombers.

Air combat gets messy. Unless you force all units to fly in formation all the time, I don't see how that doesn't become a headache.

In FA you only see air get overused on certain maps, and even then "overused" is a subjective term. And I don't understand how air is hard to counter. Unless you completely lose air superiority. And air superiority is usually lost when one player's eco is substantially better. If you take air away, nothing changes, the person with a massively better eco will still win the game, it will just take longer.

Still, if the entire point is to make air "less popular" the least burdensome way to do that would to be to make it more expensive, and/or have air units have longer build times. While I'm not necessarily convinced yet if air needs to be "less popular" it is reasonable that you should be able to field a larger force of ground units than air units within a given timeframe.

I do not think the point is to make air "less popular". If there is air on a planet then it should almost be essential to use aircraft, but there should be some strategic or tactical considerations.

Fuel makes aircraft limited in use to near your base or a fueling unit. If operating away from your base the enemy can destroy your fuel unit and now your aircraft will soon be useless.

Ammo make aircraft limited in offensive staying power but allows them to do a lot of initial damage. And while less limited in range they still need to operate close to a rearmament unit or they will soon become useless.

As for aircraft being more expensive, I think that should not necessarily be the case. I would have to see the specific unit ideas Uber decided to use before I could judge cost.

I'm not actually sure what they use. I am unsure if this was ever officially commented on. Could be nuclear, could be fission, could be a lot of things really. Whatever it is, it must be pretty explosive when broken because all units in TA and SC have always been notoriously explosive when killed.

But what about one or 2 rushed bombers that reach you before you have AA? They then procede to take out anything trying to build AA? With limited Ammo they might be able to do some damage up front, but he knows he'll need more than 2 bombers when he comes back.

And to head off the predicable counter of;

What if he rushes and stockpiles enough bombers to do a big assault? Well if built times and such are anywhere near balanced that should take some time, and the longer he waits to attack, the more likely you are to scout him and thus be prepared, and of course if he goes all in and doesn't build anything else and you scout him he'll be at a serious disadvantage.

Mike

You guys do raise an interesting point with airplane ranges. That could be a potentially interesting strategic element to manage.

But on the other hand you're still talking about combustible fuels as used on Earth. Who's to say these things aren't powered by miniature nuclear reactors or some other insanity that effectively has no range limitations? These are after all extremely advanced robotic AI intelligences that no doubt have some pretty advanced technology for such things.

Do strict range limits really make sense to you for advanced mechanical units of war?

If Project Pluto (a 1950s nuclear ramjet) is anything to go by, it would make sense for all missiles and aircraft to have unlimited range (in atmosphere). But I think it would be more interesting with more limited ranges.

Here's another thought to throw on the aircraft refueling/repair fire.

What about burning units? If an aircraft is below say 1/4 health it is on fire and will gradually lose it's remaining health until it dies unless it gets to a repair bay first. Not an original concept in RTS games perhaps, but it seems like it is one that makes a certain amount of sense here as maybe a bit of a compromise.

Also on the subject of landing pads being too few and too expensive in TA and SC I admit this always bugged me a bit too. It seemed they should be at least a little bit cheaper to put down.

On the other hand It does seem a bit wonky that you can conveniently repair aircraft, but not so much for land units. That might be another idea for a new unit in PA to balance that out a bit better.

After thinking about it for some more time I think fuel would be the superior option than ammo, even though that would absolutely be better than nothing.

I can answer that question very well. For one all of the different arenas should have different gameplay. But why then would we use fuel specially for air combat?
Air is fast and fragile, and more importantly: has no terrain obstacles. For an aircraft everything is an open plane, and a pretty small one at that: indeed it is the least interesting combat arena, less than naval and far less than land warfare. Terrain is the most important part of interesting gameplay, because it adds a dynamic element in the game (in the sense that they are generally different between games, even if you play the same map base layouts can be different and early pushing can define different battlelines).

Air warfare almost always involves blobbing and become disproportionally stronger the larger the map is. What is the reason for this? I think a major reason is that the "air terrain" or relief is uninteresting; it's a flat plane. How would one make air terrain interesting as well as keeping planes from dominating larger maps? Tie it in with land terrain. Fuel would do that in an interesting way. It would mean forward firebases and aircraft carriers become important, meaning new and juicy target that need to be defended by a plethora of other units. It would prevent airfac camping, and it would prevent aircombat be only about numbers. It would lead to complex interaction between the different spheres of combat thereby open up a whole world of new gameplay.

I support airplanes selfdestructing when out of fuel, perhaps with a small amount of "emergency fuel" to prevent small mistakes from destroying your entire air force.

Obviously this can and should all be automated. Micro managing your planes should be possible, but absolutely not neccessary for non-pro gameplay.

For the reason stated above, I think it or something similar is required to prevent dull gameplay.