Air Craft Fueling

I never liked that in TA and SC your aircraft could basically stay in the air all the time (even in SC, one air repair pad was more than enough to keep several dozen planes fuelled and in the air continuously).

Since this is Planetary Annihilation, there could be some benefit to having a space presence. Being able to deploy planes from your orbital airbase would grant infinite range, so normal planes have to have finite range to make the expense of going into space an advantage.

This is the solution. Aircraft get deployed on missions from bases, and have a limited mission time, which limits the ability of powerful aircraft to break the game, and adds the tactical possibility of destroying an opponent's forward airstrips.

Maybe this could be a distinction between low tech and high tech aircraft. Low tech aircraft are basically versatile VTOLs whose versatility is balanced by lower raw power when compared to land units, while high tech aircraft are expensive yet powerful planes which need support facilities.

I don't think there is an issue to resolve. Planes should be a constant worry, you should have to fight for air supremacy and if you lose it you should be very worried that you've lost the game.

All this complaining I bet is from people playing no air setons matches. Just because you think land is the one true layer and only honourable way to win a match doesn't make it so.

zordon: I loved air. I loved Hawk swarms and sneaky Albatross attacks in TA, I love Stratbomber sniping and clown car aircraft carriers in SupCom, That I do is precisely why I'd like to see some fundamental limitation to how it can be used. Fighting for air superiority should be more than having more ASFs than your opponent, and airstrikes should be more than just rounding up a bunch of bombers and squeezing them through a gap in your opponent's air defence to flatten his fusion reactors.

Ok thats good, just strikes me that many of these posts are sounding like they want to nerf air. Air should still be as potent a force as land, just with different strengths/weaknesses.

I agree with you zordon, but I don't think limiting fuel or weapons constitutes a nerf. Actually I am of the opinion that air units should, in a strategic sense, be considerably more powerful than land units. They can project power over a much larger area, much more rapidly, and very rapidly do a lot of damage to high value targets in a way that is difficult and expensive to prevent exhaustively.

However because of this you pay a premium in cost and logistical difficulty. Flying units cost more, for less total firepower. You have to spend on airbases, transport capability, and maybe even spending energy on fuel. And you have a new category of asset to defend- airbases- which your opponent has an interest in destroying (and you theirs).

The primary function of limiting fuel is to justify extreme mobility. The primary function of limiting their payload is to allow that payload to do a lot more damage quickly, instead of an unlimited-ammo version that distributes the same damage out over a longer period.

While in one sense it is a "nerf" to limit air units' operational range, the fact of the matter is the only reason this is necessary for air units and not for land units is the incredible difference in mobility between the two. Land units are so slow compared to flying ones that limiting their operational range is unnecessary. The cost of moving that unit over the same distance is that it is going to take a very, very long time.

Having to refuel aircraft (even remotely such as through automatic landing pads) is an unnecessary block to action. It's the micro-management that you don't really want in a game like this, and not something i've ever liked to see.

If this IS something that is included, why not do the same for ground vehicles? They surely have a power-source that requires some sort of fuel. It's all or nothing, and i'm firmly of the opinion it should be nothing.

Let the action flow without such constraints.

Because one of the justifications for limiting aircraft in fuel or ammo has been to avoid air rushes crippling players from the outset.

My point is that particular issue can be tackled via other means with out resorting to this particular game mechanic.

And that is exactly what I hate about it. It ALWAYS discourages players from going planes first. In TA, it's viable, even nowadays, to go air first, but it's not overpowered (due to slower construction units). Plus, it would actually NOT make sense for planes to have to refuel when everything can be nanoloathed and resources can be transfered wirelessly.

This is one issue, which probably wont be a problem in PA, but having a stack of 50 Aircraft shoot through the gap in the defense is kind of absurd. There needs to be proper spacing between aircraft (maybe mid-air collisions between opposing aircraft?)

TA (I really don't know much about SupCom) already had resource usage by all units in the form of energy. However each unit would break even due to the energy it generated. If the units (specifically aircraft) did not generate energy or, when mobile, would draw more energy then generated, then you could limit size and mobility of the air forces. Also, using ammo would create a much larger energy draw (maybe metal too?) limiting the effectiveness over a long period of time (due to decreased building/unit construction). If energy is depleted, then the aircraft are disabled (move extremely slow/can't shoot) and energy consumption returns to only that it can generate. This does not create micromanagement for the user and does not create over-management of the AI. The balance that is needed can be accomplished by the energy draw of units (stronger units = more energy draw etc..). I believe the overall management of energy and metal that dominates the strategy of this game should be used to solve these kind of issues. Introducing ammo and fuel would detract from this overall theme.

Another aspect of PA that will ease this issue is having bases on separate planets. You can't just send you hordes of aircraft through space. A good balance between air defenses and aircraft is also needed.

Ledarsi has nailed it right on the head, here. Making aircraft reload their ammunition balances their advantages of speed and maneuverability with limited capacity to inflict damage and a dependence on ground/water units for resupply.

It adds an extra dimension to the game because aircraft's ability to inflict damage over a large area is now vulnerable to attack by ground units that have no anti-air capability. It moves the aircraft's role to one of domination to one of support, which is more interesting for gameplay.

Excessive micro-management can even be avoided purely based on the fact that aircraft can automatically reload and continue with their orders without difficult pathfinding problems.

Just because you say its true, doesn't make it true. Aircraft's role has never been one of domination in any competitive game of FA that I've seen. It's only been overpowering in games that have lasted well beyond when they should have ended.

Delegating a whole theater of war to the role of support is unjustified. Why are land units the chosen one.

Interesting point. The nub of the matter probably boils down to 'tradition'. Doesn't justify it but there it is.

As for why it is 'tradition', perhaps because art imitates life, and no one has yet found a way to rapidly motivate an engine of war across the skies easier than it is to have it lumber along (or be bolt to) the landscape.

If awesome trumps real then perhaps it's time to break with the tradition but I'm not so sure... there has to be some trade-offs to speed, manoeuvrability, and a immunity to most terrain costs after all.

Now heres something I take from command and conquer. Bombers had limited ammo, but you would build a massive blob and then one shot the construction yard while losing half or all the aircraft, This basically means you can have a blob of aircraft and then one shot a irreplaceable commander, which imo should have lot more value and requirements to keep it alive and well defended, Because how can you fight a war when you are dead?

Carriers were also useful in TA because they produced a large amount of energy, effectively operating as mobile geothermal plants.

Regarding air blobs - why not just make it so that aircraft can collide with destroyed aircraft? The most ridiculous thing about air blobs in the past was that you could pack all of them into a tiny area.

Aircraft should have extremely generous spacing requirements (the closer something is inside its bubble, the harder it's pushed or steered away automatically), so you can no longer pack a hundred gunships into a hundred cubic meters of airspace. Aircraft that are shot down should have their wreckage work as a weapon, capable of smashing things on the ground (with very minimal damage to buildings), but more importantly capable of knocking other aircraft out of the sky.

I'm fine with aircraft being powerful, but I'm not fine with how common / easy it was to make giant hordes that would all bombrape your Commander in the middle of your base.

Because doing some sort of path finding (or flow field) like that in three dimensional space is probably not trivial.

Regarding aircraft fuel, it shouldn't exist imo. The refueling thing in supcom was one of the most annoying micro "chores," which get in the way of having fun and actual combat or economy gameplay.

The easy way around that is simply to have them automatically fly back to their nearest repair pad to refuel. Of course, that won't work well if they have to fly over enemy defences to do so... maybe have that as a "last resort" when they've got very little fuel left.

Putting things on patrol in supcom2 was a devastatingly bad idea. You put things on patrol, they get picked off 1 by 1 by a coordinated swarm, guess who wins (in addition to gaining an incredible veterancy/resource point advantage) .

Let's face it - the AI is stupid, so competitive players will want to micro. Fueling is one of those "micro" things that doesn't really add much fun to the gameplay the same way combat micro does. It's just a stupid chore.

That is a bad justification, which I don't agree with at all. T1 air rushes aren't a problem, they're an integral part of interesting gameplay and can and are balanced right now.

The real problems are of a very different sort. It has nothing to do with air being somehow overpowered (it's not.). That's easy to fix, just tweak some numbers.

The real issue is that air warfare is very boring right now. It comes down to producing the biggest blob then smashing it into the other guy's blob. Why is this? Air combat lacks "tactical terrain", the whole map is a passable flat and small plane. Also in contrast to land warfare, air warfare usually doesn't involve different kinds of units like artillery/fast bots/mainline tanks but only one units: the ASF. That makes it a onedimensional uninteresting sphere of combat, one only of numbers not of strategy.

The solution would be to integrate air combat into ground warfare. Fuel and the associated aircraft carriers and firebases would do that. It would also introduce a new kind of "mission oriented" gameplay that is markedly different from ground warfare.

I never found refueling fun. It doesn't make air combat any more interesting, just more filled with micromanagement. Plus, it really really sucked to have a half you army fly back to refuel right when you get attacked.

A better solution imo would be to do what I said in another thread, make planes explode and hurt other planes that are too close. Anyone who tries to clump planes together is just going to lose them all.

TA had this, but to a much smaller extent than it should have. I've seen people do hawk stacking (with a few damaged units in there too), just to lose the entire thing to one or two AOE shells.