I would love for the Aircraft AI to work much like TA. -Turning -Landing -Building (for construction planes) -Death
You would like that the planes can brake midair, turn on a dime and hover midair? Do you want the planes to land like a vtol(vertical takeoff and landing)? Okey. That's standard in SupCom and TA. So they circle around their buildproject and stack ontop of eachother? Do you want them to blow up without leaving wreckage? Personally I'd like to see more realistic physics with dogfighting, plane crashes and wreckage as game mechanics.
godde must be a huge fan of aircraft. Every single topic just wooshed over his head. :lol: Indeed, the TA planes took sharp u-turns when they were making passes on their target. Supcom planes took huge, slow turns that sent them over large chunks of map space. Regardless of which system you preferred, the TA planes obviously had more control over their movement. It could work either way, but IMO a super future killbot should have no fear of death defying stunts. Just turn around and go full afterburners. It'll work. I'm not sure VTOL landing is needed. Planes only stop moving to make use of air support pads. Even then, sitting perfectly still for maintenance isn't really necessary. A plane that can't fly is a plane that crashes, so landing is a moot point. Construction power is amazing when it is 10 times more mobile than anything on the ground. It was pretty damn good in TA, especially for long distance construction, reclaim, and repair. You can accomplish major construction using a combination of dropship+ground engis, sort of ruining the point of an air constructor. There are still areas where a flying fabber beats a ground fabber any day, so they will excel where mobility is paramount. Nyyyaaaoooowwwwww... boom. Planes did have some satisfying explosions and crashes. Dying also caused damage to nearby aircraft, punishing players who tried going for the air death ball.
I loved TA aircraft death. They shatter into hundreds of chunks, or possibly even just vaporise into dust upon contact with a weapon. They felt so much weaker then tanks, and I liked it.
I agree with it all. TA air has been my single favorite use of Airplanes in RTSs. I loved the fighters taking off after bombers, having hovering Radar-Jammers (Transport Planes), etc. But I disliked the airplanes in SupCom1. Especially the fuel...
Can we have like supcom 2 where planes never land? When idle, they just sort of idle in place. The ability/requirement to land in TA/FA doesn't seem to provide any benefit of any kind.
I did like in SupCom how you could stick units in a troop carrier, and they could still fire... Instant Gunship... Granted, they would only be effective for early game, or base cleaning, but it really left some fun stuff you could do. I can see it now, a MCU, two tanks, and a radar jammer. While that would be Overpowered, I do like the shuttle ability, and the multi-capacity of the SupCom/SupCom2 transports. I also like the ability for transports to "help" factories.
I second this. I've been playing SC1 a good bit lately and while I admit I'm not a very good player, I have an amazingly hard time keeping my planes from committing suicide. They start flying around the moment they see an enemy they can attack, but make no effort to avoid AA; if I give them an attack order, they'll overshoot by a mile and take a long, wide U-turn over the opponent's base (and all of its AA); and if I don't give them any orders, they'll just land in front of direct-fire units and present themselves as a squishy target. Basically, I feel like my options are to either spend more time than I care to babysitting my air units, or simply have no (surviving) air units. Challenge is good. My own units defying my will for their self-preservation is just frustration.
Aircraft were extremely poorly implemented in SupCom 2, although this isn't necessarily because they couldn't land. It was a function of their cost effectiveness, universally independent mobility, and lack of a really serious hard counter. TA for a long time had the best implementation of aircraft I could think of, provided you played on maps that weren't extremely large. In my opinion Zero-K has improved upon the TA system by having certain aircraft with limited ammunition. SupCom/FA also improved the system theoretically by adding fuel. However that game didn't really utilize its fuel system. Aircraft had such lengthy time aloft that players could essentially ignore it, until it became an annoying problem when they eventually ran dry. SupCom and FA would have been greatly improved by making planes' fuel limitations much more severe, and requiring players to use the refueling tools to check their aircrafts' high mobility. Moving the air pad down to T1, and adding a T2 "air base" structure that is essentially a stationary aircraft carrier on land, for example. Combined with having planes automatically stationed in a base, launch to engage or do other tasks, and return to base afterwards, SupCom's air could have been an excellent improvement over TA. The AI is an important aspect of an effort to check the mobility of aircraft. Making them perform intelligently without supervision is critical. This means having them act tied to a base, or having them able to automatically return to a base when low on fuel, etc. etc. With such an AI in place, aircrafts' limitations have strategic significance, while simultaneously not burdening the player with endless micromanagement to ensure their planes stay fueled.
This is the only reason aircraft in supcom 2 were overpowered. You add one flak or other AOE weapon and this ceases to be a problem.
No. The problem is that air play was terrible. The ground arena had a huge number of units, experimental roles, abilities, and things to do. You can literally count all of air's features on one hand. There were things that shot down, things that shot sideways, and a single all purpose AA gun that shot up. Oh, and air units were twice as fast as anything on the ground. So you pour everything into air, pray the enemy doesn't spend everything on AA, and then marched endless death balls against each other. That's it. The only other unit that changed air strategy was the bomb bouncer.
