Aircraft Carriers

Bring on the Anti Orbital deployment missiles!

This. And you can't split it, you don't have any functional drop until you complete one, it's just bad.

A thousand dropships is badass. You get some drop capability every 1/1000th of the cost, you can split them up, the enemy can thin their numbers, you can do all kinds of interesting things.

One fatass, uber-expensive one is all-or-nothing, gimmicky, and outright stupid.

The point about it being able retreat anywhere is that it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing.
Let say smaller transports can carry more units for cost. The big carrier is just something you bring as support in order to make sure that you always got some buildpower on the enemy planet. Even if your invasion force gets wiped out you can keep your presence on that planet by hiding your big carrier.
Lets say the enemy defeats your drop but is unable to hunt down the big carrier. So you can now hide it somewhere and make some units while you prepare for your next assault.

A huge transport is by its very nature all-or-nothing. If it survives, all the units disembark safely. If it doesn't, presumably they are all destroyed.

Because you are transporting a lot of units, a huge transport needs a LOT of survivability to be worth building. Which means the enemy needs a LOT of stuff shooting at it to take it down before it can unload. Barely not enough? Too bad- everything unloads. Had enough? Too bad- everything in the transport dies. Very all-or-nothing.

Having a large number of smaller transports is a much more continuous distribution. Increasing quantities of defenders inflicts increasing numbers of casualties on the incoming transports. It creates more continuous game states, more options for both players, more approximately human-predictable, and less absolutely deterministic results... it's just way better.



What you seem to be thinking is that a unit like this might serve as a command/support or even logistics type unit that helps when it is in the area, sort of providing a backbone for other forces. I am in favor of this type of gameplay- but a unit like this huge experimental transport.... thing is NOT the way to create this type of gameplay.

I'm not fundamentally opposed to the idea of a unit with a huge transport capacity. But it needs to be quite expressly limited. Things like a big, slow capital ship that launches dropships which do the actual landing, or an amphibious assault carrier that launches landers are perfectly acceptable. These are useful for protecting the capability in battles where it isn't useful. Such as a battleship vs battleship naval battle, your amphibious assault carriers are useless, but might get hit. However a huge fleet of little landers is going to get chewed up in that fight, while a big carrier (landers aboard) has a good chance of surviving, with damage. All-or-nothing is a feature in that context. But where the rubber meets the road, all-or-nothing is extremely, extremely bad.

Apparently we are discussing different types of all-ins. Since combat in space is unlikely to be big factor I assumed that interplanetary transports would be able to make it fairly safely to the atmosphere of another planet. The transports could then chose where to land and avoid most defences. Establishing presence on another world which is controlled by an opponent sounds hard. The enemy will probably have the buildpower advantage and can chose what to build in order to counter the enemy units. It becomes an all-in for the player with the transports because if he got a smaller army than the enemy on that world he will lose his forces.
With a mobile factory and transport the assaulting player can somewhat make up for that by providing some reliable and hard to destroy buildpower to make his assault less of an all-in.
However I don't know what viable ways there will be to assault an enemy controlled planet in PA but I think there should be a way to establish a presence on an enemy world without it having to be an all-in.

I don't doubt we will have huge interplanetary transports. But where we seem to disagree is their role beyond being transports.

The way I see it, such a huge orbital transport should just sit up in orbit, or return for another load of units. It should not be able to enter the atmosphere, land, or otherwise participate in the ground war. The orbital transport might launch dropships to ferry units down to the surface, fire them in pods, or use some other method of sending units down to the surface without going itself. Having few, large transports here makes sense because it makes them easier to manage, raises the minimum barrier for transporting between planets, and makes it inefficient to transport just one (or just a few) units using this method.

For transports likely to be used in combat, however, small is good. Sending many small dropships down into an enemy atmosphere where they're going to take fire is much better gameplay than sending one huge one.

The same goes for naval vessels. You can have big naval transports for overseas purposes- but for landing/combat purposes we want them to send smaller transports to act in their stead, as few, big, expensive, high-capacity transports are too all-or-nothing in battle. Another approach that might work is to have disposable little flying lifter drones carry many units simultaneously from the sea transport over to land.

It sounds like you would have to control the orbital layer in order to deploy these "space stations" above an enemy planet which would require you to do a bit of space combat. Anyway, ground to orbital defence might be good enough to prevent those transports sitting directly over your base and outright winning the game after you control the orbital layer and maybe you could even defend your own "space stations" with ground to orbital defences that you have deployed as you landed on that planet so that you actually have to establish a presence on that planet and win with a ground force rather than deciding the game in space.

I liked the idea of drone carriers. Especially the one mentioned in the thread you started. I like to compare the larger carriers to the smaller ones since you can relocate them if you think you are losing the fight and regroup somewhere else.

It would make sence if normal aircrafts can only fly in atmosphere and need carriers to transport them through the galaxy.

how is igncom right? there is a point. a mobile air factory that could unload ground troop and air troops. it's a lethal unit, a very strategical one at that.

As others have stated, I don't see the point of carriers in PA. The unit to world scaling is such were I don't see aircraft needing to refuel to traverse great distances in PA simply because the distances don't look all that great to begin with (unit to world scaling).

Besides, have you seen the sizes of ships in PA? I can't imagine how much larger a carrier would end up being.

hi, you may find this thread of interest: viewtopic.php?f=61&t=46344

Thanks for the thread referral. I definitely did find that thread of interest.

I voted "yes". I think there is a need for strategic carriers in PA, so long as the scale of units to the rest of the world is fixed. Otherwise, the need for carriers would just be supplemented by building aircraft landing pads all over the world instead.