Any word on the naval or orbital stuff?

So far plenty of concepts and sample models on the land units and commanders and structures, but I was wondering if there was anything we could see in terms of orbital or naval structures? I've always found the navy in any RTS up to now somewhat lacking in both controllability and style (save SC2, they finally sacrificed enough realism to produce cool stuff), and I also have no idea what "orbital" entails.

This should be in the General Discussion Sub Forum.

Mike

I was specifically asking about concept art or such, the sort of thing that's not likely to be posted in GD.

Loved the naval warfare in Supreme Commander 2, but found it lacking in therms of variety. But that's a problem that concerns the game as a whole. The original Supreme Commander on the other hand had lots of different vessels, but the combat was quite clunky.

Some concept art of the naval is the thing i'm most anxious to see.

Well why didn't you say so?

I got my concept over here; viewtopic.php?p=655620#p655620

Mike

I'm also curious about why there's been a lack of research into creating compelling naval gameplay. Is it because of the comparative resistance to choosing mechanics or unit designs that aren't necessarily realistic? There seems to be a lot more of an acceptance of unrealistic land or air designs.

Woops, forgot to mention it then =p that concept reminds me of SupCom 2's UEF navy ships. Love it!

I'm also curious about why there's been a lack of research into creating compelling naval gameplay. Is it because of the comparative resistance to choosing mechanics or unit designs that aren't necessarily realistic? There seems to be a lot more of an acceptance of unrealistic land or air designs.[/quote]
I think it might stem from the fact that generally Land and Air are just better understood and just more common overall.

Mike

Just a note on why the I think naval gameplay is almost always less fun and interesting than land in RTS. As was mentioned above there is a huge lack of variety in naval gameplay. All the units are always so slow and clunky. Just off the top of my head for some faster and more nimble units. Imagine a little jet ski like robot (as in size and speed) compared to a big clunky battle ship. Perhaps this little guy zoom right up to a battleship and clime up onto it and start destroying it (by exploding or just shooting or cutting). If the developers could just look at all the variety in the land category and translated that into a naval fleet which should be able to ave an even broader scale of units I think we would see a lot more interesting naval combat.

It's probably because water is a flat, featureless plain. There's only so much content that you can pack on a permanently blank page.

While crossing water is difficult for today's ships, it doesn't seem like a big deal for future zombie killbots. Personally I liked Supcom's take on water. Water walking (and land walking) was one of those things a unit had just because it could, making water a fuzzy terrain obstacle rather than a completely different theater of war.

It's simply logical order of execution. Water and orbital are both speciality movement types with their own set of issues but are generally simpler to deal with.

If anyone does have specific ideas for naval gameplay feel free to bring it up here. Since we are going to have completely water planets (or mostly water with small amount of land if you want) there should be some interesting naval scenarios possible. I'm open if people have ideas on how we incentive the use of naval on planets with less water (maybe make naval units more effective per $ for example or possibly hide some better resources in the ocean).

I definitely want a battleship with the equivalent of 16 inch guns. That would imply we should open up some beach landing type scenarios.

*Cough*Way ahead of you Neutrino*Cough*

Sorry, something was stuck in my throat! xD

Mike

There must be some walking ships like these from SupCom.
And a secret technology (on a metal Planet in the same system) like a rocket that can be shooten on the water planet and turns the water into acid and after that the planet will transform into a lava planet.

Big idea: make air transport of land units less cheesy (aka, somethhing other than build this unit and set ferry route for absurdly effective unit transport), then make fairly efficient naval transports of some kind.

I like the previously proposed robot on a jet ski as anti "big guns" concept.

Amphibious stuff, perhaps blurring the line between tanks and navy instead of just walking ships. "Tanks that go underwater" are kind of limited and boring.

Choices for super long range stuff on navy, so you're not stuck with investing your money into a resource that just sits there useless.

I'd be either against subs entirely or want ways to make them more interesting than "cigar-shaped blurs that sit opposite from each other and lose health". Maybe starting with overlays on subs and making torpedoes true long range weapons.

I'd like to see more ways to connect waterways. Transports can bring units between islands. How about moving ships between lakes? For example, the little toy boats in Supcom are roughtly transport sized, so they could feasibly be carried by one.

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Real world oceans have many benefits over plain land. For example, they are ideal places to attach a space elevator. The vast ocean acts gives the anchor point a wide degree of error on its location. Water is also a natural coolant, letting engines run hotter and guns fire longer. Certain installations can take advantage of free cooling, such as giving more efficiency to artillery or power plants. Deep trenches also place extractors closer to the planet's delicious mantle, making extraction potentially cheaper and more lucrative.

Anno 2070 has a special facility designed to extract geothermal power from deep sea volcanoes. In PA, a similar extraction point can be used for high efficiency energy.

One unit option is to have boat "bridges" that connect two land points together. Technomagic launches units across the water. A similar thing might also exist for boats?


It's a shame that gas giants aren't getting more love in this area. They're the perfect place to have both strong ocean-style mechanics, and strong orbital mechanics. Although no one says that a boat can't work in both places, tee hee.

i'd like to see some "boats only" and "subs only" spaces. So for example you could have shallow waters that boats could get over, but subs couldn't. Or you could have frozen ice on the surface that boats couldn't get through but subs could go under.

Also if we are going to have entirely 100% water planets then people need to be able to build a full base in the water. Power plants, mass extractors, that rocket gantry thing, all of it. And I'd like to see any building that doesn't necessarily need to be on the surface be submerged, so a power plant would be on the ocean floor, while an anti air turret would kind of having to be floating on the surface.

One incentive I could see is stealth, especially if we allow submerged buildings. If we have any sort of radar that can go through space at all, for hunting down people's secondary bases, you could say it's more difficult to detect anything submerged.

So someone could build a pile of power plants and mass fabricators on some ocean somewhere, and if their opponent doesn't build a sonar station nearby then they will be able to produce resources in peace.

I always saw gas giants as the "orbital only" worlds. Although I do think we definitely need some sort of "orbital terrain" for people to work around, otherwise the orbital layers is going to feel like you are fighting in a big open parking lot.

Shameless bump for this and the support it got.

If we are going to have 100% water planets then ice at the poles could be an interesting building area since the world builder already has temperate zones.
Unit movement speed and turn rate could possibly be lowered as your moving/fighting on ice and snow, the ice itself could be easier to damage than normal ground making cracks possible even under basic weapons fire and as for nukes and heavy weapons they could melt the ice away to open water (assuming the planetary damage models can be changed in different areas)

Im not saying all water planets have ice or ice replaces the need to build on or under water just that it could add another possibility with its own risks should you choose to build on it.

Submerged base. :mrgreen:

Should be invisible to orbital units ofc. Hiding stuff in a water planet.

To be able to invade naval planets, make some naval units air- or orbital-dropable. Dropping a bunch of submarines from orbit into a water planet to clear a staging zone would surely be awesome.


As for naval gameplay, some focus on naval transports maybe. Usually transporting stuff via air transport is easier, faster and more convenient to set up. If using naval transports would be better in some respect, it could lead to more use of ships. I always fancied transport units where the transported could still shoot out off.


Perhaps some way to set up a fleet. Usually slow battleships get outrun by their escorts, forcing one to babysit fleets a lot.

That's a problem you don't have that much with land or air units. On land, one usually just sends its tanks in front while keeping other stuff behind, with air one usually doesn't mix different units. With ships though I normally want to keep a mix of units together. Battleships for the big guns, some cruisers or destroyers for anti-submarine duty and AA.

Because ships often have slow turn rates with slow acceleration speeds keeping different types of ships together is a pain. If we could have it that different types of ships would go in formation when sent somewhere (main ships in the middle, with a screen of smaller ships around) it would help quite a bit to make it less annoying to use 'em.


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I also think that gas planets shouldn't have any buildable "ground". To keep it from being just an empty plane to fight on, how about incorporating the moving bands of clouds and storms on a gas giant into unit movement? Also orbital buildings on gas giants may move around depending on the current of the wind resp. storms on it.

Take a look at this animation from wikipedia.

Different bands of clouds that rotate against each other. So orbital buildings on a gas giant would move together with the cloud band they're in. Units moving in the same direction as the band they're in would get a boost while moving in the other direction would slow them down. (Probably very hard to do a good pathfinding algorithm for this though...)

So you would have moving bases (mostly He3 suckers and factories and the like I guess) on gas giants, making it play quite uniquely.

And if you had a base on one cloud band and your enemy one too on the cloud band next to you, the bases would meet every half rotation of the clouds for a short shooting match. :twisted:

The best incentive for naval units in my opinion would be to make them pretty expensive but really strong (which would equal cost effectiveness). I really liked the naval units in SupCom1 where Battleships were swimming artillery platforms that could be used to provide very strong fire support for land units. I would really love to see Carriers having a much stronger use to reach far bases. I don't know if this should steem from ressource regeneration or just as a nearby repair plattform that the jets / bombers use, when they are low.

On an asthetic note: Bigger ships should have more than just one weapon plattform. Just like in SupCom i really liked the little aa-turrets f.e. on the battleships that spew lots of bullets when flyers were near.

Just so long as they can properly contribute, in SupCom Battleships had 60DPS in terms of AA, which is absolutely pointless when air units are flying around with 3500HP(and up) and can't actually accomplish anything.

Not that Battleship should have effective AA, but giving it something "for show" is just as bad.

Mike