Any word on the naval or orbital stuff?

Going with A, also this thread; viewtopic.php?p=561475#p561475

Mike

One thing that I haven't seen much discussion on, is analyzing the role of these different theatres of war, and taking on a unique control scheme for each one.

Right now, the 'standard' is that all units act like land units - they fight like land units, move like land units, and are controlled like land units. Aircraft move like fast ground units, naval moves like slow ones, and we make some blue stuff with different units and call it 'naval warfare'.

And now you want to extend this to orbital too? Structures in space?

It's a control scheme designed and built for Real time tactical - on the ground, in your face control schemes where clicking 20 times to wiggle your units past a mass of fire is effective and a good use of your time.

If the best we can do is blue land.. I have to agree with a previous poster, and say why bother with water planets at all?

Because controlling "blue land" could net you some distinct advantages in the "brown land"?

By the way: I don't get why everyone wants to add so much complexity (collisions etc) to this game. How do expect to manage all this on multiple round objects?

What would be a different control scheme for orbital? Like special attacks used in C&C Games where you could fire your ION Cannon every xy seconds. Or using spy sattelites that grant you sight beneath their current orbit?

My main worries with orbital is that it gets in the way of the ground fighting in the UI. I'm very interested to see some ideas how this should be presented in the UI (Perhaps you need to see the whole planet to control and see them?). Anyways, I don't want much units in orbit. A few would be enough for me.

Oi. I've been suggesting a completely different control scheme for naval since halfway through this thread, it's just that nobody seems to have any kind of response (positive or negative) to it. It's not that we haven't tried

Like I mentioned before; Uber, please look at Carrier Command for an idea of how to do Naval different in a strategy game.

This is a terrible reason. Why bother with new units for blue land, and not new units for green land, or brown land... or whatever.

pluisjen, I'm trying to find a good video or something to figure out what you're talking about but I can't - what's good about Carrier Command?

There has been no mention of something that's incredibly important. Naval units have the same invasion and mobility problems as land units! Boats are going to have the same problem crossing large tracts of land, moving between rivers+lakes, and being an integral component of a planetary assault.

If you want boats to be just as meaningful as land across space, they need to start with a comparable scale. Otherwise how are you going to carry boats on transports, or stuff them into your unit cannons, or elevator/orbital drop them into the ocean?

Yes, I am. You can make them branch in unusual and unique ways, and in fact I have provided several features that land units simply wouldn't or don't need to have. But pound for pound, you can not give a supreme advantage to one layer without screwing up both.

You can not stop land units and naval units from interacting, ever. You have amphibious tanks, reptilian boats, hover units and rivers and coastlines and islands and peninsulas and lakes and waterways. Interaction is inevitable and unavoidable, and neglecting meaningful play between the two will be a disaster.

Because amphibious units can not cover every role needed for the water. Blue land has resources that green land has a hard time reaching and defending, and whoever gets the most land is still going to win. As long as there are resources on water, the full features of dedicated water units will be necessary to fight over them.

I can imagine it's hard to find good video; the original carrier command is old and the latest re-imagining was a bit of a flop.

I was thinking about what makes it so great, and basically what it comes down to is that the Carrier which you control in the game is kinda like the TA Commander, except that it carries all the things it builds along with it.

In the game, you compete for islands with resources and structures and the like, so it sails around launching aircraft and hover to capture the islands, and it gives long range support with artillery shelling and the like. It also builds new vehicles, does research, etc.
It has barely any real involvement with combat, but it is the enabler of all strategies.

The thing I'd try in PA (because I'm not sure it'd work, of course) is to do away with the concept of buildings in the water. Instead of a Naval Factory, your engineers build Command Ships, and those will serve as a combination of ship production (for escort ships that support it with weapons), bulk transport (landing troops would be done with landers that the Command Ship launches en-masse, but actual transport of an army over distance would be inside the ship), holds the infrastructure needed by a normal base (whatever Uber decides on; air-repair, supply, immense build power, radar, local energy production, stuff like that) and basically does what a base normally does, but it moves.

This will make it so that a waterworld doesn't have people building regular bases that float (which is a cop-out), but having giant bases sailing around that perform the task of a normal base, except also moving around slowly. It makes no sense to me to have a floating base in a water enviroment. If you're going to make a building float, why not pack an engine on it?

The concept of assaulting a base that actually moves, or being able to float your entire base with production capabilities, support, everything, right up to the enemy island/resource generating station will give it a very different feeling from the land war.

And because the Command Ship is so big and carries no meaningful armament (its guns, if any, should be comparable to a nuke-silo on land; devastating but expensive to fire) it won't interact in problematic ways with land units. The smaller sea units which escort the Command Ship can be balanced like land units, including short range so they can't outrun anything.

Sorry, i don't see your argument (not my first language :/). As far as I see it. Why not look at the reasons todays military uses ships and apply them in some awesome form to this game.

My argument:
* Navies could bring more firepower for inland bombardments on a more stable plattform than mobile land or air units
* Navies bring Carriers that should have some distinct advantages over conventional base to base air fights (but this depends largely on implementation of air)
* Submarines with the option to use cruise missiles while under the water would be some pretty amazing tools to crack defensive bases
* Transports open a new backdoor into enemy territory
* Ressources in the sea have strategic values that could possibly be very important on that planet

That is not a terrible reason. Your retort is exactly the type of reasoning that players should make for themselves, and if the game is designed and balanced well, both decisions (to op for navy or just focus on land) will have their sensible places.

Somehow i feel nobody asked how an AI would consider designing his units of war..

1 Word.... Efficiency.

In what way could i kill someone or something off in as many ways as possible in the fastest manner and destructive manner?

I would like to see Railguns in the game by preferal reference. And guided missiles used actively in the field. So silly to see unguided missiles in a game, where you would probably see MIRV missiles and more insane weapons of war than we have today.

How would an AI go about making weapons of war?

And you could mostly in a similar way land units do. You have hovercraft and perhaps ships similar to the T2 Cybran destroyer that could walk on land. Moreover I don't see any reason why air-transport shouldn't be able to lift small boats. Perhaps even bigger ones if you take multiple air-transports.
It even might be not to bad if you can't transport the largest ships across land, giving the an disadvantage on different maps.

As mentioned above I think it might be possible to shot small boats with the unit cannon, but I'm not sure whether this might be a interplanetary solution. However OrangeKnights idea of a dry-dock may be a solution that works for all types of ships if you could build them in orbit. Build a fleet and drop it.

What advantage is "supreme" and in how far can't you balance advantages with disadvantages? If you mean range you have on the one side stationary very-long ranged weapons and medium- to low-ranged mobile weapons versus long-ranged mobile and long- to low ranged mobile weapons. Also keep in mind that there are two additional layers you can use, if necessary.
I also looked through the last 5 pages to find the unique features you've mentioned, but could not find them. Perhaps you'd be so kind and show me the post you're referencing to.

Of course land and naval units interact somehow, but this section has two statements that bother me:

• -You compare a zergling to a battlecruiser (a battleship with less armor). In PA this would mean a kbot versus a battlecruiser. This means a basic land unit that is supposed to destroy other (weak) land units with a advanced (you said this here) naval unit that is supposed to destroy mainly land units. This has nothing to do with amphibious, hovering or whatever units. Even these units aren't per se supposed to destroy naval nor land units efficiently, because they are dual-layer units and nobody would build any other unit if they don't perform worse on both layers.
  
  -You say that interaction between land and water is unavoidable but this is only partially true, it depends on the map. Having maps largely consisting of water and some islands it's unavoidable, but this isn't the operation area of land units. Maps largely consisting of land and some lakes aren't the operation area of naval units. Mixed maps with continents are interesting for both unit types, but here the interaction isn't necessarily unavoidable. Depending on the map you could move your units far enough from coast, so the can't be hit. This isn't a nice solution but if you are on a map largely consisting of water and don't build any land-based counter ((stationary) arty), navy, air-based counter (torpedo-bomber) or orbit-based counter, you lost/ignored 3.5 of 4 layers. A disadvantage seem acceptable.

Why can't amphibious units carry torpedoes?

In how far differ resources of water an land? Why are they easier to reach and defend?

So if I ignore water I win?

I don't see why resources increase the features. SupCom hadn't resources on water, but the same features where talking about right now.

I'd rather distribute these tasks to dedicated units. But having movable floating factories and other buildings sounds fine to me. At least if they move slow.

I can get the gameplay appeal, but it would still look and feel a lot less like Naval to me.

Why not simply build a drydock on land that sends ships into the sea? Earth 2150 had that.

*** This is unrelated to the last few posts afaik. Wrote it before I saw them. ***

I assume we're going to keep the water and land realms mostly independent. Naval transports are useless if most land units are going to be amphibious or carried around by air units.

Also, are they even needed if the focus is air transport? I like the variety, but only the submersible transport and super-transport (see below) are any use if that is the case.

Anyway, with regard to naval transports, I don't think the classic 'move to location and unload' will work. It may be appropriate when you are just moving between two friendly locations, but any assault runs the risk of suiciding your transports in an attempt to reach the shore.

Instead, they could have miniature unit cannons. Limited range, but better than approaching a heavily defended shore. Multiple cannons allows the entire load to be sent out quickly.

There could even be a super naval transports:
- Mobile factory
- longer range unit cannons
- Rocket gantry to launch units into orbit (eg: to other planets / moons)

May need to split this among multiple units, since a single unit doing all this sounds OP

Also, submersible transports could be interesting if we keep the underwater layer. Limited capacity, but perfect for surprise attacks.

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I think I've accepted that orbital should only consist of passive units. An active combat layer would require too many different things. It would be difficult to have combat ships in space without making all surface combat obsolete. Easier to just leave it out. Perhaps an expansion / update later, since I'd still like to see the orbital layer extended beyond just resource / defense / detection.

Mike's post here about interplanetary transportation sounds good.

Only change / clarification I would make is to dropships. The multi-functionality of them is going to be hard to balance against the other transport methods without either making the others OP, or making the dropship useless in most situations. A balance issue which is impossible to determine right now though.

I think dropships should be the generic transport, with the other specialized types being used for more advanced operations. This way, they can be intentionally underpowered, encouraging the use of more advanced devices.

Positives:
- Can go anywhere
- Good mobility

Negatives:
- Very poor health
- Very limited capacity

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A little off-topic, not sure where to say this though. Related to orbital I suppose.

I am concerned that planets can be fortified to resist attacks. My solutions:

1) Asteroids are slowly repopulated in the belts (obviously, just wanted to mention it again)

2) Space stations (miniature metal planets, aka Death Stars) can be constructed.
- Are treated as a moon / asteroid
- Can be built upon
- Much smaller than metal planets
- Super-weapons, but less powerful than metal planets
- Lower health than metal planets

I assume metal planets are going to be used primarily for planetary assaults on heavily fortified planets. Players should have the option to build them in the event of no normal metal planets existing in the system.

If for some reason orbiting asteroids aren't a sufficient basis for planetary assaults, player constructed moons could be a solution.

I rather have awesome units instead of efficent ones as a player of this game. This whole commander / AI / Killerbots stuff was just a fluff thing for me and makes releasing this game world wide much easier. I live in germany and I remember very good the cuts Westwood had to made to C&C to get it released here ^^

This was considered in a design manner and i'm not really referring to any games and such.

They aren't that uncommon, at least as oil-rigs and other heavy weight applications.

If your enemy has air-supremacy it might be an option, if they have more HP/capacity/are cheaper.

This could also happen to your air-transporter.

Sounds nice.

At least if the enemy has no sonar, but they'd be immune to nearly everything, except for torpedoes, so they'd have good chances to deploy the units.

I have somehow to disagree. How should these gas-giants work out, if the units are only passive?

i really do not hope land units are going to be amphibious en masse. However: yes air is so superior to Naval that naval carriers do not really work (aside from obviously Air carriers). This is why i feel Naval should be more factory-oriented and less transport-oriented: Naval simply builds the units on the spot.

i proposed this myself too and i think this is necessary. I always hated the naval TA transports with their slow unit-by-unit unload.

mm this might actually be the one thing i would build a naval transport for...(big Atlantis fan here)

i think Air will be useful on Gas planets too....

I am in the camp of naval vessels being large, full-featured ships. Smaller ships could be more specialized, but any very large ship should have at least minimal capabilities in areas other than its main function.

I would like to see large sea transports. Although I think a more effective implementation is to simply have capital ships that can build and transport land units, and which send them to land by some method other than a one-arm crane. Lander boats, or a small group of lifter drones to carry many units simultaneously, independent of their host ship's position, would both work well for this job.

I would also like to see very important aircraft carriers. Lots of discussion about that in other threads, but the carrier really should be the heart and soul of a fleet, with powerful battleships acting as their naval muscle against enemy ships when in close, cruisers being their guardians against air and submarines, and a screen of smaller ships around the fleet's core capital ships.

Just a random thought. I'd love to have a ship firing massive cannons as well as launching units at the enemy. Something about that just seems epic.

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I agree that navies should focus on factories, whereas air is focused on transport (with regard to assisting land units).

Unit cannons on the aforementioned "Capital Ships" is only logical. Could be similar to what I imagined.

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As it stands, orbital is a passive-combat only layer. The only way to attack the orbital layer is with weapons from the surface below, and with an unclear system of orbital weapons.

What if air units could fly into the orbital layer?

I imagine air could be nearly nullified with surface weapons, but will have free reign in space.

I know many people were having issues with deciding what to do with air. Could this be it?

It would fit perfectly with gas planets, and would keep the surface a primarily ground / naval battlefield (something I personally enjoyed much more).

Also, launching an air assault could take the form of moving above the enemies defenses and then dropping into their base. This means the defending player must not only defend the surface from land and naval units, but also defend space against air units.

Just a thought.