Bridges

There is a thing missing from TA & SupCom.

That is bridges that enable units to travel from one landmass to another with deep water in-between without needing an air/sea transport. Id like to see this to make it easier to invade a continent with ground forces and also to see what happens when someone destroys a bridge and/or its sections when your units are on them.

Ships should be capable of passing underneath them unless they [the ships] are too large to simply go underneath. That could be overcome with draw bridges however.

I think support for bridges would be nice. There could even be mobile bridges which go into a river and expand to allow units to cross it, if the river is too wide, multiple could be used.

Bridges were always on of this bastard tricky things to do with the terrain systems we had. I'm trying to make the new terrain support support them well. So that is a tech design goal.

Not opposed to the idea. It allows for a ground-only assault, and cuts down on potential micromanagement (though SC made that a little easier with ferry points).

Awesome to hear!

Awesome, Can we blow up The bridges? This was one thing I loved about the Red Alert series.

"A little C4 knocking at your door."

glad to hear.

Yes! I had suggested bridges in a thread the other day.

I think it would also be good to have two or three different sizes of bridges. Cheap narrow bridges that would accommodate a couple of bots at a time, medium bridges that could do a few tanks across, and of course nice wide bridges for massive armies.

I also think a good feature would be that a bridge is a structure still owned by the player that built it (as opposed to a neutral terraformed feature placed on the terrain) so that player could choose to self destruct it should an opponent start using it for their own purposes

I think the system is going to need to be just a bit more complex and robust than having a couple different pre-made bridges. Some type of customizable construction size or modular tile to drag an area to fit your needs at the time.

Mobile bridges.

Why not just have a 'Water force-emitter' that repels water back essentially performing a 'Moses' as an area of effect.

That is too disruptive to the fishes

Also mobile bridges can bridge things other than water, for instance it could act as a ramp to help units with poor climbing ability get over an incline, or cross over wreckage.

TA had an elegant solution by having shallow water that units could walk through, while still allowing ships (at least the smaller ones) over.

I feel bridges don't really fit the game and that sea transports would almost always be more effective (making the reasonable assumption that the devs make a better transporting system)

Awesome for real!

Sea transport is never as effective at crossing a small divide. Building a specialised ship just to get to get across a place you can spit across seems self-defeating. Anyway bridges were never in ta + supcom [barring the mods], so who knows how much better it could be with them in.

Not the feature I'm most excited about, but if it can be done I guess there's no reason it shouldn't be done, it'll add some strategic options.

I know this is a pretty old topic but I feel bridges should get more love! :lol:

I think the ability to build bridges in an rts game is always quite a nice feature!

If I understand Neutrino's terrain blog post, it should be possible to make just about any shape and drive on it. Not so sure about doing this *dynamically* (as in, build terrain bridges in-game) but it would seem to me that you'd be able to cut out a section of the terrain with a brush (the underside of the bridge), and as long as your nav mesh is correct, your units will path over it.

I don't think I've seen it confirmed that one unit can drive on another, but that would solve the buildable bridges just fine.

Well it's encouraging that it's a possibility.

Buildable terrain in general (anyone remember Bolo?) would allow for this as well as a variety of other options under the same tech umbrella.

Bridges are great. Small rivers suck without bridges. But then you have the idea of bridges being TOO easy to build, and then rivers are pointless.

Having them be destructible is a good start. Then again that can get super annoying.

If you need a bridge across the water, why not freeze it?

Ice has many great uses, and it only costs energy to set up.