Carriers: Strategic Impact

I didn't understand how that explains limited ammo. Wouldn't the reload time just be slower because the lathes are smaller?

The idea is that you can't build multiple bombs at the same time, so on the first pass you drop all 10 bombs but if you got straight into a second pass maybe you only have 3 bombs built in time and if you keep making constant passes your effect DPS after the first pass is reduced.

Mike

Nice read.

I like the idea of making units dependent on/support others.
In this case a carrier that can rearm and repair the aircraft.
There should be buildings that can do that as well

Would it be interesting to let carriers improve aircraft range as well ?
As the op was saying, irl fighters cannot stay in the air forever, there range is limited.
I could imagine that on larger maps aircraft would not be able to just circle all over the planet, but would be limited through support buildings/vehicles.

Higher tier bombers on the other hand could be able to travel larger distances to do a bomb run.

I don't mean to dismiss mobile factories out of hand, what you say about their utility in SupCom2 is likely true. In fact I'd love to see them make a return, but the problem I see with mobile production as the central merit of carriers is redundance with regular air production. Either carrier air production is more efficient and therefore replaces factories or it is less efficient and only used in a support capacity (e.g. mobile power production in TA).

I wouldn't call mobile production a paradigm shift either. It diminishes supply lines which is nice but different than how gunships affect game strategy. I would argue that mobile production does not necessitate an active or immediate response from your opponent. And when I say strategic impact that's what I meant. My semantics perhaps could have been chosen better.

I don't agree. Even if the production is not as efficient as factories and the airpads is not as cheap as land based airpads the blend of production capabilities, air repairs, air rearming, some defensive weapons and mobility can make a carrier worthwhile.
If the carrier is designed that way then you are not using the carriers to its' strength if you have it at home building airplanes but its' strength is when you put it closer to the conflict where it can repair and rearm planes while also providing some defence for your fleet and producing planes suited for whatever you need there right now.

A carrier can also be balanced just for the maintenance role with some buildpower tacked on for extra versatility. Don't underestimate being able to build units right there and right now for your immediate needs.

Edit:There are also other roles that you can tack onto a carrier, like anti-missile defence, anti-nuke defence, long range tactical missile, etc.

OK, fair enough. Redundancy and versatility work well together, that's what makes SCUs so powerful in SupCom. And I can't argue with the utility of a specific implementation as that is always a matter of balance not design. Would you dispute that mobile production does not necessitate an immediate strategic response? E.g. do you see carriers and immediately reevaluate your strategy? Or do SupCom2 carriers only require an adjustment of strategy and change of tactics? I am suggesting it is the latter.

You are right in your assertion but I'm trying to look at the strategic impact of that utility.

In real life Carrier fleets are sent to areas where the owner has no proper military presence so they can act as a temporary C&C and bring local superiority to the area.

In Supreme Commander and well pretty much all other RTS games the maps are too small to make proper use of Aircraft Carriers however with PA finally making maps on a proper worldwide scale we may finally have a game where Carriers actually become very important tools.

Imagine sending a Carrier fleet halfway across a huge largely aquatic world to launch a strike against the enemy, you would have to defend that Carrier like it was a Commander in it's own right -In PA I can see some pretty intense naval battles where Carriers (being the only unit in the area that can actually build stuff) are treated like they are like Queens on a chess board

I agree, unfortunately.

So other then the proposed idea of carriers speeding up the rearming process for aircraft, what could actually make them real super weapon ships in the game?

and in contrast to battleships, missiles ships or another kind of ship?

I have a thought, what if carriers could be equipped with drone aircraft, kinda like the way that carriers in the RedAlert games work? Allowing carriers to not only quickly resupply standard planes, but to unleash a swarm of throwaway attack dones to bombard a target location and try to establish air superiority through numbers?

Yup and I would add that the value of carriers isn't in actually transporting aircraft. It's in providing logistic support for aircraft. Carriers do carry, but they carry runways, supplies, parts, pilots and engineers which in turn allow persistent air presence. We still have bombers flying around that can nuke Russia, we don't need carriers for that.

Indeed, alternatives are possible, it certainly doesn't need to be the way I described. Drones could be very interesting in a support capacity, for instance drones that repair or add build power to anything in their vicinity could provide a value similar to shields. Nukes on carriers would also be strategically viable, although it wouldn't necessitate immediate response. Carriers concealing aircraft could also be powerful but that would depend on how intelligence and anti-air work. Versatility isn't a bad place for carriers to be, but I'd love to see them influence air strategy.

That'll be good for the water worlds!

I haven't really played SupCom2 so I don't know about that. When I play Phantom on Roanoke Abyss in FA I play as Seraphim and make loads of carriers to spam ASF. It is a good way to hide how much air I got and I can powerbuild Torpedo bombers to supplement my t3 submarines. Then I spam cruisers to bombard the enemy islands.
Its' funny how all those units are good against air but once you own air the enemy can't snipe you, you can dominate the sea with t3 subs and bully the enemy with missile cruisers.

I like the you concept described in the first post but that hinges on that rearming of some or all airplanes can be sped up significantly by landing on the carrier. It also requires a pretty large map and is dependant on how air is balanced overall.
If hiding airplanes inside a carrier would be an effective way to protect your airforce when you lost airsupremacy an air carrier might be an effective tool even on a small planet though.

Indeed, I too like force concealment. Mobile air production (for marginal needs) isn't bad and naval drone-based repair would also provide utility.

I think how valuable staging proximity will be a function more of ammunition constraints than map size. But I'm sure map size and sea size will also play a role.

Yep, I like everything I read in the OP. That's pretty much how I imagined air playing out when Neutrino mentioned the ammo mechanic being attached to air units. This allows for an air pad building that makes air units more effective the closer they are to home, and carriers then become a home away from home.

It'd be nice to get some other things attached to carriers - like a T2 radar - that make it a threat from multiple aspects. I know pawz wants to be able to build buildings on ships too, which would be awesome for customizing which additional roles a carrier fills, but I'm not expecting this functionality out of the box.

Just because carriers caused a paradigm shift in real life, doesn't mean they have to serve that function in PA. The difference between big ships shooting each other and a mobile airbase only makes sense with a sophisticated enough modelling of aircraft supplies and operation, and I don't think aircraft will be that complicated, as stated in the may17th livestream.

If we are to have aircraft carriers function as mobile energy generators, factories and missile defences, those systems should be accounted for in the overall cost of the unit, and I would like a pure economical carrier without any bloaty secondary systems to be a possible unit as well, to emphasise the role of just aircraft support.

And please no situations where the aircraft carrying capacity is physically bigger than the ship itself.

That's a perfectly fine abstraction, in my opinion, considering the miniscule size of planets with atmospheres and evolved life, and wireless transmission of energy and matter, an aircraft with internal hammerspace isn't a problem.

Plus how unworkably big carriers would probably need to be to support more aircraft, and the whole "you can fit 20 heavy bombers or 35 light bombers"

Repair is not a service uniquely required by aircraft. Everything with an HP bar is going to want repair, so isolating it as just a carrier function is silly.

The only real unique thing a Carrier can do at this point, is to refill the ammo reserves on an empty bomber. But that's not a very complex or expensive role. A mobile land unit could do it.

Carriers work in real life because aircraft burn petrol, turbines need maintenance, and pilots need sleep. None of those things apply here.

Aircraft can burn endlessly off of internal fusion (or the energy supply, either way works), anything in the air is going to die before reaching any level of wear and tear, and robots do not tire or sleep. Furthermore, a carrier does not bring an aircraft anywhere unique, does not bring it there faster, nor does it reduce any vulnerabilities along the way.

Perhaps the only exception is with the Supcom Atlantis. It brought aircraft underwater, where they normally couldn't go, which helped protect them from interceptors and land defenses.

You oaf. The whole appeal of scaleable units and environments is the move away from abstraction.

The accommodation of kilometre radius spheroids is only out of necessity if you want to do fighting on spheres, due to hardware limitations, and because making games last on real earth sized maps would be impracticle. However, people still want a sense of internal consistency. Clown carriers are ridiculous.

More to the point, what this does is make fielding more than one carrier anywhere redundant.

Absolutely. However there is a functional difference between air units and other units with HP in that air units are highly mobile, making a distant support asset more practical. Slower land units will take longer to retreat back to support assets. As a result it makes more sense to bring the support along, or to set up forward bases closer to the action to support your forces. Retreating land units back to a FOB should also be a strategic consideration.

This is a lore argument for why the game should play a certain way. The real question is whether having planes with limited fuel and ammunition is more interesting from a gameplay perspective. I posit that having these limitations is more interesting because it makes aircraft positional, creates air staging bases, limits the stacking of large numbers of aircraft without cost, and creates more map features and support/non-military targets and production options. Building an airbase is a strategic consideration that costs resources, and gives you a real advantage in terms of projecting air power, increasing the quantity of air units that can be supported in the area. It also develops the board with a strategic target that can be destroyed.

Lore can justify anything you want- fusion engines are too heavy to put on birds. In order to save cost and weight, and to absolutely maximize efficiency and speed, they run on capacitor banks/batteries instead of using a fusion generator.

As Mavor said on the livestream, historically air units have been tricky to balance- they either are too strong or too weak. The reason for this is simple. Air units are extremely mobile compared to other units, meaning a large force of aircraft can project power in many places at once. Even ignoring their unlimited stacking and focusing of firepower, this makes for a completely different effective force calculation. Even if a single bird is somewhat cost-inefficient, a large group of them can do the jobs of multiple groups of ground units, and get even more efficient the more ground you have to cover.

The best solution is to limit the mobility of aircraft. If a plane has an operational range of 10 km, then it doesn't matter if the planet is 50 or 10,000 km in circumference, the relations between units are preserved. Regardless of how high its speed is, it can't go anywhere on the planet like a completely unconstrained airplane. Limiting their independence even allows for increasing their speed, as well as their firepower.

One of the best RTS games in recent times, a title which I have mentioned multiple times, is Wargame. Its sequel, Airland Battle, is in beta for another week, and it has hands-down the best implementation of air units in any RTS game to date. Birds are fast and incredibly powerful air support which ground forces call in, but are expensive and vulnerable to anti-air. Compare Airland Battle to the silly blob warfare from Supreme Commander. It's just no contest.

What I would like to see is a complete overhaul of the air system as it was in TA which develops air units from other assets like bases and carriers. Instead of building and box-selecting blobs of planes, they operate from bases which receive orders on how their planes will act. The player orders a base or carrier to conduct a sortie or airstrike. The plane (or squadron) flies out, does its task, and heads home, in a hurry to minimize exposure to anti-air weaponry. Planes can be rebased/transferred between bases to "move" them from one theatre to another, do so in a hurry, and can automatically leapfrog from one base to another if necessary. When you have a ground war across multiple large fronts your planes' time is needed in many different places simultaneously, and the player has to decide where they are most needed, and weigh the risks of exposing valuable birds to anti-air.

Could you elaborate on how airland battle makes air interesting, beyond they are 'fast and powerful but expensive and vulnerable to anti-air'? I have a cursory understanding and am not entirely interested in preordering to play beta. You piqued my curiosity though and I do plan to watch some let's play footage when I have a chance.