Disconnected Oceans and the issues faced by Naval Units.

Uh, no.



Look at the size of the gas envelope compared to the deck space, you need a tremendous volume of gas bag to lift quite a small amount of usable deck and engines, made of lightweight aluminium.

Realistically, an airbag to lift a battleship (or even a smaller ship) would be approaching the size of an (in game) asteroid. Of course, games don't have to be realistic, but if you have a battleship being lifted by an unrealistically small airbag, why not just give it pop-out turbines like in the Avengers movie? I'd say that was a pretty Awesome[tm] scene, and just as unrealistic. Let the turbines count as a specialised transport unit, so they can be targeted by AA units. Not a lot of things cooler than watching a giant flying thing crash to the ground.

So now ships can cross water, but you wouldn't want to use flying ships in combat because they'd just get shot down with ridiculous ease even by non-aa units. Can't land airborne ships on land because the hull would crumple and explode the generators.

All this talk of zepellins reminds me of the gas bag trees from the acid maps in TA. Hope we get weird plants like that in PA

i submitt to you, the airship ship, its a boat that can convert to an airship by inflating some baloons and fire up its engines.
the hitpoints of an airshipship is of course a lot lower than a ship and it is slower, unarmed and generally a lot worse.
:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

on a more serius note, i would like to see this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zubr-class_LCAC
the zubr hoovercraft. this is an acceptible alternative to a walking boat.

If you're against the ideas of legs... why not straight out simple wheels?? Practical, logical, and don't look stupid (in some peoples opinion). Water proof, only visible once the bot hits the beach and starts to rise, rather easy to mass for heavier boats and able to lift heavier boats then if they were on legs. Would only be lacking if you had to cross rough terrain, but you're a boat. So mostly your crossing small sections of land, typically smooth because thats how land near water works. Wheels are probably the most efficient way of crossing.

However, I do like Cybran legs. They are pretty fun, and look awesome when an entire fleet decides to go: "Damn, my cannons can't reach their base. Lets get closer" and just starts walking up the beach in synchronisation.

Hmm "ships with legs are impractical" and then you show a picture of a battleship as being practical...

Unless im mistaken, battleships are currently replaced or being replaced by a combination of air craft carriers and smaller ships in most modern navies, since the "big guns" of battleships arent practical or realy needed anymore (There are other "better and cheaper" options for any functionality a battleship has/hade in war before).

I admit that battleships are awsome and i would be depressed if they arent ingame, but i wouldent use them as a example of practical naval war.

I do not like the idea of flying boats. Flying transports are more than capable of carrying most reasonably sized sea vessels across land. A combination of walking and hover units are excellent for bridging the swampy wastes between land and water.

The game absolutely needs some aspect of falling boats. After all, any invasion is going to require an arbitrary amount of land and naval power. If you can't drop boats in from orbit, how are you going to take a water world?

dropping engineers and building a naval factory?

rly tho what would be nice is floating platforms even if its just a surfboard style naval transport. that sort of stuff creates emergent gameplay like the ghetto gunship of supcom

Funny thing is even supcom admits this because cruisers are far cheaper than battleships and the missile bombardment is just as good if not better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landship

Tanks are just landships, so why not a wheeled or tracked boat?

I just wanna have unbelievable Millenium / Warlord battles that clog the waterways with their wreckage!

Assuming a game with hybrid ships that can cross land or fly - or hybrid units in general: I would expect them to be cohesively and exponentially more expensive than traditional units of equivalent firepower (because you're paying for two methods of locomotion as well as the systems to swap them out).

Well, in my opinion, supreme commander is an example on how to do this rather well, (with the exetion of wagners) amphimbious tanks are mass ineffcient agianst land based tanks, and agianst ships, the cost that you pay for them compared to another tank is for the ability to be amphibious.

However this does not mean they are not effective, it simply makes them a very good, well designed, nieche unit.

(not refering to wagners here...)

supcom had nicely designed units i'm not exactly sure about sprinkling random hybrid units in factories.

how about this:

tank factory
bot factory
hover factory
amphibious factory

naval factory
amphibious naval factory

I think thats too many factories. I liked the simplicity of air/ground/naval. Covers all the bases.

u dont like zero-k huh?

I don't like spring at all.

Mhm, I disagree. But I like a thousand units. I dislike the minimalist trend of 'one unit does role X, another does role Y, and that's it'. I want subtle variations and lots of units.

If you have two units that do the same thing what's the difference? And if there is a difference then one is better, so why build the other?

To be fair you can strike a subtle balance between say a tank that is fast and light and a tank that is slow and heavy, theyre both tanks and they both shoot up ground pretty good but they still have different uses.

i too like unit variation, but i want it sorted by factories and unit classes. instead of 40 different units on a single factory i would prefer to have unit "classes". what do i mean by classes?

each factory has a different set of similar units: engineer, scout/raider, assault unit, siege (artillery) unit, skirmish unit, and riot unit.

engineer builds stuff
scouts/raiders are weak but fast to harass and can provide precious intel
assault units have respectable damage speed and hp
siege units have great range and damage to static things
skirmishers have good damage and speed, they flank well
riot units have powerful front loaded dps to handle assaults but are weak to skirmishers

throw in some unit ai like auto-dodge, auto-kite and voila micro-free intense battles that don't result in massing the best 1-2 units. You build what you need based on your strategy and circumstance.

And the beauty of unit classes are that they can easily populate different types of factories. What's the difference between the units of different factories? Hopefully not much in how they work but naturally hover units or bots would be relatively different in where they are effective. Hover units would probably be slower and more expensive. Bots would probably be faster and could climb higher inclines but might be weaker in other stats.

How would this play out in a game?
say your opponent is in a very mountainous base, build an army of assault bots and siege bots to easily overcome the terrain. if he doesn't match your bot army he will be helpless to your hit and run tactics. or if he's a clever guy he can lure you into the open where you cannot take advantage of the terrain and then ambush you with riot tanks.

I do agree with you though bmp, i don't want to see 2 units from the same factory that have essentially the same role or unit class. We don't need 2 different types of assault tanks, we can have an assault tank, hover assault tank and an amphibious assault tank though.

Edit: this also introduces a soft teching value to infrastructure without tech escalation "oh my opponent has an amphibious factory, i better get some subs out and expect hordes running across the ocean floor to raid me." If you only have 3 factory types you're going to end up with a really confusing unit layout, so it's a matter of where you want the simplicity. Do you want 40 units on a factory or 8 units spread out over 5 factory types?

Yeah, like your last paragraph. I think this is awesome. I know many think otherwise though, and I doubt something like the aforementioned example will get in this game, but one can dream.

thanks nlspeed, i was going to link that earlier but zero-k was down so i made a much longer post than i intended x)