Feature: Engine: Amphibious water transports

Navy has traditionally been difficult to make useful. Usually because boats are made to be slower and bigger than regular units to meet everyone's expectations about what boats are like. To counter this disadvantage, there could be one huge advantage that makes it worthwhile building boats, and that could be water transports. If water transports could carry many more units, that are much larger, and deployed faster than units from an air transport, it could drastically change the game for water maps like we've never seen before.

The problem with air transports is that they're weak, take a long time to load an unload, and can't carry large units. These limitations all make sense, since air transports have the maneuverability and flexibility to drop units pretty much anywhere on the map very quickly.

To make the transports load and unload quickly, it would be great to design them like the landing craft used in D-Day in World War II.



If the game engine design hasn't been set in stone yet, now would be a good time to make sure that it can support units walking on top of other units (transports), and moving together over the water, so D-Day style landing craft could be supported.

As an additional effect, it would be impressive if units could wade in the water for the first few metres of the shore to create the illusion of a genuine beach landing.

Yeah, I agree with all of this.

Should be doable in any [real] game engine -- it's just up to Uber to program that into the game logic.

I see you never tried to make naval transports in supcom then.

"Supcom" isn't a game engine. :|

The moho engine is though, don't be pedantic ;p

You don't [usually] get full access to the game engine by modding the games it's built on...

Unreal might support seamless map loading, giving the illusion of an endless world, but you can't modify UT (or UT2K4, and probably not UT3) to do that.

A 3d engine lets you draw/display whatever you want. Beyond that, a full game engine will have some tools and frameworks to make your life easier (map editors, IDE, etc.)... so it's something that should be allowed/prohibited by game logic/design, rather than 3d engine.

TA had air transports that could hold 1 unit at a time, yet naval transports that could hold an unlimited amount of any unit. Only problem was that you had to select every unit, one at a time, to get it in. And it took a long time (like 2 seconds per unit to load and 2 to unload). Would love to see it done right here though, and yeah, more sturdy transports would be awesome.

Also, I prefer a fast navy (like in TA).

I think it's a great idea. They could use the SupCom ferry system which worked very well for air transports. For the benefit of those who only played TA: Basically you use an air transport to create a to and from ferry point and then any units you attach to the ferry point get picked up by the air transport and moved from a to b automatically - the transports keeps ferrying until the job is done. You can attach several transports to a single ferry point to speed the process. You can even attach factories to ferry points too so that all units created by the factory are transported automatically. As your landing zone is cleared and your ground forces move up you can drag the ferry B point somewhere new so that air dropped force keep landing where you need them to (or even behind the enemy front line!).

If they could do this with the naval ferry points..! I think naval transports should be a lot slower though (obviously), but they should also come with some serious capacity and fire power. That way you can use them to create your own beachhead without the explicit need for cruisers or battleships to gouge a hole.

I also think submersible transports would be sneaky too! TA had a couple of 3rd party units which were submersible air repair pads. You could stash a couple of high level bombers on them and sneak them under enemy air defences before letting them rip. Supcom had the submersible aircraft carrier. Both these were cool but of limited use.

It's about your enemy's expectations though; When you see bunch of triangles on that map you have an expectation of what coming and prepare for that. A single ship, might not get you worried... but a single ship carrying an army...!!

If they do this they need to make ferry points first-class entities. In Sup Com, if the transport which made the ferry point dies, all the other transports on that ferry route stop (because the ferry command dissappears also). This prevents any kind of epic brute-force beachfront invasion.

Any word on water transports?

Is the engine capable of making a unit that other units walk on top of and get moved with?

I like the Rise of Nations approach. Every unit just automatically crosses water (the unit just transforms into a boat over water, then back to the unit once it hits land) after a research. More macro, less micro.

would be interesting, haven't seen it in any rts game I can remember.

in theory you could use this mechanic also for some obscure land vehicles or multilevel buildings.

I liked SupCom's six-pack-o-tanks air transports, loading tanks into racks and dropping them off fourteen at a time added to the feel of your Brutally Efficient Self-Replicating Mechanisms of War. A boat that beaches itself and then disgorges a dozen tanks from racks on both sides (bonus points for being double decker) could be viable, but I get the feeling it would lose out to air transports for any situation where you'd actually want to use one.

Even if air transports have a lower capacity, they'd be faster, and not have to rely on finding a beach, so their lower capacity can be offset by being able to do multiple trips in the time a boat can do one. They're vulnerable to fighters and boats are not, but boats are vulnerable to subs, so neither is much of an advantage, and if you can't keep fighters off your transports, you can't keep gunships off your boats.

The only way I see it being viable is if the transports are submarines, and so have the potential for stealthy insertions of troops.

Under no circumstances should SupCom2's terrible clown car teleporter transports return. And TA's transports (both air and naval) were almost as bad, for reasons already posted.

the problem is the factor, in a RTS even with larger unit numbers the capacity advantage of a ship doesn't matter as much as in reality. Even large RTS troop transports are more single insertion than mass transport. (and noone asks for fuel efficiency )
The only way I see, is too limit the air lift to specific smaller types while needing ships for transporting heavy equipment.

I put something like that forward in the Ideas for Units thread:

Clearly I didn't proof-read that one. :roll: But you get the idea!

Doesn't that rather negate the whole point of oceans as an impassable terrain type?

To reply directly to the op, I don't think it would add to the game to allow unit standin on unit interaction, unless said first unit was GIGANTIC! it's just as feasible to have them "mount" to assigned positions, with larger transports capable of carrying the biggest (just like Sup Coms transports) it works great and doesn't look bad. As for massive ships with units scrawling across the tops... that would be AWESOME!!!! but from a design standpoint its actually a decent bit more resource intensive to have object on object inertia and stuff like that. As for actually coding it in, I can't imagine it'd be a problem. But again the units would have to be MASSIVE which is currently not planned.

Nope. Units get turned into vulnerable transports which can be taken out by other ships/aircraft.

Unless I'm mistaken, this design would save money because it reduces the art assets to 1 boat.

Although I like the concept of transporter ships, they always handle very gimpy and are micro intensive. So +1 or the auto transform into transport ships idea!

To prevent that they easily cross the water everywhere and to add a bit more strategic depth, how about "bridge buildings/water gates" that you build on the coast. Units which want to cross water need to move through these bridges, the bridges would be responsible for building the temporary ship around the unit, which could have a cool animation.

That would not only give you strategic points you can attack if you want to prevent your enemy from crossing the water, it would also be a solution for the "how do we transform a land unit into a ship, without making it look stupid" problem.

Here's some more details: http://riseofnations.wikia.com/wiki/Transport_Ships

This is all assuming navy even makes it into the game. I love navy, so I'm hoping. Apparently Civ 5 took this idea too.