Feature: Engine: Amphibious water transports

The same argument coud be made for all units turning into aircraft and flying wherever they want. It defeats the point of having water as mostly impassable terrain.

Letting all units turn into transports will be similar to having swarms of amphibious tanks all trying to crawl across the ocean. It wasn't that interesting in Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander, and it won't be this time.

It required a dock and research in Rise of Nations. The transports were very weak and got annihilated when attacked by combat units. Its not as simplistic as you're making it out to be. Clearly you never played that game >.>

I'd rather see this implemented and gain a combat unit elsewhere. Uber isn't rich. Why do you think Combat Girl is a pro in SMNC? =P

If they can all transform/erect their own water transports, why not simply allow the units to float across the water on pontoons and continue to act exactly as they did on land? These are supposed to be the pinacle war machines right?

Sorry but the reason we like the idea of water transport units being seperate is because it's simply BORING for them to magically move across the water. It's much more exciting when you can skirt abunch of units on a specific other unit designed to do that, or simply trod across the bottom of the pond, unable to fight back (so when we hit naval stretch goal said navy can depth charge the snot outa em until they wise up and use naval units or anti naval units themselves). If we hit the naval stretch goal 1 more unit devoted to transport is not gonna ruin the whole expansion, trust me.

I tend to agree, I liked RoN but it had a strong historical perspective which (compressed historical time and) made that transport convention acceptable. In this game I hope for more strategy re transport. SupCom1/FA was heading in the right direction but could have gone further.

I think quietrage's slow wading idea makes sense for some units and is part but not all of the answer, like the pirates crossing the ocean floor in PotC Dead Man's Chest, some future bots are bound to be able to do that like the percival and brick did. Like he said, the balance factor is they would not have aquatic propulsion. So they would be slower in water and they would not have subaqua weapons and could be picked off by torps and compression wave (depth) charges. I guess these kinds of weapon would be in if we get naval stretch goals and water planets.

I think with wading that terrain could provide some impassable barriers like vertical cliffs and trenches and greater depths. But I don't think that there should be a magic depth they wont go beyond, I think the choice and the risk of wading passable terrain at great depth should be the players but there should be a danger eg seals breaking > wear increasing at greater depths causing real time damage with time spent over the unit's depth limit.

That would create the situation where you might risk crossing a deep bit to scout and find the bots lose 90% their health and maybe some suffer critical failure. eg scout a beachhead where you could then drop submarine or air transport loads to secure it so you can bring in much bigger surface transports, to overwhelm the enemy... muhahahaa!

I see submarine transports as slower with small capacity but naturally difficult to spot unless the enemy has sonar and well defended against surface attack unless it is a specialised subaqua attack like torpedos. They could transport special units that cannot otherwise go subaqua like anti-air ground units, engineers or artillery.

Air transports could also do that only move much faster but very vulnerable to anti-air.

Surface naval transports would be much bigger capacity but vulnerable to all attacks.

ok thats my 2c

I liked the amphibious tanks in Total Annihilation

I sort of like this idea, though I also think it would be abit of an annoyance. Having a "magic depth they cannot cross" actually does make sense, and could easily be displayed onscreen (water between x and y depth is light blue, water deeper than y is deep blue) Deep blue is only for naval, where light blue is for anything that'll fit.

Well IMHO more annoying not to be able to go where you want, but the units should default wayfind along the contour of their max safe depth limit unless countermanded with a specific waypoint inside the deep bit.

Okay I really don't understand what you're saying. You seemed to indicate that each individual unit would transform into its own transport, and move itself across the water analogous to being an amphibious tank for a short period of time.

If that's not what you're suggesting, could you either describe it more clearly or post a video of a transport from Rise of Nations? I couldn't find one on Youtube.

We could still have an offensive land unit that is amphibious, but not every land unit should be amphibious.

If naval transports can be made simple and quick I'm all for it, short-range teleportation might be a nice way to do this, but I've yet to see it done without being tedious.

Now for the 'all amphib' angle I see three options:

Hover: Like pretty much all the Aeon,
Transformation: Like the TA Pelican and a few others,
Underwater: Like a lot of the bots and some tanks in both.

The problem I have with first two, is if they remain effective weapon systems while on water they begin to encroach on the domain of naval units, but artificially disabling things feels well artificial.

So that leaves underwater, it's easier to justify their vulnerability, but now they become more (too much?) of a surprise element due to the need for sonar and lack of underwater terrain historically found in the games.

The latter is more easily remedied and already been mentioned, add in underwater terrain, it's long overdue IMO.

Now buffing sonar fixes the former but diminishes the stealthy element of subs, but you could go the Omni route, all subs are 'sonar stealth' and amphib units are not.
All sonar has two ranges to denote how far out it can see stealthy or regular units.
Removing ships from sonar and make them radar blips instead may be required also.

I fully support the idea of water transports (ships, and especially submarines for the ultimate surprise beach landing), at least as a modding possibility [we do want the game to come out eventually and within budget]. They were clumsy to use in TA, but SupCom had very good transport mechanics that should just be copied wholesale (ok, you can still improve them if you manage to :lol: )

That's boring, and is definitely not TA-style. What is this "research" you speak of? In TA and Supcom: FA, whatever tech you have, is on the map. No clicking buttons to unlock silly stuff. (Plus boats with legs are cooler than what you described.)

Ah then you never played Red Alert ! That is an hilarious game with some very entertaining acting in the cutscenes. The music to PA reminds me of RA , which is a good thing, RA is a gem.

In Red Alert the Soviet troop carriers eject their passengers via one of those circus cannons mounted on the roof and the passengers all open chutes at the top of the trajectory and parachute down. Balmy!

Anyway I think rapid deployment would be a must and I think a short range ballistic ejection would be kinda cool, units would need landing animations with shock absorber effects but that would be needed anyway for dropping from an air transport or that unit cannon in the video.

The ejection could either happen in pairs in rapid succession or all at once though the roof, with different trajectories for the units so they end up in formation ready to move out. Just a thought.

Else have them all suspended from a carrying frame iside the transport like the droid army carriers in StarWars and have a large extending arm reach out from the transport over the beach and drop them all in one go.

PS the arm would need a wheel at one end because those armored battle droids are heavy, right?

I played them all up to and including RA2: Yuri's Revenge.
Don't remember that so I'm guessing it came in at some later point in the franchise.

RA3

Platform boats sound great, especially if you can chain them together to make a temporary bridge. Chaining 20 of them would kind of feel lame though, unless you can wipe them out with a tsunami from a massive explosion . You could have buildable bridges or water platforms to cross short spans of water.

I like the bridges in Company of Heroes that you can rig with explosives, rebuild, and so on.

You seem to completely fail to understand that a massive D-day-style landings with massive amounts of units swarming out of transport ships and (even better for stealth) subs is much cooler that every unit turning amphibious at will.

Also if every unit can do it, it removes the possibility of having units that are special because they're amphibious. TA had both hovercrafts and amphibious tanks that went underwater, SupCom added boats with legs for the Cybran faction... your proposition only goes in the direction of banalizing all that.

That's also why "realism" arguments in the line of "hurrr future machines should be able to do this" fail. TA and SupCom voluntarily have bombers that are more like their WWII counterparts because carpet bombing is just cooler than having just guided missiles.

I strongly suggest you go play TA and Supcom:FA, because there are some things that make those games great that you don't seem to get.

Each unit magically turning into a transport might be the single most retarded idea I've seen on these forums yet.

Naval transports for shoreline invasions. Yes. That would definitely be awesome.

Thanks for the well-informed and constructive criticism. :roll:

Its been done games before. Like Civilization 5. Maybe you've heard of that series?

You fail to recognize the difference between opinion and fact.

Example- Fact: Every cost cutting idea I threw around eventually made it into SMNC. Whether my posts were read or not are irrelevant. It meant more content for less money.

I've never been arguing flashiness, I've always been advocating cost-efficiency.

I think that if they do naval transports, and I think that they should, they should make the ship/submarine amphibious (but slow and unmaneuverable on land) either by making it walk/crawl or be some type of hovercraft (though not a hover submarine). I think this would assist in unloading.

Also using some form of roll-on/roll-off loading would be cool.