Feature: Engine: Amphibious water transports

uhh what?...

Either I wasn't there, or your "cost cutting ideas" were obvious half-hinted design decisions.

That aside, I doubt you have enough experience to decide "creating custom naval mode animations for every single ground unit" is more efficient than "one well coded transport unit."

No customisation necessary if they simply walk/drive across the seabed.

You're not actually helping your case by mentioning Civ V. Civ V, while not a bad game, was full of extremely gamey mechanics, embarkation being one of them. It was the game that had English longbowmen that outranged WWII destroyers, age of sail privateers capable of boarding and capturing submerged submarines from their wooden sailing ships, and a no-stacking mechanic which implied that it was common to have country-sized islands where it was impossible to build or land more troops because the island was full.

How many strawmen can you pack in to a post?

Okay then, let's just ignore the fact that Civ 5 was a turn-based hex-board grand-strategy 4x game and thus the comparison between games is moronically irrelevant.

That's not a direct argument either.

Plus the genres are not Apples and Oranges, they're Apples and Pears at worst, why can one not influence the other?

To assert otherwise could be described as moronically narrow-minded.

How is "this mechanic worked in a gamey game, but that doesn't mean it will work in a simulationist game" a strawman?

You're still not making an argument that directly relates to the validity or otherwise of the the general concept.

If it'd been suggested a commander run around the map smashing blocks for power-ups and collecting coins as a resource to buy tanks I could understand your outright dismissal of it as an abomination from a wildly different genre. But we're not.

Except we are. Civilization is an abstract game, at best. Every single aspect of the game is an abstraction of a greater idea.

You can either chose to understand this point or continue to try to make petty arguments, but the idea of units magically turning into transports to cross the ocean, effectively making it just 'more terrain', is a pretty dumb one.

Given that "It worked for Civ V" also isn't an argument that directly relates to the validity of the general concept, you're operating a bit of a double standard there.

IMHO a real time strategy game like this is better for being more literal than a TBS game like Civ V which is very abstract to start with because it is turn based.

Hovercraft is a nice machine (again featured in Red Alert 3, this time the allied troop carrier) and lately I have even seen combo hover/ground effect craft.

Ground effect gives a craft (like the Ecranoplan) large aircraft load capacity and about half the speed but requires less power so are cheaper to make/run per load (or give more load per cost) and evade ground based air radar and all sonar though probably not ship based radar. Hovercraft undercarriage means they can lift off and land on any water or flat terrain but could not make it up the side of a sheer cliff or steep gradient.

Use of hover would need a small amount of air thrust and you could have a nice lift_off_speed animation if you wanted of ducted fan(s) tilting from a vertical angle (pointing down at and making contact with with a duct aperture which leads to the hovercraft skirt) to a flying angle where it would thrust backwards, making the reverse move when the vehicle came into land. Else you could move the ducts (big S form tube with big bearings at one end) in and out from the side of the vehicle to meet the ducted fan(s) and channel some air down to the skirt.

But these wouldnt have the high load capacity of a large ship with a forward tapering draft and a ramp at the front which could make massive beach landings, but that would move much more slowly and be more vulnerable to detection and attack.

It strikes me as a possibility that some units could survive (damaged) when surface transports are destroyed if they are either static or moving slowly but not unloaded. I am thinking if a ship sinks with dozens of bots on board in shallow water then then some of these bots ought to survive and struggle out of the wreckage.

All games are abstract and it's petty to deride something as 'magic' since sci-fi of this nature might as well be given it's largely held together with fanciful techno-babble. Of course holding up Civ V as an example is no argument for or against, it's not one I've tried to use, all I said was the suggestion was inspired by Civ V.

Now there is no need for them to turn in to transports, because what I'm pointing out is naval transports may not be needed and instead represent an unnecessary intermediate step, if all land units have some form of amphibious capability.

Plus it doesn't necessary have to involve transformation, that's just one option which just so happens to be used in Civ V, but you two keep harping on about this as if it is some unassailable argument against the entire concept of doing without transports.

But since you so enjoy talking about transformers, what about Cybran Destroyers growing legs and walking on land, or the TA Pelican becoming a boat beforehand?
Both were interesting additions to their respective games and not wholly dissimilar to some of the suggestions made here.

You should note that they were single units, and their abilities were only interesting in relation to other units which lacked those abilities. Making every unit amphibious can only remove tactical depth from the game. The Civ V example is actually more relevant than you think, since I've seen successful campaigns waged over water without building any boats at all (using artillery and bombers exclusively), which isn't something that should be encouraged.

And would they be limited in ability to attack, movement speed, armor, or anything?

If not, there's little point in a separate naval branch. You'd basically be choosing to build units that can only navigate ~60% of the map. The only other option would be to make naval units equally amphibious, but in that case there's no point in even having land/water count as different terrain. Hell, what's the point in water planets? You'd be able to send all your ground units there anyway.

If yes, I (and probably many others) would still like the option of having a transport unit that can do the job quicker and safer. No argument of inefficiency is going to change that.

Wing-in-surface-effect ship (WISE) or wing-in-ground-effect (WIG) vehicle would is an awesome idea.

Driving/walking across sea-bed should be movement limited (as would be in reality - water is dense).

You could make them unable to attack, but that would severely expose underwater units. I think they should be able to attack naval units from below with perhaps a more limited range, with ships not equipped with underwater sonar being unable to detect all underwater units. How that gets implemented IDK, maybe small ships with limited attack capabilities have sonar and have to help defend larger carrier/transport type ships.

Plus subs would inherently be able to detect/attack underwater units as they would have sonar, as well as visual of the enemy at closer range.

A system like this adds several new elements to the game play - one being massive underwater assaults and battles with units that could be strategically placed underwater to provide defense against naval, two ability to penetrate weak, poorly planned defenses, and lastly gives the game a reason to have naval at all - to protect against underwater units.

agreed on the equally amphibious comment. My opinion is that it should not even be considered...as it defeats the purpose of large bodies of water in the first place.

and that would be my argument as well for a water transport - protected, and quicker mode of transportation across bodies of water. Their quickness would only be matched by their immensely valuable reward as a target - as destroying the ship would destroy the contents - making them something that you would need to protect ultimately.


My final comments would be that having underwater capable units albeit being slower would also allow a sort of land/sea battle on water only planets. That would be pretty damn cool.

Neither bullets nor missiles are going to work underwater; water is dense. A laser might, but it's probably going to boil the water around your unit and cause it to overheat before it does any real damage to something on the surface. I guess if you get enough laser units in an area then you could get a good boil going and capsize whatever's above them. That might be neat. But really, if you're going to have an army walk across the ocean floor, you should probably have them accompanied by at least a few submarines, if not a navy. A tank shooting underwater is just silly.

Actually, most guns would be able fire underwater considering the propellant would be encased in some way (bullets have encased gunpowder, etc.) - especially with an internal firing ping. While the dense water would slow it down, so long as the chamber and barrel is clear of any water the bullets would only be contending against the dense water once they leave the chamber and barrel. Most of this, though, would/should be considered moot considering that these are highly advanced war machines fighting thousands of years in the future. I think many things we consider problems today would be essentially non-issues in the future...kind of like light/electricity compared to a couple thousand years ago...

boiling water sounds pretty cool though.

Underwater tank fights might just behave as though they were melee battles, firing at point blank range because of the density of the water.

Absolutely and for exactly that reason.

From earlier in the thread:

http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=528439#p528439