Feature: Engine: Amphibious water transports

1.Don't change the content of my post.

2. Amphibious transports will be a good unit.

3. Of course if amphibious transport sinks then 40 units get destroyed. However it is severally times tougher than air transport, fighters and air defences can not harm it and if it's down by half a life then still all units arive to the destination. If the equivalent of damage would be done on air transports, many would plummet down and crush. The Less air transports arrive to destination, the less units disembark.

But a naval transport can be shot at by battleships and other strong naval units, which I would say are significantly more powerful then AA.

don't bring your transports near AA or battleships?

Which is why transports are escorted, or their route is patrolled / cleared.

Has anyone brought up submersible transports? I think these would be far more valuable than floating variety due to the surprise factor.

All you're doing here is coming up with a unit that's useful for everything other than a water transport.

The purpose is to make water ferrying useful; not shore up the water transport unit.

Wrong. It's why transports are FAST and CHEAP. A naval transport is very typically neither. It should therefore be no surprise when it fails horribly due to any amount of scouting w/half arsed response. One consistent detail between RTS games is that transports are prime targets no matter the battle's scale. You can not expect their safety even with an escort.

Air transports were half decent in Supcom thanks to their high speed and relatively low cost. It wasn't great (interceptors were so much faster and absurdly cheap, which ruined a lot of things), but it was worthwhile every now and then.

Uh. Go back and check again. None of those ideas excluded a water transport that carried units. They just aren't the metal boxes you seem to desire.

Good luck amassing the necessary firepower to sink it. While your fleet is targeting my transports, I'm free to plummel you. Even if you sink one with a precision air strike, you had to fly into my anti-air coverage, and so must deduct the value of that lost transport with your own lost aircraft.

I read perfectly clear.

None of those ideas excluse the possibility of their use as water transports. But why would I want to use them as water transports? Firing on board makes them excell as makeshift tanks on water over transports. Repair functions make them better repair bays than transports. Unit launchers make them better defence breachers than transports. You're just making the unit better for reasons which have nothing to do with transporting units across water.

Make transport ships with all those auxiliary functions sufficiently expensive, and you downplay the role of transporting units across water. Make them cheap, and you've introduced a low cost repair unit and unit cannon!

As you just said, you will throw your units at my escorted transport, in the hope of destroying it. Some of your units will die, because this transport would be escorted. And perhaps it's empty, and perhaps I only used it as a bait to lure you into my army, which is a nice strategy. I don't see anything wrong with such a transport...?

Um, yeah. "I have more of everything therefore I win". Well no $hit Sherlock. Unfortunately, in the REAL world a large transport force necessarily has fewer boats and supporting craft to protect it. This is because you invested in a land force on the ocean, which sounds like a stupid idea because it really is.

Amphibious units are made for amphibious assault. Stop throwing all your eggs into a floating coffin.

Yes, defense breaching is exactly the point, and WRONG, it has everything to do with transporting. Air units are already superior for transporting units fast and efficiently, but they lack the endurance to breach enemy territory. A mini unit launcher solves that problem by letting the transport unload from a distance. No longer does a boat have to suicide charge onto the coast (and typically glitch out), which has plagued transports across RTS titles for ages. It sits back in a safer position, unloads its cargo, and sails away scot free.

Not dying is a critical transport option. Range helps immensely with the not-dying role.

Your theory is premised completely around the idea that transports do not visibly show their cargo. If you want such an annoyance built into the game then go ahead, but it is not a great idea for PA.

Any unit transport that is slow might as well have a big target painted on it with a sign saying kill me first before the defending escort.

so that leaves fast (aircraft hello been there done that :roll: ) or stealth

stealth could be ....
1 underwater transport that can roll up on to the beach or unit cannon at short range to the landing zone.
2 We can go with cloaking unit transport to drive (or/both) float past the enemies lines
3 Unit orbit drop pods they can also be made flashy with the landing impact animation and rocket and lazer etc shooting through the dust cloud.
4 under ground transport like C&C2 nod transport but the horror of the engineer rush still haunts me today

well my thoughts are
1 yes all you need to do is watch out for sonar and sub killer units
2 ok but would feel wrong if it is a huge transport that no one can see :?
3 hell yeah
4 hell no that just opens to many can of worms in terms of defending against it (I'm not talking about concrete slabs :roll: )

In a real game, my opponent also invested heavily in air defence to stop any air drop-ins, which is precicely where the utility of transporting across the water comes in, because my opponent can afford little else.

Then taking your unit cannon concept to heart: the poor unit cannonballs would be unloaded into saturated anti-air fire, one-by-one.

But you're asserting a lot about how the game will be balanced -- the forefront of these is that air transports will be cheap. But I reckon this shouldn't be the case -- transporting by air, cost for capacity, should be factors more expensive.

Since you hate breaking internal consistency with your comment against hiding transported cargo, let's argue over internal consistency:

Assuming aircraft must be lighter to maintain flight -- aircraft carryalls would have to sport much massive engines over its contemporary flying cousins to support the weight of heavier ground units along with itself.

And what of the energy requirements of the mini-unit cannon/transport? They'd have to generate the necessary massive force to launch such heavy payloads over a long trajectory. And you want these unit cannon ships to operate at a "safe" distance. A Total Annihilation Big Bertha expends a thousand energy to fire a single shot over great distances. But that's just for a single shell only containing explosives. Unit cannons' payloads are complex, 4-8 metre tall war engines as well as the accompanying systems to dampen their hard landing impact!

Building the unit cannon which can project that much force must be expensive, and the result is an expensive ship. Your demand for a ship which can operate at safe distances would more likely results in a ship used to get close and payload units as far in shore as possible. Now I don't deny there is merit in this. But it would no longer be a water transport.

Because every other real time strategy game fails at user interfaces, pathing and scale -- so this one must too. And because real time strategy engines and pathing can't evolve.

Id like war transports (Hovercraft?) If they had a quick deployment method, and loading method.

What about a shot range shotgun teleporter, like the ones use by supcom 2 transports to burst out off of their cargo directly in front of them onto a beach to give the transport the ability to unload units rapidly if during the case of a landing into hostile territory?

If hover transports had a larger capacity to air transports in exchange for manoeuvring, speed at all terrain moment it could make for some fantastic landing battles where a fleet could escort hundreds of units in smaller transports, and possibly even have a small unit cannon on top of a large unit transport container, like a cargo ship?

Bobucles. Do you know what a team play is?
If you know what a team play is then you should also know what a cordinated strike is.
You never send your transports just to die. If your opponent will have warships then, either your friend will send his warships or torpedo planes to combat them or just distract the opponent and force the warships to abandon position. Furthermore if you will send your transports to disembarck units sufficiently a way from the base of the opponent, strategic point or battelfield, then most likely he will not even notice the ships. My experience from Supcom. No one is interested on what is going on the egdge of the map.

Even if there is a chance that water transports will get destroyed, I see nothing bad in it, as the assulting player takes the risk. If he's assult is successful then he most likely elimated one player. The assulted player should also have chance to successively defende( if he has proper units!)

It is still highly possible that the player you will attack will not have naval units. In this case a big assult can be formidable.

You can skip the problems with water transports all together by simply using a floating factory. They can hit any beach head, there's no valuable cargo to lose, and their storage capacity is unlimited.

Overly expensive transports are just bad. They already have to deal with hostile action and sacrificing cargo when they die. Adding an expensive price tag does not help gameplay in any way other than removing viable options for their use.

So air defenses shoot down individual flying tanks, rather than individual transports loaded with tanks? That's still a positive outcome! It's not even getting into the simple solutions of launching more units, launching them faster, and covering shorter distances. Also, ground units will naturally be far more durable than air if TA rules are followed. Saturating enemy air defense sounds like a great way to cover some actual air units for a combined assault.

Skipping past the harder hitting ground defense is always a good thing, and the whole point of using the launcher in the first place.

The energy cost is somewhere between zero and negligible. Turn off engines, enable launcher. No problem.

Have you seen the weapon range on most units? Launching a unit that far is not a tall order. You seem to have "unit launcher" confused with the kickstarter's artillery piece. It is not. It is a transport power that deals with the last mile problem. Most of the work is still done by hauling units across deep ocean, and that's what you pay for on a transport. In addition it is no longer blocked by ocean cliffs(something that air transports get by default), which means more landing options that amphibious units can't use.
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Or course, the whole concept of storming an armed beach is based on ancient assumptions of square maps, impassible borders, and land having more value than ocean. That is no longer true. If a beach is heavily defended, you go around and flank another side of the island. You conquer the ocean and amass superior resources. You punish tightly defended areas with AoEs and lethal barrages. There are plenty of ways to secure an advantage more effectively and for less cost than sacrificing half a platoon of robots to the deep.

Let's not forget that coastal assaults work both ways. Land is going to need viable options to storm the OCEAN as well! Camping out on an island is no way to win.

The thing is that water transports will be usefull if your opponent will not have fleet or your friend will provide you an escort. If someone will be superior at the oceans and will camp on one island, then I think that air transports are better than water transport, but the best solution is just to nuke him. While if he will camp on isle and have good air and nuke defences, then it's better to go with naval transports.

I have found the capacity of the air transport in Total. Guess what is it.




The capacity of air transport in total is 1. The trick was thought that you could steal oponents commander and then detonate the transport or disembarck the oponents commander in base of different player in ffa. This is the first thing I will try out in PA.

You could still attempt to make medium size drop, but you needed to have many transports, which were very fragile in TA

The capacity of the transport ship is 20.

I think giving the water transports the unit launcher ability would steal the only advantage from air transport( the mobility ). Furthermore in Pa all actions of units a part from movement will require energy. A unit launcher will use energy too.

i'd like to see getting shot down not immediately kill the transported units.
like this: http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=40729

The purpose you seem to miss is the bulk deployment of existing forces into an area. You can't do that when you have to build the units on site one by one. You won't be storming any beachfronts, unless you build an extortionate amount of floating factories to match your build rate with a typical unload speed -- the price of them all as well as risk of fielding them at sea most probably canceling out any gains from your "no valuable cargo to lose" argument. Give floating factories rapid build rates for their price to compensate? You just created a brutally efficient factory that renders standard land factories obsolete!

You can't give these floating factories transport capacity to build units to unload in advance either, because that brings you back to your original concern of losing cargo at sea.

All your cargo getting lost in succession is a positive outcome?

How do I launch units faster? That mini-unit cannon must have a serious energy draw and structural integrity stopping the whole ship from ripping itself apart if it's launching 4-8 metre tall war engines in rapid succession. Or does the ship carry more than one min-unit cannon? Either way, this must seriously rack up the price of one of these ships. Why would I want to invest in such an expensive ship for a diminished purpose?

What air assault to cover? You told me I already invested everything in a land force on the ocean, as well as escorts. So I can't afford anything else. Or are you telling me "I have more of everything therefore I win" now? Are you changing your goalpost?

In the game example I outlined, my opponent already invested heavily in air defence. They won't be investing in a heavy ground defence net too unless in which case they've cut so far back on building anything else that they're effectively turtling, and I can just beat them at map control alone.

If we both have equal map control and are fortifying all our territories, the game has escelated so far on that superweapons become necessary anyway.

Most units fire compact munitions containing only explosives and maybe guidance systems; not 4-8 metre tall war engines.

For a modern comparison: an M1 Abrams main battle tank weighs 61.3 tonnes (61368 kg); an M829A3 tank round(fired by the M1 Abram's primary weapon) weighs 22.3 kg. That's 2751 times heavier. So assuming munitions scaled accordingly with the units of Planetary Annihilation, your mini-unit cannon would need to be roughly 2750 times as powerful as "most weapons" to achieve the same velocity.

So is this the same system powering the battleship; along with everything else? So the battleship's main batteries grow a thousand times its power when its propeller turbines stop? While lowly tanks lob big bertha grade shells? -- If not, then shouldn't your mini-unit cannon/trransport ship logically cost at least as much as a battleship, for yielding such (a) powerful cannon(s)? -- Otherwise, every other unit must be wasting an exhorbitant amount of power. -- But then why would this cheap engine rerouting technology only be present in your mini-unit cannon/transport ship, and not everything else? I thought all technology had been captured, refined and transformed to utmost efficiency.

The earth is round. We still find it useful to transport things by ship. You're not making any case here.

How do you know there will never be a situation where water deployment of ground forces is optimal? Have you read the balance notes?

What you're paying for really is rapid response times, high mobility, the ability to bypass all terrain and evade ground fire; none of which are possible with surface based transporting. This is called balancing. After all, we don't mail everything by air or first class, because that's frivolously expensive.



Overall, your concern doesn't make sense: "transports are bad because all its cargo can die with it." -- no sh!t, that's kind of the whole point -- don't let your transports die. -- In fact, don't do anything...ever.