Idea to balance planes - Airbases

Realistically in-flight refueling is only going to be useful in cases where you need extra operational range to reach a specific target, and for one reason or another have not established, or cannot establish, a more permanent airbase within range of the target, or cannot use a carrier or other method.

Airfields don't have to be expensive. Some flat space and some basic equipment to create fuel and munitions is all that is needed. Send an engineer and build it wherever. Probably cap some mexes while you're at it. You are right, it is going to be difficult to keep the approximate location of such a base secret when you are actively engaged in sustained, high intensity bombing operations, but such is life. If you want a secret airbase, stock it with planes, and wait for the right moment to strike.

The utility of having airbases provides significance to secondary battles and terrain. Controlling the territory is what we are after, and that opens up all kinds of interesting angles. For example, capturing this island gives me a location I can use to build an airbase which is within striking range of his base over there.

And while the damage per second of planes does drop with distance, you are thinking of their continuous dps. Which, as stated before, is not really the true measure of planes' damage under this system. Planes will be constantly coming and going over the target area, dealing high burst damage before heading home. The true mathematical damage per second of each plane is not really significant any more, like it is if they are going in circles, firing every time their cooldown is up.

Perhaps a better way to think about munitions is like a cooldown that requires another unit to reset. As a result, the length of the cooldown is affected by the distance away from that unit, rather than some arbitrary number, like it is for bombers with unlimited bombs flying in circles over their targets.

Suddenly defense in depth is no longer reqd, because you're enforcing planes to continuous fly in and out of the target area, I can't sneak into the back of their base and start destroying it if they've left themselves open, because all my planes will fly directly back to the airbase potentially right over the middle of their most defended area.

So instead I spend some time, build another airbase further around to the north lets say. And all he has to do to counter that is build AA in line with it. Whilst the idea might seem sound in theory, I just cannot see it ever increasing the strategies involved. It's inherently a limiting system.

No, they don't. You said limited fuel won't affect the smaller maps - I was talking specifically about Coldboot's suggestion of limited ammo and no other changes. It is hilariously obvious that this makes aircraft strictly weaker in all situations, therefore it would make aircraft weak in any area they are currently balanced or weak. Aircraft are not overpowered in any sense in either the early game or on smaller maps. I still dispute the claim they are even overpowered late game in large maps, but that's the only place there is even a discussion to be had. You then went on about staging areas and flying tankers - again, irrelevant to Coldboot's limited ammo proposal.

Taking my post out of context and pretending I'm talking about limited ammo with buffed damage, or limited fuel with aerial refuelling, or any of the other suggestions floating around here makes your points are irrelevant.

Wait, why are you assuming that you can't tell planes to fly around to the back, then attack?

You can, and then they run out of ammo and the autopilot flies them back to reload...

I'm sure you could, and it may even be possible for them to return to the airbase on the same path they took to get to it. Further reducing range and damage. What would be hard in this case is showing the range of your units taking into account orders, so you wouldn't be instantly sending them to their deaths for lack of fuel.

Actually, DefCon does that. Though it most certainly isn't of the scope of PA (planetary scale is absolutely right though). Cluttering the interface with fifty circles might make me cry.

On the contrary, the fact that planes have to travel back and forth makes defense in depth incredibly effective.

It becomes much more difficult to conduct air operations deep inside an area well encircled by considerable areas of air defense, because your planes have to fly out, and then back in again. You could expend planes to hit a high value target doing this, but keeping it up for an extended period is going to bleed your air force dry eventually.

However by your own description that isn't how planes are supposed to be used. We want to pick away at places that have light air defense, not plunge directly into the heart of an area with kilometers of defense in depth surrounding it.

Still, due to their burst damage, limiting their ammo also gives the air force some limited options with regards to eliminating anti-air at the extremities of such a defense, and chew on it in key locations. Smart air commanders with good intel might even be able to conduct significant operations in areas with good defense in depth by targeting key anti-air assets, like SAM sites, and moving through the cleared area with an air wing intended to hit some important soft target.

Your primary point at the moment seems to be air units will suddenly become retarded and fly into enemy anti-air. They could do that now, I would like to point out.

That's not my point at all.

Your argument is ignoring the fact that once THROUGH the outer defenses you're no longer under attack, where as with your system they will have to continuously pass through it.(in two directions) Defense in depth will be the same without airbases, except more dps can be applied at the target location.

I said that limited fuel will not effect smaller maps, and that limited ammo (depending on implantation) has lesser effects on smaller maps.

I expanded this because I feel that fuel and ammo deserve equal focus.

The game is not yet made. Aircraft have seen many implementations including limiting ammo and they are generally not too weak (as in Warzone 2100).

The larger the map, the more powerful aircraft will become relative to other units unless they are put on some sort of leash. The stage of the game does not matter. Early aerial harassment can be just as effective if not more so then a massive late game air raid.

The flying tanker was an example, would you be happier if a called it a flying rearmament aircraft?

I cut down on what I was quoting because I did not want to make too long a post. I addressed a more general point, because I am not here just to argue with you but make the point that some sort of limitation like airbases, fuel, and/or ammo should be implemented.

Exactly. If air units are free to do whatever they want, then once they are past exterior air defense they are no longer concerned with it.

I may have misread your comment, you could mean either that the air units can apply more DPS at the target location, or the anti-air might. If you meant the aircraft, then this is not necessarily true. If they have unlimited fuel and ammo they may spend more time in that area, but their dps for one pass is massively reduced. With limited ammo, they need only spend long enough to unload, which might take one second, and deal tremendous damage. In the existing implementation, planes spend a lot of time with their weapons on cooldown, and potentially getting damaged at the same time. So that reduced time spent in the hot zone cuts both ways.

And even if you want to talk about their long-term dps, including returning to base, reloading, and making another sortie, even then their raw damage per second could be considerably higher than it is now, although it would vary with distance from the base.

And if your comment was intended to read that the defending player might apply more anti-air dps at the target location if planes have unlimited fuel and ammo, then I would wholeheartedly agree. If planes can go anywhere and attack unlimited times, then that cloud of planes only need concern itself with peripheral anti-air once or twice, and can spend the rest of its time attacking its intended target with slow, continuous dps. So it makes sense to build quite a lot of your anti-air near targets of interest, as planes will be spending, comparatively, a lot of time near them to destroy them.

Except you completely changed the interpretation of my post, and then argued against things I didn't say. This is called the straw man fallacy. I was very specifically rebuffing a particular suggestion. As I have pointed out repeatedly, Coldboot wants to implement aircraft which are broadly equivalent to ta/supcom aircraft except that they have limited ammo. Not aircraft which are rebalanced to be more effective until their ammo runs out, equally effective until the ammo runs out. This is a direct nerf to aircraft and screws over early game and small maps in an attempt to address a perceived problem with aircraft late game on large maps.

The reason I wanted to address that specific point is that there are a wide range of different suggestions being made. Some people want to change the way aircraft play, some want to limit their effectiveness in certain circumstances, and some just plain hate them and want them to be worse. As these are all different goals, each must be addressed individually, if you try to talk about them all at once you just end up with everyone talking past each other because they are operating under different assumptions.

So, to be clear, I do not accept the claim aircraft are overpowered in supcom or TA - there have been individual units which were problematic in various cases (Hawks in TA, Restorers in supcom pre-FA) but those problems were with individual units, not the whole class. I agree that aircraft are more effective late in the game where you can field them in large numbers - and particularly on large or terrain dense maps which make it difficult to apply land power - than they are early game or on smaller/more open maps. I don't agree that they are utterly dominant in any circumstance, there are a wide range of strategies which can win a large game of supcom, air is only one of them. I believe that shifting power between different classes of units based on the map played and the strategies pursued by the players is a good thing, as this supports more different types of play. Don't enjoy air combat? Play smaller maps. Want to nuke everything into the stone age? Huge maps. Like using your ACU offensively? Tiny maps. Enjoy artillery? Medium sized maps, preferably with lots of terrain. These are all valid play styles.

In short, any suggestion that aircraft need a flat nerf I strongly oppose.

If you want to change the dynamics of air combat then we have something to discuss, but I think that the addition of multiple planets and the orbital layer are both going to shake things up dramatically, so I'm having trouble seeing the need to mess with a basic system that's worked well for 3 games so far. If you really want fuel I can live with that, as long as the range is sufficient (supcom aircraft worked, though I'm not convinced it was actually an improvement over TA). If you want rearming then we have to look at how to buff aircraft to compensate for the nerf - and the knock on effects that buff will have. The most obvious counterbalance would be to dramatically increase damage per shot. But if you do that you're both creating the perfect ACU sniping tool, and also making aircraft a lot more like cruise missiles as you will tend to lose many of them to fixed AA and hostile aircraft while they fly back and forth. Also the impact of limited ammo will vary massively depending on the support units. If you can only reload at an expensive, fragile tech 2 structure that's a huge limitation. If there are cheap, fast, robust rearming planes then it'll have almost no impact so what's the gain for the extra dev time and complexity? Rearming land vehicles and cheap, tough t1 structures fall somewhere in between. It opens a giant can of worms for very questionable benefit.

Sorry, I thought you were making a more general argument then you were.

Well I propose that there be limited fuel and ammunition (though every aircraft need not have both or even either). Refueling and rearmament could be done at aircraft plants, aircraft carriers, specific land or amphibious vehicles, and specific aircraft. The replenishment probably should be pretty slow, and relatively expensive (it may or may not have limited fuel). The rate of replenishment could vary with the unit replenishing and the unit being replenished depending on what ends up being balanced. Burst damage for aircraft would probably be higher than ground units (I can not say how much though) though sustained damage rates would be lower.

To counter the issue of ACU/Commander sniping, the most obvious solution is the unit could simply do less damage to ACU/Commanders (most high powered weapons did less damage to commanders in TA).

Aircraft may be no more likely to be destroyed by anti-aircraft then if they had unlimited ammo because the number of attack runs needed would be reduced, however peripheral anti-aircraft would become more important then centralized anti-aircraft.

I really don't like the idea of different amounts of damage to different units. I might be misremembering TA (it was kinda a long time ago), but I'm pretty sure the only weapons that have ever had special cases like that were the supcom overcharge and ACU explosion, and those were specifically to reduce the number of draws produced when ACUs got close together. Modifying aircraft to make them heavily front loaded but then nerfing the most powerful use of heavily front loaded weapons seems artificial and arbitrary.

So let's step back a bit, why do you want fuel and ammo? What parts of the TA aircraft model are you trying to fix with them? Cause to me it seems like there are two reason to implement them - either you want to make air weaker, or you want to make it more complex. As discussed, I think the first is a terrible idea. The second could be interesting - but it runs the risk of adding unnecessary micro to a game that really, really doesn't need it. Also after three successful games using the TA model (yeah, ok, supcom had fuel... But as many people have pointed out the range was long enough to make it largely irrelevant) it's probably going to be easier for Uber to produce something similar, and to make sure it's well balanced. New-and-more-complex means more dev time and more risk that it'll be horribly unbalanced one way or the other on release.

I didn't read through the entire thread, so I don't know if this has been suggested before, but what about C&C style "air ports" Planes have to rearm, after they used up all of their ammo. In PA you would improve this simple system...

First of all, in C&C airports could support 4 planes only (at least in those games of the series I played). In PA one might have a system to build expandable air bases (add new hangars/ silos/ launch pads/ whatever) so you have a modular (assembly) system. Air bases consume resources to provide fresh ammunition. the bigger a airbase is, the more cost efficient it is. Air bases can be upgraded with own radar stations, small turrets, repair drones and maybe an own shield dome (I know about the shield discussion...). Those air bases wouldn’t limit the planes operation radius but would force them to stay close to air bases due to their need to rearm after having se duo their ammo. But because air bases can be upgraded with some defense and repair systems they can be built close to the front.

What do you think of that cncept?

read the thread.

In TA lots of weapons did different damage to different units (and the only outcome of a commander shootout was a draw): The Pyro did less damage to other Pyros, the attacks subs did less damage to the sub hunters, the sub hunters did extra damage to the attack subs, nuclear missiles did almost half damage to commanders, most anti-aircraft weapons (i.e. Crasher, Vamp, Hawk, Jethro, Sampson, Freedom Fighter, the lasers on the adv bombers...) did more damage to most aircraft, the Arm Sniper did six different amounts of damage depending on target, and so on. If your big issue with the high burst damage is Commander/ACU sniping it is the most obvious solution. An alternative is the give the Commander/ACU a anti-missile/bomb laser or something that has a chance of intercepting a given percent of projectiles (or maybe projectiles have a certain amount of HP).

Given those options, I want to make it more complex.

Fuel has been done before (as in Supreme Commander), as has ammo (as in Warzone 2100 and in many of the Command and Conquer games). It is not hard to implement it at the basic level, what is hard is automatic it in a smart way. As for the difficulty balancing units, I think that it will be no harder, as the increase in variables to balance also means there are more ways to limit aircraft.

Some things I think are better done with limited fuel or ammo:
Light Fighters and Light Interceptors: They have short range but excellent maneuverability and speed. Their primary limitation is that they can not travel too far from a replenishment unit. If they have a good punch, it may also make sense for them to have limited shots.
Heavy Interceptors: This unit has very long range (for air to air), very powerful (for air to air) missiles, and probably long range RADAR. To balance this it has say only six shots of its primary weapon between reloads.
Nuclear Bombers: I have seen this done with long reload times, or having to build the weapon but I think it would work better if it had to return to a T2 Aircraft Plant (or maybe it is an experimental unit and must return to its gantry between attacks). It advantage over a missile is that it can fly around defenses and does not have to take a predictable path.

Now the biggest issue is the path the aircraft takes for replenishment of ammo and fuel. What could be done is assign the aircraft a circuit like path that you can stretch and move. This way you can control the path that your strike force is taking to and from the target with minimal micro management.

@ zordon:

I did. Now I know your point (that is you don't like my point) and the other's. All what has been said so far does not un-justify my post, as what I wrote agrees with what some others wrote and also added something new. So it was a constructive enrichment to what a big portion of the people involved in the discussion agrees on. So what makes you write "read the thread", which is fairly impolite indeed, as I began my post with stating that I hadn't read through all of the thread before posting. Basically you told me to read the thread so I could read what your point is, right? Telling me to read the thread would only have been justified (although still impolite), if what I wrote was opposed to the general agreements in this thread. However, I don't want to start a personal dialogue between us both here.

I think that there will need to be mobile land (or hovercraft) airbases if we require them for aircraft to rearm.

@thelambaster I simply told you to read the thread so you could conduct a discussion on the merits and disadvantages of the idea, seeing as thats what we've been doing for the last 10 pages.

It wasn't intended as an insult, just that it's hard to debate these points if we have to go over the same points again.

Keep in mind this has been in discussion over three separate threads on air balance. There has been a lot already discussed.