It's time to talk unit ideas

I didn't read the entirety of what has been said, so i'll just add my opinion as everyone else does. and i have also added ideas i like from other people because i don't whant them forgotten, so it's going to be pretty long.

Mobile radar jammer units: apparently a lot of people want those, i kind of agree it can be nice, either stealth or fake radar dots are fine, or both, why not. but that would be great if they still have some firepower to defend themselves. additionnally, it would be way better if the movement and position of the fake dots could be coherent with what a real unit would be able to do, but that's probably not easy to program.

Splash damage units: the game is about massive armies right ? then splash damage is really a must have, plus it's the opportunity to make some kind of flamethrower units, which is always cool.
or some small mobile missile launcher that fire dozens of poor-aiming rockets at once, which would results in massive splash damage, then a relatively long reload would be logical.

EMP / stun damage: there is plenty of ways to make this kind of things, i guess a small bot or tank firing either a paralyzing ray or EMP shells would be nice. low armor, average speed, very light/no damage, but completely disables whatever it manages to hit (for as long as it keeps hitting), well that should not work on large units, but on the same tech-level stuff. that would be great to attack poorly defended bases : you attack with a few of them mixed with a bunch of pee-wees, and once you're close enough turrets gets stunned and stop firing at you.
of course you can also make proper EMP missiles, but i don't need to explain how it works.

Mine fields: i think they are too often forgotten in RTSs, it's a bit sad cause i love them, but i have to agree that is often needs a lot of micro, and that's what we want to avoid. but i have an idea to make it work nicely without being too munch time consuming. rather than ordering manually your mine layer to place mines at certain locations each time, i imagine it could have a "place/maintain mine field" command. basically select it, "paint" the zone(s) you want mines to be placed (as if you were using paint.exe with a large paintbrush) and release. then the mine layer goes off to do his work, and once finished, it comes back to its original position. after that, when something gets caught in the mine field, the mine layer goes back there and automatically replace detonated mines. (plus runs away if there is enemies nearby)
i think it could be neat, and of course you could make an aircraft that just drops mines from the sky the same way or directly drop them on units as its primary attack, that could make a pretty cool bomber i guess. obviously, the same is possible with submarine mines, flying mines or whatever you want. i've even imagined a "mine turret" that would spit mine fields at long range. they don't necessarily need to be explosive too, someone talked about a "gravity well mine" or something, those could be Tech 2

Battleship / Zeppelin bomber: i had this idea while writing about the Salem Class lower, imagine a ship that could deploy a balloon to become zeppelin bomber, that would be awesome \o/

Metal corrupter: Just another idea i had, i was thinking of a unit that would have some kind of "poison" effect that damages stuff over time. that's quite simple, but the fun part would be that it would -as it names states- corrupt the wrecks of units that blew up while being poisoned, those wrecks would be non-recoverable, and any unit trying to reclaim it would keep trying to suck the metal out of it, without ever succeeding. of course if you ever notice one of your engi stuck on a wreck, you just give the reclaim order again and it would wipe it instead (or you can order something to blow it up). i guess the corrupter's wreck itself would be corrupted whatever happens to make sure it's annoying. i think that would be interesting in the way that you could attack without feeding your opponent with metal, except if he is willing to do the cleaning manually.

Orbital assault factory: someone came up with this on page one or two i think, and that sounds great. imagine some kind of huge factory build directly in space, that you can send between planets. to start the invasion you just crash it on the planet, squishing flat whatever it falls on. after that, it deploys as a factory + turrets and liberates some units build during the travel. that would be quite a spectacular assault, and could even make a decent countermeasure to asteroid rockets if you see your opponent planning that early enough. that could be an omni-factory, but i think having land/air/sea variations should be better

Camouflage turrets : I like the idea of having stealth, camouflaged turrets that deploys only when it's too late to run away, but the issue it that it's supposed to work only one, there's no way an AI would "forget" that the turret was here, but still, that's kind of pleasant.



for the rest, i don't like saying "make this unit from that game", but i really can't help it this time (i'll commit sepukku later)

Amphibious tank (Wagner): among the things i liked most in SC, i think that's a really nice unit, attacking from the water because your opponent doesn't have a sonar was certainly fun. too bad his torpedoes were so weak though.

Salem Class : probably my favorite unit in SC (yes, i played Cybran ), too bad it was really weak against air, but it was way too awesome, i wouldn't be able to live without that anymore. also i'd like it to be tech 1 so it can be spam-able
Generally speaking, i feel units that can play on two battlefields are really neat, for example the siege chopper of C&C red alert 2 was great (machine guns in air or deploys as an artillery), but i think it's particularly useful for naval units.

for the rest, well, i take this as a promise :

Flat bed trucks no weaponry but you use them to transport ships across land to other bodies of water. The use of them stacks up. Want to send a ship fabber takes 1 flat bed, want to send a blue bottle it'll take 3. Want to send a leviathan it'll take 10 take them out during transport over land. The boat crashes into the ground and is destroyed. Would give Naval some mobility which I think it currently lacks

I would argue the other way around, the flawed or at least problematic transport systems are a consequence of the fast building process, which makes forward production bases the practical way to go.
In that situation, transports walk a thin red line between useless and overpowered.

Anyhow, that doesn't change much concerning air transports, it's relatively easy to make them too strong.

I would prefer a system, where transport of units would play a much more critical role, but that would have too many implications on other stuff to really be the same game.

After having played a two planet war where each side controlled a planet I think we need space ships for balance and to break planetary turtles. We also need bigger interplanetary transports.

This might actually be fun, specially if ships could fire while on these. On the other had; making a dedicated amphibious ship might be better.

They did that in RA3 it was pretty stupid this is my idea of a compromise plus never said the ship couldn't shhot but perhaps it can't move and shoot....

An interplanetary larger multi-unit transport ship with very high HP. Defensive or offensive interplanetary ships to assist. The only way to break a fortified planet with every conceivable defence in place when there are no small enough planets to smash into it.

KIll-Sat:

(Replaces orbital fighter)

The kill sat is a expendable orbital missile designed to ram enemy satellites for a suicide attack, relatively cheap unit designed for space dominance, but suffers from a poor activation range fore its afterburners, making enemy landing attempts hard to counter all at once.

Edit:

Ion Boat:

Submarine armed with a deck mounted ion cannon, designed to fire up to the orbital layer, and when in surface operations it also able to stun enemy units for a short duration.

Ion Leveller:

A leveller chassis re-equipped with a scaled down ion system, much like its naval counterpart is able to fire up to the orbital layer, and can also act as a temporary sun unit in surface operations.

Sky-guard:

A large bomber craft equipped with a anti-satellite laser cannon for attempting to take on enemy satellites, however the long recharge time on shots makes this unit ineffective at protecting a location from an orbital attack but much better suited to keeping up with a satellite as it attempts to flee.

Bumping with Sharktopus.

Also, I'd like to respond to all the requests for a "Suit" for the Commander that turns him into some sort of Rambo bot-grinder... That shouldn't need to happen. That's what's known as a "band-aid fix". I'd like to, again, bring up TA's Commander design in that the Commander was the singular most deadly unit in the entire game, no exceptions. He could 1-hit kill Krogoths, direct-units which cost about 5 times as much as a single Bertha. However, even with his Cloak, he was risky to use. Utilize terrain and the D-Gun correctly, and you can decimate entire enemy armies with your Commander. Use the D-Gun wrong, and your Commander is about as survivable and worthwhile as PeeWees marching through a canyon surrounded in Gaat Guns.

I played a game with Nanolathe and Greppy a while back where Greppy and I teamed up on Nanolathe because neither of us had engaged him for over 20 minutes. He had reached T2 eco when we scouted him, and the moment he realized what had happened he began putting up Gaat Guns about 1 every 10 seconds. But the Gaat Guns didn't even matter because our armies couldn't get close; Nano had parked his Commander behind a hill, right next to the only viable choke-point leading into his base, and he would just hammer the D-Gun into the side of the hill, wrecking anything that approached. I had to use 3 Berthas from multiple angles to finally dislodge him, as well as at least 1000 T1 land units.

His Commander had well over 2000 kills by the end of the match. And every single last moment of that match was fun as all hell.

Posting this here from the general discussions from the Space 'Navy Thread?';

I like the avenger but there are no units to defend satellites from avengers apart from avengers. So no chance of getting beyond the orbital layer. I saw your unit suggestion. Taking out the avenger would then create another balance problem... it could become too easy to move an advanced satellite along with the nice little one shot kills all laser into orbit. Your other unit suggestions would stop that to an extent but then again we don't want orbital to become redundant to land/sea units. Do you see where I am going with this? The right balance would be an invasion style set of space ships. Like Independence Day [kidding!].

And eat your face...

So the goal is to present a player with invasion tools, preventing enemy's from using the orbital layer to fully prevent any kind of assault planet side?

Considering the rough state of the Interplanetary mechanics I feel it is too early for these kinds of suggestions, beyond that I don't feel that space combat is the correct answer to that should it even be a problem.

Okay, but as I mentioned in that thread, it's the function of a weapon is what's really important, how does the shilka weapon work?

Mike

I can't tell if this is a legitimate question or just a really elaborate ploy to say you don't think it'd fit. If you don't think it would fit, just say so. It isn't that big of a deal.

The weapon runs similar to a gatling cannon, but fundamentally like flak cannons do, so a combination.

It rotates between firing each barrel and it's speed is accurately described by the wiki as..

That's a firing sequence of 14 - 16.6 times per second for a single barrel. When you have stereotypical gatling cannon, it shoots thousands of bullets per second that don't do much damage themselves. Flak cannons only throw very few air-burst rounds per second, if not doubles or singles, but do extreme amounts of damage individually. Given the speed at which you're shooting mid-tier autocannon rounds, these units can be obscenely dangerous.

I think that kind of gatling flak, of all things, is something that would be really fitting for PA's setting. It would be perfect for taking out anything in the air not fast enough to evacuate it's lethal crosshairs.

To be blunt I don't care how it works in real life, what matters is how it works in the game. That is what you haven't described. Is it just a cross of the Direct-fire and Flak by putting more rounds that explode with a smaller AOE than 'standard' Flak rounds or is it something different?

Mike

Ooooh, ok. Didn't know that's what you meant. Fair enough.

It would actually fit in between missile and flak weapons in-game. Missiles being fast and tracking, flak being slow but area of effect for anything floating about.

These would be a faster direct-fire weapon like the role T1 worked in SupCom, as opposed to T2 being flak and T3 being missiles. I don't think these were all fair in damage compared to each other, though, so it's only the ideas and roles of these units instead of the actual implementation of them. If you understand what I'm getting at.

Flak's not good at hitting anything moving too fast. Missiles aren't effective at multiple units in small groups, nevermind anything larger. This is for the middlegound, it shouldn't be as good as flak against swarms (IE gunships), but unable to hit aircraft designed for speed (superiority fighters). Anything in the middle would be where this unit excels better than anything else. Bombers and scouts staying in one area (not trying to get from A to B) would be a prime example of what this would be more effective than flak at. Not that flak shouldn't be effective at killing bombers, mind you, this should just be much more effective.

• It would give flak a defined role of medium to large swarms of aircraft instead of single units,

• This unit a role of single to small groups of units , slow to medium speed aircraft, bombers and scouts

• ..and missile-based units for taking on extremely fast enemy units, scouts trying to quickly run the gauntlet, superiority aircraft quickly flying in and out, or ground units that have low health.

So it's fundamentally, it's just direct fire then? Sounds pretty similar to what I proposed already to be honest in terms of the mechanics.

The problem with Flak in SupCom wasn't just that it was slow, it also had some weird stuff going on with teh way the flak rounds detonated and that T3 air just flew higher than the prior tiers, those combined with the speed of T3 air meant that although theoredically Flak could hit T3 air, due to the way the Rounds detonated, they were never able to connect. Oh course even if they could hit with the way the tiers were balanced it wouldn't contribute much but still.

Mike

Thats the reason I love the basic AA being the tracking weapon.

So, basically because the old system had some kinks, instead of ironing them out, we should just chuck it out and try something else?

I don't agree with that because it's that kind of mentality that I think brought us SupoCom2.

Mike

No no no, it due to the ease of having a reliable basic weapon due to the tracking.

T1 and T2 AA in supcom was good at it's job, but missing their targets could get worrying.

Having a dependable weapon to begin with is just nice to have, a good foothold that is easy to put everywhere before you have to worry about having more specialised devices to deal with gunships and spyplanes.